More of wot I have read…

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

This was one of the books I got for my birthday by an author that I had not read before and taking the Amazon recommendation. I enjoyed the first one (Windup Girl) very much and this one was very different from the start.

The feel of this story was in keeping with the subject matter, outsiders, criminals and dropouts, characters with their own way of talking, with different morals and values and a pragmatic approach to problems that befall them. Some of the references were lost on me being unfamiliar with the use of South African slang or tribal cultures, but still it was an exciting and exotic world that was brought to life and the Animaled concept was fresh and interesting.

This was a fascinating read.

‘Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit and a talent for finding lost things. But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, she’s forced to take on her least favourite kind of job – missing persons.
Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass and their animal companions live in the shadow of hell’s undertow.
Instead, it catapults Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she’ll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives – including her own’.

Vurt by Jeff Noon

 

Another unknown for me this author has a unique voice and I was quickly immersed into his strange and twisted world. The story played heavily on the drug induced virtual (vurt) reality and gang culture in a disturbing and psychedelic roller coaster ride that made you feel you were tripping along with the characters.

Some of the twisted mutation imagery and shocking character attitudes jarred and highlighted the dystopian aspects of this world. A world that was left mostly unexplained as the main characters concentrated on struggling to survive on the fringes of society leaving us to wonder on how it all came to be.

A baffling and exciting read.

‘Take a trip in a stranger’s head. Travel rain-shot streets with a gang of hip malcontents, hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine. Yet Vurt feathers are not for the weak. As the mysterious Game Cat says, ‘Be careful, be very careful’. But Scribble isn’t listening. He has to find his lost love. His journey is a mission to find Curious Yellow, the ultimate, perhaps even mythical Vurt feather. As the most powerful narcotic of all, Scribble must be prepared to leave his current reality behind.’

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

Different again I hadn’t realised until I started to write this review that this author was also responsible for the satirical The Soddit a parody of the Hobbit that I read many years before. This is much different and although it has satirical and humorous passages all through it there is a more sophisticated story and intriguing idea carrying this work along.

I like the more measured pace of this story that plays well with the elderly main character, an anti-heroic ‘ironist’ who is taken from his quiet and drab life that he has resigned himself to and thrust into a strange new world where his preconceptions are constantly challenged as are the reader’s as we are drawn ever deeper into the bizarre.

This book has some wonderful twists and turns to it and the Russian flavour to the dialogue, the superbly stylised characters and the way the author lures you into believing in the unbelievable makes this well worth the read.

‘Russia, 1946, the Nazis recently defeated. Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside somewhere. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away, and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together, to give it purpose and direction, he tells the writers: 'I want you to concoct a story about aliens poised to invade earth…  I want it to be massively detailed, and completely believable. If you need props and evidence to back it up, then we can create them. But when America is defeated, your story must be so convincing that the whole population of Soviet Russia believes in it - the population of the whole world!' The little group of writers gets down to the task and spends months working on it.
But then new orders come from Moscow: they are told to drop the project; Stalin has changed his mind; forget everything about it. So they do. They get on with their lives in their various ways; some of them survive the remainder of Stalin's rule, the changes of the 50s and 60s. And then, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the survivors gather again, because something strange has started to happen. The story they invented in 1946 is starting to come true…’