Moxyland by Lauren Beukes, Reviewed
New From Angry Robot Books, The New Harper Collins Line
Oct 16, 2009
Lauren Beukes is a South African journalist whose 2008 debut novel Moxyland (Angry Robot Books, July 2009, ISBN 978-0007323890, 320pp ) was picked by Harper Collins as their lead SF title for their new imprint. And what a debut it is.
Digital Natives
Kendra is a sponsorbaby, injected with nanotech that addicts her to the soft-drink Ghost, whose logo shines through her skin. As a side-effect she doesn't get sick, and her complexion becomes near-perfect, but this is a truly Faustian pact, as Beukes eventually makes clear.
Tendeka is the dreadlocked idealist, activist, the gay who marries a woman so that she won't be deported. And the catalyst for the terrible denouement.
Toby is the slacker, disowned and disinherited by his mother so that he's forced to use his BabyStrange (a jacket that both displays and records to Toby's streamcast) what's going on around him and earn enough to survive.
Lerato is an Aids-baby raised in an orphanage who becomes the ward of a multi-national and rises through their ranks, even as she burrows from within, helping the activists (or terrorists, according to the multinationals) sabotage advertising displays.
Corporate Wars
Beukes takes the economic wars between multinationals first popularized by cyberpunk in the 1980s and rubs the reader's nose in the consequences of governments selling out, where everyone has to have a cellphone to get into their own home, to the shops or onto the subway, but where a breach of the peace gets them tasered through it by remote.
Lerato has a good life, but she owes everything to Communique, her employer, and she's living on a knife-edge, where dating the wrong guy can get her thrown out of a fifth floor window. So as if doing favours for Toby which could get her labelled a terrorist isn't dangerous enough, she decides to defect to a rival.
Teenage Riot
One of the favours that Lerato's been doing is to doctor the footage from the surveillance networks so that Tendeka can vanadalize Communique's electronic billboards, but Tendeka dreams of a bigger, more visible protest. When he joins a Second Life-type virtual enclave he sees the opportuntity, to create a demonstration that will lead to 'an alternative economy that doesn't rely on SIM IDs and credit rates.' (p. 180)
But as Tendeka's lover Ash points out Ten is obeying 'An avatar. A ****ing online persona whose orders you blithely follow, like a lapdog. Roll over. Play dead. Drag a bunch of kids into what's going to be classified as terrorist action.' (p. 181) Ash is right. The 'riot' that follows shows how far the forces of authority will go to suppress dissent.
Future Tech
Moxyland is crammed full of gizmos, from the genetically enhanced dogs that can follow the scent of a suspect sprayed at the scene of the crime to Toby's BabyStrange to the VimBOT that gobbles his rubbish and hides under the bed when it's not needed.
But what sets Moxyland apart is Beukes' raptor eye that takes the sociological trends she's covered as a journalist, from the Cape townships to Lucky Strike's 'five million Rand (million dollar) party train with multiple dance-floors... snaking through the Cape winelands on its way to a secret destination for a luxury picnic.' (p.312), and extrapolates from them while inflicting terrible consequences on characters she's made the reader care about.
One of the many nice touches that Angry Robot bring to their packaging is to recommend other books to the reader that they might like, even if they're produced by other publishers. It's unlikely that Charles Stross, Walter Jon Williams or Cory Doctorow, who are all recommended would ever be quite so brutal, quite so graphic as Beukes, who is clearly a name to watch. Moxyland is quite simply one of the best novels of the year.
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