Stand on Zanzibar

John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar: The Novel That Predicted Our World

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In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates one of the great science-fiction achievements of the 1960s

What’s the most prophetic book you can name? Nostradamus’ notebooks? In my book The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History, which gave its name to this Friday books column, I proffered Jules Verne’s little-known 1863 book Paris in the Twentieth Century, which is set in the French capital in 1960, and describes a future world in which people drive motorcars powered by internal combustion and travel to work in driverless trains.

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Five Fascinating Facts about John Brunner

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Interesting facts about John Brunner (1934-1995), British science-fiction author

1. John Brunner coined the term ‘worm’ for a program that infiltrates another computer. In his 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider, Brunner came up with the idea of the ‘computer worm’, a program that sabotages another computer (or a whole network). In that novel, one character says, ‘I’m just assuming that you have the biggest-ever worm loose in the net, and that it automatically sabotages any attempt to monitor a call to the ten nines.’ Prescient indeed! Now, of course, ‘worms’ are part of the modern world of computers connected to the internet, along with Trojan Horses (from Greek myth, of course), viruses (borrowed from biology), and other insidious programs.

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