Utopia in Speculative Fiction– Examining Space in Cape Town

Abstract

Speculative Fiction in South Africa maintains its utility by grappling with the representation of the everyday in utopic/dystopic urban settings. In doing so the genre can also “(re)frame the multiple past and present realities” of the urban environment. In this regard, I address how the genre’s trope of utopia is used to mediate spatial conceptions of Cape Town through physical and digital urbanisms. The city has been defined by its entanglement with dystopic corporate homogeneity and its impact on the “everyday” in the three novels I examine. Thirteen Cents, Moxyland, and It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way offer competing representations of the privatisation of space emblematic of the onset of neo-liberal politics that followed South Africa’s transition to democracy post 1994. In this regard, the characters’ “everyday” in the novels is mediated by competing visions of utopia/dystopia. This can be shown through the circulation of the characters through the city, either physically (as shown by Azure in Thirteen Cents), or digitally (as shown by Tendeka in Moxyland and Malcom in It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way). While Thirteen Cents does not offer the vision of “digital doom” represented in Moxyland and It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way, read together the novels address theorizations of futurity in Cape Town. Drawing on the work of Jameson, Bickford-Smith, Robinson, Tšehloane and Smith, I explicate how speculative fiction addresses the contradictory development of the city-space that is represented as simultaneously utopic and dystopic.