ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.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 expl...

I ended up tracking down a copy of Moxyland (I'm not sure if it was released in the US or if it's still in print in the US, I had to order a copy in some godforsaken way) because Lauren Beukes second novel, Zoo City is getting a lot of hype but the synopsis of Moxyland made it sound more like something I would enjoy. Anyway, holy shit this book was amazing. Decently color-blind character portrayals (eg: nobody has "coffee-with-cream colored skin" but you do learn things about characters' backgro...

This might be one instance where an audiobook has the potential to lead a reader (listener) into confusion more than reading the print might do. Moxyland is read by Nico Evers-Swindell, best known for his portrayal of Prince William in the made-for-tv movie William & Kate. While he does a good job with the voices and South African accents, the intertwining stories are hard to keep up with, particularly with the way the reader is dumped right into the center of everything already going on.That's

I ended up reading two of Beukes' books in fairly short order, but the first one last. They're not in a series, so that isn't the issue. What is is how assured her debut novel is. It really took my breath away, and the ending was so stunningly well-realized and dark as hell that it knocked me for a loop for a while.Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.In the meantime, you can r...

The way your brain works it's always rewiring itself; the layers of association tangled up with different people and places recontextualised by new experiences. You can map out a whole city according to the weight of memory, like pins on the homocide board tracking the killers movements. Wow this book blew me away. It confused me at first and then it snuck up on me and I felt blind-sided when I finished reading. The ending was a little confusing, but that's okay. Life can be confusing, too.

It starts with a shot. As soon as the needle pricks her skin, Kendra’s bloodstream is flooded with corporate-sponsored nanobots that will invade her system and harmonize with it, protecting her from disease, clarifying her skin, and even making her literally glow. They will also make her a part of a new viral ad campaign for the soft drink Ghost, give her an unquenchable craving for the product, and brand her with a ghost logo that glows beneath her skin. In Kendra’s world, selling one’s soul an...

”And it makes perfect sense. The process has to be managed. Fear has to be managed. Fear has to be controlled. Like people.” As people have become more disconnected from reality and spend more and more time in game worlds and social media, these sites have become sanctuaries, more “real” than real life. In the process, people have become so much easier to manipulate. It is all about who controls the spin. And about apathy. Corporations in this dystopia are more powerful than governments. Alle...

Upon finishing this book, I was in equal parts delighted (it rocks!) and dismayed: It was first published EIGHT YEARS ago and I didn't know about it until now? Luckily, it's just been reissued, so likely a lot more people will be discovering it. Hopefully, the marketing will be hitting the right target audience this time (the aesthetics of the covers this book has been issued with really don't fit the content well). Basically, anyone who loves William Gibson should have this book forcefully shov...

Now THIS is good cyberpunk. Definitely reminiscent of genre classics like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, with the updated tech of contemporary books like Little Brother... but believe me, this ain’t Young Adult. Moxyland, set in future South Africa, has all the hallmarks of a good dystopia: government control, believable surveillance methods, lots of designer drugs, even a virus epidemic. Lauren Beukes is a phenomenal world-builder, and I found her speculation of what the near future will be like b...

I really enjoyed this novel. The setup was pure near-future SF with nice thriller/horror undertones, kinda a mix between Stross's Rule 34 with some vintage William Gibson, and finishing with a really nice twist. What was most scary about it was how realistic and how very *possible* it is.But setup and plot is only part of what makes this book great. In the end, I can't help but think only wonderful thoughts about all the characters I got to live vicariously through. I've read Broken Monsters and...

4.5 "dynamic dystopian DY-NO-MITE!!!" stars. 2016 Honorable Mention My faith in dystopian literature is restored :)Since high school I have been searching and yearning for books as good as 1984 and Brave New World.This book came mighty damn close. This is Ms. Beukes' debut novel. She had previously been a South African journalist and many of you have read her The Shining Girls.She is a writing dynamo. I am falling in love with South African writers this year. Earlier I discovered Malla Nunn who

Lauren Beukes has an affinity for social commentary and a worldview that I find intriguing. Her novels Moxyland and Zoo City are both set in South Africa, which is a locale that I know very little about. Beukes' novels alone have piqued my interest in the culture and politics of South Africa. Both are set in a hi-tech future that is grim, and both have morally ambiguous characters that make questionable choices to survive in a society gone rogue despite governmental efforts at control. Moxyland

Corporations are legally people—how long before they become nation-states? Some of them own islands, or indeed, virtually entire countries. I’m not as pessimistic as some about our short-term survival odds in the coming century. Sure, we have problems, but we’ll muddle through—somehow. Yet if I had to pick which chilling dystopian vision of the future I feel is most likely, the corporations-own-us-all future is the one I’d choose. It’s feudalism all over again, baby—party like it’s 1214. Corpora...

I am changing up my genres and trying new authors which was one of my reading resolutions for 2018. Moxyland takes place in Cape Town, South Africa, in a not-too-distant dystopian future. The story is told through 4 points of view, 2 men and 2 women. My major criticism is that one of the men (Toby) a dj/sorta you-tuber (but of course never called that)/gamer/cut off trust fund kid, uses "future-speak" slang words that I totally do not understand so I had a hard time following the story when he w...

Moxyland is a wild and sprawling science fiction novel set in South Africa in what I would call ‘the near future’, except that it’s actually now past; first published in 2008, it takes place in 2018. As it opens, we’re introduced to one of four narrators: Kendra, a likeable character who makes terrible decisions – such as becoming a ‘sponsor baby’ for a soft drink brand, which means she gets to benefit from performance-enhancing technology, but is also branded with the drink’s logo... and become...

Moxyland is one of those rare books where a single string of stars is inadequate to properly rate it. It requires more stars, with explanations. BIG IDEAS ****Big ideas drive science fiction. Moxyland is jam packed with big ideas that kept me reading. In fact, the discovery of the next "that's a neat concept" was all that kept me turning pages for the following reasons. CHARACTERS *Splitting the point of view among four characters made the book more difficult to read. Multiple POV's are okay, bu...

7.11.14: I am shell shocked. I love and hate this book at the same time, I hate it because of what it is but I love it because of how it was put together, the story woven from four different threads into a whole. A full review is to come but for now, crap, for now I'm going to curl up in a ball and stare at a wall and think. The Review:rating: 4.75/5 (rounded up)I loved this book more than I initially thought I would. I love her use of a futuristic slang. It was a bit difficult to get into it fo...

Review from Tenacious Reader: http://www.tenaciousreader.com/2016/0...Moxyland follows four storylines in this near future dystopia. Each perspective spotlights a different aspects of this world and culture. I really enjoyed each of the four characters, even if I didn’t feel quite as connected to any of them as I would have preferred. But then, I think this is the nature of the story. With the focus being divided, there is less material to really attach you to each perspective. Plus I think the

Lauren Beukes has written something new with Moxyland. To say this is not cliched, and to realize this you would need to read Moxyland. It is a future where the cellphone is indispensable, as much a part of your life as your driver's license, social security number, and bank account. In fact, it is all these things then some more. It is also a riot control device. Beukes has crafted a almost dystopian society of relative simplicity that conceals moral complexity.There's the cops and their nanote...

Before I had even finished Moxyland I was trawling GoodReads for more of the same, which should give you some indication of how thoroughly I enjoyed it. Beukes has seamlessly meshed current technology, pop culture and existing societal issues, set it in a future dystopian South Africa and arrived at genuinely entertaining and thoroughly believable read. I found myself Googling elements of the story all the way through to see which were based in reality, and was equally impressed and horrified to...