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A review by simonlitton
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
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.