STAND ON ZANZIBAR

This is quite a marvelous projection in which John Brunner landscapes a future that seems the natural foster child of the present. Roughly, it follows the careers of two individuals--Norman Niblock House, a young, super-geared ""Afram"" working for the monolithic General Technic Corporation, with its megabrain computer ""Shalmanser"" and its plan to buy and monopolize the backward company of Beninia. Racial tensions have eased but not evaporated and Norman is the product of Black Awareness that has turned into Black Self-Consciousness. His roommate, Donald, is a mild student when first met, but he had been recruited by the Secret Service years before. During the course of operations, he is activated, programmed as an assassin, and sent to another remote country to investigate the announcement that a genetics genius has managed to come up with the happy combination that will make all unborn children predetermined prodigies. Everything compounds into a fractured tomorrow here--from the population explosion to Marshall McLuhan to the Territorial Imperative to the underground press, in this case a marvelous manifesto called ""the Hipcrime Vocab."" It would be a Squarecrime for the Sci-Fi audience to miss this.