Stand on Zanzibar

Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar." Astonishing in its prescience: wearable electronic fashion, genetic trends, world population numbering 7 billion in 2010, (though this didn't happen until 2011), expansion of corprocracy. Other things he got wrong like the rise of eugenics to counter large population growth. Clever use of the 4 mode technique of Dos Passos with his context, continuity, tracking up close and newsreel sections depicting Brunner's world of 2010, actually written in 1968. Like "V" there are two main plotlines concerning a WASP intellectual turned Manchurian killer, and a black zeck (executive) orchestrating the rejuvenation of an independent African country. As these two plots veer away from each other we might think of a Z with them starting in the middle but moving outwards in different trajectories. The WASP narrative turns out to be the weakest since it devoves into a boring spy thriller (a genre that Brunner actually wrote) while the black zeck tale is more interesting from an anthropological viewpoint. The greatest thing about "Zanzibar" is its world-building expounded through the multi-focal technique which consists of hundreds of pages of info-dumping about fashion, world events, war, all rendered in an inventive slang which is hit and miss. Informal terms like shiggie, zeck, coddie etc never caught on.