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premat's review against another edition
4.0
read this 'cause William Gibson liked it. enjoyed it all on my own.
eleanorfranzen's review against another edition
4.0
In an alt-Johannesburg, there’s a condition called Acquired Asymbiotic Familiarism. No one can explain it, but if you do something bad (not necessarily criminal, but definitely morally wrong), you get an animal sidekick – silent, ever-present, inseparable from you. Think kind of noir Pullman. Our heroine Zinzi has a Sloth. You also get a gift: hers is finding lost things. When she takes the kind of case she never takes—missing persons—she’s in at the deep end of a story involving the South African music scene, traditional medicine, and very unscrupulous people. This won the Clarke Award; my last Clarke winner was Air, by Geoff Ryman, which was a more ambitious and more moving novel than Zoo City, but this is a seriously fun noir/sf mashup, the pace never lets up, and Beukes’s prose—while occasionally overegged—usually hits just the right tangy/salty notes. Grand stuff.
batrock's review against another edition
4.0
The four is more for the concept than the execution; Zoo City's plot is sketchy and abrupt, and time is a confused construct. The setting and the conceit make up for most of it.
In a world where murderers have familiars (sometimes literally) dogging them, Zoo City follows the travails of disgraced ex-journalist and recovering drug addict Zinzi December and the Sloth (capitalisation Beukes') that rides on her back. Zinzi makes ends meet by finding lost things, but an ill-timed murder leads to a missing persons case, and then things get progressively weirder until the climax sneaks up and then disappears.
I didn't really like Beukes' previous effort, Moxyland, much at all, but concepts don't get much better than magical sloths that cause their owners to become social lepers. Interspersed through the novel are background materials on the phenomenon of the "animalled", but these never overburden the novel with too much information; Beukes keeps enough of her rules mysterious enough to make the entire thing fascinating.
It's a pity that all of these ideas and concepts can't quite support Zinzi December, who rushes from one set-up to the next until arriving at the final confrontation almost out of nowhere. The bond between Zinzi and Sloth feels genuine, but Zinzi's relationship to illicit substances literally distorts the time-frame of the novel to the point that I couldn't tell if months had passed or if the whole novel was contained in a week.
When it actually matters, too little goes unsaid, and that's how the novel ends.
Despite structural integrity flaws and occasional character qualms, Zoo City is vibrant and intriguing, without coming close to the crushingly fatalistic conflagration of Moxyland. Recommended as something to knock over in a day or two.
Post script: I really should mark this down for "I can haz murder weapon?" Instead I will leave that sentence there as a dire warning.
In a world where murderers have familiars (sometimes literally) dogging them, Zoo City follows the travails of disgraced ex-journalist and recovering drug addict Zinzi December and the Sloth (capitalisation Beukes') that rides on her back. Zinzi makes ends meet by finding lost things, but an ill-timed murder leads to a missing persons case, and then things get progressively weirder until the climax sneaks up and then disappears.
I didn't really like Beukes' previous effort, Moxyland, much at all, but concepts don't get much better than magical sloths that cause their owners to become social lepers. Interspersed through the novel are background materials on the phenomenon of the "animalled", but these never overburden the novel with too much information; Beukes keeps enough of her rules mysterious enough to make the entire thing fascinating.
It's a pity that all of these ideas and concepts can't quite support Zinzi December, who rushes from one set-up to the next until arriving at the final confrontation almost out of nowhere. The bond between Zinzi and Sloth feels genuine, but Zinzi's relationship to illicit substances literally distorts the time-frame of the novel to the point that I couldn't tell if months had passed or if the whole novel was contained in a week.
When it actually matters, too little goes unsaid, and that's how the novel ends.
Despite structural integrity flaws and occasional character qualms, Zoo City is vibrant and intriguing, without coming close to the crushingly fatalistic conflagration of Moxyland. Recommended as something to knock over in a day or two.
Post script: I really should mark this down for "I can haz murder weapon?" Instead I will leave that sentence there as a dire warning.
writegeist's review against another edition
5.0
An incredibly complex, imaginative creation. A mix of fantasy and sci-fi (I kept thinking back on William Gibson's books while reading this; he endorses the book on the cover). I will definitely be keeping Ms. Beukes' work in mind for future reading.
simonlitton's review against another edition
3.0
Two things about modern science fiction struck me while reading this.
Firstly, the tendency to under-explain. Before, the narrator would stop the story in order to give you an info-dump on the world, a key piece of technology, or something else you needed to know in order to understand the story. Nowadays there will be a couple of hints dropped in passing into a dialogue exchange, and it's up to you to join the dots and figure out what it means. On the one hand this makes for a smoother reading experience, but on the other it can hide lazy writing, as the author doesn't have to fully think through or clarify some aspects of the world they've created. The problem then is that I don't necessarily understand what's going on in the plot, and if I don't understand, I find it hard to care. So here there's lots of talk about "muti" and "the undertow" and other aspects of characters' symbiotic relationshps with animals, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you what it means, and I'm still pretty vague on what it was the villain was actually tryig to do.
Secondly, whereas earth-bound SF used to take place in Europe or America (or, at a push, Japan) these days the trend is for more exotic, and less obviously science-fictional locales. So we had India in Ian MacDonald's River of Gods, Thailand in Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, and now the ghettos of Johannesburg in Zoo City. This undoubtedly adds a novelty aspect and allows the writer to explore a new environment and set of characters with a different vocabulary and lifestyle, and the richly detailed descriptions and convincingly vivid characters, settings and situations are the strongest points of the book.
I just wish I knew what it was all about.
Firstly, the tendency to under-explain. Before, the narrator would stop the story in order to give you an info-dump on the world, a key piece of technology, or something else you needed to know in order to understand the story. Nowadays there will be a couple of hints dropped in passing into a dialogue exchange, and it's up to you to join the dots and figure out what it means. On the one hand this makes for a smoother reading experience, but on the other it can hide lazy writing, as the author doesn't have to fully think through or clarify some aspects of the world they've created. The problem then is that I don't necessarily understand what's going on in the plot, and if I don't understand, I find it hard to care. So here there's lots of talk about "muti" and "the undertow" and other aspects of characters' symbiotic relationshps with animals, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you what it means, and I'm still pretty vague on what it was the villain was actually tryig to do.
Secondly, whereas earth-bound SF used to take place in Europe or America (or, at a push, Japan) these days the trend is for more exotic, and less obviously science-fictional locales. So we had India in Ian MacDonald's River of Gods, Thailand in Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, and now the ghettos of Johannesburg in Zoo City. This undoubtedly adds a novelty aspect and allows the writer to explore a new environment and set of characters with a different vocabulary and lifestyle, and the richly detailed descriptions and convincingly vivid characters, settings and situations are the strongest points of the book.
I just wish I knew what it was all about.
olinj's review against another edition
3.0
The world building was amazing and immersive, and the main push of the plot was hella thought provoking. However, it felt like it would have benefited from a bit more editing and tightening, like a few extraneous characters and moments that we could have done without and a few loose ends that I really would have liked to see tied up. Minor spoiler here, but DO NOT READ if you are triggered/emotionally effected when animals die senseless deaths - or even ones that are part of the plot.
Two major problems I have with this book:
1. I DO NOT LIKE when the N word shows up in a book written by a white person - even if it is in the "mouth" of a black character. In this instance it did nothing for the plot and was just a throw away moment of someone reciting lyrics, so it could easily have been left out.
2. I listened to this book, and I don't understand why they had a white person narrate a book with a list of characters who were mostly black - including, most importantly, the protagonist.
Over all, I'm glad I read this book, but I probably wouldn't have if I'd known about the animals deaths. Also, though I'm glad I read this book (like I said - the world building was immersive and impeccable), I probably won't read anything else by Beukes.
Two major problems I have with this book:
1. I DO NOT LIKE when the N word shows up in a book written by a white person - even if it is in the "mouth" of a black character. In this instance it did nothing for the plot and was just a throw away moment of someone reciting lyrics, so it could easily have been left out.
2. I listened to this book, and I don't understand why they had a white person narrate a book with a list of characters who were mostly black - including, most importantly, the protagonist.
Over all, I'm glad I read this book, but I probably wouldn't have if I'd known about the animals deaths. Also, though I'm glad I read this book (like I said - the world building was immersive and impeccable), I probably won't read anything else by Beukes.
juushika's review against another edition
2.0
In a version of our world where murders are marked by their bond animals, one animalled woman takes on an ill-advised missing person case. I care a lot about the bond animal trope and dislike urban fantasy, and this didn't defy those predispositions. Bond animals are typically a wish-fulfillment trope, so this subversion is exciting--but that worldbuilding sits in the background, occasionally alluded to, frustrating unexplored: how do responsibility and guilt effect becoming animalled? is it punitive or reformative; can it be a source of comfort? The encyclopedia exposita is interesting but disjointed; in the body of the text the experience of the animalled is practical, physical. It gives the animals a narrative weight that compliments the trope inversion, but the lack of introspection or emotional bond makes it feel impersonal--and the prickly protagonist have benefited from some humanizing elements.
And all this is buried under the setting--vibrant, diverse, crapsack Johannesburg with some fantasy and near-future additions--and an urban fantasy detective plot laden with the tropes that make me dislike the genre: protagonist doesn't have adequate reasons to become involved; all early plot elements are important and meet in a busy, overly-scripted climax; red herrings and filler action in the middle third explore the gritty, grimdark urban setting. It's readable, but not my style. Angry Robot loves to publish weird books, and they allow that weirdness to run rampant when tighter, more conventional editing would improve the book. (I'm thinking of Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng and vN by Madeline Ashby in particular, but notice it in most of their publications.) And weird is good! it's refreshing, provoking, and I wanted to like this. But it would benefit from a glossary, a rewrite, and (honestly, because of genre) a different reader.
And all this is buried under the setting--vibrant, diverse, crapsack Johannesburg with some fantasy and near-future additions--and an urban fantasy detective plot laden with the tropes that make me dislike the genre: protagonist doesn't have adequate reasons to become involved; all early plot elements are important and meet in a busy, overly-scripted climax; red herrings and filler action in the middle third explore the gritty, grimdark urban setting. It's readable, but not my style. Angry Robot loves to publish weird books, and they allow that weirdness to run rampant when tighter, more conventional editing would improve the book. (I'm thinking of Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng and vN by Madeline Ashby in particular, but notice it in most of their publications.) And weird is good! it's refreshing, provoking, and I wanted to like this. But it would benefit from a glossary, a rewrite, and (honestly, because of genre) a different reader.
lille_in_the_ville's review against another edition
3.0
A very fresh and exciting voice with a fantastic mix of sf and magic realism. The characters are fleshed out, the relationships ring true and the pithy metaphors litter the page. I picked this up as a free Kindle book and am excited to read more of Beukes work.
courtcourtack's review against another edition
5.0
Beukes has a lot of faith in her readers. She writes everything vividly and clearly, but without complete explanations of what is going on, so we have to fill in the blanks ourselves. But she is so good at this that the blanks are pretty easy to fill. Sometimes when books heavily rely on setting, the story gets a little lost and I felt like this happened sometimes but not so much that it took away from the overall quality. Her prose is one of the most unique styles I've ever read, and it's one of the things that keeps me coming back to her. The characters were so strong and unique and real, and boy does Beukes know how to create a serial killer.
rosalindmgh's review against another edition
4.0
3.75 stars. Very well written, very original ideas. I was left feeling pretty disturbed once I'd finished. Ultimately just not my cup of tea.