I’m very pleased to be included in an expansive survey of Cape Town-based spec-fic – Cape Town: The Writers – alongside Diane Awerbuck, Lauren Beukes, Imraan Coovadia, Panashe Chigumadzi, Mandisi Nkomo, Mia Arderne, Ziphozakhe Hlobo, Nicholas Ernest, Toby Bennett, Zinaid Meeran Novelist & others. Part of the outstanding series, 100 African writers of SFF by Geoff Ryman (also of the African Speculative Fiction Society) for Strange Horizons Magazine. Read the Nineveh extract and interview here.
I think Nineveh falls into a grey zone, where I don’t completely recognize the moment when it passes into speculative from non-speculative. It’s set in a recognizable Cape Town but not an altogether real Cape Town.
Certain things are invented—the plague of insects for example, or the underground cabins beneath the swamp and the estate—these gesture towards fantastical fiction. But I like to keep on that line of uncertainty between the real and unreal.
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