Book Review: Womb City

 

Image: The cover of the book is bright red with the title "womb city" in large black letters, repeating and cascading down the background, fading into the red with each layer. In the center is a dark skinned Black woman facing to the left with a transparent mask covering her face, inside of which is a small fetus. Her braids are sticking out of the back and cascading down to her shoulders. Part of her neck and the upper part of her torso are composed of grey machinery. Across the bottom is the author's name, Tlotlo Tsamaase.

Womb City is not an easy read. Cyberpunk in general is dark and grim by definition, but Tlotlo Tsamaase's Womb City is on another level in part because of who is telling the story. This book is difficult to define because it does not fit only into the cyberpunk genre, but that's the one that stuck out to me the most as I made my way through it. It also has supernatural elements and pieces of other genres (which arguably have been combined with cyberpunk for some time such as in Shadowrun, so maybe I am digressing too much. This is the point where Pat Cadigan would tell me and anyone else fussing over genre borders to just try and enjoy it.) The reason I want to focus on cyberpunk is not only because it is a favorite genre of mine, but because this book breaks the mold of so many (but certainly not all) well known cyberpunk texts by telling the story from the POV of a Motswana Black woman/nonbinary/agender person (the character refers to herself in many ways, hence my possibly contradictory description.) 

One of the biggest issues with mainstream white guy cyberpunk is that female characters, and even moreso female characters of color, are lucky if they get a supporting role. There is often some form of technological sexual exploitation and/or sexual assault which is used solely for world building and to support the story of the main character who is almost always a dude who may save them or seek their counsel in a technobrothel or something. You can see this in the book Neuromancer to the film Blade Runner to the videogame version of Cyberpunk 2077. In Womb City, our protagonist is Nelah, a Motswana woman who is exploited in many of these ways, but whose complex and batshit insane life (lives?) are at the center of the story. As your average ignorant USAmerican, I don't know a ton about Botswana's culture and what parts of it inspired the author to write this book. It definitely made me interested in learning more about her country and her own life.

I have struggled to figure out how to summarize this book without spoiling it. Tsamaase spends a ton of the book world building, creating a complex web of dark and dismal high tech, low life struggle. Women, and people seen as such, are exploited in a variety of sexual and other ways. There is a horrific dystopian authoritarian government. There is body-hopping, but what makes this book super interesting is that, you aren't just transferred to a new body intact after death- you lose many or all of your memories. You become responsible for the host body's crimes as well as partly responsible for your past body- unless you are wealthy and powerful. Most people who have body hopped have microchips installed that record them and some chips can also stop you from committing a crime before you do. These are things you learn early on, but there is so much more. A cascade of horrifying events takes place and we ride the rollercoaster with our protagonist.

I will criticize the repetition a bit. As someone who needs to take notes while reading fiction- especially 400+ page fiction- I appreciate some reminders here and there. But, this book could likely have been 100 pages shorter if we weren't told the same thing over and over unnecessarily. I also think the exposition and vibe were a bit heavy handed and overt at times. Cyberpunk can generally be heavy handed, but sometimes it was so much so that it took me out of it. I also am unsure why gender identity was used the way it was. Perhaps due to the author's identity (all I know is that xi uses xi/xer.) But, the way it is written makes it tough to tell if the protagonist is a woman who hates how women are treated and thus wishes she wasn't one, or if shes nonbinary and/or trans. I think the story would have been much better off without it because it's not developed at all. Though the God presiding over this dystopia is given xi/xer pronouns which did make sense to me.

Be warned, there is not only horror in terms of oppression in Womb City. There is a significant amount of body horror and gnarly violence. There were times that I was taken a back by the level of... creativity that the author used in devising things that happened to the characters. There were times I needed to take breaks from reading this book, which is why it took me so long to get through despite me being fairly absorbed. Sometimes the violence was so over the top I wondered how necessary it was, but it did often fit into the world building. A society like this where people take the measures they do to succeed and survive cannot be fashionable.

There was a section near the end where I laughed and thought, "OK do we really need THIS MANY twists?" I do think the author gets ahead of xirself at times and puts too many ideas together without fully developing them. I gave this 5 stars anyway due to both personal taste and because the level of creativity and cooperation with and diversion from mainstream cyberpunk is something I want to see more of. Surprisingly, with all of the horrific things that happen in this book, it ends on a somewhat upbeat note. I mean, as upbeat a note as a story based in this world can. I didn't finish the book feeling defeated as is sometimes the case with really dark stories. 

If you are a fan of cyberpunk, but see it as a guilty pleasure because of my aforementioned descriptions of how female characters are often treated, this is the book for you. I actually found out about this through goodreads giveaways and I am glad I did. I am not often as pleased with what I win as I was with this book.

This was also posted to my goodreads.