Triangulum

* 2020 Nomo Awards Shortlist for "Best Novel"* A Best Book of 2019 —LitReactor, EntropyTriangulum is an ambitious, often philosophical and genre-bending novel that covers a period of over 40 years in South Africa’s recent past and near future—starting from the collapse of the apartheid homeland system in the early 1990s, to the economic corrosion of the 2010s, and on to the looming, large-scale ecological disasters of the 2040s.In 2040, the South African National Space Agency receives a mysterious package containing a memoir and a set of digital recordings from an unnamed woman who claims the world will end in ten years. Assigned to the case, Dr. Naomi Buthelezi, a retired professor and science-fiction writer, is hired to investigate the veracity of the materials, and whether or not the woman's claim to have heard from a “force more powerful than humankind” is genuine.Thus begins TRIANGULUM, a found manuscript composed of the mysterious woman’s memoir and her recordings. Haunted by visions of a mysterious machine, the narrator is a seemingly adrift 17-year-old girl, whose sick father never recovered from the shock of losing his wife. She struggles to navigate school, sexual experimentation, and friendship across racial barriers in post-apartheid South Africa.When three girls go missing from their town, on her mother's birthday, the narrator is convinced that it has something to do with "the machine" and how her mother also went missing in the '90s. Along with her friends, Litha and Part, she discovers a puzzling book on UFOs at the library, the references and similarities in which lead the friends to believe that the text holds clues to the narrators’s mother's abduction. Drawing upon suggestions in the text, she and her friends set out on an epic journey that takes them from their small town to an underground lab, a criminal network, and finally, a mysterious, dense forest, in search of clues as to what happened to the narrator's mother.With extraordinary aplomb and breathtaking prose, Ntshanga has crafted an inventive and marvelous artistic accomplishment.

LitReactor, Entropy"The violent and fascinating history of South Africa

Triangulum has been optioned to become a TV series by SK Global Entertainment in a joint venture with BlueLight and Black Mic Mac. Acclaimed South African filmmaker Sibs Shongwe-La Mer is attached to direct the project.* 2020 Nomo Awards Shortlist for "Best Novel" * A Best Book of 2019

The African Speculative Fiction Society (ASFS) announced the shortlist for the 2020 Nommo Awards, for speculative fiction by Africans living anywhere.* A Best Book of 2019: Best Fiction Books

"That night, the machine returned."* 2020 Nommo Awards Shortlist for Best Novel

an operating system, I now saw, unsuited to the continent’s hardware

“the machine,” the narrator, much like Nongqawuse, Cassandra, and Joan of Arc before her, can be described as an imperfect vessel of a communication much bigger than herself. Can you locate other historical or modern women figures who could fit this description?4. TRIANGULUM positions South Africa as integral to the survival of the planet. This is different from most science fiction narratives, which tend to have the West or USA as the center. How did this difference influence your reading of the novel and your expectations of the genre?5. The narrator ponders the following: I thought about the Accelerated Christian Education program I’d attended as a child

and their implications

“necessitated” by dispossession?6. In her memoir, the narrator mentions that in 1981, when her parents met, Lennox Leslie Sebe, the first ruler of the Ciskei Homeland, was awarded the Order of Good Hope, the apartheid republic’s highest accolade. He was, of course, a black man. In what way does this highlight the inconsistency in apartheid’s logic and the perennial collusion of power across racial lines?7. In TRIANGULUM, The Tank, a radical hacker group, is seen as existing in opposition to The Returners, a radical environmentalist group. Whose philosophies did you find yourself gravitating toward and why?8. In detailing the narrator’s upbringing, TRIANGULUM deals with the melancholy of small-town girlhood, the hollowness of lower-middle-class childhood under unjust authorities, and the power imbalance between adults and children. How did you relate to this, and how would you say it informs who the narrator grows up to become?9. TRIANGULUM is a novel of patterns and allusions, the most dominant being the number three and the shape of the triangle. How many references to this shape and number

About the Author

Masanda Ntsganga is the winner of the inaugural PEN International New Voices Award in 2013, and a finalist for the Caine Prize in 2015. He was born in East London in 1986 and graduated with a degree in Film and Media and an Honours degree in English Studies from UCT, where he became a creative writing fellow, completing his Masters in Creative Writing under the Mellon Mays Foundation. He received a Fulbright Award, an NRF Freestanding Masters scholarship, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship and a Bundanon Trust Award. His work has appeared in The White Review, Chimurenga, VICE and n + 1. He has also written for Rolling Stone magazine.

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