Zoo City to be turned into a film

Zoo City, the award-winning novel by South African Lauren Beukes, is to be turned into a film. Producer Helena Spring, also a South African, won the rights, and will be looking for a director.

Spring’s credits range from the Oscar-nominated “Yesterday” and “Red Dust” (a not so good courtroom drama about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) to the silly, but lucrative, Leon Schuster comedies Mama Jack (he’s in blackface for most of the film) and Mr Bones. Her most recent film is “The First Grader”, which is winning awards all over the place. So she seems to be in good company with Beukes, who earlier this year won the Arthur C Clarke award for Zoo City. The book also won a British Science Fiction Award for best art work – for designer Joey Hi-Fi. It is a great cover – far better in my view than the one on the North American edition.

Zoo City is a ‘cyberpunk thriller’ set in an alternate Johannesburg, where criminals or those who have serious moral failings, get landed with an animal familiar as a permanent attachment. They also get the added benefit of a psychic power. The book’s protagonist is Zinzi December, a former journalist and drug addict, who ended up with a sloth on her back after causing her brother’s death. She spends her time writing copy for 419 scam emails until she gets roped in to searching for a missing singer (her talent is being able to find lost things).

The concept of the animal familiar clearly owes a lot to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, although the idea plays out very differently.

Zoo City is incredibly innovative, and Beukes is clearly a really original voice in South African literature. She can be compared to China Mieville, another Arthur C Clarke award winner (in fact, here they are photographed together). They both write wildly innovative sci-fi/fantasy — Mieville calls his work weird fiction — set in dystopian urban environments. This kind of fantasy is very different from the escapist wizards and fairies you get in Tolkien and his clones. It’s gritty and real, morally complex, and politically aware – though I think Beukes is not yet quite at Mieville’s level.

I enjoyed Zoo City, though for some reason about two thirds of the way through the book my interest started to flag. Despite the weirdness and invention of Beukes’s language, context and characters, I found the storyline ultimately a little disappointing. I preferred her earlier novel, Moxyland, which I think deserves a lot more attention. The story of corporate and political power gone mad, and the use of technology for surveillance and control in a futuristic Cape Town, has powerful resonance in these days of Carrier IQ, Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent.