John Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar...Each of the 32 closeups in the book follows one character (who may or may not otherwise intersect with the main narrative) during a crucial or illustrative turn of events. The closeups are one of four types of chapters that Brunner interleaves throughout the book; the others are "context," like the news show that started everything, "the happening world," like the second burst of input, and "continuity," the notionally main story. Pair of stories.Our chaotic present in John Brunner's overlooked Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
...fragmentary vignettes and interludes focusing on minor characters, peripheral to the main narrative...Closely following the stylings of John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy (published 1930 - 1936), Brunner presents 2010 as a heap of broken images—crabbed newsreels, jumbled advertisements, fragments of narrative and more. The result for both work is a novel as archive or repository; U.S.A. is a document of its early 20th century namesake, while Zanzibar uses the same approach to create a future history: an artefact from 2010 digested in 1966.
This strategy seems to be working pretty well.
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