I have recently very much enjoyed South African novelist Lauren Beukes' science fiction/magic realism novel Zoo City.
Beukes is, I think, Afrikaaner; the heroine of this novel is black; I am not sure how this fits into the chromatic fandoms scheme of things, but I liked the story and Zinzi, the heroine, is quite fabulous. Fucked up and smart enough to know how fucked up she is, and stubborn enough to be trying to go straight but not quite stubborn enough to get there...and then there's a take on animal familiars which turns a lot of that concept on its head. Anyhow, it's a good story, and I'm still stunned to have found African genre fiction on the shelf at my local Borders.
(I am so far less impressed by Beukes' debut novel Moxyland, which I read the first third of and then abandoned on my nightstand. I may yet come back to it, but...enh, she's sort of trying to do Cory Doctorow in Johannesburg, and I'm not real enthused.)
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Beukes is, I think, Afrikaaner; the heroine of this novel is black; I am not sure how this fits into the chromatic fandoms scheme of things, but I liked the story and Zinzi, the heroine, is quite fabulous. Fucked up and smart enough to know how fucked up she is, and stubborn enough to be trying to go straight but not quite stubborn enough to get there...and then there's a take on animal familiars which turns a lot of that concept on its head. Anyhow, it's a good story, and I'm still stunned to have found African genre fiction on the shelf at my local Borders.
(I am so far less impressed by Beukes' debut novel Moxyland, which I read the first third of and then abandoned on my nightstand. I may yet come back to it, but...enh, she's sort of trying to do Cory Doctorow in Johannesburg, and I'm not real enthused.)