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Stand on Zanzibar has spent more than five decades being handed around as the science fiction novel that got the future right, and the list of confirmed predictions does its rounds with a kind of ritual regularity: smartphones, gay marriage, the decriminalisation of marijuana, the rise of China as America's rival, the consolidation of Europe, the slow death of Detroit, and the queasy fusion of multinational corporations with state power. Published in 1968 and set in 2010, it is the kind of book that gets handed around with a knowing nod, the prophetic credentials stamped firmly on the cover. What gets discussed less often, and what is actually the more interesting thing to talk about, is whether the novel survives once you set the soothsaying aside.

The structure is the first thing that hits you, and it does not let up. Brunner stole the macro-micro chapter rotation from Dos Passos's USA Trilogy and adapted it for a world that had begun to feel like television rather than newsprint. Four kinds of chapters take turns: Continuity advances the actual plot through the two main characters, Tracking with Closeups dips into the lives of secondary players, The Happening World batters you with news fragments and adverts and overheard slogans, and Context steps back to lecture or to quote from invented academic texts. It is, frankly, a lot to absorb in the opening fifty pages, and there is a reasonable case that the first hundred pages of this book have put more readers off science fiction than almost any single experimental gesture of the New Wave. Stick with it, and the channel-surfing rhythm does eventually click into place; whether the click is worth the wait is the central question reasonable people disagree on.

The plot, once it surfaces, follows Norman Niblock House, an ambitious Black executive at the megacorporation General Technics, and his roommate Donald Hogan, a mild-mannered synthesist who turns out to be a government sleeper agent. House's career is about to launch him into a corporate takeover of the small African nation of Beninia, a country mysteriously immune to the eptified rage-violence that periodically erupts in the rest of the world. Hogan is dispatched to Yatakang to investigate claims of a perfected genetic engineering programme. Hanging over both threads is Shalmaneser, the General Technics supercomputer, who may or may not be sliding from machine intelligence into something less manageable. These are good science-fictional bones, and when Brunner gives them room to breathe, the novel becomes genuinely gripping. The long party chapter near the middle, told almost entirely through rapid-fire snatches of overheard conversation, is one of the great set pieces in the genre - a single chapter that vindicates the whole experimental apparatus.

The flaws are also real, and pretending otherwise does the book no favours. The characters are thin even by the modest standards of late-sixties science fiction. House is competent and cold and not much else; Hogan is a function rather than a person; the women, as a rule, are sexual conveniences who tend to meet abrupt and unpleasant ends. The invented slang, while better ear-tuned than most of the period, includes terms like "shiggies" that have aged into something between cringeworthy and offensive. The sexual politics are exactly what you would expect from a writer extrapolating the 1960s into the future and assuming the trajectory would keep going in the same direction. And the Beninia subplot, when it lands, lands on a resolution that has not improved with time.

What survives all of this is the texture of the thing. Brunner did not predict the internet, but he predicted what it would feel like to live inside the internet: the fragmentation, the dopamine-drip of news snippets, the casual disposability of relationships, the way politics curdles into branding and branding curdles into politics. He missed plenty of specifics and got the broad emotional weather of the twenty-first century alarmingly right. The Sheep Look Up, which Brunner wrote four years later, may be the more focused and more emotionally devastating book; Stand on Zanzibar is the more ambitious one, the one that swung for the fence and connected often enough to matter. It is not a book to love so much as a book to grapple with, and there is still nothing else quite like it on the shelf.