
John Brunner's “Stand on Zanzibar” spookily predicted today - hhs
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190509-the-1968-sci-fi-that-spookily-predicted-today
======
mindcrime
If you haven't read _The Shockwave Rider_ , do yourself a favor and read it
ASAP.

One fascinating aspect of it, aside from the whole "computer hacker hero
before there were any" bit, is that it was largely based on a non-fiction work
- Alvin Toffler's _Future Shock_. Brunner was apparently so interested in what
Toffler had to say, he chose to portray his ideas in novel form.

And _Future Shock_ is another book which I can't recommend highly enough.
Toffler might not have been right about everything, but I think he really hit
on something with the basic concept of "future shock" as a state where you
constantly feel out of sorts and disjointed due to how rapidly the world is
changing. And given that he wrote that book in the late 60's, early 70's,
imagine how much more profound that effect is now (just due to technological
advances if nothing else).

I'm not sure either Toffler or Brunner had, or claimed to have, any answers
for how to deal with the "future shock" phenomenon, but I think it behooves
all of us to think about the idea and ways to deal with it.

Plus, _The Shockwave Rider_ is just plain entertaining. And depending on who
you ask, it's either the first cyberpunk novel, or an example of "proto-
cyberpunk", and probably influenced any number of subsequent works that are
widely beloved in this community.

~~~
dredmorbius
And if you're going to read Toffler, dive deeper and read Herbert A. Simon's
underlying works. He was an exceptionally unorthodox polymath genius.

 _Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American
economist, political scientist and cognitive psychologist, whose primary
research interest was decision-making within organizations and is best known
for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing".[5] He received
the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 and the Turing Award in 1975. His
research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature and spanned across the
fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration,
management, and political science.[6] He was at Carnegie Mellon University for
most of his career, from 1949 to 2001.[7]_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon)

------
glangdale
Well written, fun, and bizarrely prescient compared to a lot of SF written
decades later. Even William Gibson (of all people) has Soviet astronauts in
space and hard SF themes in short stories written in the 80s, but Stand on
Zanzibar predicts the rise of SE Asian powers all the way back in 68, and is
far more biology/sociology themed.

It has some great epigrams sprinkled through:

"Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing
from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this
morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view."

"SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say
he's apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as
intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much,
because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave."

Note that a lot of the rest of Brunner's output is very different - I found
the Traveller in Black stuff pretty much unreadable.

------
8bitsrule
Another don't-miss Brunner 1975 novel: _The Shockwave Rider_ ...

"notable for its hero's use of computer hacking skills to escape pursuit in a
dystopian future, and for the coining of the word "worm" to describe a program
that propagates itself through a computer network.... In the novel, data
privacy is reserved for corporate entities and individuals who may then
conceal wrongdoing; by contrast, normal citizens do not enjoy significant
privacy."

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

------
atombender
The Sheep Look Up is fantastic. It's a very dark novel, but at the same time
it has a great sense of irony. In particular, it keeps setting up characters
and then throwing them to the wolves faster than you can say "Game of
Thrones". For example, the plot is ostensibly about a legendary environmental
activist who is about to come out of hiding — he's sought for inciting his
followers to violence — at a pivotal time as the world is being thrown into a
series of political wars/crises caused, indirectly, by environmental disasters
(think Syria) and squabbling for resources, but the moment the hero emerges
for his triumphant appeal to the American people, everything blows up in his
face.

The article doesn't mention The Jagged Orbit, which Brunner considered to form
a trilogy together with Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. Anyone read
it?

~~~
arduanika
(tangent) What environmental disaster caused the Syrian conflict?

~~~
DanBC
Drought may have caused conflict.

[https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2009/02/22/drought-b...](https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2009/02/22/drought-
blamed-food-scarcity)

[https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/90442/syria-
drough...](https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/90442/syria-drought-
pushing-millions-poverty)

[https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/88139/syria-
over-m...](https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/88139/syria-over-million-
people-affected-drought)

[https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/feature/2009/09/02/drough...](https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/feature/2009/09/02/drought-
driving-farmers-cities)

------
cerealbad
a lot of the golden age sci fi authors were good guessers.

they were prolific (and their misses fell out of favor), scientifically
literate (the foundation sciences have not progressed much since the 60s,
biology/genetics being the major exception) and based their stories on old
myths and legends (a standard trope in fiction), which allowed a type of
reflective writing on the human condition with forward prediction power. many
were also tied into anti-soviet/anti-american spy networks and traveled
frequently working as information gatherers and agents for their respective
governments.

sumna technologiae (stanislaw lem) is a good primer for people working in AI
today, as lem attempts to understand cybernetics through the golden age lens.
arkady and strugatsky's hard to be a god is about the problems of trying to
order society and artificially advance it.

the soviet skepticism towards scientific/technological utopias comes through
much stronger, given those authors lived through a failed one. the movement
continued into the real sciences, fomenko's new chronology being the gold
standard of what happens when you erode faith in your society, truth and the
stability of reality. the western system is going through a similar social
collapse the soviet one went through, reading the soviet literature of the
time will help you understand the coming future of the english speaking
peoples, no death or violence, just a disoriented sadness, a type of alien
haze which clouds your senses and has you slowly floating down into cold
darkness.

~~~
mieseratte
> a lot of the golden age sci fi authors were good guessers.

A while back I bumped into a sort-of fraud wherein someone would create a
Twitter account and predict that someone die or something would happen on a
given date, but for every date, i.e. "mieseratte will die on 2019-05-11",
"mieseratte will die on 2019-05-12" and so on. Then when the even occurs they
delete all tweets but the now correct tweet.

Whenever I bump into these "So and so predicted EVENT N number of years ago" I
just sort-of assume that if I search hard enough I can find a book that
"predicts" most broad scenarios.

~~~
zantana
I was listening to the Yale history of the new testament course a while back:
[https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-
studies/rlst-152](https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152) and one of
the more interesting observations was that scholars can date prophets (such as
Daniel and John from Revelations) by when they start being wrong.

------
EdwardCoffin
Let's hope that his _Total Eclipse_ [1] does not predict tomorrow as well.
It's one of the bleakest yet believable books I've read in a long time. First
paragraph of the description from the link:

 _In 2020, an international space team, exploring Sigma Draconis, 19 light
years from earth, discovers the remains of a highly advanced society that has
left behind its most spectacular artifact; the largest telescope imaginable,
carved & polished from a natural moon crater. Successive space crews determine
that the native culture evolved & disappeared mysteriously after a mere 3000
years of existence. It's now 2028. Another mission reaches the planet with
just one goal--to discover why the civilization disappeared--& with just one
hope--that this knowledge will prevent the same thing from happening on
earth._

[1]
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41087.Total_Eclipse](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41087.Total_Eclipse)

------
shalmanese
My username came from going through a huge John Brunner phase when I was a
teenager.

I always make sure to have at least two copies of Stand on Zanzibar on hand at
any point in time so I can always gift one to a friend on a whim (I hunt used
bookstores and pick up another copy if I’m below 3)

~~~
chadcmulligan
I'm not the only one, what an imagination you have. I have a few copies
sitting around and, of course, on my kindle.

------
lifeisstillgood
>>> As Smith describes it, he imagined a Victorian time-traveller pitching up
in the 1960s, and then pondered how he’d go about explaining to them
everything from the telephone to the sexual revolution

A while back oh write about taking a naive teenager and a seen-it-all elder
and 'diff'ing their thoughts - everything left would be deep cultural
assumptions

This is a nice complimentary idea

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Edit

A while back oh write

A while back pg wrote

Darn spell check

------
namenumber
Always nice to see people rediscover John Brunner, he's one of my favorite
authors. There's a quote i once heard that goes approximately like this :
"Philip K Dicks novels turn into movies, John Brunners novels turn into
reality".

Stand on Zanzibar was a real trip the first time i read it, though in later
years my favorite Brunner novel has been Squares of the City. Its not as
scifi-ey as Zanzibar, but it is interesting for being built on a famous chess
game and for exploring the nature of propaganda and its influence on the body
politic.

And honestly, deciding to write a book where the characters conform to the
moves of an almost 100 year old chess game and pulling it off is just amazing.

------
ggm
I read Brunner voraciously when younger. I find "shockwave rider" aged badly,
it's like SciFi juvenilia. Along with his source book, Alvin Toffler's "future
shock" it sat in the remainder pile of most secondhand bookshops.

Some of his other work is .. bizarre. A book about sentient plants on a planet
beset by Massive meteorite threat stimulating speedy evolution.

I can't but think Brunner was depressed. His books make grim reading
sometimes. Perhaps less depressed than David Lindsay but overall he thinks
humans are weak, and unlikely to find politically stable paths out of trouble.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> I can't but think Brunner was depressed. His books make grim reading
> sometimes. Perhaps less depressed than David Lindsay but overall he thinks
> humans are weak, and unlikely to find politically stable paths out of
> trouble.

You could also describe that as just “historically literate”.

~~~
ggm
Yes, thats another take. all the books seemed to end on some sense the human
spirit remains, even under load. Vague green-anarchist tendencies.

------
PeterStuer
In my childhood I went through a period where I only read sci-fi, borrowed in
batches of 7 books a week from the city library. Sci-fi wasn't in a separate
section, but the library had color codes for different genres, marked by a dot
on the spine of the books. Sci-fi's dot was yellow, and it wasn't yet lumped
into the weird 'Sci-Fi and Fantasy' arranged marriage of later.

I started scanning for yellow dots and reading through the shelves in
alphabetical order, backtracking my way sometimes to pick up on books that
were borrowed by others, or just added new in previous passes.

For that reason Brunner came rather early with pearls like 'Stand on Zanzibar'
and of course 'The Shockwave Rider' most certainly fueling the habit. Even
back then at a very young age I felt the dystopian writers for the most part
were more thinking in terms of complete system dynamics while the utopian
writers had a more narrow view and thus it comes as no surprise that the
former turned out to be less blind-sighted than the latter in hindsight.

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hazeii
From the article (about a book written 50-odd years ago):-

"... and there’s a teeming social network that allows media organisations to
put out hits of news and receive real-time fan feedback."

And at the bottom of the page:-

"If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on
BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter."

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TheOtherHobbes
Brunner was amazingly prescient, but sadly almost forgotten now.

See also _The Stone that Never Came Down_ \- the most 70s novel ever.

------
beezle
Ironic timing in that I'm about half way through this. Started a few months
back and got side tracked but just picked it up again last night.

As at least one other said, the presentation/style is not like anything you
have seen before and it takes getting used to (I'm not quite there yet). The
first half of the book (roughly where I am) is kinda slow as well, but
starting to pick up the pace now.

------
chadcmulligan
It is one of the most prescient books I've read, and a bit of a fave, as my
user name probably shows (a character in the book). It is notoriously hard to
start reading though because of its style - it breaks up the story with
montages of news articles, stories and excerpts from books. Though once you
get in the groove its hard to put down.

------
Merrill
While Brunner's forecasts may have been prescient, that might be due to the
freedom he enjoyed as a science fiction writer.

Forecasters making earnest and serious attempts to predict technological and
social change over a couple decades often get it badly wrong.

One of my favorite books is "Megamistakes: Forecasting and the Myth of Rapid
Technological Change" by Stephen P. Schnaars, which provides many examples of
poor predictions. In some cases, technological change is simply delayed, as in
video calling, which can now be done with smartphones 50 years after
PicturePhone. In other cases, such as supersonic airliners or gas turbine
powered cars, the predictions may never become true.

~~~
pfdietz
We have plenty of gas turbine powered cars. Granted, the turbines are
stationary and the energy is stored in the cars in batteries. :)

------
Confusion
I wonder whether you can't write this story about almost any SF author. If you
write a dozen books and stories each with a plethora of new ideas, you are
sure to get some things right. Pick out all the things they got right, add a
few mistakes for 'balance' and tadaaa, another visionary SF author.

Has anyone done statistical analysis on the accuracy of 'predictions' by SF
authors? Are some really more visionary than others?

~~~
bryanrasmussen
that would be a huge undertaking but I think probably the answer is that most
are not that prescient, other than minor bits of prescience like making video
calls or stuff like that -

Isaac Asimov - foundation series too far off to be prescient, robots future
hampered by three laws of robotics not being really possible so prescience of
those not very high.

Heinlein - lots of space travel, time travel, far future - does not seem very
prescient.

Bradbury - major sci-fi martian chronicles, I don't think likely to be
prescient.

Andre Norton - too far future to be prescient.

Ursula K. LeGuin - sci fi too far future to be prescient.

Phillip K. Dick - his artistic worldview was prescient, but that is to say he
predicted a lot of the concerns of literature and pop culture in our present,
but I don't think his worlds were prescient. You could also say LeGuin was
prescient in the same way Dick was.

~~~
kermitismyhero
In fairness to Asimov's laws of robotics, he invented them as a device to
illustrate how fundamentally flawed those sorts of rules can be. His robot
stories are about how unforeseen situations create unexpected behaviour,
despite apparently simple and rigid rules. He wasn't really trying to promote
those laws as a practical solution to future robotics problems. He wanted a
source of conflict as fuel for stories.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Perhaps I've misrecalled but I thought Asimov said something to the effect
that the reason he did the 3 laws was because all robots stories were about
robots going amok and making war on humanity which he found unlikely to happen
because of course robots would be programmed not to do that.

~~~
Confusion
His stories are also about robots running amok, so obviously he didn't think
the 3 laws were a solution to that problem.

------
rurban
I always thought of that book when I watched Bigelow's movie "Detroit". It's
not scifi, it's history.

------
HNLurker2
Is this confirmation bias?

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RappingBoomer
huh... the article says that in response to overpopulation that the world
"governments have responded globally with draconian eugenics laws, harnessing
genetics to determine who can and cannot be allowed to have children."

Well, we do have the same overpopulation that brunner predicted, but instead
our governments encourage overpopulation because it props up our Western ponzi
economies, which are based on debt and consumer demand....our govt's should be
responding to the overpopulation crisis, but they do not because they are
under the control of the big corporations that want to keep propping up the
ponzi economy...so, brunner called it wrong on this angle...he failed to
foresee our out of control Western pseudo-democracies

~~~
cstross
Did you not notice the one child policy in China? (It came along after Brunner
published SoZ, so I'm calling it a win on the predictive front, although they
discontinued it more recently.)

~~~
RappingBoomer
I specifically referred to western pseudo-democracies

