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Sign up todayStand on Zanzibar
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Learn moreThe brilliant 1969 Hugo Award-winning novel from John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, now included with a foreword by Bruce Sterling
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.
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.
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.
Reviews
“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