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- Title
"Are We Adopting the Right Measures to Cope?": Ecocrisis in John Bruner's "Stand on Zanzibar."
- Authors
Bukeavich, Neal
- Abstract
Few scholars have acknowledged the contribution of John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" (1968) to our understanding of the intersections of politics, science, society, and the environment. This essay considers Brunner's foregrounding of false representations of ecosocial conditions that are predicated on Western fantasies of unending economic growth, material abundance, and technological innovations. Set on an overcrowded Earth in 2010, the novel examines the ways in which Western socioeconomic structures inevitably shape political and technological responses to population-resource pressures. In so doing, it critiques mid-twentieth century unicausal theories of environmental problems and dramatizes the ideological blinders that prevent societies from taking corrective action. Furthermore, the novel departs from conventional narratives that emphasize individual agency and linear notions of ecological fall and recovery, focusing instead on the ways that various power structures shape and limit individual and cultural attitudes about ecosocial problems. Part fiction, part cultural theory, and part case-study for reading narratives of politics, science, and culture through and against one another, Brunner's novel suggests that taking effective social action in response to real-world ecosocial crisis demands an interdisciplinary sensibility and a commitment to dissolving capitalist fantasies about endless resources and technoscientific fixes.
- Subjects
CRITICISM; BRUNNER, John, 1934-1995; STAND on Zanzibar (Book); MIMESIS in literature; AUTHORS
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 2002, Vol 29, Issue 1, p53
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Literary Criticism