Stand on Zanzibar is an densely textured psychological study of a civilization on the brink of suicide. Even now, more than 45 years after it won the Hugo it still has the capacity to shock with predictions and insights that just smell right. However, it is also a triumph of style over story, a handful of Freudian buttons pushed until overload, and a wandering brick that would be well served edited down into a small shorter novel.

It is some point in the middle of the 21st century, and an overpopulated world has gone mad. Cities are packed warrens, despite strict eugenic controls on births. The fundamentals of human ecology (food, water, power) are on the brink of collapse and sabotage is a spectator sport. Pretty much everybody is on either tranquilizers or hallucinogens or both. 'Muckers, ordinary people driven into homicidal rage by the pressure of modern life, strike two or three times a day in major cities, along with countless ordinary murders. Mr and Mrs Everywhere are "you", always there first, watching computer edited news and hoping that their children turn out all right. An all-powereful computer named Shalmaneser runs everything. Meanwhile, the fate of the world may depend on developments in the fictional countries of Yatakang (Indonesia, roughly) and Beninia (a sliver of a country in West Africa). And rogue sociologist Chad Mulligan drops by with truthbombs out of his best seller "The HipCrime Vocab".

The setting is presented in vignettes, post-modern fragmentary depictions of the chaos of life, with it's drugs and violence and meaningless sex and obsession with genetic purity. I'd be impressed with the style, except that it takes 450 pages out of 650 for the plot to move out of first gear. The story, such as it is, follows a pair of roommates, an executive with the megacorp General Technics and his attempt to redevelop Beninia, and a sleeper agent of the US government sent to retrieve the world's leading geneticist and pioneer of a cutting edge eugenic technique from Yatakang. It's a pretty good thriller, but one buried under a ton of literary rubble.

There's a strand of thought that science-fiction can predict the future, and whatever else I can say about Brunner, he has the touch. His future New York is entirely insane, and entirely coherent. We're not there yet, and we might never get there, but the obsession with reproduction, birth, health, and competition is a clear lens into something which people care about deeply, but rarely speak about. It's a single trick, but one executed again and again with such verve that I want to admire it, even as I see through the artifice.