Well written, fun, and bizarrely prescient compared to a lot of SF written decades later. Even William Gibson (of all people) has Soviet astronauts in space and

Well written, fun, and bizarrely prescient compared to a lot of SF written decades later. Even William Gibson (of all people) has Soviet astronauts in space and hard SF themes in short stories written in the 80s, but Stand on Zanzibar predicts the rise of SE Asian powers all the way back in 68, and is far more biology/sociology themed. It has some great epigrams sprinkled through: "Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view." "SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he's apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave." Note that a lot of the rest of Brunner's output is very different - I found the Traveller in Black stuff pretty much unreadable.