Book: Zoo City
Nov. 27th, 2012 10:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Lauren Beukes
Details: (c) Lauren Beukes 2010; Pub Angry Robot 2010; ISBN 978-0-85766-056-5
Verdict: Zoo City is innovative and highly readable.
Reasons for reading it: There was quite a bit of buzz about it when it came out a couple of years ago, and I had the impression people were seeing it as an alternative to derivative or nostalgia-driven genre stuff. Then it was in the ebook Humble Bundle, andkhalinche read it and was very enthusiastic about it, so her recommendation bumped it up to the top of my to-read list.
How it came into my hands: I bought it directly from the publisher and paid full price for the DRM-free ebook.
Zoo City has a really cool premise: people who commit serious crimes acquire Pullman-style daemons along with some degree of magical abilities. And it handles that premise really well, with really excellent world-building. "Animalled" people are generally at the bottom of social hierarchies, but this plays out in various different ways, it's a nuanced exploration of prejudice which avoids the trap of using the Animalled as a crude allegory for why Racism is Bad. ZC is mainly set in Johannesburg, with the background that Animalled have somewhat more legal rights in South Africa than many other parts of the world, though socially they still face obstacles, so there is a significant immigrant population. The book doesn't get so much caught up in its clever invented subaltern population that it avoids addressing real world issues of class, sexism, race (and this is race in South Africa, it doesn't follow the standard US-influenced templates) and displaced populations, but it's also primarily a story rather than a book about Issues.
I basically love Zinzi as a viewpoint character. She's in some ways the classic hardboiled detective, a recovering alcoholic / drug addict with an incredibly cynical attitude towards life, who is dragged into solving a mystery out of necessity. And in other ways she's really not that cliche, because she's young, female, black, and someone whose addiction has cast her out of a fairly privileged existence into desperate poverty. I love that she's not "sassy" or "feisty", she's just jaded with indisputable reasons for assuming the worst of people. I felt very much as if I were being invited to relate to her rather than to find her charming or sexy. And yes, she's bright, she's competent (because she has the kind of existence where if she weren't competent she'd probably not last very long), and she has some degree of magical powers, but she's not super-duper-awesome, she makes mistakes and her magic is very limited and doesn't allow her to solve all her very real problems by wishing.
She interacts with a great number of people over the course of trying to investigate her mystery. They're all vividly drawn, even those who just appear in brief cameos. And as the story unfolds, you get more and more glimpses of how the world works, and it's all quite fascinating and cool. Beukes does the characteristic SF/F thing really well. I think ZC is particularly appealing for me because I loved Pullman's daemons but hated pretty much everything else about the Northern Lights books, but even if you've never read Pullman, or if you like Pullman, Beukes takes the concept in multiple entirely novel directions.
The plot itself is pacey and interesting and does a very good job of weaving together the different strands, lots of people with their own motivations and loyalties acting in humanly plausible ways to create a messy situation. There's all kinds of connections between the specific disappearance of Song that Zinzi is investigating, and the wider political and magical background. I was always excited to find out what would happen next. The ending is quite downbeat in some ways; genre conventions led me to expect that Zinzi's solving the mystery would save the day, but although she works out what is going on the situation at the end of the book is in some ways worse than at the beginning.
Beukes has had a pretty varied writing career; apparently she's done comic books, journalism, non-fic, screenwriting, all sorts. I think that background shows in ZC; she's certainly aware of mainstream SF/F, but she's also doing something quite different from the standard. I really like the voice of ZC, as well as the original world-building.
Details: (c) Lauren Beukes 2010; Pub Angry Robot 2010; ISBN 978-0-85766-056-5
Verdict: Zoo City is innovative and highly readable.
Reasons for reading it: There was quite a bit of buzz about it when it came out a couple of years ago, and I had the impression people were seeing it as an alternative to derivative or nostalgia-driven genre stuff. Then it was in the ebook Humble Bundle, and
khalinche read it and was very enthusiastic about it, so her recommendation bumped it up to the top of my to-read list. How it came into my hands: I bought it directly from the publisher and paid full price for the DRM-free ebook.
Zoo City has a really cool premise: people who commit serious crimes acquire Pullman-style daemons along with some degree of magical abilities. And it handles that premise really well, with really excellent world-building. "Animalled" people are generally at the bottom of social hierarchies, but this plays out in various different ways, it's a nuanced exploration of prejudice which avoids the trap of using the Animalled as a crude allegory for why Racism is Bad. ZC is mainly set in Johannesburg, with the background that Animalled have somewhat more legal rights in South Africa than many other parts of the world, though socially they still face obstacles, so there is a significant immigrant population. The book doesn't get so much caught up in its clever invented subaltern population that it avoids addressing real world issues of class, sexism, race (and this is race in South Africa, it doesn't follow the standard US-influenced templates) and displaced populations, but it's also primarily a story rather than a book about Issues.
I basically love Zinzi as a viewpoint character. She's in some ways the classic hardboiled detective, a recovering alcoholic / drug addict with an incredibly cynical attitude towards life, who is dragged into solving a mystery out of necessity. And in other ways she's really not that cliche, because she's young, female, black, and someone whose addiction has cast her out of a fairly privileged existence into desperate poverty. I love that she's not "sassy" or "feisty", she's just jaded with indisputable reasons for assuming the worst of people. I felt very much as if I were being invited to relate to her rather than to find her charming or sexy. And yes, she's bright, she's competent (because she has the kind of existence where if she weren't competent she'd probably not last very long), and she has some degree of magical powers, but she's not super-duper-awesome, she makes mistakes and her magic is very limited and doesn't allow her to solve all her very real problems by wishing.
She interacts with a great number of people over the course of trying to investigate her mystery. They're all vividly drawn, even those who just appear in brief cameos. And as the story unfolds, you get more and more glimpses of how the world works, and it's all quite fascinating and cool. Beukes does the characteristic SF/F thing really well. I think ZC is particularly appealing for me because I loved Pullman's daemons but hated pretty much everything else about the Northern Lights books, but even if you've never read Pullman, or if you like Pullman, Beukes takes the concept in multiple entirely novel directions.
The plot itself is pacey and interesting and does a very good job of weaving together the different strands, lots of people with their own motivations and loyalties acting in humanly plausible ways to create a messy situation. There's all kinds of connections between the specific disappearance of Song that Zinzi is investigating, and the wider political and magical background. I was always excited to find out what would happen next. The ending is quite downbeat in some ways; genre conventions led me to expect that Zinzi's solving the mystery would save the day, but although she works out what is going on the situation at the end of the book is in some ways worse than at the beginning.
Beukes has had a pretty varied writing career; apparently she's done comic books, journalism, non-fic, screenwriting, all sorts. I think that background shows in ZC; she's certainly aware of mainstream SF/F, but she's also doing something quite different from the standard. I really like the voice of ZC, as well as the original world-building.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-02 01:49 pm (UTC)