A Meal of Thorns 52- STAND ON ZANZIBAR with Dan Hartland

Brunner’s prescient classic about overpopulation: is it about overpopulation? Was it prescient? And, for that matter: what does it mean to be a classic? Reviewer and editor Dan Hartland joins to discuss these questions and more.

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• Guest: Dan Hartland
• Title: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
• Host:Jake Casella Brookins
• Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork byRob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Strange Horizon’s 2026 fund-drive
• Strange Horizons’ Critical Friends podcast
• The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J.G. Ballard by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan
• Prism, Plastic, Void by Violet Allen
• This Is How You Lose The Time War by Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar
• Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
• We The Parasites by A.V. Marraccini 
• Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Trade of Blood, Mr. Shivers, and Divine Cities trilogy
• Orion’s “SF Masterworks” series
• Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination
• Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War
• The Club Of Rome’s report “The Limits to Growth”
• Brunner’s “Club or Rome Quartet”: Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, Shockwave Rider, Jagged Orbit
• John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy
• New Worlds magazine
• "New Wave" science fiction
• Timothy Leary
• The Beatles’ Please Please Me versus Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
• Jad Smith’s John Brunner
• Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s The Sirens of Titan & Cat's Cradle
• William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson
• Thomas Disch's 334 & Camp Concentration
• The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich & Anne Howland Ehrlich
• Soylent Green, dir. Richard Fleischer
• Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
• Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic”
• Vajra Chandrasekera
• China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• Network, dir. Sidney Lumet
• Marshall McLuhan
• Taylor Sheridan & John Linson’s Yellowstone series
• Transmetropolitan comic series by Warren Ellis, Darick Robertson et al.
• Going Rogue podcast
• Warren Ellis sexual coercion allegations; lots more but here’s an early overview from the Guardian
• “FogHorn Barge” from Daniel Simon @ SoundBible, CC BY 3.0
• James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand
• David Runciman’s “Are we doomed?” for LRB
• Degrowth
• KSR’s The Ministry for the Future
• E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again
• Strange Horizons’ “Ageing in Science Fiction” special issue
• Shintaro Kago’s Dementia 21
• Julia Armfield’s Private Rites
• Jacqueline Nyathi’s Harare Review of Books
• David Brin's Earth
• Jerry Pournelle
• Dan's Bluesky
• The Clarke shortlist discussion will appear on Nerds of a Feather
• Tenacious D
• The Long Winters
• The Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA)