Dear Mr State President, we need to have a word

About some of the trouble you’ve recently incurred

What with your running around like you’re Mr Big Love

Getting it on with the ladies without the latex glove.

You’ve inspired national debate and political deadlock

On the subject of your 22 kids and multiple wedlock

You’re caught in between a hard place and a rock…

And it’s not your head at risk on the chopping block!

While our best minds are working on an AIDS vaccine

You’re playing the field like a teenage sex machine,

Busy undermining the sex ed ABCs:

Abstain, be faithful, put a condom on it, please.

At least you “put a ring on it”, like Beyonce says

Upgrading some of your ladyloves to Mrs Prez

But what about the significant others who don’t have bling?

You still gonna keep on at ‘em, keep swinging that thing?

You said many good things in your address to the nation

Talking about jobs and health and improving education…

But times are tough out there for our single moms

Especially with fathers absent without any qualms.

Breaking up families was apartheid’s worst wrong

Please tell me you’re not encouraging the same old song

Of struggling working moms and dads in far off places

Kids on their own, soon to be social welfare cases.

It’s a confounding factor in the worst of our ills

(You’re lucky to have the taxpayers footing your bills)

Men need to be accountable for sowing their seeds

They have to be able to support all their kids’ needs.

Sorry for you, public figures don’t get private lives

Especially if it turns out they’re cheating on their wives

And disrespected families are demanding redress.

As Prez, you have to be MORE responsible, not less.

You’ve said you’re sorry and you even seem to mean it

Now it’s time to stand up and show us your grit

Please keep in mind, a leader leads by example

So can you quit handing out the free semen samples?

—————————————————————–

(* including allocating a $15.5 million budget to supporting his nearest and dearest and keeping it in the family with all the dodgy business interests of his wives and lovers.

This is a response to the really lovely review of Michael Gastrow’s Road To Absolom in Monday’s Argus that claimed some really nasty things about me. (Scan above.)

Dear Books Editor,

It was sad to see such a fantastic review of Michael Gastrow’s Road To Absolom undermined by a gross misrepresentation of me.

In her review yesterday, Beverley Roos Muller claimed I “dissed” struggle literature, a position which, she says, “conveniently ignores the deep sacrifice that many of those same struggalistas made without which Beukes would not be sturdily sitting where she is today.”

Wow.

There’s the use of that dodgy word “struggalistas” which seems to suggest that it was just the trendy thing to do at the time (ideally while wearing a fetching Che Guevera-style beret) instead of a devastating war against an evil regime willing to stoop to surveillance, oppression, intimidation, exile, character assassination, torture and outright murder.

Then there’s the way Muller completely misheard or misinterpreted what I was at careful pains to spell out – that I was very cheekily referring to a cliché about the Post-1994 emerging young South African literature scene which saw a glut of white middle class memoirs about growing up under apartheid and coming to the startling realisation through a memorable encounter with a gardener or maid wronged by the state, that [heavy dose of irony] “black people are people too”. I also pointed out that there was a lot more to SA lit at the time than that.

(And, in fact, there have been some superb books in exactly that mould, including Richard Poplak’s Ja, No, Man and Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs’ Tonight about Zimbabwe)

I don’t know how Muller got the impression that I was “dissing” the struggle or struggle literature, particularly when books like Andre Brink’s A Dry White Season were an influence on my novel Moxyland, which is fundamentally ABOUT a re-imagined struggle against a neo-apartheid state in South Africa ten years from now.

I’m no denialist. The trees may have been cut down, but apartheid’s roots run deep and will be tripping us up for years to come.

I know exactly how I got to where I’m sitting today; through hard work and luck and an unfair privilege granted me by a racist state, through feminism which allowed me to actually have an education and a career (thanks suffragettes!), and absolutely through the efforts of everyone who opposed apartheid and made this country a tolerable place to live.

Finally, if you absolutely have to compare me to a flower,  at least make it a scrappy Leonitis.

- Lauren Beukes

Which reminded me of Elizabeth Klarer, the South African woman who loved an alien and had his love child in 1958. And in honour of the MoD throwing open their files, I’m going to throw open the chapter on her from my 2005 non-fic Maverick: Extraordinary Women From South Africa’s Past

You can buy Elizabeth’s autobiography, Beyond the Light Barrier here.

Or read on below…

The Woman Who Loved An Alien: Elizabeth Klarer

This is a love story; of an interstellar romance that spanned space, time and credibility. But it’s also a mystery story tangled and clotted with verifiable facts, close associations with top brass military personnel, experimental plane testing sites and a four-month vanishing. What really happened to Elizabeth Klarer?

Elizabeth Wollatt was born the youngest of three daughters on 1 July 1910, most auspiciously in the year Halley’s comet inched its blurry way across the night skies. She was into horse riding and music and the stories of the farm’s induna, Ladam, which he related to her in Zulu.

She had her first encounter when she was just seven. As Elizabeth tells it in her book, Beyond The Light Barrier, she and her nine-year-old sister, Barbara, were playing outside on the family farm in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, when they saw a pocked-marked meteor hurtling through the upper reaches towards the farm, viscous smoke trailing in its wake. Suddenly a silver disc appeared, coruscating with a lustrous pearly light. It swooped out of clear skies to intercept the meteor. In fear, the dogs ran yelping for cover.

The children tumbled into the house to tell their parents of the narrowly averted disaster and the spaceship that had saved them. Elizabeth’s father, Samuel Bankroft Wollatt, was sceptical, while her aristocratic mother, Florence, who dressed in glittering evening gowns for dinner — even in rural KwaZulu Natal, accepted them at their word. But it was Ladam who was the most supportive of their wild-eyed claims.

In Zulu legend there is a creature known as the lightning bird, but although most references depict the impundulu as a witch’s familiar that summons thunder with its wings and lightning strikes with a kick of its talons, Ladam painted it as a herald of the Sky Gods with metallic iridescent wings that shifted colour, coincidentally much like the ship Elizabeth had seen.

Her second sighting came several months later. She was outside with Ladam, when a flattened, black cumulo-nimbus cloud bristling with jagged flashes of lightning suddenly heralded a tornado that twisted down over their heads. Again, a silvery craft swept in to the rescue, intervening between Elizabeth and the pulsating funnel that spun away to vent its fury on a pine tree and an abandoned shed instead.

Ladam called her Inkosazana (chieftainess) and Hlangabeza or ‘one who brings together’ and claimed that her golden hair would call down the Abalungu (white people) from the sky and that there would be a meeting. And a mating.

By comparison, the next few years were uneventful. After matriculating from St. Anne’s Diocesan College in Pietermaritzburg, Elizabeth moved to Italy to study art and music in Florence, and then on to Cambridge University where, compelled by her fascination with the skies, she completed a four-year diploma in meteorology.

She returned to South Africa in 1932, married an RAF pilot, Captain W. Stafford Phillips, and gave birth to a daughter, Marilyn a year later. Stafford taught her to fly and she would often serve as navigator during flips in his Tiger Moth. In 1937, they were en route from Durban to Baragwanath airfield in a Leopard Moth when a huge pulsating sphere with a slightly raised dome pulled level with their plane over the Drakensberg. Elizabeth tapped Stafford on the back of the neck. When he looked over his shoulder to see what she was on about, he immediately launched into evasive manoeuvres, ducking and banking away. The ship paced them easily, cyclically flashing through white, blue and yellow, before it flipped on its side, rolled away like a wheel and then, with a burst of light, vanished. As soon as they landed, Stafford filed a detailed report to headquarters in Pretoria. Unfortunately, the South African Air Force has no record of it.

Shortly thereafter, Stafford was redeployed to the DeHavilland Experimental Station in Hatfield, England. Elizabeth was employed by the Royal Air Force as a meteorologist and was trained to observe aerial anomalies, as many women were during the war. It was around this time that she claimed she met Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding (who later lead the defeat of the German Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain in 1940 and was consequently upgraded to Lord).

Hugh, or ‘Chief’ as Elizabeth called him, a keen spiritualist and student of unexplained phenomena, was very interested in her experiences. Just before the outbreak of the World War II, the Chief recruited Elizabeth to do research on flying saucers, perhaps as an early precursor to a quite real secret committee set up after a rash of sightings in the late ’40s.

Under pressure from top brass such as the Chief, as well as Earl Mountbatten and Sir Henry Tizard — a leading scientist who helped develop radar technology, the British Ministry of Defence initiated the unfortunately named ‘The Flying Saucer Working Party’ in 1950. Their findings (recently released in February 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act, according to London’s The Times newspaper) were cursorily dismissive of the sighting reported by people like RAF Flight Lieutenant Hubbard who had seen an oscillating ‘flat disc, light pearl grey in colour’.

If Elizabeth was privy to that very secret information, it didn’t dissuade her in the slightest and she maintained regular contact with the Chief until 1960, ten years before he died.

During the war, Elizabeth said she did decoding for the RAF as well as research into what the pilots called ‘Foo fighters’ and the radar monitors ‘angels’; small bright lights that used to pace the planes. It was originally thought that the mysterious lights were some kind of secret German weapon, until it was discovered that the Luftwaffe was reporting them too.

In 1943, Elizabeth moved back to South Africa and allegedly continued her work in air force intelligence. She was hospitalised in Groote Schuur after an accident on the Ysterplaat airbase when a fire broke out in one of the hangars and a petrol tank exploded, catching her and Stafford in the blast as they tried to rescue one of the planes. (SAAF records recall a fire in 1944, apparently an act of an Afrikaner group with Nazi sympathies, but no injuries were noted).

The couple divorced soon after, quite possibly because Stafford didn’t share her passion for flying saucers, or perhaps Elizabeth was subconsciously trying to make way for the alien assignation she claimed later she psychically knew was to come However, she married again in 1946, this time to Paul Klarer, an engineer in Vereeniging. She gave birth to her son, David, in 1949, but Paul proved <I>too</I> level-headed to handle her all-consuming passion in the unexplained and by the mid-1950s, the marriage was over

Elizabeth still holidayed habitually in the Drakensberg on the farm, which by then belonged to her older sister May and her husband Jock. In 1954 she experienced something that would shift her reality forever.

According to her, she was standing on what has come to be known as Flying Saucer Hill when the same silver ship that haunted her childhood scudded through the sky, using the clouds as camouflage. It descended lower and lower until it hovered barely a metre from the ground, its pulsating hum reverberating through her head until her ears popped. It was a massive ellipse of a ship, 18 m in diameter with a rounded dome dotted with portholes in the centre – the quintessential flying saucer. Staring at her from one of the portholes, a man stood, arms-folded — the most beautiful man she’d ever seen with a shock of white hair.

In her book, which takes on a decidedly Mills & Boon tone after this point, she writes, ‘I studied his face, the most wonderful face I had ever seen and I felt a sense of affinity and love. A slight smile softened the aesthetic lines of his face, a gentle smile that caused my heart to miss a beat; a smile I knew had softened his eyes too and I dared not look again into those eyes.’ After a few brief minutes, the ship abruptly rose vertically and with a flash of light disappeared, leaving only a heat wave shimmer in the sky behind it.

It was to return 18 months later. Elizabeth sensed it’s imminent arrival (she’d spent much of her life developing her telepathic skills by practising on animals, plants, machines and ‘anything with the spark of life’), but this time, when she rushed up Flying Saucer Hill, it was parked, the tall man standing beside it clearly waiting for her. She ran to him and he swept her into his arms and swung her round, laughing.

‘Not afraid this time?’ he asked.

‘I have known your face within my heart all my life,’ she answered.

He took her onboard and introduced himself as Akon, a scientist from the planet Meton in the Alpha Centauri system. He had light grey eyes, fair golden skin, aquiline features and straight white hair that reached the nape of his neck. He wore a tight, shimmery one-piece suit. Elizabeth said the suit had a matching headpiece with slanted, slit eyeholes and a slit mouthhole, although he rarely wore it.

He told her he had been watching and waiting for her all his life and that while his kind only rarely mates with Earth women, when they do, they keep the offspring to strengthen the race with the infusion of new blood. Then he whisked her away beyond the reaches of the atmosphere to the awaiting mother ship.

He showed her the marvels of his immaculately utopian civilisation by way of an ‘electric mirage’, a type of holographic screen. He introduced her to his colleagues and they quickly became embroiled in explanations of how their ships worked (they’re moulded from pure energy and based on an electro-magnetic gravity field that creates the shifting colours). They also revealed their peaceful space-faring society, discussed technology, philosophy and that ultimate force of the universe – love. But while Akon and Elizabeth shared electric kisses and he revealed to her that she was truly a Venusian and the reincarnation of long lost soul-mate, she had to wait until the following occasion for their love to be consummated.

Back on earth, the Zulu villagers gathered on the hill, the women ululating and the men shouting about the ‘umlingo wagon in the sky’ in a scene that her sister May described as cinematic. May was admirably stoic about the news of Elizabeth’s would-be alien lover, but the Chief was so ecstatic, he flew out immediately from London to see her, although he advised her to let the hubbub calm down before she tried to see Akon again.

The story was already out in the press and when Elizabeth returned to Johannesburg, she was bombarded by journalists, enthusiasts and sceptics wanting a piece of her. At the time, alien intrigues were all the rage along with the perils of the communist Rooi Gevaar and there were several people at the time claiming to have seen UFOs, possibly inspired by a 1953 movie Invaders From Mars that was the first to dramatise alien abductions.

Elizabeth was very critical of her rivals and wrote, ‘Societies flourished like fungi in the bracing warmth of the highveld summer, watered by the fanatical enthusiasm of many misguided individuals whose egotism far outweighed any good they attempted to do.’

Indeed, a few years later, Elizabeth was to have a very public falling out in the newspapers with another self-styled specialist, Ann Grevler, whose book, Operation Broomstick claimed that she had experienced a close encounter of her own on the astral plane with an enlightened being called Ashtar.

Back in 1956, Elizabeth claimed she was threatened with abduction by shadowy military organisations and possibly the Russians if she didn’t hand over scientific details of the ship’s propulsion systems. When she appealed to the authorities, presumably the Chief or his local cohorts, she claims they assigned an ex-policeman to guard her Parktown home and accompany her wherever she went.

Unfortunately her book is sketchy on the exact dates, but when Akon’s ship appeared over Johannesburg in about 1958 , she says, inspiring the Air Force to scramble jets from the Waterkloof Air Force Base, she knew it was a sign and left for the Drakensberg immediately with David and her two dogs in her MG.

Akon was waiting for her when she arrived – but, she claimed, so was a curious Air Force helicopter. Fortunately, Akon bent the light rays around the ship to render it invisible and took Elizabeth to the heights of Cathkin peak, where they would not be followed.

Inside the ship, alone at last, Elizabeth removed her practical gillie shoes and her thick tartan kilt and luxuriated in an exotic green foaming bath rich in minerals and cleansing agents. When she stepped out, Akon presented her with a ring of beaten silver and green enamel set with a stone of light and then … ‘I surrendered in ecstasy to the magic of his love making, our bodies merging in magnetic union as the divine essence of our spirits became one.’ Afterwards, they enjoyed a tasty meal of fresh vegetables and fruits grown onboard and Akon returned her to Earth. Already his seed was growing within her, at the ripe age of 49.

Rather than return to Johannesburg, May and Elizabeth decided it would be best for her to lie low in the Drakensberg. Marilyn was already at university and David attended boarding school nearby, although Elizabeth claims he was with her on a ride up the mountain to meet Akon, when Russian cosmonauts ambushed her with the intent of kidnapping her and her unborn baby in their vertical-landing spacecraft equipped with a death ray. She made a narrow escape and galloped off on her horse. In frustration the cosmonauts fired at her and the death ray melted a nearby sandstone boulder, which may well still be up there. The brewing storm drove off the cosmonauts back to their orbiting spacecraft, while Elizabeth to one of the stone camping huts along the trail, where David was waiting for her, quite calmly with a meal prepared.

David remembers none of this. He has no recollection of his middle-aged mother being pregnant. Nor does he remember her being away for four months, when Akon supposedly took her – and, conveniently, the MG – into space so she could give birth on his planet in 1959. However, he admits that he simply might not have noticed her absence, being at boarding school. Or he shrugs, reluctant to be blatantly disloyal to his mother, his memory may have been erased.

While Elizabeth (and her car) were supposedly only gone from Earth for four months, that time equated to nine years on Meton. The planet was a truly wondrous place, with dome homes arranged in private gardens where the grass never needed cutting, amazing birds and horses and silkworm plants that produced the silvery clothing everyone wore. There was an abundance of everything and, Elizabeth noted, a marked absence of violent movies or comic books, alcohol, cigarettes or drugs.

When the time came, she had a natural birth, remarkable only for being utterly painless, and she called the child Ayling. Curiously, in her book while she lavishes pages on Meton’s incredible white horses, she spares only a few paragraphs on the nine years of her son’s life, describing him as a perfect gentle child, full of life and intelligence, who would sleep in her arms and ride on Akon’s back when they went for walks or rides.

Unfortunately, the planetary vibrations affected her heart and Akon gently explained to her that while they could implant a timing device to regulate her pulse to Meton’s electrical frequency, she would never be able to readjust to Earth and her heart was too unstable to endure the shock of a device that could normalize the effect of multiple time-fields.

She reluctantly returned to Earth, glowing with her startling new revelation that would put anyone else’s alien encounter to shame, but her health was never the same. After May and Jock died, she moved back to Johannesburg and started work in one of CNA’s bookstores. However, she struggled for money and her tachycardia plagued her to the extent that she ended up in hospital.

In 1963 she became romantically entangled with Major Aubrey Fielding, an ex-British intelligence officer who Elizabeth maintained the Chief sent to look after her. Certainly he was there to take care of her when she was hospitalised, but David maintains he was much more than just a bodyguard and that his poised and elegant mother did love the gentle major. However, one of her surviving friends now claims Aubrey was a member of MI16 (as opposed to MI5 or MI6), and that when he died in 1980, it was an assassination by lethal injection because of Elizabeth’s interests.

Whether he was still an active agent or not is debateable but Aubrey was, as proprietor of the Aubrey Fielding Gallery, most definitely an art dealer and Elizabeth, ever the culturati, delighted in being part of the hip Jo’burg art scene as well as the alien one.

And what did Akon think of all this? Elizabeth believed he was not only supportive, but that he’d helped to arrange it. For his part, Aubrey had only this to say to the newspapers, ‘Well, my wife has been in love with a spaceman for 20 years. That’s all right with me – as long as he stays in space where he belongs.’

Despite his gruff rebuff, Aubrey, unlike Paul Klarer, was very much a believer. He was involved on the sidelines in Elizabeth’s work and the flying saucer society she chaired, Contact International, which held monthly meetings well into the ’80s.

Elizabeth was quite the activist. She travelled the country giving talks to interested groups and apart from the heckling she received at the Jo’burg MENSA society meeting, she was generally met with open-mindedness or, at worst, polite scepticism. She also attracted international attention and had correspondences from all over the world, including a post card from Professor Valerii Sanarov at the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences in Novosibirisk, Siberia, who read about her in a copy of The Sunday Times that was mailed to him, and a letter dated 17 January 1968 from America’s Library of Congress in Washington DC, requesting a copy of her book, then still in manuscript form.

In 1975 she was invited to attend the 11^th International Congress of UFO Research Groups at Wiesbaden and received a standing ovation from the 22 assembled scientists. She also apparently gave a speech at the House of Lords in London in 1983 and one of her papers was read at the UN, although hard evidence of these latter two is not readily available.

What is readily available, in a trunk in David Klarer’s house in Durban, is a ton of newspaper articles. Ever since the 1950s when she first came forward about her experiences, the papers have loved her – and loved to ridicule her. She was a favourite of human interest columnists and journalist Jani Allen (best known for her affair with the riding-challenged AWB leader, Eugene Terreblanche) did several pieces on her over the years that were mostly friendly. But other journalists couldn’t resist the opportunity to make light of her light-years-away romance. Juicy headlines in the entertainment section read along the lines of: ‘My Stepfather Is An Alien’, ‘Liz Is In Love With A Harmony From Space’ and ‘A Romance That Is Out Of This World’. Elizabeth took it on the chin, claiming bad publicity was better than none and she needed all she could get to spread Akon’s message of peace, love, understanding and environmentalism that would save the planet.

When her book, Beyond The Light Barrier was finally published in English in 1981, it inspired new flurries of publicity. Following her coup at Wiesbaden, the book had already been published in German in 1977 and the first two print runs had quickly sold out, but in South Africa, publishers treated her autobiography as science fiction and it was only several years after completing it that Howard Timmins Publishers stepped in to bring it to light.

The book is an uneasy combination of autobiography, emphatic New Agey philosophical treatise, complicated science that sounds most convincing and wild adventure love story. It includes many photographs of the family farm in the berg, pictures of various dogs, horses and family, and Elizabeth receiving a bouquet in Wiesbaden, as well as several authentic-looking photographs of ships in motion streaking across the sky, which Elizabeth took with her Brownie box camera. But apart from a painting of Akon, there are no images of her family in space or close-up shots of the ship when it had landed.

While Elizabeth was in regular telepathic contact with Akon, she never saw Ayling again other than in holographic projections. She claimed it was too dangerous for him to come to Earth considering the violent barbarism of its inhabitants.

She always maintained that Akon would come back to fetch her. He never did, although her friends will tell you that she’s with him now. In 1994, at the age of 84, Elizabeth died of breast cancer, leaving her second book, The Gravity File unfinished.

She purported that her second book would fill in many of the gaps of the first and would also provide a detailed breakdown of Akon’s electro-gravity propulsion technology. The manuscript is not lost, however, just incomplete, and radio personality John Marsh is trying to complete it, with the aid of her notes.

Was it all hokum, a convenient format to propagate her free spirit philosophies, a way for a middle-aged woman to bask in the glow of public attention? Or did she really see something in her youth and just go overboard at the end as Zimbabwean UFO authority Cynthia Hind apparently claimed? Or are we simply not capable of understanding?

David says he now regrets not ‘cornering’ his mother on some of the things she wrote in her book. There are certainly glaring plot holes; for instance that there just happened to be beautiful white horses on Meton, which Elizabeth just happened to love, or that Akon took her MG onto the ship because he wanted to adjust the engine, despite not being familiar with piston engines, let alone the purple prose or the biological logistics of having a baby at 50.

On the flip side, Elizabeth had the hard evidence of photographs, Akon’s ring and a piece of space rock (although it was never analysed), which are all in the keeping of her family, as well as ties to high-ranking British military personnel. She is still taken very seriously by UFO societies today.

The descriptions of technology in her book read convincingly, at least to a layperson, although her relationships with the Chief and Stafford at the DeHavilland test site would have placed her in a position privy to speculation about new technologies Based on currently available technology, it would take all Earth’s energy resources to power a ship to reach the closest star, Betelgeuse, let alone Alpha Centauri. And it would take 250 years to get there.

As for her claims to working for the South African Air Force’s UFO division, a highly placed archivist I spoke to (who requested anonymity) says he’s never seen any documentation to that effect and all the SAAF’s secret files cross his desk, including the ones on the Helderberg. It helps that he has a special interest, having experienced a sighting himself outside of Kimberley.

However, he wasn’t prepared to dismiss it entirely either. ‘Just because I haven’t seen anything doesn’t mean it didn’t exist – it could have been shredded,’ he says. ‘I know many pilots who have seen things and the SAAF once scrambled a mirage to check out a sighting in Tabanchu. In the ’70s at the radar base in Devon [outside of Pretoria] the guys saw stuff on that James Bond shit of theirs that was moving too fast to be anything we know of.’

In her book Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy puts forward the theory that abductees’ memories are often a combination of a nasty, but quite normal sleep paralysis, which many people will experience at least once in their lifetimes, combined with a vivid imagination, an already established interest in the paranormal, that work together with tricks of memory and emotional investment and are ofen complicated by suggestive hypnotherapy.

On the flip side, even Britain’s Ministry of Defence isn’t prepared to deny flat out that UFOs exist. The press release that accompanied the declassifying of The Flying Saucer Working Party in February 2005, stated, ‘The MoD does not have any expertise or role in respect of UFO/flying saucer matters or to the question of the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial life forms, about which it remains totally open-minded.’

Or as Elizabeth cannily wrote in the introduction to Beyond The Light Barrier, ‘The Cosmic scale of this book will be lost and misunderstood by many whose intelligence cannot be expanded in this epoch of time, to a conscious awareness of our Cosmic connections.’

So I’ve very happy it’s finally out there in the world (and here on BookSA, which is technically part of the world) and it’s been getting some great reactions already.

Here’s a round-up of some of them.

Dave Brendan’s SciFi and Fantasy Webblog was first to break the news.

Stomping On Yeti on how newer genre imprints are more forward-thinking in their publicity and art departments (even if Patrick preferred the Moxyland cover) with “bonus points for avoiding any potential Liar-esque RaceFail. (refer Mandy Watson’s upcoming story for more on this).

And here’s John Picacio on the making-of.

As for what Zoo City is? Here’s Angry Robot’s blurb:

Zinzi has a talent for finding lost things.

To save herself, she’s got to find the hardest thing of all:

The truth.

FILE UNDER: Modern Fantasy [Black magic noir / Pale Crocodile / Spirit Guardians / Lost stars]

It’ll be out in June 2010 worldwide.

Thomokazie Zazayokwe, 23, died on Sunday morning.

She was murdered four months ago.

Three weeks ago, her mother, Gertrude Mdelele stood in my kitchen and told me proudly, ‘I am not Gertie today, I am detective Gertie,’ because she’d caught the bastard who did it when the police couldn’t.

We didn’t know then that Thomo would die from her wounds, that the police would lose the culprit.

Gertie has worked for me and my husband for eight years. Once a week she comes to clean my house and do the ironing. Domestic chars are common in South Africa. I could do this myself, but I appreciate the help and in a country with 40% unemployment, Gertie appreciates the job. She has four other people she works for during the rest of the week.

Over the years we have become involved with her family. Together with her other employers, we’ve helped fix up her house and provided loans when she needs them, usually, in this time of Aids, so she can attend a funeral in the rural Ciskei. But we also got her youngest, Thomo, a dress for her matric dance in better days, found her middle daughter, Bhongo, a job (for a time) and helped paint her kitchen bright green.

Gertie is a strong, proud woman with a wicked sense of humour. She’s an elder in her church, an outspoken member of her community council, who liaise with local government on issues of housing or crime. When a burglar tried to break into the house she was working in several years ago, she beat him unconscious with a brick, tied him up and called the police.

But Gertie has endured more than one person should ever have to. Her abusive ex-husband used to share her shack. She built him a separate room and locked him out of the main house until her RDP house from the government finally came through.

Her second eldest daughter, Nonkolo is HIV+. So is her four year old grandson, Luvo. Nonkolo copes with the virus by drowning it in alcohol to the extent that Gertie has taken custody of the child and now collects his government grant money herself so that Nonkolo cannot drink it away.

She was already supporting Bhongo, who now has a one year old daughter and no job, when Thomo was attacked by her boyfriend, Sonwabo Njana, in late August.

Sonwabo had beaten Thomo before. Thomo and Gertie had fought about it. Gertie had begged her to leave him. But this time, he didn’t limit himself to punching Thomo in the face. He beat her to the ground, stabbed her in the buttocks and poured boiling water over her head and back. Then he locked her in his shack and walked away.

After five days, responding to the moaning, to the terrible smell, the neighbours broke down the door. By the time the ambulance came, flies were thick on her skin. (news story)

I offered to drive Gertie to the hospital. She didn’t want to go. She said she was too angry, she couldn’t see Thomo right now. She’d told her about this boy. I struggled with that, struggled with the language barriers between us, her poor English, my non-existent Xhosa. I took it to mean that she was too hurt, too afraid, transmuting the raw fear for her child into anger because that was the only way to deal with the enormity of it, standing on the edge of this abyss.

She did go, eventually, that afternoon with Violet, her eldest daughter. Thomo was in a terrible way. She couldn’t speak her face was so swollen. The burns were agonising, bad enough on their own, but they’d been untreated for five days and now they were infected.

After a week, they were able to find a place for her at the specialist burns unit at Tygerberg where she received a skin graft. A week later they discharged her. It wasn’t good enough. She was still in agony. Several times Gertie had to make a plan in the middle of the night to get her to hospital, to change her bandages, get her pain medication.

The police couldn’t find the guy. But two months after Sonwabo had beaten and burned and stabbed her daughter, Gertie was returning home after a day working at my house and by chance, she saw him at Heideveld Station, just walking down the street.

She confronted him, ‘talking softly’ at first. She told him Thomo was in hospital. Sonwabo denied that he had anything to do with it. Gertie told him that Thomo was suffering, that she needed money and she knew he loved her, could he please help. He reluctantly handed over R40.

Gertie told me, ‘I put that money in my wallet and I hid it in my bra, because I knew now, I was going to have to fight! I prayed very deep to my God to help me. I was very scared. And then I grabbed that guy!’

He managed to wrench himself free and ran away, but Gertie shouted after him and a couple of taxi drivers tackled him. Gertie explained the situation, brandishing the police case number she was carrying in her wallet, and the police came to arrest him and took Thomo’s statement. She was too broken to make one the first time.

But when I put a journalist from the Cape Argus on to the story, no-one could seem to trace him. There was no evidence at all that an arrest had ever been made. Sonwabo had disappeared.

In the meantime, Thomo was getting worse. The late night hospital visits became more frequent. She started coughing up blood. Gertie wept in my kitchen. But, still, no-one expected that she would die.

I heard the news from Violet this morning. I didn’t understand her the first time she said it. And then I wept and raged and blamed myself for not doing more. Gertie is already on her way to the funeral.

It’s too late for Thomo. But I can do this, tell their story and maybe make it count. And when Gertie is back, we will find the bastard who did this or the bastard cops who lost him.

The funeral will cost R5000. Matthew and I have already put in R2000, which is all we can afford in this bad recessionary year.

We’re collecting money for Gertie and her family through Monsterpay (a local, secure Internet payment system ala Paypal run by Setcom), which is the easiest way to do it right now, especially for people outside of South Africa.

If you can contribute anything, R50, $10, £5, believe me, it will make a difference.

Click here to make a contribution in Rands. $10 is around R75. £10 is R120.

Realtime exchange rate information is at www.xe.com

——————————————————————-

If you’re in South Africa, you can deposit cash into Gertie’s account directly.

Gertrude Mdeledle
First National Bank
Savings Acc # 62088530409

branch code 250655

Thank you for listening.

Here’s a taster…

…There were more crashing sounds from the roof. A clatter and a long scraping sound, as if of the world’s largest sword was being drawn from, like, the world’s largest scabbard.
‘It’s that gorgeous werewolf of yours again!’ Edward snarled. ‘This time I swear, nothing you can say will prevent me from tearing his lupine throat out.’
There was another thump and a bump. Now they seemed to be coming from inside the walls. I clung to Edward in terror. And then there was a terrible crash and the sound of something big and rustly and adorned with tiny bells being knocked over. The Christmas tree. Dad and I had hung the decorations this afternoon before he went on shift. Well, I hung the decorations and he just watched and drank a beer, until I tripped over a chair and he had to help in case I broke a leg on a bauble or something.
‘The living room!’ I yelped. Edward burst through my bedroom door and tore downstairs. I limped after him, still holding the gold box.

I emerged into the living room to find Edward still snarling, but with a confused, impenetrable glaze in his eyes, looking down at a large pudgy guy with a beard and a red suit, covered in a dusting of soot and sitting among the remains of our Christmas tree. There was a large bulging sack beside him.
Santa Claus stood up and dusted himself off. He seemed pissed off. ‘A Christmas tree right in front of the fireplace? Really? Do even you know what kind of fire hazard that is?’
‘We weren’t planning to light it…’ I said, defensively.
‘Who are you? What do you want in this house?’ Edward moved towards Santa, his teeth bared, his fists clenched at his sides. He was restraining himself for now, but only barely.
Santa shook out his hat and replaced it jauntily on his head. ‘Hey there, I’m Santa. Although you might also know me as Father Christmas, Grandfather Frost, Papá Noel or Baba Chaghaloo. And I’m here to see the little lady. So buzz off, Twinkles.’
‘“Twinkles?”’ Edward said, incredulously. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’
Santa sighed. ‘Didn’t we just go through this? Is your brain made of marble too?’
‘But you’re a myth,’ I muttered.
‘Exactly!’ Santa grinned, ‘And way I hear it, Bella Swan, you’re practically the village bicycle for mythical creatures – romantically at any rate. That’s why I’m here!’
‘What?’ I was dazed by the accusation. ‘Who said that? I’ve never even had sex.’
‘That’s what I hear too. Don’t worry, I can help you with that.’
It was too much for Edward. With a strangled noise he leapt at Santa, his lips pulled back to reveal his fangs, bright as steel. I screamed. The gold box dropped at my feet…

Read the full story here.

So, after trying to take over Equatorial Guinea, South Africa’s dogs of war have got off with the equivalent of a rolled-up newspaper slap on the nose and the promise to piss on Mark Thatcher’s leg for orchestrating the whole thing.

We could arrest the sorry bastards and try them again the moment they cross the border, but that would be a waste. After all,  these are some well-trained puppies! They could be put to all kinds of uses rather than being impounded on charges of trying to take over other people’s dictatorships.

I mean, I could do with a private mercenary army. Just think how useful it would be to be surrounded by burly men with automatic weapons. No-one would ever push in front of me in the supermarket again!

Blackwater Mercs (almost as good as Simon Mann's)

A soldier of fortune or 66 sure would have come in handy when we bought our house. We could have sent them to have a friendly little chat with our bank manager or to use their subtle powers of persuasion to convince the other potential buyers to go away quietly and the seller to lose a couple of hundred grand on the asking price.

There are limitless daily uses you could come up with. I could dispatch my drooling human rottweilers to ‘take care of’ those inconsiderate menaces who answer their cell phones in the middle of a movie, for example. Or deal with the scum who nip in to steal your parking space at the last second, when you’ve been sitting there waiting patiently with your indicator going for ten minutes. It would be brilliant!

Of course, they’d have to be kept on a tight leash. Maybe even literally. Because nothing says Statement! like a vicious killer on a chain. Then again, in dog collars, they might be mistaken for Goths, which would totally ruin the image because no-one finds Goths scary.

Naturally, they’d have to be thoroughly house-trained. Having a pack of hulking great thugs in camo  romping around the house could prove hazardous. You’d have to teach them not to get on the couch or leave muddy (or, for that matter, bloody) footprints everywhere. And they’d have to play dead when the cops came round to investigate all the complaints of intimidation and assault from queue jumpers and road ragers and all the other inconsiderates who may have pissed me off along the way.

I believe mercenaries require frequent exercise, so I’d have to take them for regular walks, although maybe they should leave their AKs behind so as not to freak out the yuppies jogging down the Sea Point Promenade. And after their recent excursion, they’d also have to be sent to the doggy salon for grooming and de-fleaing after four years in one of Africa’s most notorious prisons.

Of course, you’d have to feed them too and I somehow don’t think they’d settle for Husky, although by all accounts, Guinean prison food isn’t much better. Ditto on the accommodation. A blanket and a fresh bowl of water should suffice, I think, but then, just keeping them in khaki and bullets could drain my credit card.

On second thoughts, this could prove to be an expensive exercise. Unless I could persuade the largely inept son of a British high-up to bankroll it for me?

Anyone have Mark Thatcher’s home phone number?

(originally appeared in The Big Issue)

A huge thank you for everyone who took the time to write a story inspired by some aspect of Moxyland for the Authonomy/Moxy competition.

The stories were fantastic, from canny perspective switches on major events in Moxyland to sheer insanity I don’t know if I would have come up with if you shot me full of hallucinogens and locked me in one of those floaty sensory deprivation tank things. I’d often catch myself grinning at stories, at the wild inventiveness.

The calibre of the writing was great, and even when it wasn’t, when the writers didn’t quite deliver on the premise, the ideas fizzed and popped like sherbet laced with C4, from a live guitar that had to be tamed to nano-goo sex dolls to body armour made of meat.

It’s been an incredibly frustrating process to decide on just three stories. In making the big decision, I looked for stories with smarts, that were playful or surprising, but also had bite.

They had to be bold, inventive and ideally have a social conscience. If they found a sneaky way to bring in Moxyland’s characters or major events or ensure that it was very much at one with the universe, so much the better.

Ultimately, it was a very subjective and personal decision. I chose the stories that excited me the most, the ones that resonated with Moxyland, the ones that made me want to rave about them to everyone I know.

The full short-list and long-list are included below.

The (very, very close) runners-up are:

• Khanyi by 821202 – A cunningly brilliant perspective switch on Moxyland’s gallery scene written with wit and style and a razor-edged verve. I loved this story.

• Shade by TobyOne – A wicked and thoughtful gem of a story. It has great writing, a well crafted story about energy and land claims with impeccable world-building and a nastily appropriate resolution. And it has zeppelins.

AND… THE WINNERS ARE (cue drumroll: segues into extended drum solo):

• Inatec Biologica by Unpresuming

• Land of the Blind by Newmouse

• @nother by Bryan Steele

The winning stories will be published in the British edition of my new novel, Zoo City and in the US edition of Moxyland – both in stores in May next year.

Authonomy will be in touch with the winners directly to make the necessary arrangements.

Here’s why I loved these stories:

Inatac Biologica by Unpresuming

I love stories that play with unconventional format and the minutes of a board meeting between various concerned parties concerning the Toby situation was both clever and appropriate.This, along with the runner-up story, ‘Khanyi’, represents, for me, the best of true fan fiction, picking up a dangling thread in the novel and running with it. It’s smart and funny and disgusting (the kebab image is vilely, absolutely Toby). A pitch-perfect post-script to Moxyland that answers, very satisfyingly, the burning question at the end of what Toby did next.

Land of the Blind by Newmouse

This isn’t a perfect story. It has rough edges, partly due to the lost formatting. But it’s the kind of story I wish I’d written. It’s loaded with subtle telling details incisive insights, beautiful descriptions and a dark plot that tangles up a mesh of shiny ideas in a way I didn’t see coming, incorporating a secret drug trial only accessible via a virtual world, disturbing art, seedy Salt River locations, epilepsy and the anti-corporate struggle. It’s provocative, political and really, just horrible. Which I appreciate.

@nother by Bryan Steele

This story plays out behind the scenes on Moxyland. Cnapce is a repo man cum bouncer for the digital age, an irresistible bastard who gets a kick out of pulling the plug on unpaid accounts, booting duplicates and generally enforcing the rules of Pluslife according to his dailylister uploaded by his corporate bosses. The writing is sharp and slangy and Cnpace is that dangerous combination of cocky and oblivious to what’s really going down here. You just know someone is going to get hurt. It’s fast and fun, hurtling towards a moral crisis that’s all in a day’s work.

—————————————————————————————————-

Here’s the shortlist:

1. Khanyi by 821202 – a cunningly brilliant perspective switch on Moxyland’s gallery scene

2. Raw Materials by Anitero – Death and architecture in Manila with a dose of brand sabotage.

3. @nother by Bryan Steele – The story about the online equivalent of the repo man, booting users and shutting down illegal accounts that seamlessly latches Moxyland.

4. The TICK-TOCK-MAN by B. Saint V – a queasy mash of identity and art with beautiful characterisations and explosive results.

5. No Cure For Cancer by Decca – A secret nano-cure for cancer and reality TV are not a good combination in this raucous fast-paced frolic of a story.

6. Nostrum by Duffy5000 – Before Kendra’s Ghost, there was another lurking in Foo Bear’s tai-chi classes. A sly, smart tale about what’s wrong (or right) with the kids today.

7. Digem 1.0 by Keith Harvey – Tobacco industry advertising at its finest and vilest with compelling characters and a real sense of Cape Town.

8. Land of the Blind by Newmouse – Secret drug trials, disturbing art, a working class stiff stricken with epilepsy, virtual espionage and dodgy dealings and an anti-corp struggle hero who is going down.

9. Shade by TobyOne – When even sunshine has become a commodity, Startek finds a unique solution to dealing with an unwanted intruder in their Kalahari solar plant. A provocative, relevant and spiky story.

10. Inatec Biologica Inc by Unpresuming – a pitch-perfect postscript to Moxyland that answers the burning question of what Toby did next.

And, by popular demand, here’s the long-list:

1. Khanyi by 821202
2. Raw Materials by Anitero
3. @nother by Bryan Steele
4. The TICK-TOCK-MAN by B. Saint V
5. No Cure For Cancer by Decca
6. Nostrum by Duffy5000
7. Digem 1.0 by Keith Harvey
8. Land of the Blind by Newmouse
9. Shade by TobyOne
10. Inatec Biologica Inc by Unpresuming
11. The Sedge by Steffan Evans
12. A Cup of Coffee by Adrian Ellis
13. You Have No Fucking Idea by flatbread
14. Job Hunting by qscribe
15. Optical Delusions by Cadence
16. Life is a Diamond by Giulietta M. Spudich
17. Level Four Physicality by Rico Craig
18. Whispers on the Wind by Sam W. Sanders
19. Thandie Barbie Meet Ghost by Poppet
20. Technically Defunct by Ryan
21. Untitled by Seamus33

PS: If you’d like to discuss your story with me (briefly) I’m open to giving you once-off feedback. This is not an invitation to a lengthy critique, but I can give you some quick comments and notes, if you’d like. Contact me via my fantastic publisher on moxy@angryrobotbooks.com

Judging the Moxyland short story competition has been hellish.

It started off well enough, getting to read 52 stories and pretending like it was work? Especially when those stories had DNA in common with Moxyland and all the things that excite me? Brilliant!

But then I had to start culling them down to a longlist. And then, god help me, a short list, and then the final three. Just three. It nearly killed me. Curse you all.

I looked for stories with smarts, that were playful or surprising, but also had bite. If they found a sneaky way to bring in Moxyland’s characters or major events or ensure that it was very much at one with the universe, so much the better.

Generally, the calibre of the writing was very good, and even when it wasn’t or when the writers faltered and couldn’t quite deliver on their premise, the ideas fizzed and popped like sherbet laced with C4, from a live guitar that had to be tamed to nano-goo sex dolls to body armour made of meat.

I’d strongly encourage the writers who didn’t make the shortlist to rethink and rewrite their stories – the potential is there. (Steffan Evans, Adrian Ellis, Poppet and Rolland get honourable mentions for kick-ass ideas that need more work)

Without further ado  – or any more bitching about the talent out there – here is the shortlist.

(These stories are all available to be read on Authonomy as the cherry-picked entries at the top of the comments section).

Winners to be announced on Tuesday.

SHORTLIST (in alphabetical order by author)

1. Khanyi by 821202 – a cunningly brilliant perspective switch on Moxyland’s gallery scene

2. Raw Materials by Anitero – Death and architecture in Manila with a dose of brand sabotage.

3. @nother by Bryan Steele – The story about the online equivalent of the repo man, booting users and shutting down illegal accounts, seamlessly latches onto Moxyland.

4. The TICK-TOCK-MAN by B. Saint V – a queasy mash of identity and art with beautiful characterisations and explosive results.

5. No Cure For Cancer by Decca – A secret nano-cure for cancer and reality TV are not a good combination in this raucous fast-paced frolic of a story.

6. Nostrum by Duffy5000 – Before Kendra’s Ghost, there was another lurking in Foo Bear’s tai-chi classes. A sly, smart tale about what’s wrong (or right) with the kids today.

7. Digem 1.0 by Keith Harvey – Tobacco industry advertising at its finest and vilest with compelling characters and a real sense of Cape Town.

8. Land of the Blind by Newmouse – Secret drug trials, disturbing art, a working class stiff stricken with epilepsy, virtual espionage and dodgy dealings and an anti-corp struggle hero who is going down.

9. Shade by TobyOne – When even sunshine has become a commodity, Startek finds a unique solution to dealing with an unwanted intruder in their Kalahari solar plant. A provocative, relevant and spiky story.

10. Inatec Biologica Inc by Unpresuming – one possible answer to the burning question of what Toby did next.

1. Salon.com on Vooks (video books) cos, you know, YouTube and all that are killing literature! And the only way to win is to fight back with ill-conceived bastard hybrids: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2009/10/06/vooks/

...The unfortunately named vooks consist of text and video clips produced in concert to form integrated works. You can read/watch them with a Web browser, but they’re primarily intended for mobile devices like the iPhone and meant to win over those people you see on the subway or in airports frantically pounding their thumbs through endless rounds of Frogger instead of reading a David Baldacci novel. The spectacle of people not reading in public has become a motivating trauma for many publishing executives of late. Brian Tart, publisher of Dutton Books, told the Times’ Motoko Rich, “You see people watching these three-minute YouTube videos and using social networks, and there is an opportunity here to bring in more people who might have thought they were into the new media world.”

And sums up with:

Somehow, the old-school format of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire romance series hasn’t alienated the vast army of Twi-hards, most of whom, by the way, qualify as digital natives, the generation who supposedly have no patience for print. These are also the same kids who buried themselves in 500-page Harry Potter novels for entire weekends not long ago. Some even claim to find printed books a welcome break from staring at screens all day.

2. Why Science Fiction Authors Just Can’t Win cos, you know, Orwell and Vonnegut and Dick and Atwood and Ballard aren’t really science fiction. They couldn’t be. Because, well, science fiction is crap. http://sffmedia.com/books/science-fiction-books/417-why-science-fiction-authors-just-cant-win.html

…Just keep insisting that everything science fiction is tacky, silly and sad and ridicule its creators at every opportunity. Disown the genre as emphatically and publicly as possible. As a writer there are tremendous advantages to avoiding the label science fiction, and Margret Atwood has successfully done that throughout her career and gained literary credibility in exchange.

In her defence, Atwood’s apparent fear that once the label “science fiction” is attached to a novel the literary establishment will treat it differently seems well founded.

“I am going to stick my neck out and just say it,” begins Sven Birkerts’ review of Atwood’s science fiction novel, the Oryx and Crake, “science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘L’” (New York Times, 18 May, 2003).

3. Plot Advice from a Star Trek Role-Playing Manual. Neatest narrative structure guide I’ve seen in a long time as contemplated by Dan Wells, author of I Am Not A Serial Killer, cos you know, Spock would totally take that Robert McKee guy. http://www.fearfulsymmetry.net/

I think that Roleplaying Game supplements have some of the best story structure advice I’ve ever read… because the games themselves are based on the idea of storytelling; teaching you how to tell good stories is, in a sense, the very product they’re selling.

I’ve always known this, but it didn’t occur to me until recently just how good some of this RPG advice is, and how much I rely on it. A week or so ago someone asked me what my favorite “story structure” book was, presumably hoping to have some kind of deep conversation about, I don’t know, Robert McKee or Orson Scott Card. I thought about it, determined to give the best answer I could, and realized that the only “structure” book I keep next to my desk is an RPG supplement: the Star Trek Roleplaying Game Narrator’s Guide by Decipher.

I love this book; I should probably put together a workshop or something for a convention. Put simply, it’s a twist on 3-act format with seven specific points: hook, plot turn 1, pinch, midpoint, pinch, plot turn 2, and resolution.