Stand on Zanzibar, Bruce Sterling
Stand on Zanzibar, Bruce Sterling
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Stand on Zanzibar
The Hugo Award-Winning Novel

Author: Bruce Sterling, John Brunner

Narrator: Erik Bergmann

Unabridged: 21 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/02/2011

Categories: Fiction, Science Fiction

Synopsis

Norman Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically---it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him.

These two men's lives weave through one of science fiction's most praised novels. Written in a way that echoes John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, Stand on Zanzibar is a cross-section of a world overpopulated by the billions. Where society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, and mundane uses of genetic engineering. Though written in 1968, it speaks of now, and is frighteningly prescient and intensely powerful.

About Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction writer, born in Brownsville, Texas on April 14, 1954. His first published fiction appeared in the late 1970s, but he came to real prominence in the early 1980s as one of several writers associated with the "cyberpunk" tendency, and as that movement's chief theoretician and pamphleteer. He also edited the anthology Mirrorshades (1986), which still stands as a definitive document of that period in SF. His novel Islands in the Net (1988) won the John W. Campbell Award for best SF novel of the year; he has also won two Hugo awards, for the stories "Bicycle Repairman" (1996) and "Taklamakan" (1998). His 1990 collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, was an important work of early steampunk/neo-Victoriana. In 2009, he published The Caryatids. In 1992 he published The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, heralding a second career as a journalist covering social, legal, and artistic matters in the digital world. The first issue of Wired magazine, in 1993, featured his face on its cover; today, their web site hosts his long-running blog, Beyond the Beyond.

About Erik Bergmann

In praising Erik Bergmann’s narration of Robert Ludlum's The Moscow Vector, AudioFile magazine said, "Erik Bergmann skillfully infuses the myriad characters with distinct accents in this spine-tingling trek…Bergmann moves this captivating plot from the frying pan into the nuclear furnace.” Bergmann has also narrated books in The Justice League series as well as Stephen P. Kiernan’s The Curiosity, whose cast won an AudioFile Earphones Award.Bergmann has been performing since the age of ten, practicing mimicry and character voices since he could form a syllable. Making a living doing voice-over work in New York City, Erik can also be heard narrating the Area 51 and Justice League audiobook series, as well as the voice of Fred on the companion audiobook for the Warner Bros. feature film Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. He has also dabbled in television, making appearances on Saturday Night Live and Break a Leg and doing voiceover work for Random! Cartoons.

About John Brunner

John Brunner (1934 – 1995) published his first novel pseudonymously at the age of seventeen. He went on to publish many science fiction adventure novels and stories. Stand on Zanzibar, winner of the 1969 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel and the British Science Fiction Association award the same year, is regarded as his greatest achievement.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Mario the lone bookwolf on May 14, 2022

During the wild 60s, Brunner wrote an amazing novel about overpopulation, corporatocracy, everyday terror, and permanent infodump by news media and corporations and described a setting that became astonishingly true in many details. Reread 2022 with extended review Dark social sci-fi Sure, he was a b......more

Goodreads review by mark on February 07, 2016

:: Stand on Zanzibar is one of my favorite novels :: a) Stand on Zanzibar is about overpopulation. if the entire world's population were to stand on Zanzibar, it would sink. b) Stand on Zanzibar is about information. how is it processed? what does it really mean? c) Stand on Zanzibar is about the e......more

Goodreads review by Henry on April 29, 2021

This psychedelic novel, is set in the far distant future, 2010! When we can look forward to picture phones, holographic t.v. sets , Moon bases looking down on the poor, struggling, threatened Earth, and battery powered cars everywhere, (can't wait) but no cell phones or internet, the book was writte......more

Goodreads review by Bradley on August 26, 2015

Some novels should only be read once. On my second read, I wanted to downgrade my estimation of the novel by a star. I felt sad. Sure. Shalmaneser was and still is my go-to model for a hell of a kick-ass supercomputer developing true intelligence and will, with all of it's concomitant problems, such a......more

Goodreads review by Manny on December 26, 2008

Definitely one of the best SF dystopias, which IMHO deserved more attention. OK, it's fair that "1984" and "Brave New World" received greater critical acclaim - there's no doubt that they are better. But there must be a hundred people who have read them for every one who's read Zanzibar, and that's......more

Quotes

“A wake-up call to a world slumbering in the opium dream of consumerisum; in the hazy certainty that we humans were in charge of nature. Science fiction is not about predicting the future, it's about elucidating the present and the past. Brunner's 1968 nightmare is crystallizing around us, in ways he could not have foreseen then. If the right people had read this book, and acted in accordance with its precepts and spirit, our world would not be in such precarious shape today. Maybe it's time for a new generation to read it.” —Joe Haldeman

“A quite marvelous projection in which John Brunner landscapes a future that seems the natural foster child of the present.” —Kirkus Reviews

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