Womb City, the debut novel from acclaimed short fiction writer Tlotlo Tsamaase, is described as “The Handmaid’s Tale meets Get Out” and a “cyberpunk body-hopping Africanfuturist ghost story.” In other words, this is not your typical dystopian mystery, and io9 is thrilled to share a first look.
Here’s a description of the story:
Nelah seems to have it all: fame, wealth, and a long-awaited daughter growing in a government lab. But, trapped in a loveless marriage to a policeman who uses a microchip to monitor her every move, Nelah’s perfect life is precarious. After a drug-fueled evening culminates in an eerie car accident, Nelah commits a desperate crime and buries the body, daring to hope that she can keep one last secret.
The truth claws its way into Nelah’s life from the grave.
As the ghost of her victim viciously hunts down the people Nelah holds dear, she is thrust into a race against the clock: in order to save any of her remaining loved ones, Nelah must unravel the political conspiracy her victim was on the verge of exposing—or risk losing everyone.
Here’s the full cover; the artist is Colin Verdi, and the designer is Samira Iravani.
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“My jaw dropped when I saw how Colin Verdi drew from the details in Womb City by blending its science fiction features into this surreal mind-womb: a disembodied, floating cyborg’s head that encloses not a brain but a womb-pod with a baby trapped inside,” Tsamaase said in a statement provided to io9. “This image is truly symbolic of the objectification and pervading threat that Nelah, the protagonist, faces. I love the striking aesthetics of the mind-womb—particularly how it touches on the book’s themes of restricted autonomy and the technology that plagues the characters’ bodies—against this red backdrop; this color transforms Womb City’s cover into a horror-hued poem.”
Verdi gave us a bit of background on how the cover came together. “When I started working on Womb City, I was lucky to receive a gorgeous moodboard from the author that painted a clear picture of the visuals Tlotlo Tsamaase had had in mind while writing this story,” the artist said. “It included the phrase ‘Womb of Sins’ tucked under a series of reference images of people growing in pods. The imagery that would end up on the final cover immediately sprang to my mind. The titular womb is directly where the central figure’s brain should be, telling readers that this is a story about a mother with a child always on her mind, yes, but also conveying that this book is about how a secret or a sin can grow and take on a new shape the more time it spends rattling around in our heads. The mother’s body is incomplete, with the creeping tendrils of wires and futuristic technology dangling from her ‘shoulders’ into space, to show how much this thing growing in her mind will consume her.”
And here’s an excerpt from Womb City!
SUNDAY, AUGUST 2
05:00
PURE
In our city, everyone lives forever. But murder hangs in the air like mist.
The morning sun is a still-sparkling eye, blinking through our bedroom shutters when my husband shrugs me awake. “It’s time,” he whispers.
I toss and turn. Sleep slips, evades me. Eyes closed, the skin of my eyelids is tinged pink as the probing, UV-forensic sunrays seep into the darkest part of my mind, the part that wakes up with me every morning. Barren. Lonely. Desperate. I rub the heels of my palm into my eyes.
“Babe.” Elifasi’s lips nibble my earlobe.
I sit up as my microchip vibrates, sending quivers down my spine. It’s my daily reminder for my morning assessment. I already feel so incarcerated in my own bed that the government-imposed reminder makes me grit my teeth.
“I don’t understand why you always feel nervous about this daily routine,” he says, fluffing the pillow. “You always pass.”
“You don’t understand what it feels like to lose a body,” I bite back. “What if I had a child?”
Child. That grenade of a word in our marriage lands in his heart, blasting out pieces of sadness like shrapnel. The hurt in his eyes is too heavy to hold. But what if I bump into them at the market, and I can’t tell that I gave birth to them in my previous life? I do not say these things aloud.
His hand detaches from my face. The cold air fills his place, gripping me. The vast amount of space between us keeps us emotionally light-years apart. My fingers clasp his cotton shirt at the small of his back, where I often draw circles to comfort him, but he shrugs me off. “I’m sorry.” The wet whisper clings to my lips. “It’s just … I wish the Body Hope Facility had given me a body that was at least fertile, given the high premiums I pay.”
“We,” he says.
“What?”
“We pay, not I pay.”
I make more money than him, and he says I keep rubbing it in his face, wrongfully accusing me of doing so. I wish he would see past that because it makes it difficult to speak to him.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“It’s a waste of time to focus on the past,” he says. “The only thing we can change is our future.”
Sirens pierce through the silence in our bedroom. He stands, the bedcovers crinkling. His fingers tease open the shutters as he peers at our garden down below. “Looks like it’s about to rain.” The city sirens are hollow ghosts, fingering the city along the A1 highway, pulsing through our suburb, Tsholofelo East, toward a culprit.
Murder hangs in the air. The cold clings to my skin. Every Sunday at the cusp of dusk, each police tower in every district coughs up into the skies a puff of human corpse-detecting chemicals. The rains will come, and the chemicals will detect homicide in our urban landscape. Through the sliver of window to the horizon, far out, is a scenic view of soft hills and sky, a mass of forested land, outstretched.
“It must be the perpetrator they brought in last night,” Elifasi says. “He wouldn’t talk. Previous forensic assessments failed to predict his criminal intent. But the sun never fails us.” Its rays catalyze the chemicals into truth-seeking action. He directs this statement at me. The guilt, the anger bridling beneath all that muscle, those still-murky deep-set dark eyes. A ray of light knives its way across his light-brown skin, climbing up his sharp nose. His hand jerks; the wooden shutters jolt and flick open. The sun glares into my face. Guilty, it seems to say.
“Even if the sun fails us,” he says, “we can always rely on the Murder Trials to protect us.”
I tremble. The Murder Trials, heavily shrouded in secrecy. It’s a back-up plan for our forensic evaluations and allegedly uses horrid practices to catch criminals who go undetected by technology—practices I pray I never discover. They especially scrutinize microchipped people, which means a high majority of women, since female bodies are microchipped more often than men’s. But I’ve no idea what they do to people like us or why they target us. How can I avoid what I don’t understand?
The Murder Trials are based near Matsieng, a ritualistic site made holy by the surrounding folklore-riddled waterholes, where some crazy people drink its miracle water to solve financial problems, infertility, erectile dysfunction . . . I’m no atheist, but I can’t believe a whole-ass government would entrust our safety on supernatural gimmicks. How could crevices in the ground aid them in unearthing criminals? Yet even I can’t deny it’s worked so far, reducing crime over the centuries.
Elifasi pulls me to my feet. “Let’s get this over with,” he says. I lean in to give him a morning kiss, but he evades me.
“Sit.” He presses me primly against the armless cushioned chair. He walks behind me, footfalls softened by our lush bedroom carpet. Crouches by the bed.
“It’s chilly in here,” I say, bare-armed, bare-legged, in a light velvet camisole and pajama shorts, trimmed with satin.
His hands brush my shoulders, my neck, holding me stiffly. “Shit.”
“What?” I ask.
He fingers the Plasma hanging above our dresser. “Ran out of memory. It’s not automatically connecting to your microchip. Why can’t it find you? Told you we should’ve gone with a different brand.”
“Just plug the cable in,” I say.
He yanks an audio-video interface cable from the dresser, wraps it around my neck. “Been naughty or nice?” He chuckles, and lets it fall loosely around my shoulders.
“Both,” I add for the fun of it.
Reality strikes me. I freeze, unable to move, as a cold draft of fear settles in my lungs, and I realize with rising panic that I will never escape this invasive ritual.
His thumb presses against my lip. “You taste like gunpowder,” I whisper.
He smiles, inserts the stiff, cold, serpentine cable into a slim port sitting below the AI microchip that’s fitted in the back of my neck. He inserts it the same way he uses his penis: mechanically, thoughtlessly. I jerk from the shock of the cable’s cold, abrupt slurping of my memories straight into our Plasma’s storage facility. Every morning, I have an AI assessment where my husband peruses my memory files. “That’s why I married you—to keep you in line,” he’d shoot off, laughing at his own joke.
The cable connects to the Plasma and transmits data recorded by my eyes from the past 24 hours, like Sunday movie night. He sits on the edge of the bed, gulps a cold beer, by the glow from the Plasma’s screen. He rotates his finger. A silver Source: Gizmodo