{"id":20948,"date":"2023-07-26T10:10:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-26T08:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/?p=20948"},"modified":"2023-07-26T10:16:28","modified_gmt":"2023-07-26T08:16:28","slug":"triangulum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/2023\/07\/26\/triangulum\/","title":{"rendered":"Triangulum"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Triangulum <\/em>is South African writer Masande Ntshanga\u2019s second published novel and it represents an adventurous departure in genre from his first book, The Reactive <\/em>(2014), a realist novel dealing with the HIV\/ AIDS pandemic. What does not change in Ntshanga\u2019s move into speculative fiction<\/a> in Triangulum <\/em>is his lyrical prose and focalisation through an introspective protagonist who is something of an outsider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel is framed by a foreword that introduces the text to follow as a manuscript that has been delivered anonymously to the South African National Space Agency and then released to the public after three years of intensive review, a process meant to determine whether the seemingly fantastical material is a work of fiction, or fact.The year is 2043 and the primary aim of this manuscript is to serve as a warning to the world. It predicts that an asteroid will strike Earth in 2050, which will be an apocalyptic event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u2018manuscript’ that follows is what can be called a \u201cfuture history\u201d that projects the implications of the past and present to imagine, in this case, a dystopian future. In this way, Triangulum <\/em>offers a critical commentary on how colonial and apartheid regimes of segregation have ongoing effects in the postapartheid present of Ntshanga\u2019s writing. The story takes place across several time planes by alternating between two broad sections. One tells the story of the unnamed protagonist\u2019s teenage years (between 1999 and 2002) in which she and her friends search for her missing mother, and whom she imagines to have been abducted by aliens. The other tells the story of the protagonist\u2019s adult life (set between 2025 and 2035) in which she collaborates on a dystopian corporatised plan to segregate and confine poor people to slums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With this ambitious framing, Ntshanga tells a story that is able to show how a dystopian future can be easily imagined from a dystopian past. Here, what seems like \u2018the stuff of science fiction\u2019 \u2014 regimes of societal control through technologies of oppression \u2014 can be easily found in apartheid-era forms of control like the \u2018Homelands\u2019 policy, which provided the \u2018reasoning\u2019 for forced removals of Black South Africans from what was designated \u2018white territory\u2019, and which forms the backdrop of the protagonist\u2019s parent\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Triangulum <\/em>refuses to offer a simply hopeful story where the apocalypse is avoided and a dystopian future overcome. Rather, it presents its readers with the ethical question of what to do with the knowledge of these entangled histories, when, as the novel suggests, this might help us avoid the predicted apocalypse. \u201cNow what to do with the Future?\u201d, the last lines of the novel ask, \u201cthe choice is ours\u201d the Foreword proclaims.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With his second novel, Masande Ntshanga moves into speculative fiction. Triangulum offers a critical commentary on how colonial and apartheid regimes of segregation have ongoing effects in the postapartheid present of Ntshanga\u2019s writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":20944,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[103],"tags":[388,1842,1049,1156,455,1837,162,288,1836],"class_list":["post-20948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-apartheid","tag-apocalypse","tag-dystopia","tag-fiction","tag-future","tag-masande-ntshanga","tag-south-africa","tag-speculative-fiction","tag-triangulum"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20948"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20961,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20948\/revisions\/20961"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}