So yes, Beukes does the cyberpunk thing well - corporates in control, government serving them & not the people, heavy restraints on freedoms, cellphones and computers pervasive with a little bit of VR gaming and avatars thrown in for good measure. Beukes freshens the cyberpunk genre with her use of SIM cards as the ID document, credit card, vehicle of punishment, all-in-all lifeline, and in her idea of using nanotech to genetically modify people so that they become walking ads and artwork.

But the notion of corporates 'watching you', and the eventual denouement of 'yes they're really watching you more than you think' was a bit stale. I've read that before. You won't be surprised by the plot, there's not much new there. You mustn't let that get you down - the new, funny, interesting and cool stuff is bonded to the architecture, to thescaffolding of the plot as it unfolds: the characterisation of Lerato, Kendra, Toby & Tendeka; the Nguni, Cape Malay and so-called coloured names instead of the US-Nippon-Sino melds you so often see in
cyberpunk; the familiar-mutated landscape; the Cape Town art/model-scene gone wrong (I'm thinking Michael Stevenson & the Goodman Gallery with legalized drugs, more corporates, more models, nano implants, and pretension skyrocketing); the polarisation of Rural vs Connected; the gross & crazy inequality and how Connected vs. Non- makes this all the more apparent, all the more alienating.

Don't go in expecting to be blown away by an untold story - that's not going to happen. But don't hold that against the book. The novelty's in the unweaving, the style, and the characterization. The book feels like the synthesis of bits of Orwell, with a character or two from Bret Easton Ellis, and various cyberpunk & sci fi authors, Gibson, Dick, Stephenson, Cory Doctorow come to mind. Expect a typical cyberpunk story, but take pleasure in the SA- and CT-specific minutiae, appreciate the 3rd world take on a genre so typically 1st world, endure some of the ways txt msg speak invades speech and writing, laugh at the occasional silliness. It's a good book, a good quality SA product to be exported to the SIM-toting, cyberpunk-reading masses in the rest of the world; many of the sci-fi junkies out there will lap it up and love its uniqueness - Charlie Stross likes it, so you could too

Post-script 1: My wife, Amy, just finished reading Moxyland and was surprised by how much she liked it. Amy had never read sci-fi before and loved it, so my compliments to Beukes for drawing my wife into a sci-fi novel, I had tried before with little success.

Post-script 2: I wonder if someone could convince Jessica Tiffin to resurrect her 3rd year English lit sci-fi elective at UCT and teach this book... Hmm... <schemes>