“Afterland grabbed me quickly and sent me into a stupor of reading at a time – during the first hard lockdown – when concentrating on full sentences was proving very difficult.”
Back in October 2021 Keith Bain at South Africa’s Daily Maverick interviewed me about Afterland and the themes that strongly paralleled the real world at the time. We talk the pandemic, oligarchs and feminism. Bain writes about Afterland and has some very cool things to say about it! Definitely worth a read! Here’s a snippet:
“In Beukes’s imagination, taking men out of the picture doesn’t instantly result in some sort of Utopia, but postulating a post-male world gave rise to a kind of speculative fantasy about the many ways in which society might evolve or erode, unravel or improve. […] For Beukes it was also an opportunity to reimagine human activities and social behaviours. To imagine, for example, a world in which all-male teams no longer dominate professional sports. And how would sex work? How would lust and love reorder themselves?”
Great photo of Afterland looking vibrant from B&N Ala Moana via their IG