Book
Moxyland by Lauren Beukes
Synopsis
Four people in their early 20s, all from disparate backgrounds and living in Cape Town in the near-futuristic dystopia of 2018, are trying to establish themselves in a society over-dependent on technology, with strict societal divisions between corporate employees and “civilians,” a government more beholden to the corporations than to its citizens, and an oppressive police force with ubiquitous shock devices and genetically modified police dogs. Their lives intersect in various ways until a catastrophic incident slams them together.
Notes
This was one of the first books that my now-husband recommended to me and loaned me his copy, not long after we started dating. I’m embarrassed that it’s taken me this long to read it! It’s darkly ironic that the main reason I never read it at the time was because it was a physical copy; I’d recently converted to reading ebooks exclusively because the digital version was so much more convenient.
The story is told in the first person of each of the four main characters — a photographer who’s agreed to have herself injected with nanotechnology that gives her a permanent, glowing tattoo of the logo of an energy drink; a spoiled live-streamer who’s become desensitized to everything except playing to his audience; a hot-tempered and naively idealistic activist; and a ruthless software engineer who was raised in a corporate-owned orphanage — and it gives each their own voice and their own perspective. But more significantly, it lets us become gradually aware of the self-delusions that each of them has been operating under, suppressing their own key desires — human connection, a sense of worth, social justice, or safety and stability — in an attempt just to survive.
As a result, Beukes accomplishes the remarkable feat of taking these characters that I so thoroughly disliked (or was frustrated by, in Kendra’s case) at the beginning, and making me sympathetic towards them by the end. I gradually began to appreciate how their flaws are the result of a society that’s stopped valuing them as human beings. I went from hating these characters and dreading having to read more about them, to being extremely invested in what happens to them and rushing through the entire last half of the book.
You could devote an entire essay just to exploring what Beukes does on a literary level, ignoring all of the themes about culture and technology and instead focusing on how she deftly intercuts between four somewhat-unreliable narrators in a long slow burn that builds to a horrific climax and a relentlessly desperate conclusion. All while establishing not only the world they live in, but the core of their characters.
I’ve got a big cultural blind spot when it comes to cyberpunk, since I made a half-effort to read Snow Crash when I was in my early twenties, immediately hated it and gave up, and pretty much ignored the genre outside of video games ever since. So I don’t know how this book would be classified exactly, and I feel unqualified to call it “post-cyberpunk.” But it feels less concerned with science fiction, and more as if it were written from within a society that had already embraced some of the main ideas of classic cyberpunk, and extrapolated from there. Of all the media that I’ve read and seen, it felt more similar in tone to the movie Her, and how it was not about the technology itself so much as how it affects us as people.
Beukes wrote an essay in 2018 that was included in the afterward of my copy of the book, in which she describes the “stem cells” of ideas that made it into Moxyland. She makes it explicit that the rigid stratification of her version of Cape Town isn’t a speculative invention, but is instead a reflection of the very real class divisions that still exist post-apartheid, the same structures but lightly modified to be along urban/rural and corporate/“civilian” lines instead of strictly race and ethnicity. She goes on to list all of the other news stories from the early 2000s that demonstrate how the most dystopian elements of the book were actually just short-term extrapolations from stuff that’s already happening.
And she has a great conclusion, mostly referencing the book’s version of cell phones as being more about punishment and control than about communication:
If we’re willing to trade away our rights for convenience, for the illusion of security, our very own bright and shiny dystopia is only ever one totalitarian government away.
Verdict
Brilliant and effective in ways that took me by surprise. The magic trick of the book — in that I didn’t even realize it was happening until it had already worked — is that Beukes avoids letting the book completely collapse into cynicism or nihilism. There is an undercurrent of compassion and sympathy, and we’re left with the idea that even if these characters have lost it, we haven’t.