Triangulum
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
In the Eastern Cape, a schoolgirl maths prodigy is haunted by the loss of her mother, who disappeared during the demise of the country’s homeland system.
When a strange apparition – “the machine” – visits the girl at night, she’s convinced it’s a sign from her mother, and connected to a series of abductions of local girls. With her two closest friends, she sets out to find the truth, exposing links to the area’s murky past.
Are her visions disturbed hallucinations to be medicated away? Or are they evidence of supernatural – perhaps even extraterrestrial – contact?
Years later, as a gifted data scientist in a dystopic surveillance-state, she is drawn into a world of espionage, shadowy corporations, eco-terrorists and hackers through the love she feels for an elusive artist.
Presented as a message from the future, Masande Ntshanga’s Triangulum boldly mixes science-fiction with philosophy and details of South African history seldom examined. An affecting exploration of bereavement, sexuality and coming of age, this multilayered novel showcases a completely original talent coming into his full powers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This quirky, futuristic novel skirts the boundary of science fiction with its allusions to alien abductions and its presentation as a document that predicts the end of the world in 2050. The episodic narrative, delivered secretly to a university astronomy department, is organized as two interlocking manuscripts. In the first, set in 1999 (and featuring memories dating to 2002 obtained through regression therapy conducted in 2035), the unnamed narrator, a 14-year-old girl living with her father in the Ciskei state in postapartheid South Africa, ponders the mysterious disappearances of her mother and several fellow schoolgirls and how they may relate to "the machine," a presumed alien presence that manifests as a triangular shape in her vision during seizures. In the second section, set in 2035, the same narrator is working in a government office on a secret project to influence human behavior when she is recruited by The Returners, a radical group hoping to return the land to a pre-corporatization paradise. Ntshanga (The Reactive) writes convincingly from the viewpoint of his narrator as she advances into adulthood. Her struggles to make sense of the strangeness and unpredictability of her world and experiences make this a stirring coming-of-age story.
