Dub Steps

Winner of the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award for 2015.

Dub Steps has a strange long aftertaste. It is science fiction with ordinary characters trying to understand what it is to be alive.

People have gone, suddenly, inexplicably, and the remaining handful have to find each other and start again. In that new beginning they wrestle with identity, race, sex, art, religion and time, in a remarkably realistic, step-by-step way. Nature comes back, Johannesburg becomes wonderfully overgrown, designer pigs watch from the periphery walls, and the small group of survivors have to find ways of living with their own flaws and the flaws of each other. The aftertaste comes from the surprisingly real meditations in the middle of the end: after all simulated reality has gone, what human reality is left?

There are no clichés in this book, but there is plenty of humour, originality and a gripping, unusual interrogation of the ordinary but really extraordinary fact of being alive.