Running Through Hugo's Back Yard 4: Stand on Zanzibar

Hugo winner: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, 1969

My view: At this point - and this was a while ago, to say the least (at least twenty years, if not twenty-five) - this was the longest novel I had ever attempted to read. But read it I did, and if Brunner softened the blow of his overpopulation-as-hell on earth plot by resorting to a somewhat pat happy ending (a trait this book shares with The Jagged Orbit and The Shockwave Rider but not The Sheep Look Up) it's only because he was looking to find hope of escape out of the dystopian maze he expertly constructed. An incredibly solid work regardless of that fact, and a work that's almost impossible to adapt as a movie or even a miniseries because of its structure and refusal to pull its sociological punches.  

Nuggety? Nope. For one thing, it's constructed in a fashion largely inspired by John Dos Passos' USA trilogy, and that constitutes literature. For another, it's message fiction, but the big difference between this sort of message fiction and what the Sad/Rabid Puppies think constitute big-m Message Fiction is this: the message follows from the consequences of the plot and not the other way around. It's not a form of Stalinist Socialist Realism at work here but an Orwellian cautionary tale (although Brunner is much less of a pessimist than Orwell was), and anyone who can't tell the difference probably thinks that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was unduly didactic as well.