Moxyland

Moxyland

Lauren Beukes

Angry robot books

A division of Harper Collins

South Africa, ten years in the future. Apartheid is alive and well, but this time it’s discrimination between the corporati – the employees of the big companies – and the rest. The privileged corporati have their own trains, their private beaches, and a tame South African Police Force to protect them using genetically modified dogs. The rest of the people have to make do as best they can. They live in poverty or crime, part of the cities but never part of the corporate world unless the corporati have a use for them.

One such is Lerato. A baby raised in an orphanage run by a communications corporation, she is now one of their most brilliant programmers. Her future career is tied almost unbreakably to the corporation. Her privileged lifestyle is not enough to satisfy her and she is dabbling with a group of social revolutionaries by helping them defeat corporate security systems. What she is doing is extremely dangerous since the corporations demand total loyalty from their people and disloyalty will earn severe punishment.

Toby is one of the underprivileged but he is doing OK for himself by producing a popular broadcast blog and getting involved with the underground revolutionaries. He hopes this is where the best news will be. He tends to think of everything in terms of whether it could be a broadcast scoop for him.

Kendra is borderline. She has allowed herself to be genetically modified as an experimental human advert for a soft drink corporation. She is an art school dropout but she is gradually gaining a little fame and money as a photographer. She is also strongly involved in anti-corporate activities. She gets by with her corporate “sponsorship” but in return they impose a code of conduct on her that is almost as harsh as that of their employees.

Tendeka is a dedicated revolutionary. He survives in the slums by using his wits and overseas money. He genuinely believes that revolution is the only way the greater population will ever have any improvement in their life.

Life in this corporate-based culture revolves around the mobile phone. It is your communications, your bank account and credit card, and it allows you to access basic functions like the railway stations or your home. It has a “defuser” built in – a device that can deliver a stunning electric shock to anyone targeted by the Police. It also makes you easier to track if the Police are interested in you, and surveillance is an ever-present part of this world.

So far the revolutionaries have been able to get away with minor acts of urban mischief, like hacking into corporate billboard data streams and inserting their own messages. Sooner or later the corporations will react. Sooner or later the hotheads in the revolution will turn from urban vandalism to outright terrorism. There will be an explosion that will rock South Africa.

Lauren Beukes has written a powerful novel of what so easily might be. She paints a high tech world of privilege versus despair, a world that she has seen in her own experience as a freelance journalist. The world of Moxyland is quite credible as it is based on fairly simple extensions of technology and events happening today. The people of South Africa are still coming out of the problems of apartheid and now Beukes is making the point that it could so easily happen again.

“...it’s all possible, especially if we’re willing to trade away our rights for convenience, for the illusion of security”

I recommend this book to you. It’s great science fiction, but it is also an important social warning.

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This review will appear in Volume 2 No.5 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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