Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Ballantine Books (1969), Hardcover, 507 pages
Description
"Originally published in 1968, Stand on Zanzibar was a breakthrough in science fiction storytelling technique, and a prophetic look at a dystopian 2010 that remains compelling today. Corporations have usurped democracy, ubiquitous information technology mediates human relationships, mass-marketed psychosomatic drugs keep billions docile, and genetic engineering is routine. Universal in reach, the world-system is out of control, and we are all its victims...and its creator"--Cover p. [4].
User reviews
LibraryThing member penwing
This is not a book as most people would think of a book. Sure, it's got sheets of paper with words printed on them held together between covers. It looks alike a book, it feels like a book, hey, it even smells like a book. But it doesn't read like a book.
Most "books" are about presenting a story.
I'm a sucker for worlds - If I can't believe in the world that's presented, I can't enjoy the story - so this book hit all the right spots for me.
It does mean that this book is difficult to read. There's a heavy use of dialect. There's a large use of montage and background techniques normally used in movies. To see these elevated and used in the written word can be confusing and indeed that the first chapter is such a montage of facts and provides so much "context" in such a context-less way and with in the full dialect that it is easy to be put off by it. Don't be.
The world itself is the 2010 as envisioned by Brunner in the late 60s. Other reviewers have commented on the similarities and differences between his predictions and the reality and whether that detracts from the book, especially given that we are fast approaching the 2010 timeframe of the book. The similarities tend to be the depiction of society and what the world is doing rather than the particular technological advances and I believe that the message or thesis that Brunner was trying to illustrate with this world was a sociological one rather than technological; the final scene is Chad Mulligan working out the reason for the Beninian society functioning the way it does in contrast to societies over the rest of the world.
Talking of Chad C. Mulligan - where can I find his works?
I know I have to read more Brunner and I would urge any of you to read this one at least.
Most "books" are about presenting a story.
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The characters are there to support the story. The places are there for story to happen in them. This book is not about a story or a character. This book is about a world. Every word in the book is there to show off the world. The characters are there to support the world. The plots are there to support the world. Yes, plots - as in more than one. I'm a sucker for worlds - If I can't believe in the world that's presented, I can't enjoy the story - so this book hit all the right spots for me.
It does mean that this book is difficult to read. There's a heavy use of dialect. There's a large use of montage and background techniques normally used in movies. To see these elevated and used in the written word can be confusing and indeed that the first chapter is such a montage of facts and provides so much "context" in such a context-less way and with in the full dialect that it is easy to be put off by it. Don't be.
The world itself is the 2010 as envisioned by Brunner in the late 60s. Other reviewers have commented on the similarities and differences between his predictions and the reality and whether that detracts from the book, especially given that we are fast approaching the 2010 timeframe of the book. The similarities tend to be the depiction of society and what the world is doing rather than the particular technological advances and I believe that the message or thesis that Brunner was trying to illustrate with this world was a sociological one rather than technological; the final scene is Chad Mulligan working out the reason for the Beninian society functioning the way it does in contrast to societies over the rest of the world.
Talking of Chad C. Mulligan - where can I find his works?
I know I have to read more Brunner and I would urge any of you to read this one at least.
Show Less
LibraryThing member RandyStafford
Sure it's frequently called a classic science fiction novel, but it's also one of that variety that can date horribly fast: the near future novel. Is it still worth reading 40 years later? On the whole, yes.
The novel surprises for what it isn't. For a novel with the reputation of being about
The plots involving the main characters are pretty straightforward. Hogan, a seeming layabout who spends all day reading, is activated as a spy. The American government wants him to discredit or stop the announced program of the Yakatang government to edit human genes. It fears the population pressures resulting from the millions, denied the right to reproduce, suddenly allowed to via gene editing. House, an angry, young black executive (and, in this future, living space is expensive enough where even corporate executives have to share apartments) gets put in charge of his company's collaboration with the American government to bootstrap the poor African country of Beninia into prosperity, protect it from its neighbors, and use it to process ore from deep sea mines. Along the way, he has to find out why the impoverished Beninia is so lacking in the social pathologies of wealthier countries. Oddly, their stories lag a bit at times when, in the second half of the book, they arrive, respectively, in Yakatang and Beninia.
Like Brunner's literary model, John Dos Passos' U.S.A.Trilogy, the joy and interest of the book is when the focus is off the main characters. Their lives are covered in the Continuity chapters. Brunner alternates those chapters with others labeled Context (usually news reports), The Happening World (a scattershot of vignettes and quotes from books, ads, and tv as well as just brief statements of fact about the world and various characters), and Tracking with Closeups (following several minor characters and their lives). To my mind, this Dos Passos technique is perhaps the most dramatic, interesting, and effective expository method a science fiction writer can use to show off his world building.
And there is an impressive amount of world building. I suspect that Brunner's serious look at the possibilities of genetic engineering (allowing for changes in terminology, they seem pretty accurate predictions) and pheromones was among the first in science fiction. The man who is credited with inventing the computer worm in the The Shockwave Rider gives us the beginnings of artificial intelligence and sort of an internet service (asking questions via phone of an automated service).
Some of that world building, though, is bound to be dated and especially so given its origin in the 1960s. Like so many other authors of the time, he thought the future would hold many new and bizarre art forms. Instead, the computer game is really the only new art form of the last 40 years. His picture of Communist China was too kind, his opinion of the tractability of African problems too kind. He thinks too much of Marshal McLuhan.
Critic John Clute has contended every novel has three dates: when it was written, when it was set, and the year it's really about. Brunner's style makes this novel enjoyable even though it's now more a time machine back to the late sixties than any credible view of the future. But it is a glorious example of a technique still not used enough by writers.
And Brunner was smart enough to know what his novel's ultimate fate would be. There's a scene at a party where the fashions from the late sixties until the novel's year of 2010 are closely described. I like to think Brunner was brazenly rubbing it in that he wasn't trying to be a true prophet, that he was going out of his way to risk looking silly someday - and was going to proceed anyway.
The novel surprises for what it isn't. For a novel with the reputation of being about
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overpopulation, it doesn't have the squalid and packed future of Harry Harrison's classic (if extrapolatively dishonest) Make Room! Make Room!. There isn't a lot of mention of scarce commodities. Technology continues to develop. Wars continue to be fought. New entertainment media still is invented. The effects of overpopulation mainly seem to be an extensive adoption of worldwide government eugenics programs to ensure only the healthy procreate and the appearance of "muckers", people driven into mass killing sprees by the pressures of overcrowded living. And, from the author who went on to write the famous polluted dystopia of The Sheep Look Up, there is little talk about the effects of overpopulation on pollution.The plots involving the main characters are pretty straightforward. Hogan, a seeming layabout who spends all day reading, is activated as a spy. The American government wants him to discredit or stop the announced program of the Yakatang government to edit human genes. It fears the population pressures resulting from the millions, denied the right to reproduce, suddenly allowed to via gene editing. House, an angry, young black executive (and, in this future, living space is expensive enough where even corporate executives have to share apartments) gets put in charge of his company's collaboration with the American government to bootstrap the poor African country of Beninia into prosperity, protect it from its neighbors, and use it to process ore from deep sea mines. Along the way, he has to find out why the impoverished Beninia is so lacking in the social pathologies of wealthier countries. Oddly, their stories lag a bit at times when, in the second half of the book, they arrive, respectively, in Yakatang and Beninia.
Like Brunner's literary model, John Dos Passos' U.S.A.Trilogy, the joy and interest of the book is when the focus is off the main characters. Their lives are covered in the Continuity chapters. Brunner alternates those chapters with others labeled Context (usually news reports), The Happening World (a scattershot of vignettes and quotes from books, ads, and tv as well as just brief statements of fact about the world and various characters), and Tracking with Closeups (following several minor characters and their lives). To my mind, this Dos Passos technique is perhaps the most dramatic, interesting, and effective expository method a science fiction writer can use to show off his world building.
And there is an impressive amount of world building. I suspect that Brunner's serious look at the possibilities of genetic engineering (allowing for changes in terminology, they seem pretty accurate predictions) and pheromones was among the first in science fiction. The man who is credited with inventing the computer worm in the The Shockwave Rider gives us the beginnings of artificial intelligence and sort of an internet service (asking questions via phone of an automated service).
Some of that world building, though, is bound to be dated and especially so given its origin in the 1960s. Like so many other authors of the time, he thought the future would hold many new and bizarre art forms. Instead, the computer game is really the only new art form of the last 40 years. His picture of Communist China was too kind, his opinion of the tractability of African problems too kind. He thinks too much of Marshal McLuhan.
Critic John Clute has contended every novel has three dates: when it was written, when it was set, and the year it's really about. Brunner's style makes this novel enjoyable even though it's now more a time machine back to the late sixties than any credible view of the future. But it is a glorious example of a technique still not used enough by writers.
And Brunner was smart enough to know what his novel's ultimate fate would be. There's a scene at a party where the fashions from the late sixties until the novel's year of 2010 are closely described. I like to think Brunner was brazenly rubbing it in that he wasn't trying to be a true prophet, that he was going out of his way to risk looking silly someday - and was going to proceed anyway.
Show Less
LibraryThing member figre
Let’s face it. It is impossible to go back and objectively review a classic that impacted you as a youth so profoundly that you reread many times. But that is what I took on with Stand On Zanzibar. I returned to it because I recently read some books that remind me of it, and seemed to pale in
Who am I to say? All I can say is that it still hit me between the eyes. I read scene after scene that had emblazoned themselves in my memory. I had forgotten the real thread of the story, but had it come back to me like an old friend. This is a story of a world that is tearing itself apart. There are limits on everything, but most importantly, the population is being controlled through eugenics - if you have even the smallest chance of having an “imperfect” child, you will not be allowed to have one. Two roommates, Norman House and Donald Hogan, really have nothing in common except existence in the same apartment. Norman learns that his mere presence in the wrong location can cause a riot. Donald learns that he is a tool of the government. Just as they are about to really connect, their lives take off in different directions. Norman goes off to discover why a small country in Africa is a hotbed for pacifism. Donald goes off to discover if someone has really discovered how to make perfect children. Norman goes off to find a solution for the world. Donald goes off to learn of greed, avarice, and destruction.
Interspersed (well, not really interspersed – that makes it seem inconsequential, let’s instead call it “playing as important a role as the story” because it takes up over half the book) are stories of individuals coping with this kind of world. And the chaos of this new world that is doing its best to destroy itself
It stood the test of time. It deserved (deserves) every award it won. It is Brunner at his strongest, science fiction at its best, and literature at its finest.
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comparison. Would it still stand up when read after all these years? Would it still have the impact? Did it age well or smack too much of its 60’s heritage?Who am I to say? All I can say is that it still hit me between the eyes. I read scene after scene that had emblazoned themselves in my memory. I had forgotten the real thread of the story, but had it come back to me like an old friend. This is a story of a world that is tearing itself apart. There are limits on everything, but most importantly, the population is being controlled through eugenics - if you have even the smallest chance of having an “imperfect” child, you will not be allowed to have one. Two roommates, Norman House and Donald Hogan, really have nothing in common except existence in the same apartment. Norman learns that his mere presence in the wrong location can cause a riot. Donald learns that he is a tool of the government. Just as they are about to really connect, their lives take off in different directions. Norman goes off to discover why a small country in Africa is a hotbed for pacifism. Donald goes off to discover if someone has really discovered how to make perfect children. Norman goes off to find a solution for the world. Donald goes off to learn of greed, avarice, and destruction.
Interspersed (well, not really interspersed – that makes it seem inconsequential, let’s instead call it “playing as important a role as the story” because it takes up over half the book) are stories of individuals coping with this kind of world. And the chaos of this new world that is doing its best to destroy itself
It stood the test of time. It deserved (deserves) every award it won. It is Brunner at his strongest, science fiction at its best, and literature at its finest.
Show Less
LibraryThing member salimbol
A searingly bitter yet somehow wry dystopia. While it's obviously a product of the late 60s, at the same time much of it seems eerily prescient (shallow media, consumerism, corporatisation, etc). It's taken me several months to read it, but that has actually proved for the best - it's given me time
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to properly digest it, and I'm very impressed by how Brunner's seemingly fragmented approach, with hundreds of tiny, scattered chapters, could end up being woven into a cohesive whole. Kudos are also due for having non-white characters and non-white settings, and for thoughtful explorations of post-colonial legacies. One of the very best in the SF Masterworks series. Show Less
LibraryThing member xuebi
It is the year 2010: there are over seven billion people on an ever-increasingly overcrowded Earth. It is a time when decisions are made wholesale by super-intelligent computers, there are bases on the moon and the Mid-Atlantic is being strip-mined, and when one's genotype determines whether one
Stand on Zanzibar is a frenetic and overwhelming novel that captures the hysteria of a dangerously over-crowded world in a unique and inventive style. The Continuity chapters follow two men whose lives are transformed and yet interlinked: Norman House works for the global mega-corporation General Technics and becomes in charge of a plan to transform an entire country from third- to first-world status, Donald Hogan is sent to an Asian country to investigate a genetic engineering break-through to transform the country's people. These chapters alone are an exciting story of politics, economics and shaping the future of the world.
Yet there is so much more to Stand on Zanzibar. Brunner fully immerses the reader in this frantic world through a similar style to Dos Passos in the USA trilogy. In Tracking with Close-ups, Brunner introduces the reader to various ancillary characters that inhabit the world; in The Happening World, he captures the vibrant and often ephemeral situations that arise in this over-crowded world; and in Context, he develops and fleshes out this world with commentary from noted (fictional) individuals, headlines etc.
Squarely in the New Wave of science fiction, Stand on Zanzibar is complex, eccentric, but above all, startlingly prescient. As Joe Haldeman (author of The Forever War) said, "sci-fi is not about predicting the future; it's about elucidating the present and the past." Brunner has captured the fears of the 1960s and 70s - the fears of scarcity and overpopulation, fears that still resonate today. And yet the book is not overly moralising. Rather, it immerses the reader in a vision of a world not unlike ours today, one that could easily come about.
Overwhelming and visionary, exciting and absorbing, Brunner's vision of the world is still fresh, still as current as when he first wrote this in 1968.
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can have children. Mass-marketed psychedelic drugs are taken by everyone and New York is encased in a giant dome. Three years later, and many of Brunner's predictions for the twenty-first century have not come true yet there are over seven billion people alive today and resources are becoming even more scarce.Stand on Zanzibar is a frenetic and overwhelming novel that captures the hysteria of a dangerously over-crowded world in a unique and inventive style. The Continuity chapters follow two men whose lives are transformed and yet interlinked: Norman House works for the global mega-corporation General Technics and becomes in charge of a plan to transform an entire country from third- to first-world status, Donald Hogan is sent to an Asian country to investigate a genetic engineering break-through to transform the country's people. These chapters alone are an exciting story of politics, economics and shaping the future of the world.
Yet there is so much more to Stand on Zanzibar. Brunner fully immerses the reader in this frantic world through a similar style to Dos Passos in the USA trilogy. In Tracking with Close-ups, Brunner introduces the reader to various ancillary characters that inhabit the world; in The Happening World, he captures the vibrant and often ephemeral situations that arise in this over-crowded world; and in Context, he develops and fleshes out this world with commentary from noted (fictional) individuals, headlines etc.
Squarely in the New Wave of science fiction, Stand on Zanzibar is complex, eccentric, but above all, startlingly prescient. As Joe Haldeman (author of The Forever War) said, "sci-fi is not about predicting the future; it's about elucidating the present and the past." Brunner has captured the fears of the 1960s and 70s - the fears of scarcity and overpopulation, fears that still resonate today. And yet the book is not overly moralising. Rather, it immerses the reader in a vision of a world not unlike ours today, one that could easily come about.
Overwhelming and visionary, exciting and absorbing, Brunner's vision of the world is still fresh, still as current as when he first wrote this in 1968.
Show Less
LibraryThing member chosler
Brunner follows the lives of two men, Donald Hogan, an academic, and Norman House, a VP at a huge tech-corporation, to explore the themes of overpopulation, eugenics, and warfare on 2010 Earth. Hogan is a sleeper agent for the state, and is activated, reprogrammed to kill, and sent off to foment
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disillusionment and revolution in Yatakang (a parallel to Indonesia during the Cold War). House is charged with bringing a third world country (modeled on post-Independence Benin) into the 21st century, using the artificial intelligence of the supercomputer Shalmaneser as an aid. Alternating chapters of character development, secondary character portraits, brief source material, and snippets of conversations and broadcasts, Brunner builds up the context of the world in which the story takes place, creating a rounded picture of humankind’s desperate attempts to make sense of humanity in an age of decreasing personal space and ever-growing reliance on technology. Explicit language and moderately explicit sex; graphic violence, including murder, suicide, and rape; heavy drug use; positive discussions of homosexuality. Show Less
LibraryThing member KateSherrod
Simultaneously reading like a deadly earnest Illuminatus! Trilogy scrubbed of all the conspiracy nuttiness*, a fictionalized parable of Toffler's classic Future Shock, a finger-wagging sermon about the evils of overpopulation, and a whacked-out Jeff Noon media scramble, Stand on Zanzibar is one of
A lot of people who pick up a John Brunner novel -- or indeed any older science fiction novel -- in the 21st century get hung up on either the eerie prescience the author seems to have had about our contemporary world (the book was written in 1968 but set in 2010) or on what the author got wrong about it, but to do either is to miss the point here. Good fiction is good fiction, whether or not someone guessed there would be smart phones; ditto good social criticism. Stand on Zanzibar is both.
The title comes from an observation made by a wag/sage of the novel's world that the world's current population of 7 billion (yes, one of things he got right; we hit that number pretty close to the same time he projected) if stood together in one place shoulder-to-shoulder, would take up the area of the island of Zanzibar (when the book was written, the world's population could fit on the Isle of Man, a much smaller bit of land). The world he depicts will remind fans a bit of that in Soylent Green**; its be-domed New York might also make one think of the be-domed city-as-spaceship New York in Cities in Flight. And as I suggested above, I kept thinking of Jeff Noon's fiction, particularly Channel Sk1n.
The plot Brunner chooses from among the billions of possible stories on that/this overcrowded world concerns a mega-corporation that is getting ready to buy a country, the men chosen to spearhead the project (which takes a long view of a Third World nation's economic development into a new kind of global economic powerhouse as just another opportunity to increase shareholder value -- eerily, kind of the way our modern private prison industry works!), and some of their friends. Because the nation in question is in Africa, the company's single African-American (abbreviated "Afram") vice president, Norman Niblock House, gets the nod, along with the U.S.'s equally Afram ambassador to that little nation, Elihu Masters, who's been best friends with the country's president-for-life for some twenty years. Said president*** being a tired old man now, who has been pretty much single-handedly holding his little nation together since the British abandoned the whole colonialism thing and more or less forced him into the role of someone to whom they could hand off all their problems. But there is no good prospect for a successor, so why not bring in a corporation? The project is not viewed as the president selling out so much as a father with hundreds of thousands of helpless dependents trying to secure a future for them. Believe me, it sort of works.
This is largely because there is so much else going on in this novel, which is apparently modeled on John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy ****, at least structurally, for the narrative, plot forwarding chapters are interspersed with all sorts of non-narrative interludes of pure, hypermediated texture, including extended excerpts from the works of one Chad Mulligan, sociologist, who is this novel's Austin Train figure (see The Sheep Look Up), a wise man who has gone ignored but may now be called somewhat resurgent, but only because drinking himself to death in disgust is taking too long and is actually kind of boring.
But wait, there's more!
Because Norman has a white roommate, Don, a guy with a freak gift for pattern recognition who has spent the last ten years in deep cover as a member of the U.S. Army's "Dilettante Corps" in which his job is basically being a sort of Cayce Pollard for the government. In the course of the story, Don gets called up and has to go overseas to help out with an international problem involving a fictional Pacific Rim nation with whom the U.S. is in a seemingly endless and bitter Vietnamesque war. Said country having made an announcement regarding a Great Leap Forward in eugenics and genetic engineering that holds incredible possibility and also, of course, incredible threat to the rest of the world.
For the reaction of the First World to the planet's overwhelming population problem is to plunge into eugenics with all enthusiasm. Laws governing who may have children and how many children they may have get stricter and stricter all the time -- and in the United States, differ from state to state, so, for example, Nevada is close to a free-for-all whereas Louisiana is flirting with the idea of not allowing anyone to breed who can prove three generations of residency in that state in addition to the standard prohibitions on anyone with genetic defects of any kind reproducing. As the novel opens, the latest trait under fire is color-blindness. But what everyone is really afraid of is that someday producing too much melanin is going to be a prohibiting factor.
Which is to say that racism -- and sexism, which I'll get to later -- are prevalent elements throughout the text. As the U.S. is at war with an Asian power, plenty of anti-Asian sentiment and offensive slang gets slung about (which, about the slang, get ready for that. The slang in Stand on Zanzibar could be the subject of a whole big and fascinating paper, to be pored over like that in A Clockwork Orange, but unlike Burgess' novel, all of Brunner's slang is derived from English), and blacks don't get any better treatment. It's all presented very matter-of-factly, even casually, which can be shocking but which is part and parcel of the societies we're examining. Kinship and tribalism and associated inter-group violence, sociologists tell us, tend to come very much to the fore in cases of crowding.
As is, apparently, a very casual, even cavalier, attitude towards women, the young and attractive variety of which are referred to in this world as "shiggies" and are passed around like party favors, traded like Magic the Gathering cards, apparently happy with this state of affairs and the nomadic, uncertain life they lead on the "shiggy circuit." Older women are only ever noticed if they happen by some freak of affairs to have somehow achieved serious corporate power, with a depressing few exceptions, and even the one younger-than-the-alpha female executive type who crosses our path is at first dismissed as on the scene just because her boss got tired of sleeping with her. To the slight credit of the man making this internalized observation about her, he does eventually include that she might be there on her own actual merits as well, perhaps. Partly. Ugh.
The only other reason a woman might matter, of course, is as breeding stock. But only if she's genetically OK. But hey, at least the potential father has to pass genetic muster as well. So I guess there's parity somewhere. Ugh.
But hey, all of literature has taught me how it sure do suck to be female, so I can hardly single out this book for special castigation. Especially in a year in which I have taken on Robert Silverberg. I do not cry out for a fan-edit of Stand on Zanzibar from which my gender has been removed, but, you know, yuck.
That aside, this is a pretty fantastic read, a worthy companion to Brunner's other blisteringly awful masterpiece, The Sheep Look Up. But where we could sort of, kind of, desperately cling to the idea that The Sheep Look Up was a self-denying prophecy, Stand on Zanzibar still feels like it could happen, is happening.
But we already knew that, didn't we?
*Which, I hasten to assure you, is still a very entertaining, if somewhat depressing, thing.
**Itself based on a novel by Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! that came out two years before Stand on Zanzibar.
***Whose name is Zadkiel Obomi, and I'll refer you to the rest of the internet for points of view on that amazing coincidence/prediction. Yawn.
****Which I haven't read but now really want to.
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the coolest bits of New Wave science fiction a reader could pick up.A lot of people who pick up a John Brunner novel -- or indeed any older science fiction novel -- in the 21st century get hung up on either the eerie prescience the author seems to have had about our contemporary world (the book was written in 1968 but set in 2010) or on what the author got wrong about it, but to do either is to miss the point here. Good fiction is good fiction, whether or not someone guessed there would be smart phones; ditto good social criticism. Stand on Zanzibar is both.
The title comes from an observation made by a wag/sage of the novel's world that the world's current population of 7 billion (yes, one of things he got right; we hit that number pretty close to the same time he projected) if stood together in one place shoulder-to-shoulder, would take up the area of the island of Zanzibar (when the book was written, the world's population could fit on the Isle of Man, a much smaller bit of land). The world he depicts will remind fans a bit of that in Soylent Green**; its be-domed New York might also make one think of the be-domed city-as-spaceship New York in Cities in Flight. And as I suggested above, I kept thinking of Jeff Noon's fiction, particularly Channel Sk1n.
The plot Brunner chooses from among the billions of possible stories on that/this overcrowded world concerns a mega-corporation that is getting ready to buy a country, the men chosen to spearhead the project (which takes a long view of a Third World nation's economic development into a new kind of global economic powerhouse as just another opportunity to increase shareholder value -- eerily, kind of the way our modern private prison industry works!), and some of their friends. Because the nation in question is in Africa, the company's single African-American (abbreviated "Afram") vice president, Norman Niblock House, gets the nod, along with the U.S.'s equally Afram ambassador to that little nation, Elihu Masters, who's been best friends with the country's president-for-life for some twenty years. Said president*** being a tired old man now, who has been pretty much single-handedly holding his little nation together since the British abandoned the whole colonialism thing and more or less forced him into the role of someone to whom they could hand off all their problems. But there is no good prospect for a successor, so why not bring in a corporation? The project is not viewed as the president selling out so much as a father with hundreds of thousands of helpless dependents trying to secure a future for them. Believe me, it sort of works.
This is largely because there is so much else going on in this novel, which is apparently modeled on John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy ****, at least structurally, for the narrative, plot forwarding chapters are interspersed with all sorts of non-narrative interludes of pure, hypermediated texture, including extended excerpts from the works of one Chad Mulligan, sociologist, who is this novel's Austin Train figure (see The Sheep Look Up), a wise man who has gone ignored but may now be called somewhat resurgent, but only because drinking himself to death in disgust is taking too long and is actually kind of boring.
But wait, there's more!
Because Norman has a white roommate, Don, a guy with a freak gift for pattern recognition who has spent the last ten years in deep cover as a member of the U.S. Army's "Dilettante Corps" in which his job is basically being a sort of Cayce Pollard for the government. In the course of the story, Don gets called up and has to go overseas to help out with an international problem involving a fictional Pacific Rim nation with whom the U.S. is in a seemingly endless and bitter Vietnamesque war. Said country having made an announcement regarding a Great Leap Forward in eugenics and genetic engineering that holds incredible possibility and also, of course, incredible threat to the rest of the world.
For the reaction of the First World to the planet's overwhelming population problem is to plunge into eugenics with all enthusiasm. Laws governing who may have children and how many children they may have get stricter and stricter all the time -- and in the United States, differ from state to state, so, for example, Nevada is close to a free-for-all whereas Louisiana is flirting with the idea of not allowing anyone to breed who can prove three generations of residency in that state in addition to the standard prohibitions on anyone with genetic defects of any kind reproducing. As the novel opens, the latest trait under fire is color-blindness. But what everyone is really afraid of is that someday producing too much melanin is going to be a prohibiting factor.
Which is to say that racism -- and sexism, which I'll get to later -- are prevalent elements throughout the text. As the U.S. is at war with an Asian power, plenty of anti-Asian sentiment and offensive slang gets slung about (which, about the slang, get ready for that. The slang in Stand on Zanzibar could be the subject of a whole big and fascinating paper, to be pored over like that in A Clockwork Orange, but unlike Burgess' novel, all of Brunner's slang is derived from English), and blacks don't get any better treatment. It's all presented very matter-of-factly, even casually, which can be shocking but which is part and parcel of the societies we're examining. Kinship and tribalism and associated inter-group violence, sociologists tell us, tend to come very much to the fore in cases of crowding.
As is, apparently, a very casual, even cavalier, attitude towards women, the young and attractive variety of which are referred to in this world as "shiggies" and are passed around like party favors, traded like Magic the Gathering cards, apparently happy with this state of affairs and the nomadic, uncertain life they lead on the "shiggy circuit." Older women are only ever noticed if they happen by some freak of affairs to have somehow achieved serious corporate power, with a depressing few exceptions, and even the one younger-than-the-alpha female executive type who crosses our path is at first dismissed as on the scene just because her boss got tired of sleeping with her. To the slight credit of the man making this internalized observation about her, he does eventually include that she might be there on her own actual merits as well, perhaps. Partly. Ugh.
The only other reason a woman might matter, of course, is as breeding stock. But only if she's genetically OK. But hey, at least the potential father has to pass genetic muster as well. So I guess there's parity somewhere. Ugh.
But hey, all of literature has taught me how it sure do suck to be female, so I can hardly single out this book for special castigation. Especially in a year in which I have taken on Robert Silverberg. I do not cry out for a fan-edit of Stand on Zanzibar from which my gender has been removed, but, you know, yuck.
That aside, this is a pretty fantastic read, a worthy companion to Brunner's other blisteringly awful masterpiece, The Sheep Look Up. But where we could sort of, kind of, desperately cling to the idea that The Sheep Look Up was a self-denying prophecy, Stand on Zanzibar still feels like it could happen, is happening.
But we already knew that, didn't we?
*Which, I hasten to assure you, is still a very entertaining, if somewhat depressing, thing.
**Itself based on a novel by Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! that came out two years before Stand on Zanzibar.
***Whose name is Zadkiel Obomi, and I'll refer you to the rest of the internet for points of view on that amazing coincidence/prediction. Yawn.
****Which I haven't read but now really want to.
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LibraryThing member atreic
I thought this was a re-read, but it turns out I'd just confused it with the Jagged Orbit. I was going to Zanzibar on holiday, so it seemed amusing to read this.
I _think_ I liked it, but it's a very long book, and likes to be very clever, with the interweiving of stories and sentances that all
I _think_ I liked it, but it's a very long book, and likes to be very clever, with the interweiving of stories and sentances that all
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highlight things, without making a coherant whole. It has a strong feeling of Boys Own adventure, business execs and superspies which doesn't always float my boat, (and don't get me started on the problems with the depiction of women in this novel). The main themes are the insanity caused by over crowding, and the plot that somewhere lost in a small African country is some Magic Science that will make us all Good People... Show Less
LibraryThing member sgarnell
A great book. Not something that would be published in todays market I think. It uses a-linear story telling and introduces a large number of characters which weigh it down at times. Still, this book was critical of capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Way ahead of its time!
LibraryThing member m2snick
When I read this in 1972 I would have given this five stars. Now, in 2011, I'm a different person. this is a different time, and much of this book does not hold up for me. There is a lot that does - that's why I give it 3 stars. I find it to be a somewhat tedious read now though. It might be worth
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reading for a first time....hard for me to tell. Show Less
LibraryThing member yarb
Spoiler alert. Several things annoyed me about this dystopian overpopulation novel:
1. Swearing. Why? Why, John Brunner? Why did you decide that in 2010 the English language would be unchanged in any respect, except for bad words, which would not have evolved but been forgotten and replaced by
2. Shiggy Culture. The idea, I suppose, is an extension of the 1960's free love ethos. People have sex with no emotional hangups, coming and going as they please. Fine - but in Brunner's world it's strictly one-way. Well-off men - sorry, "codders" or "zecks" - allow women - that is, "shiggies" - to live indefinitely in their apartments and eat their food, in exchange for sex. Well, great... if you're a man who wants a young woman in his apartment who he doesn't have to talk to. This theme permeates the book, and the only woman called a woman rather than a "shiggy" is the geriatric and past-it chairwoman of the mega-corp General Technics. Every other female in the book is either a passive child-bearer or a vapid "shiggy". There are many scenes of men sitting together, chomping cigar-like objects, discussing world-domination. Was this really how the future seemed in 1968?
3. Inconsistencies. Hogan is "eptified", i.e. rapidly trained by futuristic means, into a deadly assassin. Great, and this sets up a nice psychological conflict in the guy which is handled OK. So why does this master of the lethal arts accidentally stab to death the man he's meant to be rescuing/kidnapping? It doesn't make any sense. Brunner could have made it a deliberate murder easily enough, but no... And while we're taking someone with a knowledge of Yatakangi and making them into a killing machine, would it not have been easier for the government to train one of their existing killing machines in Yatakangi and send him (or even, god forbid, her)?
4. Chad C. Mulligan. A.k.a. the author. This novel spends a luxuriant 250-300 pages worldbuilding, some of which are given over to excerpts from the works of sociologist Chad C. Mulligan. Chad is a crashing explicatory bore who initially serves only to chant the author's sneering opinion of hoi polloi. But later Chad comes into the novel as a character, a sort of beardy, shambling visionary who eventually, and with minimal effort except hiring dozens of scientists, which no-one had apparently thought to do before, discovers the secret of the Shinka. Well done, Chad, i.e. John Brunner, you're a genius.
5. Race. Other races are very much other in this novel. This would be understandable, perhaps, if it was written from a white/American/Caucasian point of view, but it's explicitly not. One of the main characters is a black Muslim American. We know this because on two occasions (in a 550-page novel) he declines a drink, and on about 550 occasions he prefaces his speech with the exclamation "Prophet's Beard!" This is poor writing. There are two minor French characters, brother and sister, who are drenched in ennui and sometimes even talk in French and end up screwing each other. The Asiatics (principally Sugaiguntung) are insrcutable and unpredictable. The Africans are full of wisdom, and (this almost qualifies as point 6.) the Shinka have a prophet who Brunner spends about 10 ghastly pages on in the form of pseudo-parables, like Aesop written by an eight-year old. The parables are lifted directly from the Bible and there is no point in reading them. What lingers is Brunner's deep anxiety about people of other races and skin colours.
The only time the prose feels alive is in a few brief passages of manly adventure deep in the jungle. It seems to me that Brunner was an adventure writer with a zillion 1960's hangups which he tried to expiate in "Stand on Zanzibar" but failed, despite the reasonableness of the premise. "Stand on Zanzibar" reads like a tour of a frightened mind, but frightened for all the wrong reasons and not those ostensibly treated by the novel. Vision of the future? This book is the usual false prophet, forecasting doom very specifically, in a way that will only be invalidated 50 years from time of writing, or, generously, from time of review. Well I will stick my neck out and say this book will never be as relevant as when it was written, 1968, if it was relevant then.
1. Swearing. Why? Why, John Brunner? Why did you decide that in 2010 the English language would be unchanged in any respect, except for bad words, which would not have evolved but been forgotten and replaced by
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entirely new ones?! And why did you pick such stupid words, and having picked them, why must you use them so often? If I ever again read "sheeting hole" where I ought to read "bloody hell", or the dire "whatinole" for "what the hell" or "hole in corner" to describe a benighted location, I will know I am reading this novel again, and that I must therefore have lost my mind, and will therefore kill myself.2. Shiggy Culture. The idea, I suppose, is an extension of the 1960's free love ethos. People have sex with no emotional hangups, coming and going as they please. Fine - but in Brunner's world it's strictly one-way. Well-off men - sorry, "codders" or "zecks" - allow women - that is, "shiggies" - to live indefinitely in their apartments and eat their food, in exchange for sex. Well, great... if you're a man who wants a young woman in his apartment who he doesn't have to talk to. This theme permeates the book, and the only woman called a woman rather than a "shiggy" is the geriatric and past-it chairwoman of the mega-corp General Technics. Every other female in the book is either a passive child-bearer or a vapid "shiggy". There are many scenes of men sitting together, chomping cigar-like objects, discussing world-domination. Was this really how the future seemed in 1968?
3. Inconsistencies. Hogan is "eptified", i.e. rapidly trained by futuristic means, into a deadly assassin. Great, and this sets up a nice psychological conflict in the guy which is handled OK. So why does this master of the lethal arts accidentally stab to death the man he's meant to be rescuing/kidnapping? It doesn't make any sense. Brunner could have made it a deliberate murder easily enough, but no... And while we're taking someone with a knowledge of Yatakangi and making them into a killing machine, would it not have been easier for the government to train one of their existing killing machines in Yatakangi and send him (or even, god forbid, her)?
4. Chad C. Mulligan. A.k.a. the author. This novel spends a luxuriant 250-300 pages worldbuilding, some of which are given over to excerpts from the works of sociologist Chad C. Mulligan. Chad is a crashing explicatory bore who initially serves only to chant the author's sneering opinion of hoi polloi. But later Chad comes into the novel as a character, a sort of beardy, shambling visionary who eventually, and with minimal effort except hiring dozens of scientists, which no-one had apparently thought to do before, discovers the secret of the Shinka. Well done, Chad, i.e. John Brunner, you're a genius.
5. Race. Other races are very much other in this novel. This would be understandable, perhaps, if it was written from a white/American/Caucasian point of view, but it's explicitly not. One of the main characters is a black Muslim American. We know this because on two occasions (in a 550-page novel) he declines a drink, and on about 550 occasions he prefaces his speech with the exclamation "Prophet's Beard!" This is poor writing. There are two minor French characters, brother and sister, who are drenched in ennui and sometimes even talk in French and end up screwing each other. The Asiatics (principally Sugaiguntung) are insrcutable and unpredictable. The Africans are full of wisdom, and (this almost qualifies as point 6.) the Shinka have a prophet who Brunner spends about 10 ghastly pages on in the form of pseudo-parables, like Aesop written by an eight-year old. The parables are lifted directly from the Bible and there is no point in reading them. What lingers is Brunner's deep anxiety about people of other races and skin colours.
The only time the prose feels alive is in a few brief passages of manly adventure deep in the jungle. It seems to me that Brunner was an adventure writer with a zillion 1960's hangups which he tried to expiate in "Stand on Zanzibar" but failed, despite the reasonableness of the premise. "Stand on Zanzibar" reads like a tour of a frightened mind, but frightened for all the wrong reasons and not those ostensibly treated by the novel. Vision of the future? This book is the usual false prophet, forecasting doom very specifically, in a way that will only be invalidated 50 years from time of writing, or, generously, from time of review. Well I will stick my neck out and say this book will never be as relevant as when it was written, 1968, if it was relevant then.
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LibraryThing member DrDeFran
Ahead of its time stylistically, this strangely compelling 1967 book is firmly rooted in the late 1960s issues, extrapolated into the future. The racial ethos and geopolitical settings feel dated, as does the attempted 2010 lingo. On the other hand, the style of some of the chapters that reveal
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bits of advertising or broadcasting from a world saddled with overpopulation and dramatic government and social means of controlling including eugenics, anticipates twitter feeds in reading style and feels very fresh. It's fun to see what the author, who put a lot of research into the work, got right about the era we're now living in, and how much he could never have guessed at. Show Less
LibraryThing member dbsovereign
Science fiction that entralls as it makes you think about the population explosion [we already face]. Told in an experimental fashion combining several different styles, this remains a classic.
LibraryThing member Cheryl_in_CC_NV
amazing book - difficult esp. at first, but definitely a must read for literate sf fans - does have a bit of a jarring climax
LibraryThing member Neil_Luvs_Books
It took me about a third of the book to understand what was going on with how John Brunner intersperses his plot narrative with colour chapters to give a sense of what the world and culture are like. Once I figured that it out it became a very interesting read. What impressed me is that this was
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written in the 1960s yet reads as if it could have been written by a modern day writer of current times. Reading the chapters that tried to recreate what he likely imagined future tv to be like seemed so similar to what my experience is of surfing the net or reading through FB. He got a lot of his future history right. Good story too. Show Less
LibraryThing member wealhtheowwylfing
I loved it, particularly near the middle. I wish Chad C. Mulligan really did exist and write, because I'd love to read more than just excerpts from his books. (He's a bit like Spider Jerusalem, only more of a sociologist than a journalist.) Overall, an interesting take on human society--and what
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overpopulation does to it. Show Less
LibraryThing member tungsten_peerts
A preliminary review - I am half way through this. To be updated.
I read this book a few years after it was published. I was a young teenager and had been at least partly stewed in the more consciously 'literary' sf that had become prominent at the time, but my memory is that I found this book a
Reading it some 45-ish years later is a different experience, of course. While still dipping into what I might call collage technique, the formal daring of the book is not nearly as evident (it's possiblemy perception of daring was mostly due to me not being that well read; however, I'd guess even many contemporary readers will find chunks of this novel oblique). The main narrative is fairly straightforward -- there's just a lot of ancillary matter that mostly fills out the world surrounding the main narrative.
Where the novel has most suffered, of course, has been in the straight "prediction" department. At the time, Brunner was extrapolating into the near future, and as this book has aged, so its image of what the 1970s, then 1980s, then 1990s and so on would be has proved inaccurate. It's hard to accuse him of committing "howlers" of prediction -- Brunner was a smart man -- but I doubt his correctness average is any better than, well, average: you won't find the Internet in this book, nor cell phones, nor ... and you WILL find a lot of stuff that never showed up. If this kind of thing bothers you, you might not have a very good time with this novel.
It's possible, of course, to read it as an "alternate history" of what the 1970s, et seq. COULD have been, though it was (as far as I know) never intended to be that.
Brunner's handling of dialogue has some ... oddities that I can't quite characterize yet and which make me less than happy. When I update this review I will try to touch on these more.
I read this book a few years after it was published. I was a young teenager and had been at least partly stewed in the more consciously 'literary' sf that had become prominent at the time, but my memory is that I found this book a
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real mind-blower, formally, and loved it overall.Reading it some 45-ish years later is a different experience, of course. While still dipping into what I might call collage technique, the formal daring of the book is not nearly as evident (it's possiblemy perception of daring was mostly due to me not being that well read; however, I'd guess even many contemporary readers will find chunks of this novel oblique). The main narrative is fairly straightforward -- there's just a lot of ancillary matter that mostly fills out the world surrounding the main narrative.
Where the novel has most suffered, of course, has been in the straight "prediction" department. At the time, Brunner was extrapolating into the near future, and as this book has aged, so its image of what the 1970s, then 1980s, then 1990s and so on would be has proved inaccurate. It's hard to accuse him of committing "howlers" of prediction -- Brunner was a smart man -- but I doubt his correctness average is any better than, well, average: you won't find the Internet in this book, nor cell phones, nor ... and you WILL find a lot of stuff that never showed up. If this kind of thing bothers you, you might not have a very good time with this novel.
It's possible, of course, to read it as an "alternate history" of what the 1970s, et seq. COULD have been, though it was (as far as I know) never intended to be that.
Brunner's handling of dialogue has some ... oddities that I can't quite characterize yet and which make me less than happy. When I update this review I will try to touch on these more.
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LibraryThing member nmele
I vividly remember reading this novel in1968--it was a revelation, full of innovation and outrageous predictions. Fifty some years later, what surprised me was how thin the plot is on the down side, and how accurate many of Brunner's predictions were, and I'm not talking about the technical ones.
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He foresaw tolerance of different sexual orientations and thinly veiled racism, for example, not to mention a Catholic Church in schism over one wing's focus on sexual issues over al other moral questions. Show Less
LibraryThing member antao
Should SF be seen as prescient? Only in hindsight, which makes any "predictions" worthless. Unless the author in question develops a track record of being right (in which case I'd be interested in seeing what they wrote about Bitcoin). Given the millions of SF authors, bashing out billions of
Novelists don't live in a bubble. They respond to things which are going on around them and process them into fiction. Atwood, in particular, rejects the idea that her work is science fiction and sees it as speculative explorations of how real world issues might play out to create dystopias. The Handmaid's Tale was inspired by the Iranian revolution and growing religiosity in US politics, and Oryx and Crake trilogy is an exploration of climate change and social breakdown. The possibility of a pandemic seems to have been on the radar of many people for a while now (with the obvious exception of our dear government, which truly does seem to live under a rock) so it isn't surprising that it has inspired writers - Louise Welsh and Minette Walters have both written excellent and hard hitting novels on post pandemic societies in recent years.
What does “Stand on Zanzibar” bring to the table? Well, it's worrying to see that the 1967 prediction Brunner used was a population of 7 billion in 2010, essentially spot on (6.9 billion in fact; I know, I looked it up…). “Stand on Zanzibar” always deserves a nod for what it got right (coming to think of it, so does "The Sheep Look Up”, and “The Jagged Orbit”).
I think it was Ursula Le Guin who said that there was no foresight in SF, only lies. Well, if the past and the present are anything to go by, the future is full of them.
Book Review SF = Speculative Fiction
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pages, it is no surprise that simply due to dumb luck, some of their guesses will come true: in some form. However, since these stories have to relate to readers living in the present if the authors make up stuff that is too "out there", they will lose their readers. So any predictions are generally just linear extrapolations from the present. It is notable that almost nobody predicted the rise of the personal computer or the internet. And those who did (John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider" from 1975 being probably the closest) did not see it becoming what it is today (the novel in which computer viruses called 'tapeworms' were 'invented'. Remember 'Stuxnet'?). Authors should not be judged on what they got right. Lottery winners are not acclaimed "prescient". Instead they should be read because their stories are well written.Novelists don't live in a bubble. They respond to things which are going on around them and process them into fiction. Atwood, in particular, rejects the idea that her work is science fiction and sees it as speculative explorations of how real world issues might play out to create dystopias. The Handmaid's Tale was inspired by the Iranian revolution and growing religiosity in US politics, and Oryx and Crake trilogy is an exploration of climate change and social breakdown. The possibility of a pandemic seems to have been on the radar of many people for a while now (with the obvious exception of our dear government, which truly does seem to live under a rock) so it isn't surprising that it has inspired writers - Louise Welsh and Minette Walters have both written excellent and hard hitting novels on post pandemic societies in recent years.
What does “Stand on Zanzibar” bring to the table? Well, it's worrying to see that the 1967 prediction Brunner used was a population of 7 billion in 2010, essentially spot on (6.9 billion in fact; I know, I looked it up…). “Stand on Zanzibar” always deserves a nod for what it got right (coming to think of it, so does "The Sheep Look Up”, and “The Jagged Orbit”).
I think it was Ursula Le Guin who said that there was no foresight in SF, only lies. Well, if the past and the present are anything to go by, the future is full of them.
Book Review SF = Speculative Fiction
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LibraryThing member burritapal
Another book, like "The Sheep Look Up," that proves Brunner is a time traveler. Published in 1968, How else could he know so many things about the future? A president named Obomi, who actually loves his people and wants the best for them, "domestic" computers to help you with your finances, the
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spread of hate and terrorism, the financial and technical advancement of the Chinese so that they have become our rivals. The only thing that he was ahead of himself with, are The Eugenics Board, The Eugenics Laws and their accompanying police. We know that's coming soon. Show Less
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
Where Brunner really excels is in weaving together a variety of different narratives to paint a vision of a future that is both familiar and nightmare in nature. After thirty years, Brunner's dystopia of the future still has a lot of resonance for readers today. It is wonderful in its multi-faceted
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presentation of a dystopian vision. Make a beeline for it if you haven't read it before. If you have, read it again because it holds up well over time. Show Less
LibraryThing member albertgoldfain
I think a lot of the scorecarding of how well Brunner predicted our current world misses the fact that this is a very detailed and internally consistent story. It also thoroughly looks at eugenics, AI, and the relationship between the developing / developed world in such a way as to be perpetually
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relevant. I both read and listened to this work and the audiobook is fantastic. Show Less
LibraryThing member skylightbooks
One of the great novels in the new scifi new wave of the 1960s, 'Stand On Zanzibar' is an early example of the sociological and dystopian scifi that would become predominant in the mid 1980s. Brunner's treatment of population and class status is almost prescient when compared to contemporary works
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on the subject such as Mike Davis's 'Planet of Slums.' Stylistically, the novel melds a kind of homage to Dos Passos cut-up-newsreel technique with McLuhan's media fetishism that makes sections of the text feel almost like a script for an MTV-generation docudrama. Difficult to find in the US, 'Stand on Zanzibar' is definitely one of the great and almost forgotten gems of speculative-postmodern (read: scifi) literature. -Charles Show Less
LibraryThing member isabelx
Visiting hours, naturally, had to be based on local - Earthside - time, but it was no help to anyone when those who came were confrontedg with a series of inert lumps, even if those lumps were fifty lightyears from home.
Attempts were consequently always made to adapt the aliens to a
During the ten hours of the day when the zoo was open for visitors, as many as half the exhibits might be slumbrously dull. Alternatively, the cycles might chime together and the whole place become a buzz of vigorous movement, colour and sound. The latter occasions always brought visitors in hordes because they were always well advertised. for convenience they had to have a name and a definition: a Coincidence Day was one where forty or more of the fifty presentations were at day activity peak for at least five hours.
A book of science fiction short stories first published in 1968. My favourite was "Coincidence Day" which was about a zoo of extraterrestrial species on Earth. I also liked "A Better Mousetrap", "Seizure" and "Treason is a Two-edged Sword", but overall I prefer this author's novels to his short stories.
Attempts were consequently always made to adapt the aliens to a
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twenty-four-hour day. Some adjusted easily; others could not at any price, being too tightly fixated on their home world's night-day cycle.During the ten hours of the day when the zoo was open for visitors, as many as half the exhibits might be slumbrously dull. Alternatively, the cycles might chime together and the whole place become a buzz of vigorous movement, colour and sound. The latter occasions always brought visitors in hordes because they were always well advertised. for convenience they had to have a name and a definition: a Coincidence Day was one where forty or more of the fifty presentations were at day activity peak for at least five hours.
A book of science fiction short stories first published in 1968. My favourite was "Coincidence Day" which was about a zoo of extraterrestrial species on Earth. I also liked "A Better Mousetrap", "Seizure" and "Treason is a Two-edged Sword", but overall I prefer this author's novels to his short stories.
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Subjects
Awards
Hugo Award (Nominee — Novel — 1969)
Nebula Award (Nominee — Novel — 1968)
British Science Fiction Association Award (Shortlist — 1969)
Prix Apollo (1973)
Locus All-Time Best (Science Fiction Novel — 20 — 1998)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1968
Physical description
507 p.; 22.1 cm
ISBN
0356026256 / 9780356026251
Local notes
Omslag: Ikke angivet
Omslaget viser en masse mennesker på en ø. Billedet er skåret til så bogstaverne SF dannes
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Omslaget viser en masse mennesker på en ø. Billedet er skåret til så bogstaverne SF dannes
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
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Series
Pages
507
DDC/MDS
| 813 |