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. Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books. Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon! 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)

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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