I love, love, love this review of my debut collection Slipping: Stories, Essays and Other Writing, from Metaphysical Circus Press’ lit review blog, See The Elephant:
Here’s a snip:
“Lauren Beukes, judging from these tales, is one of the best fictional chroniclers of modern life per se. If many of the stories use science fiction tropes, it’s with a literary intent that mixes genres freely to get a far better purchase on the contemporary reality of South Africa, and the world at large. Beukes’s sci-fi South Africa seems far closer to post-Black Lives Matter America or post-Brexit Britain than many versions of their own land from native authors. Western readers may not want to face the implications of that parallel: Beukes makes it unavoidable…
…This fiction is as close to J.G. Ballard or William Burroughs, in spirit, as to Ursula LeGuin – or to Neill Blomkamp. We have techno-enabled body horror, ultraviolence, societies in meltdown, gunplay, queasy biotech, twisted glitterati, and giant killing machines, mostly rendered in a sharp, acerbic, hard-edged style that rarely slows down enough to point to an overt moral. The Ballardian parallel also extends to Beukes’s experimental leanings – there are stories that employ cut-up techniques, and others with a strong whiff of Pop Art.”
Slipping: Stories, Essays, and Other Writing will be out from November 29th 2016. You can order it directly form Tachyon or Amazon, or via your local independent bookstore.