Book Review: Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

 

Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

416 pages, Hardcover
Published January, 2024 by Erewhon Books

Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase is a complicated book to review there are positives and negatives all over the place and the ultimate opinion I sort of ended up with - this is a neat novel that could've been great. Fantastic elements but it suffers from trying to pack too much in and it gets very confusing in the last third. The literary equivalent of a CGI battle fest that turns many Hollywood blockbusters into a seizure-causing fest of imagery.  The amount of invention and creativity combined with a very different cultural setting helped elevate the material earlier and seemed to fade into the background later in the book.

Not every book has to be perfect or a masterpiece. Womb City might not make my best-of-the-year lists, but I can tell you Tlotlo Tsamaase is an author I will read again. For the first two hundred pages I enjoyed how it was starting. I liked the setting and the concept, which is built on many cool ideas. I think there were some first novel growing pains and a more heavy-handed editor might have gotten a more clear story out of this novel.

Tlotlo Tsamaase is a talented Science fiction writer from Botswana, which is a major selling point for this novel. We have had plenty of African Science Fiction, but interestingly enough it seems several of the authors who have become popular and readily available here are Nigerian or of Nigerian descent. That is cool but to get a voice from another African community is valuable and as a fan of World SF I can also say that many of the positives outweigh the negatives. Had this novel been just another work of American SF it would have lacked some of the natural strengths that come naturally with SF from cultures often underrepresented.

The reality is the power of getting an SF novel from Botsawa with the voice of an author from that country is worth a little bit of confusion. As a researcher of early to mid-20th century Science Fiction who were made up mostly of voices from New York and California, it is so welcome to have these diverse voices.  

That said, I have to be honest about my experience as a reader. Womb City is a post Cyberpunk novel built on story elements that reminded me in a good way of Altered Carbon - whichis just now becoming old enough to be dare I say a classic work by Richard Morgan. Tlotlo Tsamaase brings a unique point of view and much of the novel’s best moments involve the intense and well thought world-building about this future Africa where our minds can move from body to body. It is the unique social conditions that give humans of this future multiple lifetimes that are fascinating. Criminals have to give up their bodies and good citizens get to live on in their second, sometimes third body. 

“But if you commit suicide, you revoke that right. First – and second–year lifespanners adopt this strategy, selling off their 210 years, which is mainly obtained by foreigners with passport privileges who can declare citizenship through this form. Chinese, Indian, British, or American people possess some of our People’s bodies. Most of the Batswana I see walking in the city, I wonder what white souls colonize their bones.”

This paragraph expresses one of the most powerful and haunting themes of the novel.

Much of Nelah’s drive in the narrative relates to her intense desire to have a child, one growing in a government lab. Her marriage is in trouble, and evry part of her life down to her thoughts are being monitored by outside forces. The very nature of humanity and what makes us human is at the heart of this story. There are examples almost on every page, and multiple times in a chapter where the technology breaks down the aspects of human life by giving the characters a new body, a memory chip, memories that translate to data etc. Womb City explores the characters who exist as souls, ghosts in a sense, and spins around the idea of bodies being almost like clothing.

“for it is only the materialism of this flesh and the laws of this world that muddy the true calibre of our souls.”

As the novel novel unfolds it is clear that there is no freedom in the system as it is. One interesting scene involves two characters figuring out how they could die and force themselves into new bodies. What do race, gender, and experience mean when bodies are so casually exchanged?  

“He stares at me, smiling, unaware of the volcano erupting within me. These intimate sessions mutilate my sense of independence; in this murdered church of my body, every molecule is a screaming prisoner.”

Toward the end, I wondered who Nelah was anymore. An accident does more than break her body and it sets off the action in the last third of the book. Everything till this point I was enjoying quite a bit.
I admit some of my confusion might have been the state where I read the second half. I read the first half taking the bus and waiting for my flight to Indiana for the 2024 solar eclipse. During those days I had an intense spiritual experience with the eclipse, did a release party for a new novel, and then after a flight delay that included an overnight stay in the airport I read the final act of this novel. So I was super tired when I read it.   

I considered re-reading the novel, but I saw other reviews and I was not alone in the confusion in the back half. The first half does an excellent job bringing the characters together, defining who Nelah is, and even though her life is radically different from how we live is clear enough. In the back half the gun battles and action scenes melt together and motivations become less clear. Reading on the plane I found myself staring out the window. I don’t normally do that.

Womb City has more positives than negatives but that final act challenged me as much as the first 2/3 excited me. Tltolo Tsamaase has my attention Xer work whenever I can. This is a complicated story, and