
A 1969 New Wave Sci-Fi Novel That Made Correct Predictions - gasull
http://www.themillions.com/2013/03/the-weird-1969-new-wave-sci-fi-novel-that-correctly-predicted-the-current-day.html
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dalke
It's hard to say if something is a valid prediction without establishing a
baseline comparison. It could also be that he's predicting things wouldn't
change from the 1960s.

> (1) Random acts of violence by crazy individuals, often taking place at
> schools, plague society in Stand on Zanzibar.

In 1966 Charles Joseph Whitman went to a tower on the campus of the University
of Texas at Austin and murdered 16 people and wounded 32 others.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States#1960s)
lists many acts of violence that took place at schools in the 1960s.

In terms of a prediction, the amount of 'random' violence has gone down since
the 1960s.

> (7) Although some people still get married, many in the younger generation
> now prefer short-term hookups without long-term commitment.

The book was written in the 1960s, in the free love era between effective
treatments for VD and AIDS. Compare with the movie "Alice's Restaurant", from
the same year as "Stand on Zanzibar", Arlo Guthrie (played by himself) is
asked by a teenybopper he just met if he want to have sex with her. He turns
her down, ostensibly because he doesn't want to catch her cold.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=c0...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=c0jfwlWDgto#t=1271)
.

In terms of a prediction, has the amount of short-term hookups increased since
the 1960s? Or stayed the same or decreased? I don't know.

But I'm willing to assert that the author of this piece (which was repeated on
many sites) doesn't know either.

> (10) Motor vehicles increasingly run on electric fuel cells.

Really? I thought they increasingly run on batteries, not fuel cells.
Wikipedia says:

> As of early 2014, there is limited hydrogen infrastructure, with 10 hydrogen
> fueling stations for automobiles publicly available in the U.S.,

I haven't read Stand on Zanzibar for a long time and it's not in my
collection, so I can't investigate the other claims in any detail.

~~~
MrJagil
Once in a while you stumble on an artist who leads you down a different road
from your usual tastes. Harry Chapin did that for me, with his rendition of
the UTA shooting. Quite powerful stuff (as was Chapin's own death, actually).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWKpblxejWE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWKpblxejWE)

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ChuckMcM
I've read a number of Brunner's books, one that stuck with me was "The Sheep
Look Up" [1] which was pretty much a composition of everything bad that can
happen all happening and none of the potentially good things actually coming
to pass.

Of course as an author you choose the things that move the story along and
create tension. Not necessarily the boring things which keep things stable
:-).

Sometimes though, having read a lot of SF in my life, I really do feel like I
am "in the future" now as opposed to say in 1995 when folks were explaining
what the Internet was on TV, and perhaps that is the source of the author of
this article's observation. A _lot_ of things that science fiction has
imagined over the last 50 years have come to pass. That is pretty amazing.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Sheep-Look-John-
Brunner/dp/1932100...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Sheep-Look-John-
Brunner/dp/1932100016)

~~~
lobster_johnson
Sheep is a great, underrated novel.

I love its structure, and how it constantly undermines narrative expectations
through bathos and dramatic irony; every character in the book seems to be
positioning themselves for misfortune and irrelevance. People you've been led
to think are major, leading characters are suddenly and unceremoniously killed
off (I like to think that George R. R. Martin read Brunner years before he
used the same tactic in ASOIAF), while the novel's ostensible hero, Austin
Train, a legendary environmental activist leader who has gone into hiding and
spends the book preparing to mysteriously re-emerge, turns out — well, I don't
to spoil things; not what I expected, anyway.

Even more than character development, the sense of impending doom lies thick.
My favourite part of the novel is the tech guy who for years has spent spare
computing processing at his computer company to build an accurate
socioeconomic model of the world, and his conclusion is summarized in a single
sentence which seems to be playing out in real life exactly as he's uttering
it.

Some of the "environmental" predictions are admittedly a bit off and dated;
sonic booms from hypersonic airplanes posing a danger to avalanche-prone
mountain resorts, for example. But it's forgivable in a novel that, 42+ years
ago, got so much right.

~~~
bediger4000
I agree about _The Sheep Look Up_ being an underrated novel. I read it in 1984
or '85\. Until the end of the book, I was thinking it was a parody or satire
or projection of Ronald Reagan's presidency. When I finished, I looked at the
copyright date, and realized Brunner was projecting Richard Nixon's presidency
forward.

Sort of unrelated, is it me or does every other John Brunner book kind of
suck? _The Sheep Look Up_ , is good, so is _Stand on Zanzibar_ , but then
Brunner wrote real stinkers like _Children of the Thunder_ , which also
predicts a world of Usenet, UUCP-like email, and climate change. None of thse
things have anything to do with that book sucking mind you.

~~~
olefoo
I have a pretty strong opinion that _The Shockwave Rider_ does not suck, even
if the protagonist is a bit of a Mary-Sue.

In terms of prescient details it gets some things wrong. But it gets a lot of
the subtleties of a dystopian dataveillance society very, very right.

If you read it you'll see what I mean. The idea that pretty much every
institution you deal with knows you by your dossier and makes unaccountable
decisions based on that knowledge. That this power is unequally distributed
and that the data you need to make competent decisions about your future is
deliberately hidden from you.

The viewpoint that at the elite levels governments and corporations are
indistinguishable in their criminality. One could imagine graduates of
Tarnover stalking the halls at Google, Palantir and the NSA w/ equal ease.

It's actually reasonably fast paced and well plotted ( exceptionally so by
Brunner's standards ); and it's an easy read.

I recommend it.

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twic
I saw the title, and said to myself "i bet this is The Shockwave Rider". So
close! Brunner published that in 1975, six years after Stand On Zanzibar:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider)

~~~
fernly
Right right right. Shockwave Rider (as the wiki page notes) describes a world
of ubiquitous networked computers -- its publication date, 1975, was also the
year that Darpanet went operational -- and introduced the idea of a self-
propagating program called a "worm".

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zeroonetwothree
I read it a few years ago, but IIRC it had many wrong predictions. For example
it predicts massive overpopulation and food shortages, when in fact we have
the most food per capita in human history.

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notahacker
Stand on Zanzibar was a great book because of its bold styling and because
assumed that in a few decades' time humanity would be fighting each other in a
still desperately poor developing world rather than conquering the galaxy.

On that level it's fantastic, and the bits about ghost town Detroit and its
music scene is eerily accurate. But on a grand scale, once you've got past it
not being space opera, its core premise is basically its worst prediction:
overpopulation is the most pressing issue in the US despite draconian eugenic
policies. A large part of the plot concerns black ops in s socialist southeast
Asian archipelago.

It is very successful at anticipating how sexual liberation, civil rights for
black people and widespread televisual media might pan out, but that's not
especially unusual in New Wave literature

Most jarringly of all for hackers, the world of Stand on Zanzibar relies on a
single hard AI supercomputer equipped with a personality and near deus-ex-
machina predictive power, which involves human-computer interaction of the
type parodied in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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csdrane
Forgetting the predictions for a moment (I think it is unfortunate and belies
the book's real value that this is what everyone is focusing on), Stand on
Zanzibar is great SF novel and is still worth reading IMO.

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Tloewald
I need to go back and read _Stand on Zanzibar_. Back when I was in 8th grade,
I read Brunner's _The Stone that Never Came Down_ which I thought at the time
was the best SF novel I'd ever read (it held my top spot for some considerable
time). I never found a copy of _Stand_ at the time.

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jonny_eh
If you make enough predictions, some will come true. Many psychics do this
annually, and then at the end of the year gloat about their hits but don't
mention the misses.

