Zoo City

Author: Lauren Beukes

One of the most fascinating things that science fiction can do is serve as a distorting mirror to the world we see around us. By shattering and twisting the image, it forces us to see the familiar in a completely new way, and that can be very revealing. That was especially the case with Lauren Beukes's Arthur C. Clarke Award winning Zoo City. Set in Johannesburg, especially in the inner city area of Hillbrow, the novel captures the social and criminal problems of the city by rendering them surreal. In this universe, anyone convicted of a crime is "animalled", that is, they are magically bonded to an animal familiar which, rather like the familiars in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, reflects the inner character of the criminal. Journalist Zinzi December has been animalled to a sloth after causing the death of her brother. Now she ventures ever deeper into the fractured Johannesburg underworld as she attempts to find a missing pop star while also struggling to pay off her debt to a drug dealer. The psychic zoo proves to be a sharp and disturbing way of illuminating the city's many social problems. Why it's on the list: Lauren Beukes's background in South Africa comes out in the strange and powerful imagery that informs her novel, taking us into places that we were not previously familiar with.