Stand On Zanzibar

Stand on Zanzibar

Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author	John Brunner
Cover artist	S. A. Summit, Inc.
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Science Fiction, Dystopian
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	1968
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	582 pp
ISBN

Stand on Zanzibar is a dystopian New Wave science fiction novel written by John Brunner and first published in 1968. The book won a Hugo Award for Best Novel at the 27th World Science Fiction Convention in 1969, as well as the 1969 BSFA Award and the 1973 Prix Tour-Apollo Award.

Stand on Zanzibar was innovative within the science fiction genre for mixing narrative with entire chapters dedicated to providing background information and worldbuilding, to create a sprawling narrative that presents a complex and multi-faceted view of the story's future world. Such information-rich chapters were often constructed from many short paragraphs, sentences, or fragments thereof — pulled from sources such as slogans, snatches of conversation, advertising text, songs, extracts from newspapers and books, and other cultural detritus. The result is reminiscent of the concept of information overload.

The narrative itself follows the lives of a large cast of characters, carefully chosen to give a broad cross-section of the future world. Some of these interact directly with the central narratives, while others add depth to Brunner's world. Brunner appropriated this basic narrative technique from the USA Trilogy, by John Dos Passos. On the first page of the novel, Brunner provides a quote from Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy that approximates such a technique, entitling it "the Innis mode" as an apparent label.

The primary engine of the novel's story is overpopulation and its projected consequences, and the title refers to an early twentieth-century claim that the world's population could fit onto the Isle of Wight – which has an area of 381 square kilometres (147 sq mi) – if they were all standing upright. Brunner remarked that the growing world population now required a larger island; the 3.5 billion people living in 1968 could stand together on the Isle of Man (area 572 square kilometres (221 sq mi)), while the 7 billion people who he (correctly) projected would be alive in 2010 would need to stand on Zanzibar (area 1,554 square kilometres (600 sq mi)). Throughout the book, the image of the entire human race standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a small island is a metaphor for a crowded world.