(Alright, it's been long enough that I feel okay trashing this. I've seen it come and go from shelves and I just wanna get out the frustrations that have stuck with me long after reading this.)

I really really wanted to like Womb City, but it's just not good. I finished it mostly out of stubbornness, but the process was like trying to wade through concrete. I still think that there are a lot of good ideas in this book. It's set in a dystopian future where consciousness is transferable but expensive, and so the rich are able to escape death while the poor and the marginalized are coerced into surrendering their bodies to others. Women and those considered criminal have not just their actions but their emotions strictly monitored every minute of the day. All that's just the tip of the iceberg. Tsamaase stacks new concepts and details on this foundation in what should be a complex exploration of some very interesting themes. But  the novel's best ideas have been done a terrible disservice by the actual writing (and editing) with which they're expressed.

For starters, Womb City feels like an unedited draft. I was concerned that I might have bought an uncorrected proof or something, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It's just that the novel is riddled with errors that any decent editor should have caught on a first pass. Not just typos and grammatical mistakes (which are somewhat inevitable in early printings of a book and might eventually be weeded out in future print runs) but glaring continuity errors. I'm aware that parts of the novel were originally published as standalone short stories, and it feels as though these were stitched together without much regard for consistency. One of the examples that stood out to me as particularly egregious is also a good example of how easy these issues would be to correct. (I'll avoid plot details but still spoiler tag this lengthy discussion of it just in case).

The novel is meticulous about keeping track of time. A full page section break indicates the beginning of each new day, recording the date and day of the week. Every chapter title also includes a time down to the minute. So, about halfway through the novel, it is made very clear to the reader that the main character, Nelah, is not just waking up on a Saturday morning, but at exactly 10:44. In a chapter beginning two hours later (at 12:44) her husband tells her that he will "get breakfast ready" while Nelah washes and dresses. She enters the kitchen to find her husband and niece at the breakfast table. Nelah says good morning to her niece, and the TV is playing the morning news. Characters repeatedly refer to the "morning" or similar, and Nelah's husband promises to take their niece to school... at what is now after 13:00 on a Saturday.

To me, that seems like a telltale sign that this chapter was written as a short story or first draft which initially be set much earlier on a weekday morning. It doesn't match any of the published short stories which were apparently adapted into Womb City but there are other details in this chapter which don't crop up elsewhere in the novel. So I think it's likely that this was (at least initially) intended to be a separate piece. It was clearly not integrated very well into the rest of the novel, and the result is distracting and frustrating to read. The chapter would otherwise be tense and dramatic, as well as a perfect example of the novel's explorations of bodily autonomy and patriarchal violence but the only thing that stands out is the absurdity of characters saying good morning to one another, eating breakfast, and starting the schoolday at one PM on a Saturday.

As I've alluded to, one of the most frustrating things about these inconsistencies is how trivial they would be to correct. There are several ways the example above could be fixed without impacting the rest of the plot at all. (Spoiler tag again mostly because that makes it easier to skip my lengthy examples).

Here are three simple ways that this particular inconsistency could be fixed, in order of laziness:

Fix 1: Just have it happen earlier. By changing the chapter titles so that the events take place a little earlier, the characters could go through this morning routine in the morning. It would still be odd for a child to be going to school on a Saturday, but that could be hand-waved away as a quirk of Womb City's dystopian future Botswana. This might lead to some  slightly awkward timing elsewhere, but nothing that would be so obvious, especially since there is already some buffer time between this and other chapters that is not covered moment-by-moment.

Fix 2: Also have it happen on a different day. The events of the plot are not so tied to the calendar that this scene had to take place on a Saturday. Some events take place on particular days, but only because the fictional world has been constructed that way. A few tweaks to the dates would leave the plot unchanged but allow this to take place on a weekday morning. Slightly more effort, because it would mean changing dates throughout the text, but that's why a book (usually) goes through multiple drafts.

Fix 3: Rewrite the scene just a tiny bit. It's not at all important that Nelah's niece is specifically going to school, and while a family sitting around the breakfast table is a domestic cliché that fits the scene, the chapter would have lost nothing if Nelah's husband and niece had been eating lunch and going on some other outing (for the sake of the plot it really does not matter where). This would actually involve rewriting the chapter instead of just changing the chapter headings, but would have the very distinct advantage of making the chapter fit into the rest of the novel.

Tah dah. Easy. None of those solutions would require much effort, and some of them would considerably improve the experience of reading the novel. Not only are they undemanding corrections, they're practically a standard step in the editing process.

I couldn't guess why this book went to print with such easily-corrected issues. Did it just not get a second draft? Why would any editor or publisher sabotage an author like that? For that matter, why didn't Tsamaase spot such a glaring issue? The whole thing just feels careless. And the issues in that example are just minor continuity issues, not details that are integral to the plot. You heard that right; major setting and world-building details are just as garbled!

It doesn't help that Womb City is bloated with far too many different plots, sub-plots, side-plots, revelations, twists, and conspiracies. New exposition is being delivered right until the novel's final chapters, and for the most part it just weighs the plot down. The same thematic concepts are reintroduced in slightly different metaphorical guises over and over again rather than being developed or explored. Neither characters nor readers have time to make sense of one uncovered conspiracy or revelation about the world before another supersedes it. Earlier details of the plot or world-building are seemingly forgotten as later details contradict or simply fail to cohere with them.

While the minor issues were distracting and frustrating, these larger issues actively hamstring whatever good work Tsamaase is doing. I'll allow myself one more example, this time an actual major plot spoiler.

Literally from the outset of the novel, we are made aware of two things. First, a microchip has been implanted in Nelah's body which records all of her actions and experiences so that her husband can monitor her behaviour. He does this via a daily review of her memories, aided by a computer programme which monitors Nelah's "bio signals" for unusual emotional responses. Second, we learn that Nelah has been having an affair with another man, which she must keep hidden during these daily interrogations. That's a very interesting tension! So how does Nelah manage this?

We get some details later in the novel. At a hotel with her lover, Jan, he asks whether her microchip is recording them. (Why ask? We've been told it records everything, and this doesn't seem like an exception.) Nelah doesn't answer the question, but Jan produces a small remote and presses a button on it. He tells Nelah that this remote is a device that interferes with her microchip's recording abilities, overwriting some memories with invented scenarios. Via narration, Nelah informs the reader that she and Jan have been conducting their affair at a "gentlemen's club" which has similar technology built into its walls, but still  questions Jan about what technology is and what it can do as though she's unfamiliar with it. Moments later, when they are about to take drugs and have sex, Nelah is again concerned about the microchip recording them. Apparently, despite the magical little remote, her microchip has a "backup recorder" (not mentioned until this point) which her husband doesn't have access to, but which is accessed during a second kind of memory evaluation. And so the problem is kicked down the road. For now, Jan simply promises that he will use his wealth and influence to make the problem go away, and we are left with more questions than answers.

The biggest question of all: why are Jan and Nelah only discussing this now? This is an ongoing affair, so has the remote only just become available to them? The way Jan talks about it, that doesn't seem to be the case. If they've been using similar technology before now, why doesn't Nelah know how it works? The one thing she does seem to already know is that this remote won't affect her "backup recorder" so why is that not a problem that she and Jan have discusses in the past? Surely they would have needed to explain (at some point) why the backup and the default recording are different? Why is Jan asking whether her microchip is recording, when he (of all people) should know that it is always making two recordings, one of which can't be affected by the tampering technology that he hasn't turned on yet?

Reading scenes like this made my head spin trying to keep track of the many bizarre, contradictory elements of the setting. Elements which might end up being crucial to the plot, but were just as likely to be never relevant again. Even the most important allegorical or plot-relevant details were often never explored or expanded on and simply popped up again chapters later to accompany some new plot twist. If the moment-to-moment writing were better the book might be more enjoyable, but it isn't. The prose is boring at best. Every page is a slog.

I have spent a lot of the last year wondering how Womb City ended up as bad as it did. From my (admittedly limited) experience, Tsamaase's other work seems to be of a much higher standard.

It doesn't matter. I have exorcised my frustrations and I am putting the novel out of my mind. I wouldn't recommend reading it.