{"id":59481,"date":"2025-04-11T10:00:48","date_gmt":"2025-04-11T15:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=59481"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:20","slug":"monstrous-dreaming-lauren-beukes-and-andrew-pepper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/monstrous-dreaming-lauren-beukes-and-andrew-pepper\/","title":{"rendered":"Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our partner podcast <\/em>Novel Dialogue<\/a> invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season\u2019s signature question is: If\u00a0you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it?<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

What work can genre do today? And can the genre system become more than a method of reductive containment and market segmentation\u2014can it be a generative source of imaginative chaos? Few are as qualified to address these questions as Lauren Beukes<\/a>, whose simultaneous embrace of genres from science fiction to crime to horror and refusal to abide within their borders\u2014what she calls her \u201cBig Fuck You Energy\u201d\u2014has rendered her, by her own account, \u201cbasically un-shelve-able.\u201d Beukes is joined by crime fiction scholar (and novelist) Andrew Pepper<\/a> of Queen\u2019s University Belfast for a conversation that dances across her oeuvre\u2019s many genres. They delve into how Beukes first encountered genre through the allegories that writers used to navigate the apartheid state of South Africa; how Beukes\u2019s experiences of femicidal violence and police apathy inspired her work in genre-bent crime (\u201cAt least in novels I get to have justice,\u201d she tells us); the inflection of dystopia from different global perspectives; and the role of speculative fiction in helping clarify political enemies in an age of obfuscation. Pepper and Beukes also think about genre in more practical terms, from the logistics of keeping track of plotlines when crafting time travel or multiverse novels to what it means to be a \u201chigh concept\u201d author in a market designed for distracted audiences.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n