Lauren Beukes

The first international Moxyland blog reviews have been coming in and they’re great. Fantastic and smart and considered and often romping reviews that invoke everything from Philip K Dick and Akira to Hamlet and Jackson Pollock.

Stomping On Yeti calls it “A brilliant debut that paints a harsh but strangely realistic portrait of tomorrow with a grace rarely seen in comparable works…. Make no mistake; Moxyland is a work of art.”

Dave Brendon said “Reading Moxyland is like being electrocuted with a blend of Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, George Orwell’s 1984 and Ian McDonald’s Necroville, with a dash of A Clockwork Orange.”

Gill Polack really liked it, even though she didn’t want to. “If I were putting a shelf together of a certain type of future dystopia, then it would start with Gibson, some Stross (since not all his work is of this kind), Doctorow and Beukes… not cheerful, but definitely quality.”

Alasdair Stuart says, “As debut books… go, this is as good as it gets.”

Not Free SF Reader calls it a “very good and very polished first novel” and gets bonus points for coining the word “Stroctorow” (Cory Doctorow + Charles Stross) as in “What if Stroctorow grew up in Africa?”

And although he’s not a fan of cyberpunk, Charles Tan over at Bibliophile Stalker said, “The strength of Beukes is that she writes with such passion and sensibility, a style completely her own [that] …packs all the attitude and confidence, giving Moxyland a distinct character.”

Lovereading said, “Gritty seems an overused word but that’s what this book is. It’s cool, imaginative, un-nerving and unputdownable. A new author we will follow with great interest and hope you will too.”

More snippets after the jump

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Here’s the bits from the reviews I particularly enjoyed:

Gill Polack: “I didn’t want to like Moxyland for the first fifty pages. This isn’t because it was bad. It’s a good novel, especially if you like a fast pace, lots of hi-tech and a social conscience. I didn’t want to like it because my brain said “Not more Doctorow.” The society resonates better than Doctorow’s societies for me and the characters have more depth.”

Blue Tyson over at Not Free SF Reader gave it 4 out of 5 and sums up the plot beautifully: “The novel follows four characters. A rich kid that is an independent media producer, a walking corporate advertisement addicted photographer, a street activist, and a corporate programmer with subversive sympathies. All of whom think they can make a difference, or at least get ahead. In for a shock, this lot.”

I liked what Alasdair Stuart (who is also the host of the excellent horror podcast Pseudopod) had to say about the challenges of the genre:

“The genuinely difficult thing about near future science fiction is to make it both convincing and different. Don’t do enough and it becomes a contemporary thriller, do too much and it becomes dystopian science fiction. On top of that, the ghost of Blade Runner hovers like Banquo over the proceedings, daring authors to tilt at the definitive Cyberpunk windmill.

Moxyland avoids all those pitfalls due to three very simple, highly effective elements of the book. The setting is the first and most important, Cape Town becoming a vibrant, fascinating, evolving city that shares DNA with Blade Runner’s Los Angeles and Akira’s Neo Tokyo but is still a unique entity in its own right.

Secondly, the book is cheerfully pragmatic, the characters all flawed, normal people with the same concerns we have, albeit projected ten years into the future. These aren’t Cyberpunk stereotypes, strutting around, flexing their cybernetic angst muscles but normal, flawed, slightly desperate people. Finally, there’s the book’s cheerful, maniacal invention, taking in everything from the sponsorbabies to art with genetic structures and sculpted attack dogs.”

Stomping On Yeti: Pollockian.

And then there’s the Pollock reference:

Stomping on Yeti gave it 4.5/5 stars and liked the intriguing ideas, realistic approach and relatable characters, but says the narrative took some getting used to, saying “Reading Moxyland is a lot like watching a painting develop. Early on, when the canvas is mostly blank, it’s difficult to make sense of the individual brush strokes and envision the end result as a cohesive story. Lauren Beukes plunges you into the South Africa of tomorrow without warning…”

“Moxyland truly is a Jackson Pollock of ideas, rather than of color. The ideas are everywhere; more often than not intermingling in unpredictable but interesting ways…  It’s impossible to tell if one splash of prediction is too much or in the wrong place, but somehow they all seem to fit bizarrely together in a way which is scarily easy to trace back to current trends. It’s a future which is shockingly different yet disconcertingly similar.”