Stand on Zanzibar

I read this book about 6 times when I was in high school (1968-1972). The word "multimedia" didn't exist then, of course, and it can't apply to a print book. But this book is as close as a book can come. The way in which the plots are intercut and perspective shifts is truly amazing. But the author's future is now our (recent) past, and the degree to which the author simply extends the social and political realities of 1968 into the future is painfully obvious. The attitude toward women is painful to read now. But it has always been a great read.

Probably not. I first read this as a young man in the late '60s or early '70s and wanted to see how it held up, since it's set in 2010. While some of Brunner's story is fairly prescient, i.e. he predicted Viagra and other

The character development. Brunner was very good at putting you inside the heads of a wide variety of characters with different personalities and goals. I like that.

Read the novel and take some notes before starting to narrate. There were weird inflection and timing issues, i.e. something like

Christ, what an imagination I've got.

In spite of the obvious places where he missed, the accuracy of some of the predictions of 2010 (written in 1968) are astounding.

If the reader had not used the text as an excuse to do funny voices and accents. A proper reader and producer might have trusted the words of the author to convey mood and character.

I have read a lot of speculative fiction from the fifties and sixties and this book stands out as being unimaginative and bound by tired tropes and lazy thinking. It is what one would expect from a Pulp writer rather than a serious Science Fiction author. The future represented in this book is based on a facile spelling-out of the popular issues of the day and does not make any serious attempt at world building or imagining plausible shifts in cultural norms or new technologies. It seems as though the research for the book consisted mainly of reading Time magazine. It was very disappointing after just having finished Return from the Stars by Stanislaw Lem.

The reader could have moderated his performance. Maybe he could have attempted to portray a man reading a book aloud, say a Librivox volunteer, instead of doing silly voices that made all the dialog of female characters sound like variations on a frat boy in drag trying to speak like a twelve year-old girl from California and reading young people's dialog like a thirty-five year-old actor portraying a delinquent teen in a 50s B-movie. I was particularly struck by the use of ludicrous Foo Man Shu accents for characters in China speaking Chinese among themselves.

It was very irritating to listen to the "performance" and the text was repetitive and boring. I tried to suppress the reader's "vocal stylings" by listening at x3 speed but gave up before completing a third of the book.

I have been listening to Books-on-Tape as well as Libirvox recordings and computer generated Text-to-Speech for years... maybe Audible just isn't for me. I have had several unpleasant experiences and abandoned several Audiable audiobooks as unlistenable although the Vin Packer book I am listening to now doesn't seem too bad. The female dialog is not "performed" in falsetto. I guess I will try this and one more book before bailing on my subscription.

Throughout the book are whole chapters of schizophrenic commercials chopped off and randomized to give the reader an impression of someone changing stations rapidly. I'm sure the author intended this to help immerse the reader in his universe, however in AUDIO book form it has the opposite effect. If you're the kind of person that mutes tv or radio commercials you will hate the Audio version of this book.

The narrator does a great job of painstakingly voice acting every commercial in the book. This is part of the problem. Imagine you're listening to any given audiobook you've already bought from audible. Now imagine that story being CONSTANTLY interrupted by 7-15 minutes worth of well voice acted radio commercials.

The author is trying to be clever by having long paragraphs of random made up radio broadcasts. This almost takes up half the book, and gets boring very fast.