Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [98]
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.
www.moxyland.com
Extras…
Moxyland's Stem Cells
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