Or.
Or I have the total sony exclusive on the untimely and grotesque death of a terrorist.
Or a martyr. Depends on who’s paying.
I can’t stick around here, though. They’ve already been here once. And they’re sure to notice Tendeka’s corpse on the roof. Hard to miss with all the splatter.
I stuff the coat, spare clothes and my laptop – and fuckit, the VIM, cos wherever I’m going, I’ll still need a clean-up – into my bag.
I step out of the door into a whole new bright world, feeling exhausted and exhilarated.
And thirsty.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing may happen in isolation, but books don’t. I’d like to thank a long list of people who helped make Moxyland what it is, from its original South African incarnation to its assimilation into the Robot Army.
Thanks to Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris at Angry Robot for their boundless and bounding enthusiasm and easy-going candour – and my agent, Ron Irwin, for getting the book into their hands.
The University of Cape Town’s MA in Creative Writing programme gave me the creative space to start the book and a grant from South Africa’s National Arts Council gave me the financial freedom to finish it. Thanks especially to André Brink, Stephen Watson, Ron Irwin and Jenefer Shute.
Maggie Davey, the publishing director at Jacana read the manuscript on the plane to the Frankfurt Book Fair and by the time she’d landed had decided to give Moxyland its first home. Jacana’s Russell Martin, Bridget Impey, Emily Amos and especially Pete van der Woude (most passionate punter of books and deft ringmaster of book launches) helped make it a critical success in South Africa.
Sam Wilson, Sarah Lotz, Matthew Brown, Tinarie van Wyk Loots, Alex van Tonder, Lindiwe Nkutha, Padraic O Meara and Wynand ‘Munki’ Groenewald were the first readers who helped panel beat the early drafts with their feedback.
I owe much to Helen Moffett, my brilliant luddite editor for midwifing this unwieldy bastard, and Dale Halvorsen, aka Joey Hi-fi, the most inventive cover designer a girl could ask for (twice).
My family and friends provided love and support, both fiscal and psychological.
And lastly to my husband and best friend, Matthew, thank you for everything (most especially our daughter).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lauren Beukes is a writer, TV scriptwriter and recovering journalist (although she occasionally falls off the wagon).
She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town under André Brink, but she got her real education in ten years of freelance journalism, learning really useful skills like how to pole-dance and make traditional sorghum beer. For the sake of a story, she’s jumped out of planes and into shark-infested waters, and got to hang out with teen vampires, township vigilantes, AIDS activists and homeless sex workers among other interesting folk. She lives in Cape Town with her husband and daughter. Her next novel for Angry Robot will be the (very) urban fantasy Zoo City.
Extras…
Moxyland was inspired by a DNA remix of many influences, from BoingBoing to Stephen Johnson’s Emergence to Theo Jansen’s incredible evolving mechanical Strandbeests. It riffs off surveillance society and the Great Firewall of China, bird flu and the threat of terrorism, the cult of kawaii, RFID chips in passports, virtual rape and refugee camps in Second Life, and reallife murder over a virtual sword in China.
It developed from 12 years of working as a journalist, from stories I worked on for Colors magazine where I spent many weeks in Cape Town’s townships with photographers Marc Shoul and Pieter Hugo, interviewing electricity cable thieves, paramilitary vigilantes and people dying of the twin pandemic of TB and AIDS and learning how to make smileys or boiled sheep heads.
Of course, it also grew out of the legacy of apartheid: the arbitrary and artificially applied divides between people, the pass system and the insidious Special Branch – a secret police operation to rival the Stasi that infiltrated activist organisations, used wet bag torture to extract ‘confessions’, threw troublemakers out of fifth storey windows or blew them up with letterbombs and plotted chemical warfare and sinister bio-experiments. Don’t let anyone tell you that apartheid has nothing to do with South Africa now. Those roots run deep and tangled and we’ll be tripping over them for many generations to come.
But really, the stem cell that developed into Moxyland was Lucky Strike. Or, rather, the hush-hush underground parties British American Tobacco organised for their brands when the South African government outlawed cigarette advertising in 2000.
They seduced hip young things to be brand ambassadors for the price of free cigarettes. They staged provocative theatre at bars and restaurants like a faked strip poker game with models. And they dropped millions on the most outrageous events, from Peter Stuyvesant’s swanky mansion pool parties to Lucky Strike’s private concerts, flying out international rock acts and house DJs for one night only. The height of the debauchery was a million Rand party train with multiple dancefloors and five different bars, snaking through the Cape winelands on its way to a secret destination for a luxury picnic. If you’d missed the ARG-style clues, subtly disguised in a Lucky Strike target with only a phone number stuck up at the back of a bar, you missed out.
I wrote a story on it for The Big Issue and then transmuted it into fiction with a short story called ‘Branded’, about a girl who turns sponsorbaby for a soft drink company with a dubious agenda. It blossomed like a tumour from there, mutating into interesting directions I hadn’t anticipated – and a full-blown novel four years later.
It’s been fascinating to see real-world correlations develop since the novel made its debut in South Africa in 2008. Some of them are strange and wonderful, others are deeply worrying to me. And the best of it is stuff I couldn’t have invented.
In the last year, for example, Portugal has launched wave power generators, cell phone wallets have been rolled out and there’s now proof, after all, that subliminal advertising can work, if paired with some kind of reinforcing reward – which might well include feel-good neural feedback in the future.
South Africa’s national energy provider, Eskom, has announced its intentions to open up its own proprietary university (not, as yet linked to an AIDS orphanage); a Seoul National University team created the first transgenic dogs that glow in the dark thanks to the addition of an anemone gene; and the Pentagon put out a brief for military contractors to develop a ‘multirobot pursuit system’, ie, packs of robots that could ‘search for and detect a non-cooperative human’.
There was a real bio-engineered artwork that caused a controversy in 2008 when it was exhibited and then ‘killed’ at MoMa in New York. ‘Victimless Leather’ was a small living jacket made up of embryonic mouse stem cells, but it grew out of control, clogged up its incubation system and had to be ‘put down’, to the apparent distress of the curator – all of which, purely coincidentally I’m sure, generated a whole lot of headlines.
But the scariest synchronicity with Moxyland was something an electrical engineer friend told me – that a cop buddy had idly asked him over a beer if there was any way to SMS an electric shock to a fleeing suspect’s cell phone, you know, because it’s a pain in the ass to chase them wearing a heavy bulletproof vest. Luckily, my friend says that even for the purposes of bar talk, it’s an impractical idea, especially without buy-in from the cell phone companies and government. Impractical. But not impossible.