Stand on Zanzibar

I read Brunner's book decades ago, and haven't been particularly interested in re-reading it. It had some memorable moments. The BBC decided to highlight it as almost prophetic. Well, compare that with a more detailed listing of predictions/realities.. He didn't do badly. For example, he predicted widespread genetic engineering, but not the public reaction to it.

The BBC story describes how he tried to do his "predictions." I like his approach.

So how did Brunner do it? To start with, he spent nearly three years reading up on topics from the role of genetic inheritance in disease to links between population spurts and urban violence. He also spent a month in the US in 1966, visiting Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Then, breaking with his usual work routine, instead of outlining his plot, he filled 60 pages with thoughts before hammering out a first draft.

As he went, he devised a series of ‘parallel thought exercises’ to generate ideas. As Smith describes it, he imagined a Victorian time-traveller pitching up in the 1960s, and then pondered how he’d go about explaining to them everything from the telephone to the sexual revolution. The first was relatively simple, but accounting for the vast differences in cultural mores required him to examine countless cultural assumptions. “Then, he reversed the process, asking himself what those assumptions might mean for the future, how present environments might already be making us aware of those to come”, Smith explains. For instance, the ‘hobby-type saboteurs’ that pop up throughout the novel, getting their kicks through recreational violence, came to Brunner after he clocked the prevalence of Peter Pan syndrome on both sides of the Atlantic, and then read about kids vandalising public transport for fun.

The blogger's link claims that amateur saboteurs are under-reported. I've heard some hair-curling descriptions of infrastructure vulnerabilities, and I suspect that if the Internet weren't such an effective opiate we'd see more damage.