The two plots seem disconnected, yet at heart is the juxtaposition of naked greed and dignified idealism, of selfishness and altruism, of capitalism and communalism, of totalitarianism and anarchy. (At times, the overt political and sociological messages recall Le Guin\'s "The Dispossessed.") Or, as the character Chad Mulligan puts it in one of his sociological treatises, "applying the yardstick of extremism leads one to conclude that the human species is unlikely to last very long." Yet Brunner avoids the trap of losing himself in the hopelessness of his nightmarish world; instead, the resilience of human ingenuity and the vision for a better world still stand a chance, even on Zanzibar.
