Zoo City

Lauren Beukes

4 ideas

1. Zinzi December's Hunt for Songweza

   In an alternate Johannesburg, Zinzi December is a former magazine journalist and ex-addict who was bonded to a Sloth after her brother's death, a death she was culpable for. She lives in Hillbrow, the zone known as Zoo City, writes 419 scam emails to pay off a drug debt, and earns extra money using her sloth-given knack for finding lost things. A music mogul hires her to find Songweza, half of the teenage twin pop act iJusi, and the job leads her into a scheme in which the powerful exploit animalled people for occult power.

2. Guilt made visible creates permanent underclass

   When a crime physically marks the person who committed it, punishment moves from courts and sentences to everyday exclusion. Landlords, employers and neighbours all enforce it, and it never ends. The marked are pushed together into a single slum, so moral stigma becomes geography and a class position that no amount of later reform can erase.

3. Stigmatized people become ideal predatory targets

   A society that treats a marked group as already condemned stops caring what happens to its members, and that indifference is exactly what predators look for. Victims whose disappearance nobody will investigate are the safest to exploit. Stigma therefore does not just punish the marked, it hands them to whoever wants to use them.

4. The stigma you must protect to survive

   Each animalled person is bound to their animal, and if it dies, a dark force called the Undertow comes to consume them. The living emblem of their guilt is therefore also their lifeline, and they must care for the thing that shames them. The bond also grants a small magical talent, so the mark is at once a burden, a gift and a dependency.

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