Bizarre futuristic novel Zoo City set to become a feature film

By Eric Walkuski

Posted 15 years ago

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

This book sounds positively crazy, and that’s why its getting some facetime here on AITH.

Helena Spring, widely regarded as one of South Africa’s most accomplished motion picture producers, has just been awarded the highly sought-after film rights to ZOO CITY, the Sci-Fi thriller penned by South African author Lauren Beukes – who garnered the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best Science Fiction novel.

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The urban fantasy is set in a futuristic, gritty and hard-core Johannesburg where the eponymous ghetto has been colonised by society’s outcasts – like criminals, drug-dealers and psychopaths, and their animal companions. Like the other residents of the Zoo City slum, Zinzi, the anti-heroine, is “animalled”, but she is also a shrewd, street-smart girl with the gift (or burden) of finding lost things. Zinzi wears her power animal, a sloth, on her back. When she is hired to find a missing teenybopper star, she hopes that it will be her ticket out of Hell’s waiting room.

It almost sounds like what The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would look like with a sloth on her shoulder. Weird, wild stuff.

Spring’s career in the entertainment industry spans nearly three decades, during which time she has produced over twenty motion pictures – including the first ever South African film to receive recognition at the Academy Awards: Darrell Roodt’s YESTERDAY earned a Best Foreign Picture nomination in 2004.

We’ll keep you updated on ZOO CITY as more info about the film comes to light.

Author Lauren Beukes

Source: Angry Robot

About the Author

Eric Walkuski

Film Critic

10,340 Articles Published

Favorite Movies: Jaws, Star Wars Trilogy, Aliens, Citizen Kane, The Third Man, Dawn read more of the Dead ('78), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre ('74), Fargo, Miller's Crossing, Reservoir Dogs, The Manchurian Candidate ('62), Taxi Driver, Back to the Future, Stand by Me, Shaun of the Dead, Boogie Nights, La Dolce Vita, 12 Angry Men, The Birds, Touch of Evil

Likes: Film, Beer (who the hell DOESN'T around here?!), writing, NY Mets, read more The Jets, Girls who love film AND beer (at the same time), Jazz, Deadwood, The Wire, The Office, The Twilight Zone, Cormac McCarthy, Graham Greene, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scorsese, Spielberg, Halloween season, Marvel movies, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Ash vs Evil Dead, Game of Thrones, Edgar Allen Poe, Mother Nature

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