Stand on Zanzibar in Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy

Oct 24, 2020 Tani marked it as didnotfinish

DNF at 56%. Some comments:

Some of the world-building was very prescient. I highlighted a couple of lines that were almost exactly things you would hear said today, like comments about property being more highly valued than people. The tensions in regards to race relations were pretty close in some ways, which is sad, because let's be honestly, they're not good.

The writing style was often frustratingly frenetic. I think Brunner was going for the kind of sensory overload you get from walking thr DNF at 56%. Some comments:

Some of the world-building was very prescient. I highlighted a couple of lines that were almost exactly things you would hear said today, like comments about property being more highly valued than people. The tensions in regards to race relations were pretty close in some ways, which is sad, because let's be honestly, they're not good.

The writing style was often frustratingly frenetic. I think Brunner was going for the kind of sensory overload you get from walking through a busy city, being bombarded by ads and conversations, and at first this was kind of cool, but eventually it got terribly old. Even more than halfway through, there would be lapses into this frenetic scene-setting, and it just got really old.

The vision of the future is bleak, which is not necessarily a problem, but I hated the way he reduced people to roles. As I mentioned, race relations are terrible, and charming terms like brownnose, paleass, etc., are really common and frustrating. Women, likewise, are reduced to nothing more than sex objects for the most part (and generally referred to as shiggies, which doesn't seem so terrible until it's littered throughout the text, and again, it's a thing that gets old).

The two main characters were almost indistinguishable for me. I had a terrible time keeping them straight, even though one was kind of a frustrated academic, and one an up and coming businessman, and they should have been fairly distinct. By the time I gave up, I just about could remember than Donald was the white dude, and Norman the black dude, and it really did take me that long. Since I'm a big character reader, this was definitely a bad sign for me.

What really made me give up was the lack of plot. This felt like primarily a world-building exercise, with not much to hang on the world. I read more than 300 pages, and what happened? Um, there was a brief encounter with a terrorist (maybe two pages long?), a party, a riot (probably the most exciting thing), and I was just getting to maybe some spy business? I don't know, I just didn't care any longer. So yeah, dnf it is! ...more

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