Stand on Zanzibar

This is a giant of a book.

Not just in size, either, although probably it is the longest novel of its kind ever published. That's incidental. It had to be big to give elbow-room for its subject matter: the portrayal of an entire future world.

Seven billion-plus of our species, crowding the face of twenty-first century Earth in an age of acceleratubes and Moonbase Zero, intelligent computers and mass-marketed psychedelics, are still going to be human. Employing a dazzling range of literary techniques, John Brunner has created a future world as vivid as this morning's newspaper, detail after telling detail sockets three-dimensionally into place, creating . . .

• A New York City where you dare not venture out after dark unless you're prepared to risk triggering a riot.
• Yatakang, an island country of Asia where scientists burn incense to the spirit of a threatening volcano.
• Beninia, where African heat and oppressive damp plague men struggling to solve a mystery that might save Man from himself.

Across this brilliant world-spanning panorama we follow the fate of three key men: Norman House, Negro vice-president of a billion-dollar corporation who gets exactly what he's always wanted, and finds that it's turned to ashes in his mouth; Chad Mulligan, the sociologist who tried and failed to opt out of the society he so deeply detested; and Donald Hogan, who is made into a machine designed to kill.

But these are only the brightest stars in a whole galaxy of characters. Sometimes caustic, sometimes cynical, always compassionate, Brunner probes the private agonies of scores of victims of the forces which drive the protagonists, deftly illuminating their thinking and emotions by subtle implication: Frank and Sheena Potter, forbidden to bear children because they would inherit the banned gene for dichromatism; Elihu Masters, compelled by love to sell his best friend into slavery; Guinevere Steel, fashion-dictator of the Western world; Professor Dr. Sugaiguntung, in whose quiet laboratory the seed is planted for a world-wide crisis; and—perhaps most remarkable of all—Shalmaneser, the computer that must be called not "it" but "he," because he knows more than his makers.

STAND ON ZANZIBAR is exciting, and funny, and sad, and moving, and provocative, and real, and fantastic, and honest, and imaginative, and horrifying—in short, it's like the world we live in.