ZOO CITY by Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot, 2010).
This novel won the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best work of Science Fiction published in Britain. Joey HiFi also won the best cover art award at the British Science Fiction Association Awards. Lauren Beukes is a white South African author who was a freelance journalist for ten years.
Like so much of recent Sci-Fi, Beukes doesn’t need to invent a futuristic setting – the noughties have enough strangeness, tension and technology to fuel any half way decent story. So, when she writes of the fascination with the trappings of fame where “even vague proximity to celebrity turns people into attention whores, especially teenagers”, it is clear that this is our present day world.
Although Beukes lives in Cape Town, the fictional events take place in Johannesburg which is portrayed as “cheap knock-off” city where drugs.poverty and criminality are a way of life. The Zoo City of the title is a kind of quarantine camp in that it is a heavily policed claustrophobic urban zone. Criminals are forced to carry animals as what the central character, Zinzi December, describes as “the physical manifestation of our sin”. This establishes an artificial and visible divide between the ‘good’ citizens and the transgressors and is akin to the idea of having somewhere wearing a placard detailing what crime they have committed. Continue reading
