Stand on Zanzibar

Norman Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically---it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him. These two men's lives weave through one of science fiction's most praised novels. Written in a way that echoes John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, Stand on Zanzibaris a cross-section of a world overpopulated by the billions. Where society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, and mundane uses of genetic engineering. Though written in 1968, it speaks of 2010, and is frighteningly prescient and intensely powerful.

JOHN BRUNNER (1934-1995) published his first novel pseudonymously at the age of 17, and through the 1950s and early 1960s wrote many SF adventure novels.  His work grew more ambitious in the late 1960s; Stand on Zanzibar, a Hugo Award-winner, is generally regarded as his greatest achievement.

"A wake-up call to a world slumbering in the opium dream of consumerisum; in the hazy certainty that we humans were in charge of nature.  Science fiction is not about predicting the future, it's about elucidating the present and the past.  Brunner's 1968 nightmare is crystallizing around us, in ways he could not have foreseen then.  If the right people had read this book, and acted in accordance with its precepts and spirit, our world would not be in such precarious shape today.  Maybe it's time for a new generation to read it."--Joe Haldeman "A quite marvelous projection in which John Brunner landscapes a future that seems the natural foster child of the present."
--Kirkus Reviews