Stand on Zanzibar
Review
Stand on Zanzibar, by , is a Hugo-winning, New Wave science fiction novel that explores overpopulation, corporate power, and societal collapse.
The plot, what little there is, follows Norman Niblock House—VP at the GT mega-corporation1—and Donald Hogan—a US spy—who share an apartment in New York. House’s storyline involves a friendly takeover of the African country of Beninia by GT, while Hogan’s involves him infiltrating the southeast Asian nation of Yatakang. The book moves slowly, with these plotlines only starting about two-thirds of the way through. They end abruptly and in an almost too-cute, cynical manner: the solution to the world’s problems is discovered in Beninia, yet the only man capable of implementing it was killed just weeks earlier in Yatakang by Hogan.
Stand on Zanzibar feels incredibly dated. The issue of overpopulation is lifted straight from the discredited The Population Bomb by and , and it echoes ’s earlier Make Room! Make Room!. The decolonization of Africa in the 50s and 60s clearly influenced the book’s de- and recolonization storyline. The war with Yatakang is the contemporary Vietnam War writ large. Chad C. Mulligan, the reflexive cynic, doesn’t seem like a wise counter-culture observer but rather resembles today’s contrarian social media grifters. With the second rise of fascism we’re experiencing in the world, 1984, written by in the shadow of World War II, is the more relevant dystopia.
Stand on Zanzibar also suffers from the “Codder/Shiggy Problem”.2 invented a bunch of new slang for the novel, but it never sounds natural. was able to insert hundreds of new words in The Book of the New Sun, and they all felt natural—partly because he drew them from archaic English instead of inventing them from scratch. The new words coined by are just jarring.
One thing I enjoyed in the novel was the inclusion of the “Context”, “The Happening World”, and “Tracking With Closeup” chapters, which flesh out the setting with side-stories, characters, and bits of in-world media. However, because the main narrative is sparse and slow-moving, these extra chapters only serve to drag down the pace even further. Getting through Stand on Zanzibar was a slog.
Stand on Zanzibar was clearly influential among the authors and media that followed it:
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The use of monomolecular wire to slice a boat in half was later adopted by in The Three-Body Problem.
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The idea of a corporation buying an aircraft carrier to use as a floating city reminded me of ’s Snow Crash.
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The insertion of in-universe stories about Begi reminds me of the narratives weaves into The Claw of the Conciliator.
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The increasingly violent world reminds me of ’s Mind of My Mind.
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The ideas of identity, mind, and consciousness explored through Hogan’s reprogramming and the supercomputer Shalmaneser are further developed in Blindsight by . Both works feature a “synthesist” who pieces together and interprets disjointed facts.
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The riot and sweep-trucks equipped with plows appear in the movie Soylent Green—which are absent from Make Room! Make Room!.
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The scale of the company is hilariously off, with House and his coworkers panicking over a $40 million market cap drop, when today we see trillion-dollar companies with far less power and influence than GT. ↩
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From egypturnash on Reddit, who said this while reviewing Stand on Zanzibar:
It [Stand on Zanzibar] is the origin of one of my personal terms for Sci-Fi Problems: a story with “a case of the codder-shiggies” is a story with awkward future slang that makes you cringe every time someone says it.
. “Comment on ‘Stand on Zanzibar’.” Reddit, r/PrintSF, 2019-02-24. https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/au154p/stand_on_zanzibar/eh52zha/ ↩