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Moxyland, by Lauren Beukes
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A new paperback edition of Lauren Beukes's frighteningly persuasive, high-tech fable that follows four narrators living in a dystopian near-future.
Kendra, an art-school dropout, brands herself for a nanotech marketing program. Lerato, an ambitious AIDS baby, plots to defect from her corporate employers. Tendeka, a hot-headed activist, is becoming increasingly rabid. Toby, a roguish blogger, discovers that the video games he plays for cash are much more than they seem.
On a collision course that will rewire their lives, these characters crackle with bold and infectious ideas, connecting a ruthless corporate-apartheid government with video games, biotech attack dogs, slippery online identities, a township soccer school, shocking cell phones, addictive branding, and genetically modified art. Taking hedonistic trends in society to their ultimate conclusions, Lauren Beukes spins a tale of a utopia gone wrong, satirically undermining the idea of progress as society's white knight.
- Sales Rank: #125542 in Books
- Published on: 2016-08-16
- Released on: 2016-08-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .75" w x 6.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Review
"Moxyland does lots of things, masterfully, that lots of sf never even guesses that it *could* be doing. Very, very good."―William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
"The world Beukes has invented is both eerily familiar and creepily different."
―Cosmopolitan
"This fast-paced sci-fi trip has intriguing characters, big ideas, a new lexicon [and] serves as a global warning."―GQ
About the Author
Lauren Beukes writes novels, comics and screeplays. She's the author of the critically-acclaimed Broken Monsters, the international best-seller, The Shining Girls, and Zoo City, which won the Arthur C Clarke Award. She worked as a journalist and as show runner on one of the South Africa's biggest animated TV shows, directed an award-winning documentary and wrote the New York Times best-selling graphic novel, Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
MOXYLAND, by Lauren Beukes
CHAPTER ONE: Kendra
It’s nothing. An injectable. A prick. No hospital involved. Like a booster shot with added boost.
Just keep telling yourself.
The corporate line shushes through the tunnels on a skin of seawater, overflow from the tide drives put to practical use in the clanking watery bowels of Cape Town – like all the effluent in this city. Like me. Art school dropout reinvented as shiny brand ambassador. Sponsor baby. Ghost girl.
I could get used to this, seats unmarked by the pocked craters of cigarette burns, no blaring adboards, no gangsters checking you out. But elevated status is not part of the program. Only allocated for the day, to get me in and out again. Wouldn’t want civilians hanging around.
As the train slows, pulling into the Waterfront Exec station, it sends plumes of seawater arcing up the sides. In my defence, it’s automatic; I lift my camera, firing off three shots through the latticed residue of salt crusted over the windows. I don’t think about the legal restrictions on documenting corporate space, that this might be provocation enough to revoke the special access pass Andile loaded onto my phone for the occasion.
‘They don’t like that, you know,’ says the guy sitting across the way from me. He doesn’t look like he belongs here either, with his scruffy beard and hair plastered into wet tufts. Older than me, maybe twenty-seven, twenty-eight. He’s wearing a damp neoprene surf peel, a surfboard slung casually at his feet, half blocking the aisle.
‘Then I’ll delete it,’ I snap. It’s impossible, of course. I’m using my F2, picked up cheap-cheap along with my Hasselblad at the Milnerton market during the last big outbreak, when everyone thought this was really it. It’s oldschool. Film. You’d have to rip it out the back, expose it to the light. But no one’s ever sharp enough to notice that it’s analogue.
‘Kit kat,’ he says, ‘I was just saying. They’re sensitive round these parts. All the proprietary tech.’
‘No, thanks. Really. I appreciate it.’ I make a show of fiddling with the back of the camera before I shove it in my bag, trying not to think that I’m included in that definition now – just as much proprietary technology.
‘See you around,’ he says, like it’s a sure thing, standing up as the doors open with an asthmatic hiss. He’s left a damp patch on the seat.
‘Yeah, sure,’ I say, trying to sound friendly as I step onto the station platform. But the encounter has made me edgy, reinforced just how out of place I am here. It’s enough to make me duck my head as I pass the station cop at the entrance – behaviour the cameras are poised to look for, not to mention the dogs. The Aito sitting alert and panting at the cop’s feet spares me a glance over its snout, no more, not picking up any incriminating chem scents, no suspiciously spiked adrenalin levels or residue of police mace. His operator doesn’t even bother to look at me, just waves me through the checkpoint with a cursory scan of my phone, verifying my bioID, the temporary access pass.
It’s only six blocks but my pass isn’t valid for walking rights, so Andile has arranged an agency car, already waiting for me on the concourse. I nearly miss it, because it’s marked only by a Vukani Media licence plate. The name means ‘Awake! Arise! Fight!’, which makes me wonder who they’re supposed to be fighting. The driver chuckles wryly when I ask her, but doesn’t offer up a theory. We travel in cool professional silence.
Although my hand itches for my camera, I manage to restrain myself as we pass between the rows of filter trees lining Vukani’s driveway, sucking up sunlight and the buffeting wind to power the building. You don’t see filter forests much, or at least I don’t. They’re too expensive to maintain outside the corporate havens.
Inside, the receptionist explains that she’d love to offer me a drink, but it’s not recommended just before the procedure. Would I like to have a seat? Andile will be only a minute. And would I mind checking my camera and any other recording devices? I don’t have to worry about my phone: they’ve got app blockers in place to prevent unauthorised activity.
I reluctantly hand over my Leica Zion, and after a moment’s hesitation, the Nikon too.
‘It’s got half my exhibition on there,’ I say, indicating the F2.
‘Of course, don’t worry. I’ll stash it in the safe,’ she says, against a backdrop of awards – gold statuettes of African masks and perspex Loeries with wings flung wide.
I take a seat in the lounge, feeling naked without my cameras. And then Andile arrives in a fluster of energy and hustles me towards the lift. He’s got the kind of personality that precedes him, stirring up the atoms before he even enters the room.
‘There she is. Right on time, babes.’ He honestly speaks like this. ‘You get in all right? No hassles?’
‘It was fine. Apart from nearly being ejected because I took a photograph of the underway.’
‘Oh babes, you got to rein in those urges. You don’t want to look like one of those public sector activists with their greater-good-tech-wants-to-be-free crap. Although those pics will be worth something when you’re famous. Any chance I could get a print?’
‘To go with the rest of your collection?’
His office on the seventeenth floor is colonised by an assortment of hip ephemera, a lot of it borderline illegal. The most blatant example is the low-fi subtech on his bookshelf, a cobbled-together satellite radio smuggled in from the Rural in defiance of the quarantines, which probably only makes it more valuable, more flauntable. It all goes with the creative director territory, along with the pink shirt and the tasteful metal plug in his right ear. The stolen photographs of the underway would fit right in.
What doesn’t fit in is the contract. The wedge of white pages on the desk among the menagerie of vinyl toys seems antiseptic, too clinical to gel with all the fun, fun, fun around it.
The bio-sig pen I signed with (here, and here, and here) had microscopic barbs in the shaft that scraped skin cells from the pad of my thumb to mix with the ink. Signed in blood. Or DNA, which is close enough.
‘Adams, K.?’ A woman steps through the doorway from the boardroom, all crisp professionalism in a dark suit, holding a folder with my name printed on it in caps.
‘I’m Dr. Precious. We met before, during the pre-med?’ Through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind her, the southeaster bunches and whirls the clouds over Table Mountain into candyfloss flurries. Spookasem in the local. Ghost’s breath.
‘Can you roll up your sleeve, please?’ She’s already prepping the autosyringe.
Dr. Precious is here on call. Even ad agencies with big name biotech clients on their books don’t tend to have in-house doctors. Andile claims it’s because, ‘The labs are so impersonal, babes.’ But I suspect that it’s easier to bring her in here to shoot us up one at a time than to get the necessary security clearance for twelve art punks to enter a restricted biomed research facility.
Not that the rest are art punks necessarily. All Andile will say is that they’re hot talent. Young, dynamic, creative, on the up, the perfect ambassadors for the brand.
‘You know the type, babes,’ he said in interview #1, when I was sitting in his office, still reeling from the purgatory of dropping out, my dad’s cancer, wondering how I got here.
‘DJs, filmmakers, rockstar kids, and you, of course,’ he winked, only emphasising that this is all a mistake, that I am out of their league. ‘All Ghost’s hipster chosen.’ But we don’t get to mingle until the official media launch party.
‘Just in case one of you goes into meltdown,’ Andile said in interview #3, when it was already too late to pull out. As if I’d even consider it. ‘Ha-ha.’
Dr. Precious loads a silver capsule like a bullet into the back of the autosyringe. She’s too smooth to be a doctor-doctor. She’s not worn hollow from the public sector, new outbreaks, new strains. Inatec Biologica it says on the logotag clipped to her lapel.
Before interview #1, I thought their line was limited to cosmetics. I imagine her in a white coat and face-mask in a sleek lab that is all stainless steel and ergonomic curves, like in the toothpaste commercials. Or behind a cosmetics counter, spritzing wafts of perfume and handing out fifty-g samples of the topshelf biotech creams (one per customer, please). This isn’t so different after all. It’s just that the average nano in your average anti-ageing moisturiser acts only on the subdermal level. Mine, on the other hand, is going all the way.
‘Don’t sweat it, Kendra,’ Andile said back in interview #3, seeing my face. ‘The chances of meltdown are like zero. They’ve been using the same tech in animals for years. Cop dogs, the Aitos, you know, guide dogs, those helper monkeys for the disabled. Well, not quite the same, obviously.’
Which doesn’t mean that the contract didn’t include a host of clauses indemnifying Ghost, their parent company Prima-Sabine FoodSolutions International, Vukani, Inatec Biologica and all their respective agencies and employees against any unforeseen side-effects.
‘So, how long before the mutation kicks in?’ I ask, acting like it’s no big deal, as Dr. Precious swipes at the crook of my elbow with a disinfectant swab, probably loaded with its own nano or specially cultivated germ-eating bacteria or whatever new innovation Inatec’s come up with specially.
‘Oh babes,’ says Andile, mock-hurt. ‘Didn’t we agree we weren’t going to call it that? Promise me you won’t use that word in the interviews.’
‘What did you have for breakfast?’ says Dr. Precious unexpectedly. But her question is a ruse. Before I can think to answer (cold oats at Jonathan’s apartment, no sign of Jonathan, but that’s not unusual lately), she snaps the autosyringe against my arm like a staple gun. And just like that, three million designer robotic microbes go singing through my veins.
It doesn’t even hurt.
Considering the hype, the bulk of the contract, I am expecting nothing less than for the world to rearrange. Instead, it’s like having sex for the first time. As in, is that it?
‘That’s it. It’ll take four to six hours for the tech to circulate. Do you want me to run through it again? You may experience flu symptoms: running nose, headaches, sore throat in the first twenty-four hours. Then it’ll stop. Enjoy it. It’s probably the last time you’ll ever get sick.’
‘All perfectly normal, babes. Just your body adjusting,’ Andile chips in.
Just my immune system kicking into overdrive to war with the nanotech invasion. But it’s only temporary. People adapt. Evolve. It’s all in the manual, although I haven’t read all the fineline. Who does?
‘I’ll see you here for a check-up next week.’ Dr. Precious ejects the silver capsule from the back of the autosyringe and slots it carefully back into the case with the other empty shells. Can’t leave that stuff lying around. Light catches the gleaming shells, the reflection of Dr. Precious stretched thin like a Giacometti sculpture.
I’m already planning a timelapse, to capture the change. Only the top three layers of the epidermis, Andile was at pains to point out, a negligible inconvenience to carry with you for a lifetime.
If I could embed a camera inside my body, I would. But all I can do is document the cells mutating on the inside of my wrist, the pattern developing, fading up like an oldschool Polaroid as the nano spreads through my system.
My skin is already starting to itch.
Most helpful customer reviews
39 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
Miserable but successful
By Kat Hooper
Every once in a while a novel comes along that's touted as new, exciting, daring, meaningful, poignant, fresh, full of big ideas, etc. That's what I've heard, so that's what I was expecting and hoping for in Lauren Beukes' novel Moxyland -- especially since it has a nice blurb from William Gibson and has been compared to Neuromancer.
Moxyland takes place in a futuristic (2018) Cape Town, South Africa. The Cape Town setting is unique, and I was hoping to explore it a bit, but Beukes did not make use of her setting -- Moxyland could have taken place anywhere. This Cape Town of the not-too-distant future is a police state run by big corporations where the police control people through government-approved cell phones. Software on the phones lets the police punish citizens by tasing them or cutting off access to their bank accounts and credit lines. In Cape Town, we meet four young adults:
Kendra is an art school dropout who has become an advertisement for a soft drink company. They pumped her up with biotechnology that makes her healthy and beautiful and gives her some of the attention she craves, but the biotech also makes its brand name glow through her skin and gives her a constant craving for their soda. Toby is a vlogger whose wealthy mother ("motherbitch") has just cut him off because he spends all his money on drugs, girls, and expensive clothes. Eager for the website hits that prove people are paying attention to him, he spends his days walking around Cape Town looking for cool stuff to livestream to his vlog. Lerato is an AIDS-baby who was raised in a corporate/government orphanage. She now works for them as a programmer, and she's got an easy life in the posh corporate world, but she can't quite manage to stay loyal to the corporation that's given her everything she's got. Tendeka wants to be a revolutionary, so he rallies kids, coerces them into not accepting government sponsorships, and uses them to commit useless acts of vandalism and civil disobedience. He manages to pull Toby, Lareto, and Kendra into his latest schemes against the Cape Town government.
These four young disillusioned people can't manage to effectively change their world or their places in it. They have no noble ideology (beyond the vague feeling that things should just be "different" than they are), and the things they do just end up causing more harm than good. They are ineffective when they attempt to rage against the corporate machine because they are selfish and thoughtless and they refuse to give up what the corporation offers -- technology, fashion, status, their favorite soda, and the feeling of being connected.
I like this idea, but I didn't like Moxyland mostly for the simple reason that I despised every character in the book. Every single one of them was pathetic, hateful, nasty, rude, cynical, sarcastic, and said "f***" nearly every time they opened their mouths. Not only did I dislike them and think they were pathetic -- they all had these same feelings toward each other. They all irritated me and each other and it was pure misery to be around them.
But that's the point, isn't it? Lauren Beukes wanted me to dislike all her characters and was, therefore, successful in that aspect of her novel. Because they are such a loathsome bunch of people, I cannot sympathize with them. In fact, I start to root for the corporation instead. I think this is the message, the warning: If we buy into what the corporation is selling, we should expect to become pathetically horrid creatures who deserve to be at its mercy. I like this message, but I spent eight hours with my face contorted into a grimace of disgust and I wish I had that time back. Moxyland would have worked better for me if there had been just one character who was different and who I could like. Instead, they all felt like nearly the same nasty person to me. They all had the same voice.
I listened to Brilliance Audio's version of Moxyland, narrated by New Zealand actor Nico Evers-Swindell, who's just as nice to listen to as he is to look at, though he needs to work on making his female characters sound more feminine. Brilliance Audio, I'm glad to see that you're producing Angry Robot titles, but next time would you please include a picture of Nico on the back of the CD box? You usually have a picture of the narrator but his face is missing from Moxyland, just like the faceless people in the cover art. That way, if I don't like the story, at least I can entertain myself by looking at Nico. Thanks for listening.
Lauren Beukes is talented and I think she accomplished what she wanted to with Moxyland. I can't really blame her for not writing it for me, and my 2.5 star rating reflects my lack of enjoyment of this novel and not Ms. Beukes' promise as a new SF author. Therefore, I am definitely on board for the next Beukes novel. In fact, Zoo City is already in my TBR pile.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Some Good Stuff, But Ultimately Not For Me (Kindle Edition Review)
By Robin L. McLaughlin
Before I say anything else I'll state that I think Lauren Beukes is a talented writer. She is clever and insightful, her worlds are clearly imagined and internally consistent, and her characters have distinct voices. But, there are some things that really didn't work for me in Moxyland.
There are two main issues that made Moxyland more of an average, ho-hum experience than a compelling page turner. The first is the characters. There are four POV characters, rotating by chapter: Kendra, Lerato, Toby, and Tendeka. Toby is loathsome, Lerato self-absorbed, Tendeka too easily manipulated, and Kendra too naïve and clingy. In other words, I didn't really like any of them, and Kendra was the only one who really garnered any amount sympathy from me.
Buekes not only made the choice to use multiple POVs, but to also use first person, present tense with all of them. This can make for confusing reading, especially when you pick up the book and don't necessarily remember at first which character you were following when you were falling asleep while reading the night before.
The other issue is that while certain aspects of the book were interesting, I never had a clear idea where the story was going, which meant that my attention frequently lagged. Buekes did a good job of weaving all the disparate character threads together, and there were a few surprises. But surprises work best when the reader was expecting something else.
In this case Buekes never built any expectations in me. The plot often felt unfocused, and at times rambling. For instance, there were some extensive gaming sessions covered in detail, which I can appreciate as a gamer. But they didn't really add anything to the story. It wasn't until the last approximately 25%, when the pacing increased, that I really felt compelled to keep reading.
These things are objectively identifiable, but whether they are hindrances to enjoying the novel comes down to personal taste. For me, a good book grabs me by the collar and emotionally involves me with the characters. That just never happened in Moxyland. For readers with different tastes I expect it's a much better reading experience.
One other thing I'll point out, though this is certainly not specific to Moxyland, it seems to happen a lot with those who use near-future settings for SF. That is that there are too many drastic societal changes and tech advancements for the year in which the novel is set. Moxyland is set in 2018, and while everything she writes seems absolutely (too) plausible, it doesn't seem at all plausible for only six years from now. (10 years from the time the book was published.)
I do recommend reading Buekes' afterward in which she talks about where she got some of her ideas and some developments that have happened since the book was originally published. Interesting stuff.
I had a difficult time deciding on my star rating. Based on general factors and personal enjoyment (or lack thereof), I'd give Moxyland 3 stars. But I feel that's a disservice to Buekes' writing, which is easily worth 4 stars. So I'd rate it as 3.5 and, after literally flipping a coin, rounded up.
KINDLE NOTE: There were a few instances of hyphens or spaces in the middle of words that shouldn't have been there, and a few instances of bad line breaks. But the errors were not pervasive.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Moxyland - Lauren Beukes
By Alan N.
Moxyland, by Lauren Beukes, is a pulsating journey through a near-future corporatocracy where most aspects of society appear under the surveillance and control of an inflexible governing entity, seeming equal parts intelligence gathering, law-enforcement, and corporate oligarchy. It takes place in 2018, mostly in South Africa, but like any great novel, its story transfers across boundaries and cultures, finding resonance anywhere people find themselves increasingly surrendering their autonomy to a creeping 'corporate-state megacomplex.' Moxyland follows the lives of four young principle characters (along with about a dozen of their friends, enemies and associates) who's worlds variably intersect in interesting ways, increasingly so as the novel progresses. It is written in an engaging 'four-voices, first-person' style, with each new chapter being told in the present by one of the four main character-narrators. Each speaks with a particular style, attitude, rhythm and lingo, adding richness and complexity to their narratives. Beukes breaks ground by achieving a seamless blending of cool and novel lingo, occasional Afrikaans slang, and in the case of one voice, an appealing conversational familiarity with the reader, often addressing us as if we were his mates. The unpredictable 'rotation' of narrator order as the chapters progress - not knowing who is coming next - further increases the reader's sense of tension and uncertainty, in a story already brimming with suspense and intensity. Toward the end of the book, there is more rapid cycling of narrators, with some chapters only a couple of pages long; as the suspense and nervousness build, you too may find yourself covering paragraphs with your bookmark to keep your eyes from looking ahead. Moxyland is that kind of book. It will grab hold of you while you're reading it, and not let you go for some time thereafter.
Plot details are elsewhere if you really need to know them. But if you are this far, you are intrigued enough. Read it. Moxyland will not let you down and will have you wishing for more.
Beukes is a keen observer of our present, and an imaginative teller of our possible futures. Nothing feels derivative about this work. Moxyland does not feel descended from anything but the mind of a thoughtful and perceptive writer, transcends genre categorization, and truly stands on its own shelf. Highly creative in content, style and language, the worlds her characters inhabit feel disturbingly further from fiction than should make us comfortable. Our own Earth here truly is the alien planet. It is a smart, at times wickedly funny, and ultimately unsettling story of an entirely believable early 21st century world. Moxyland will enjoy broad readership, and Lauren Beukes is a writer to watch.
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