Previous SFF Author: Alfred Bester
Lauren Beukes is a writer, TV scriptwriter, and recovering journalist. She has an MA in Creative Writing, but she got her real education in ten years of freelance journalism, learning really useful skills like how to pole-dance and make traditional sorghum beer. Learn more at Lauren Beukes’ website.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE STORIES BY LAUREN BEUKES.
Every once in a while a novel comes along that’s touted as new, exciting, daring, meaningful, poignant, fresh, full of big ideas, etc. That’s what I’ve heard, so that’s what I was expecting and hoping for in Lauren Beukes’ novel Moxyland — especially since it has a nice blurb from William Gibson and has been compared to Neuromancer.
Moxyland takes place in a futuristic (2018) Cape Town, South Africa. The Cape Town setting is unique,
Kat Hooper´s rating: 2.5 | Lauren Beukes | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The main character of Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City is a former freelance journalist named Zinzi December. Zinzi is cool, intelligent and carries some big mental baggage. Despite her flaws, you will love her almost immediately. Zinzi lives in Zoo City, which is essentially a slum in Johannesburg for people who have been burdened with animals. In the world of Zoo City, people are magically attached to animals after they’ve done something particularly awful. People with animals are the outcasts of society,
Justin Blazier´s rating: 4 | Lauren Beukes | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
A serial killer is at a serious advantage when they can jump through time at will, as Harper Curtis of Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls can. This does not bode well for Kirby Mazrachi, intended victim of said serial killer who should’ve died after Harper sliced open her stomach and slit her throat. But Kirby miraculously survived the attack and is determined to find the man that derailed her life.
The problems with trying to find a time-travelling serial killer,
Ray McKenzie, Terry Weyna and Marion Deeds´s rating: 4 | Lauren Beukes | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes
South African writer Lauren Beukes had a hit with last year’s The Shining Girls, the story of a serial killer who could travel through time. Readers of both time travel novels and serial killer thrillers loved the way Beukes melded the two genres. Beukes has again given us a genre-bender with Broken Monsters. Both a horror novel and a police procedural, Broken Monsters is even better than The Shining Girls.
Broken Monsters is set in Detroit — today’s Detroit,
Terry Weyna and Marion Deeds´s rating: 5 | Lauren Beukes | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Bridge by Lauren Beukes
A quick glance at the jacket copy of Lauren Beukes’s 2023 weird thriller Bridge might make the reader think of the Best Picture winner, Everything Everywhere All at Once. After all, this is a mother-daughter story set in the multiverse. Beukes weaves into her story a few elements EEAAO didn’t have, like a parasite and a serial killer, or more accurately a collective of serial killers. The core of the book is a mother-daughter story, but it is filled with chills,
Marion Deeds´s rating: 5 | Lauren Beukes | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Forever Magazine is a new venture by Neil Clarke, editor of the esteemed Clarkesworld. He explains in the introduction to the first issue of the magazine that it is a monthly publication focused on previously published works, mostly from this (still new) century. Clarke is the entire staff of the magazine. The Kindle subscription price is currently $1.99 per month.
The first issue opens extremely well, with a novelette by Ken Liu, “The Regular,” about a serial killer who targets high-end prostitutes.
Previous SFF Author: Alfred Bester
I might say "formulaic" actually.
Your review made me curious, so I looked this book up. Sure enough: Tor. Tor seems to specialize in these…
It's a tightrope act for sure.
[…] Stuart (2 December 2015). “Roadside Picnic: Russian SF classic with parallels to Vandermeer’s Area X | Fantasy Lit…. fantasyliterature.com. Retrieved 8 […]
yes, I mean, there are certainly lots of good sci-fi/fantasy novellas out there, so they aren't impossible to do, but…