MOXYLAND by Lauren Beukes
 ‘The sky loops in fractals of colour, pale-blue fire washing into acid green and purple like tie-dye. Just lines of code, really. Some bored programmer, a kid with extra time to waste. No different from the wannabes recreating some rock star’s mansion. It’s pretty. But empty. Just a distraction.’
Lauren Beukes is a startling new voice on the South African literary scene, and her novel, Moxyland, is courageous, cool, and refreshingly unsentimental.
Set in a Cape Town of the future, where the familiarity of Eskom blackouts is juxtaposed with furiously super-charged technology, we enter a world where corporate control is absolute, and commercialism and escapism have all but engulfed society. Lauren Beukes catapults us towards a future where the borders between gaming and real life have become dangerously blurred. The ‘science’ is cutting edge and clever, and so well thought out that it feels quite possible, a concept that is chilling beyond belief. This results in a book that can more than stand up to any international work in this genre.
Science Fiction can be a very awkward beast, because the intricately crafted maelstrom of facts has to be revealed alongside the plot. I have never really enjoyed wading through the wheres and whens of Sci-fi before digging my teeth into the story itself, but in this case, I was immediately drawn in by the vivid characters:
Toby is a futuristic slacker, living off his mom, stream-casting his daily blog, and carelessly dipping into an underworld of drugs, anarchy and subversive revolution…
Kendra is an art school dropout, offered a second chance at cool by becoming a ‘sponsorbaby’ – a nanotech-implanted, living advertisement for a corporate brand…
Tendeka is a hot-headed revolutionary, surviving below the corporate radar, struggling to make a stand against the social order he despises…
Lerato, a brilliant corporate programmer, is just bored enough to risk everything by hacking the system that makes her privileged lifestyle possible…
Together, these disparate personalities are scooped up by the swift storyline and hurtled toward a brutal conclusion; and the reader is only too happy to be caught up in the slipstream.
The language of the book is one of its most arresting features. The author has tugged and played with the boundaries of English to make it do her bidding; both in enhancing the futuristic world she has created and bringing the characters to life. This results in a blistering barrage of word-melds, hyper techno-speak, and slithery dialogue. It is not an easy ride, but this is quite clearly exactly what the author intended.
- Miranda Sherry Moxyland is launched on Friday 25th April
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