If you’re a fan of African SFF, you won’t be a stranger to Tlotlo Tsamaase’s short fiction. Womb City is Tsamaase’s debut novel, a work of Afrosurrealist/Afrofuturist horror, set in a future Botswana where women are controlled by the state through microchips and … sorcery, and where you can extend your lifespan through body-hopping (that’s as wonderful as it sounds).

Readers experience this future through the life of Nelah, an architect who is married to an assistant commissioner of police. The couple’s been struggling with fertility issues; Nelah desperately wants a child, and they’ve run through most of their options. This, along with various other stresses in her life, sees Nelah eventually give in to a man who’s interested in her, and embarking on an affair. One night, high on all kinds of substances, Nelah and her lover commit a horrific crime that brings everything crashing down.

What makes this novel unforgettable are its horror elements. I didn’t think I would survive, but Tsamaase’s gift is to make you unable to look away, even from body horror (and there’s a TON in this novel. (Also, the undead.)). It is the point of all SF to make you listen, and Womb City explores feminist themes: women as walking wombs in patriarchal societies, women who “want it all”, and there’s even a really horrendous female patriarchal gatekeeper! Maybe my favourite character. Other themes: Black tax, families, and memory. Also really fun to know some of the places in the book. Also: that cover!!!

A really cracking way to start 2024 in African fiction. Thank you to Erewhon Books.

Unfortunately, another miss for me. 😭 Womb City had a lot of potential but it just didn’t deliver.

The sci-fi and speculative elements were super interesting — the ability to transpose consciousness into new bodies. I enjoyed the inclusion of Botswana folklore and the feminist slant.

Overall, the book read like it was still in a drafting stage. The world building and explanation of tech and the societal history tended to ramble. I frequently found myself unclear how things came about or worked.

While I love a book that centers around the struggles of a suppressed group, Womb City did too much telling as opposed to showing. It felt like too many points were shoved in our face and then clunkily force fed to us repeatedly.

Forewarning, this is a very adult book. The blood and gore are reminiscent of the Terminator or John wick and there is an underlying Bonnie and Clyde feel as well. The trigger warnings are numerous — there are too many to list — definitely best suited for adult readers.

Publication date: January 23, 2024 (DROPS IN TWO DAYS!)
Pages: 416

Thank you to @netgalley @kensingtonbooks and @erewhonbooks for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

I really wanted to like this book cause the premise was right up my alley. A sci-fi set in futuristic cyberpunk Botswana where consciousness can be transferred from one body to another, where death takes on a different meaning, and crime is nearly non-existent thanks to a predeterministic surveillance system.

Nelah, our protagonist, is a famed architect in a body that has had a criminal past and hence is microchipped. Despite her success and wealth, she's trapped in a loveless marriage where her husband can read her microchip to monitor her and she has to give regular AI assessments for possible future infringements. Being infertile, she longs for a child via expensive technology. She is wary of her family as she doesn't know the history of her body's previous host. Everything comes to a head when Nelah, drunk and drugged out with her lover crashes into someone at night and proceeds to kill and bury them to hide the crime. Which becomes a bigger nightmare when the ghost of said person starts haunting her and threatening to kill the ones she loves. But there are more secrets hidden by the people in power and the society that could change everything.

I wanted to like the protagonist. Sure, there are a lot of societal pressures and she's treated unfairly but she did still commit murder and chose to hide it instead of turning herself in and was also involved in adultery and dui. You can say that the events in the last third of the book explain why the hit-and-run occurred but it feels more like the author trying to absolve her of her sins. Nelah is a morally grey character but her lack of sufficient contrition for her mistakes and blaming others makes it hard to redeem her in my eyes. Her monologues about feminism and women's rights lose significance after some of her actions. Not to mention if you know you are being surveilled (and even if you aren't) and you have so much at risk, like your future child, why does she do risky things? Also, her repeated comments that her parents don't love her despite them taking in a stranger who reminds them of their dead daughter, loving her, educating her and providing for her wasn't enough. These kinds of family dynamics could've been explored deeper.

Womb City had some really timely and important themes of feminism, misogyny, ableism, immigration, racism, childcare and more but it felt like the topics were mashed together and lacked proper flow and ingenuity. We had a righteous protagonist but many times her actions and thoughts wouldn't align. Moremi on the other hand was a character that I liked a lot more. Throughout the book, she was someone who kept my interest and it's her actions that eventually drove the story forward and in many ways brought about the conclusion and societal justice. Jan, the lover, fluctuates as a character. It's hard to find him romantic when he pledges empty platitudes one moment but then emotionally manipulates her. Also, the author makes it seem like cheating is okay if the marriage is failing. Nelah did have the power and means to get out of the marriage and not have babies with him. These decisions felt contradictory to the book's message.

I liked the idea that the proclaimed crime-free utopia would still have provided outs for the wealthy and lead to rampant corruption and debt. And that the wealthy can access criminal records and switch into bodies of their choice while swindling others out of their own. I wish some of the consequences and scopes of this technology were explored better. There also seem to be some minor plotholes in the writing. The purple prose, despite having some passionate moments got tiring with the repetitions and random expositions, which were sometimes way too on the nose. It felt exhausting and buried the plot. The main concept of body-hopping and lifespans could've been explained more succinctly instead of scattering it over several chapters as and when needed. The overuse of hyphenated words was also something that personally irked me eg. barbie-cute, soul-mix, bone-fused, pain-screaming. Writing "I thumb-press the garage remote" instead of just 'pressed'.

Overall really interesting sci-fi dystopian concept coming from a Botswanian author that contains some crucial world issues but could've been presented in a better way

OMG. This book.
This book is beautiful and transgressive, infuriating and empowering. The prose is unique and welcoming, allowing the reader into a seemingly perfect world with small tensions and slowly blurs into a fever dream of just about every trigger (witnessed or mentioned), and then it truly gets weird. I absolutely loved this book!

What if A Handmaid’s Tale was written by Phillip K. Dick and adapted into a screenplay by Jordan Peele? That’s Womb City.

Set in a future Botswana where women are universally treated as criminals - even those who have achieved fame and fortune - whilst men enjoy a blameless society. Women are microchipped and live under constant surveillance, whilst men are have free rein, literally getting away with murder.

Meet Nelah, an award winning architect from a rich Botswanan family, enduring a loveless marriage with a high-ranking (and high rising) policeman husband. Their daughter is gestating in a high-tech facility as Nelah is unable to carry a child herself.

To escape her failing marriage, Nelah also has a lover. One evening whilst out on a drive with her lover, they accidentally hit a young woman. Terrified of the consequences in their dystopian/misogynistic society, they attempt to cover it up. Very soon she is haunted by the victim’s ghost who vows to hunt down Nelah’s loved ones in revenge, setting in motion a fight for survival to save those dear to her.

A highly enjoyable read with some great moments from sci-fi to horror to supernatural. The middle of the book did slip and so was a bit of struggle, but it soon picked up the pace again around 65% through.

Overall book is beautifully written with detailed and poetic descriptions of the world they inhabit. It has plenty of plot twists, and the pace certainly towards the end of the book makes it difficult to put down!

Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Books/Erewhon Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The story in Womb City follows Nelah, a woman living in a futuristic surveillance state. As the story gains momentum, it accelerates at an almost breakneck speed with a large info dump of characters explaining things. The transition from a slower beginning to a rapid, intense middle of the book to climax could be disorienting for readers, and hinder their ability to fully immerse themselves in the intricacies of the plot. (Me!)

Despite the pacing concerns, Tsamaase crafts a dystopian world where bodies are government-issued commodities, exploring themes of power, monstrosity, and bodily autonomy. The commentary on how patriarchy manipulates women into unwittingly collaborating in their oppression adds a certainly timely theme.

Womb City tries to offer a fresh perspective on dystopian fiction, tackling relevant social issues with cultural sensibility. I only wish the author would have trimmed the story down a bit and not had quite so many things going on, and the pacing/story were a bit smoother. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

WOMB CITY was alive with intrigue, creativity, and, as the description notes, "dark and deadly folklore." I LOVED this setting and uniqueness of this story. No author is doing was Tlotlo Tsamaase is doing right now in the realm of dystopian science fiction. I'd even go so far as to identify this book as having one foot in the horror genre, because that's how it felt reading it .... horrifying.

I was so excited to check this one out because the premise sounded so interesting and cool! I love dystopian novels. To me I found it a little hard to understand via the language and it felt like a lot of informational dumping- this doesn't mean other folks won't have an easier time reading it. I still think the story was interesting and the world building was very unique. I would still recommend this!

I dove into this book with high hopes – it's set in Botswana, and I'm all about feminist sci-fi, especially Afrofuturism. The premise? Intriguing! The beginning? Captivating! Unfortunately, this book missed the mark for me.

For starters, the comparison "The Handmaid’s Tale with Get Out" is completely false. It's a feminist Altered Carbon, and I think they avoided using that as a comp title to try and draw some distance.

I loved the beginning of the book. Following a young woman, my age, who is currently inhabiting a body that is microchipped: because of a crime committed by the body's last inhabitant, everything this body says or does is tracked by the government. Every year, she needs to go in for a review to see if she's pure enough for the chip to be removed, or if she's a criminal who needs to be evicted from the body. And since there aren't enough bodies to go around, the line between criminal and innocent is razor-thin. So far, I'm loving this. On top of this, the author has these incredible metaphors. Seriously, I've rarely seen such artistry in descriptive passages, I loved it. Just beautiful. Evocative. Raw.

But then... everything is just... conversational info dump. Characters are stuck in a loop of "Did you hear about the system?" Yes, we did, and we heard about it five pages ago too! Pages and pages of rehashing what we already know, to the point where I just wanted to scream GET ON WITH IT! Worse, details change in each retelling, making things incredibly confusing. And most of the system DOES NOT MAKE SENSE. At the very end of the novel, all the strange worldbuilding ends up having a... supernatural explanation, but for me, it didn't make up for the inconsistencies. It just made everything even more confusing.

When the narrative shifts to cover-up a crime, I hoped for a change in pace, but alas, the pattern continued. I appreciate the ambition and the unique setting, but the execution just didn't click with me. It felt like a rollercoaster that forgot to build the ups and downs.

So, while Womb City and I didn't quite gel, the initial allure and the author's skill with words were undeniable. Here's to hoping others find the magic in it that I couldn't quite grasp!

10/10. 5/5

Another unique dystopia scifi read with vibrant Afrofuturism vibes! If you found yourself watching Black Panther and were a fan of the general aesthetic of Wakanda but want to see that from a different angle in a darker story/world, this is the setting for you. But Womb City takes things a step further with it's high-concept of autonomy, child birth and rearing among a slew of others makes this story shine bright against the onslaught of dystopia scifi these days. The prose is lovely and i will purchase anything Tsamaase writes.

I loved this book from page one. The world and especially the society was so well done. The need to have your own body as your own as a woman and being able to make your own decisions about it was so well put together! Loved the literary fiction way of writing this. The horror stuff put me of a little as it was very sprung upon you and I just didn't click with it, but it gave the story another place to explore. Amazing debut!

I was originally so excited and intrigued with this but around 10% mark i found myself wanting to read less and less of this. I DNF’d this because of several reasons.

1. A lot of verbiage and terminology used were words that I’ve never heard of nor understood the context. A lot of words being terminology that was created for this world, so unfortunately i couldn’t look up the meaning.

2. A lot of info dumping especially when it came to soul swapping. Idk if i needed to store that info or not but it was going over my head and i felt like the author was telling more than describing.

3. This had a lot going on. lol

Great premise but with all these things going on i just can’t hold it together to read it.

Tlotlo Tsamaase's 'Womb City' is a striking journey into a dark and deadly future Botswana, weaving folklore with haunting speculative fiction elements. The narrative centres around Nelah, a figure of wealth and fame yet ensnared in a loveless, oppressive marriage. Her life spirals into a realm of horror and mystery after a hit-and-run incident, igniting a series of unsettling events.

The novel's concept is exceptional, marrying science fiction and horror with incisive social critique. However, I didn't click with Nelah, the central character. And while brimming with inventive sci-fi ideas, the book's worldbuilding sometimes creates a narrative with so many elements that I found it challenging. I would have preferred a more streamlined storyline, but that's easier said than done. Determining which elements to cut would be tricky.

Readers should be prepared for intense content - integral yet potentially challenging aspects of the story. 'Womb City' stands out for its thematic depth. Tsamaase's debut is bold and offers a unique and thought-provoking journey for those ready to delve into its complex narrative.

ARC copy provided by NetGalley.

I DNF'd at around 15%. I can't tell if I got a bad copy, but the formatting was nigh unreadable and skipped whole pages in places on my Kindle. Pages were out of order, or half-blank.

The novel itself felt jumpy, like it couldn't settle into its own shoes. A lot of slick worldbuilding and aesthetics, but not a lot of narrative drive, and the pacing felt like everyone's first time driving stick: jerking around. The concepts presented are fascinating, and I may try again once the book is published to see if editing shined it up a bit more than what was presented in the galley copy. It clearly has a lot of potential, and some of this may be a case of me not meshing with the author's style, which is fine, but overall I was disappointed with the quality of this book, especially with such a fascinating world.

This book had such an interesting premise and I was really excited to receive this ARC. It started off strong but unfortunately started to go down hill and I just got a bit overwhelmed with it all.

This starting off strong, but was difficult to get through as complications began piling up and my interest in sorting through them began the opposite of piling up. Worthwhile read in one big gulp, perhaps?

I first noticed Womb City, the debut novel from Motswana author Tlotlo Tsamaase, on Amazon's Best Science Fiction books of January. I liked the cover art, and very briefly skimmed over some of the summary. "Surveillance state", "desperate crime", "political conspiracy" -- these are all concepts that find their way into plenty of books that I enjoy. It all added up to a compelling enough concoction that I figured I'd give it a try.

I like to go into most books with very little preconceived notion of the plot or what direction it might head. In this case, I think I would have benefitted from a closer read of the book description. I went in thinking that this might be a fresh take on Minority Report, and that's exactly how the book started out. Our main character, Nelah, begins each day with her husband scanning the microchip embedded at the base of her neck. That allows him to see everything she saw for the past 24 hours, ostensibly to "scan (her) memory files for undetected infractions". Like in Minority Report, a system has been put into place that has effectively eradicated crime. Forensic assessments catch the majority of criminal intent before it occurs, and the secret "Murder Trials" act as a backup where the assessments sometimes fail. The microchip is a final failsafe.

It was a promising start to the novel. But before long, things started to come unraveled. Nelah begins a lengthy affair supplemented with illegal drug use, something that seemed preposterous to me knowing that her husband will be reviewing her every move for the previous 24 hours and they live in a society that ostensibly alerts authorities to "pre-crimes" (to borrow the Minority Report term). It's explained away by a magic device that her lover introduces that blocks the recording of the situation. Okay, fine. Except that then raised questions for me that lacked the same tidy explanation. Nelah has never seen the device before...yet she slept with this person a year prior. So, was that initial bout of infidelity recorded? How did her husband not discover the infidelity during the daily scan? And if he had discovered it, why doesn't he recognize this person when he crops up again? While the device blocks the actual illegal drug use, isn't the whole system supposed to identify intent before it happens? Or guilt after if it somehow goes undetected? This sort of scenario perpetuates throughout the book -- either there's a gaping hole in the plot, or the attempt to close a hole is done partially and, in several instances, lazily. I'll give you an example: at one point, near the end of the novel, the following exchange takes place, after (again) an unexplained moment that makes so little sense it even baffles the characters:

"How do you know all of this?" I ask.

"When I rose from my dead body, this 'knowing sense' and voices filled my mind," she says, eyes glazed, lost in the memory.

A "'knowing sense' and voices filled my mind"? That's a convenient explanation. We can do better than that, can't we?

You may be reading the quoted passage above and have picked up on the "rising from a dead body" portion. For whatever reason, I missed the mention of "ghost" in the book description, and that's a huge part of this novel. It plays no role in any part of the first 30% or so of the book. Then, suddenly, it is all-encompassing. Finding a way to stop the ghost from killing all of Nelah's loved ones becomes her sole focus for much of the rest of the novel. It's a head-scratching turn, and it creates a slew of plot holes and unexplained scenarios. It also shifts the genre from something that was entirely sci-fi to something that is almost entirely horror (and, it should be noted, violent and grisly horror), seemingly out of nowhere. It was a head-scratching choice.

In addition to the plot holes, I think my biggest challenge with Womb City was that it felt like Tsamaase had a hard time choosing to leave anything out. I see this occasionally with debut novels; Firekeeper's Daughter comes to mind. It was a debut novel that I loved, but in my review I wrote that "at nearly 500 pages I think there may have been an unconscious desire to get everything into this first book." Something similar happens here, but where Angeline Boulley managed to keep Firekeeper's Daughter focused and moving in a consistent direction, Tsamaase's inability to self-edit the concepts she includes ultimately torpedos the successfulness of the novel.

To help explain the disjointedness, consider that within the 416 pages of Womb City we find the following: a sci-fi plot line lifted straight from Minority Report, a romance/affair, a murder, a grisly ghost-driven horror story plot line, a political conspiracy, an ultra-powerful god-like entity, plus plenty of commentary on women's rights, misogyny, the source of a person's identity, immortality/reincarnation, and more. Human trafficking even makes a brief appearance! As stand-alone concepts, Tsamaase treats many of the above pretty well. But when thrust together, it becomes a mess, to the point that I was laughing out loud at the direction things took in the final pages of the book. There were stand-alone moments that were well done, be it insightful commentary on weighty topics or some well-rendered action sequences. But when all of it was combined, the whole was certainly not greater than the sum of its parts, and the inclusion of so many disparate components along with their inartful combination are the choices that cause this novel to suffer the most. I see Tsamaase's potential as a writer, but Womb City did not come together well.

Tlotlo Tsamaase's Womb City seems to be on everybody's 2024 must read list but I think that is because of the author and the premise because the execution leaves alot to be desired.

For a start there is just too much going on here: body hopping (with some arcane and inconsistent rules which do not make any sense), surveillance through microchips, assessment of future criminal activity, external wombs and more. This is before Tsamaase gets to the gender politics of her future Botswana and deploys some horror tropes.
None of these elements work together and all require pages and pages of dizzying and often confusing exposition.

The amount of explanation and the need to foreground the technology sidelines the things that would make this book work - an engaging plot and interesting, believable characters.

I wanted to read Womb City and ran to request it on Netgalley as soon as I read the summary, it sounded like such an interesting book! A dystopian surveillance state in a future cyberpunk Botswana dealing with themes such as bodily autonomy, motherhood and folklore? Sign me up!

That’s what I said before I realised what I was getting into. The themes explored by the book were too many, or weren’t handled with enough care. I saw what the author was trying to do, of course oppression comes in every shade and form and a Black nonbinary person in a female body, as it’s called in the novel, will feel it effects in reverberations that last all throughout their life more so than any other person in the world — but even though everything is connected it did not feel cohesive, it just felt like things were thrown together to see what stuck.
The book wanted to underline the fate of all women in a patriarcal society but it felt too personal because the author kept adding things that could go wrong for the protagonist. If you add to that the complicated feelings of motherhood in a universe where bodies are hatched to perpetuate eternal life… well. As the sages say, it got lost in the sauce.

The pacing all throughout the book was weird, mostly because instead of a book with a plot it reads like a convoluted worldbuilding draft — the whole novel is intersped with lengthy paragraphs of information the narrator is relating, an encyclopedia of knowledge that keeps being reiterated for four hundred and so pages. Sometimes the information was different from one chapter to the next (harmless things mostly, like the years the protagonist’s parents spent together, or the name of the unborn child, but still, these are things that should have jumped to the eye of an editor); some other times the information was too coincidental and convenient to be believable, which made the book feel like a soap opera by the end.

The writing style is heavy with purple prose, which is not my favourite thing to read, but among all the other things I’m bashing it should probably be commended. The first few paragraphs of the book set the tone of the book extremely well — the narrator uses an asettic and violent language to talk about common things, like the “probing, UV-forensic sunrays" that wake the protagonist up, or a ray of light that “knives its way" across the husband’s face. The language helps in making us understand how Nelah, our protagonist, feels a bone deep desperation when it comes to the lack of agency she has over her body, and the constant assessment over her purity through the microchip implanted in her neck.
But just a couple sentences later you start to notice the heavy handedness of the exposition, taking away the pleasure of finding out things for yourself.

I don’t want to go too deep into the connection with Botwana’s folklore because I’m not super knowledgeable about it, but I will say that the way it ties to the ending of the book feels extremly rushed.

I’d be curious to read some of the author’s short fiction, for which xe’s won prizes before, because maybe less space to develop xir ideas leads to more evocative stories? Who knows, I’ll try to find out! I wish Tlotlo a long career that will provide xem with the chances to improve xir writing in a way that gives justice to xir incredible ideas!

This book had a lot of potential but I ultimately felt like there were too many *things* going on. Should I be concerned about the blatant misogyny from the police state? Should I focus on the babies being made in creepy labs? Or should I be most concerned about inhabiting ghost bodies? Too many things for me to think about and I can't pinpoint which sci-fi thing should be the main concern of the plot line!