Stand on Zanzibar was a great book because of its bold styling and because assumed that in a few decades' time humanity would be fighting each other in a still desperately poor developing world rather than conquering the galaxy.
On that level it's fantastic, and the bits about ghost town Detroit and its music scene is eerily accurate. But on a grand scale, once you've got past it not being space opera, its core premise is basically its worst prediction: overpopulation is the most pressing issue in the US despite draconian eugenic policies. A large part of the plot concerns black ops in s socialist southeast Asian archipelago.
It is very successful at anticipating how sexual liberation, civil rights for black people and widespread televisual media might pan out, but that's not especially unusual in New Wave literature
Most jarringly of all for hackers, the world of Stand on Zanzibar relies on a single hard AI supercomputer equipped with a personality and near deus-ex-machina predictive power, which involves human-computer interaction of the type parodied in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
On that level it's fantastic, and the bits about ghost town Detroit and its music scene is eerily accurate. But on a grand scale, once you've got past it not being space opera, its core premise is basically its worst prediction: overpopulation is the most pressing issue in the US despite draconian eugenic policies. A large part of the plot concerns black ops in s socialist southeast Asian archipelago.
It is very successful at anticipating how sexual liberation, civil rights for black people and widespread televisual media might pan out, but that's not especially unusual in New Wave literature
Most jarringly of all for hackers, the world of Stand on Zanzibar relies on a single hard AI supercomputer equipped with a personality and near deus-ex-machina predictive power, which involves human-computer interaction of the type parodied in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy