Best feeling – when the fiction love is mutual.
Over at Electric Lit, Tim Maughan, who wrote one of my favourite books of this year so far, Infiinite Details had very nice things to say about Moxyland for Electric Lit’s Read More Women series.
Tim writes:
Moxyland came out about the same time I first started seriously writing fiction, and as such it was initially conflicting: it was so thematically and stylistically similar to what I was trying to do that I didn’t know whether to be happy that I was on the same page or dismayed that I’d been beaten to it. None of that mattered by the time I’d actually finished reading it though —Moxyland is just too damn good. Beukes’ near-future debut follows four misfits—an artist, an activist, an internet streaming celebrity, and a corporate executive—as they hustle to make a living, political waves, or both. But it’s the setting that feels like the book’s real protagonist—a divided Cape Town that’s saturated with high-tech advertising and where gated communities, corporate campuses, and slums all sit anxiously next to each other. Moxyland was arguably the first novel to fully capture the inequality and digital chaos of the now all too familiar global mega-city, as Beukes skillfully picks apart everything from our obsession with smartphones through to gentrification and corporate surveillance.
😊
I so appreciate the shout out and would like to urge you to go read Tim’s book asap, which I described as “deft and jolting as an EMP, Infinite Detail is a worryingly credible ghost story about our electronic lives”. It’s raw and right now, smart as hell and scarily relevant.
Thanks to @transkeimeg for the awesome photo of the original first edition of Moxyland, in its native setting, Cape Town!