feste_sylvain

For toDAY third of MAY twenty-TEN ManhatTEN reports mild spring-type weather under the Fuller Dome. Ditto on the General Technics Plaza.

But Shalmaneser is a Micryogenic^R computer bathed in liquid helium and it's cold in his vault.

(DITTO Use it! The mental process involved is exactly analogous to the bandwidth-saving technique employed for your phone. If you've seen the scene you've seen the scene and there's too much new information for you to waste time looking it over more than once. Use "ditto". Use it!

-- The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan

Less of a machine, more of a human being, but partaking of the nature of both, Georgette Tallon Buckfast is largely supported by prosthetics in her ninety-first year.

When the strain becomes TOO MUCH it's because Hitrip of California bred it to have less stalk per ounce, more clean-queen leaf. Ask "The Man who's Married to Mary Jane"!

Donald Hogan is a spy.

Thus starts (sort of, after an intro and a warm-up) the "happening world" of John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar". As you can tell, this book (written in 1967 on a Smith Corona 250 electric typewriter fitted with a Kolok black-record ribbon) takes place now. So I'm doing something I hardly ever do: I'm re-reading a novel.

It's eye-opening.

There are several things Brunner managed to miss entirely. In order of their notability:

1. The social status of women. "Shiggies" drift from apt to apt, effectively homeless, trading sexual favors for shelter. The major exception to this are housewives, but eugenics legislation means that most women drift longer until they can find a genetically acceptable and compatible mate.
   
2. Decentralization of media, especially computers. Brunner doesn't even consider computers to be media; centralization leads to artificial intelligence ("Shalmaneser" being the most famous), but television (available in holographic models) and radio are pretty-much centrally controlled. People still own records, but they're not portable.
   
3. Continued Cold War. Russia slid down the list of threats, only to be replaced with China, but the Cold War mentality in the United States is still the dominant paradigm. Brunner (understandably) did not forecast the limits of socialist systems, missed their major collapses (catastrophic in the Soviet Union, transitional in China, unnecessary in the Cuban backwater).
   
4. Continuation of the Draft. See "Cold War" above.
   
5. The continued illegal status of drugs. Up until 1981, it was reasonable to assume that marijuana (at least) would be legal. Brunner forecast the rise of synthetics, but these were legal as well.
   
6. Concern about overpopulation. This, of course, is the central theme of the book. He forecast a 2010 global population of 7 billion, and he came pretty close. But he also forecast a U.S. population of 400 million, which is 30% or so too high. But the major thing he missed was that we don't really care. We haven't enacted eugenics legislation, we haven't legislated limits on family sizes (only our China has done that; so did Brunner's), we don't screen for hemophilia or dichromatism or any other genetic trait. The biggest political fooforah that we have is the perennial abortion debate. In Brunner's world, abortion is frequently mandatory.

For all that, Brunner totally forecast many things which did not exist in 1967/1968 (when this book won the Hugo), but which we see frequently (if not every day) now:

1. "Muckers" (from "run amok"). The phrase "going postal" did not exist when Brunner wrote the book. We didn't have "school shooting seasons". And altho we had some political violence, we didn't have suicide bombers, rogue militias, or domestic terrorists. He saw all that coming.
   
2. A general degeneration of the previous social order. This is pretty much a given, but there are scenes when he describes something outlandish on television, which we instantly recognize as a 1980s MTv video.
   
3. The slow but persistent rise of an African-American executive class ("Afram zeck"). Both the presence and the slowness are described accurately, as is the fact that "we're still rare".
   
4. Did you note Brunner's use of the word "bandwidth" in one of the opening lines? Trust me, that word was not in common use in 1968.

For all of the differences between his world of 2010 and ours, his description of a fast-paced information-driven society is recognizable, distorted as it is thru this fun-house mirror. This is a parallel universe which easily could have happened.

And I'm only half-way thru the re-read.

(More in-depth single-issue analysis as I feel like it.)