quotes from *stand on zanzibar*

Fighting in an army is a psychotic condition encouraged by a rule-of-thumb psychological technique discovered independently by every son-of-a-bitch conqueror who ever brought a backward people out of a comfortable, civilized state of nonentity (Chaka Zulu, Attila, Bismark, etc.) and started them slaughtering their neighbors. I don't approve of people who encourage psychoses in their fellow human beings. You probably do. Cure yourself of that habit.
from You: Beast by Chad C. Mulligan





so i finished that today. duuuuude. that book was awesome. i'm not normally a big fan of "classic" sci fi from before the eighties -- i'm an enlightened black person and i can tell you the roots of the stereotypes found therein. kind of. and why would i read sci fi that's like as bigoted as real life? but zanzibar amazed me. the only thing that really gave away the WHEN of when it was written was the terms used for black people... which were AfrAms, coloured, negro, and blacks, aframs being the term used by the nice characters and others being used by the not nice ones. also sometimes people used "brown nose." but that was the only thing that made me realize that this book was not written at the same time as say david brin's *earth* or william's *otherland* series.