Paper short abstract:

The aim of this article is to map the way history, crime fiction and the future intersect in Triangulum by Masande Ntshanga (2019) and A Spy in Time by Imraan Coovadia (2018) and to provide hypotheses on what this reveals on the South African contemporary literary landscape.

Paper long abstract:

Masande Ntshanga’s second novel, Triangulum (2019), starts with a fictional foreword by a former science fiction writer, Naomi Buthelezi, explaining that she got hold of a set of documents which she is about to publish under the name Triangulum in 2043, and that these documents predict the end of the world in 2050. The set of documents comprises “a written record in the form of a memoir, followed by what appears to be a work of autofiction, as well as a set of digital recordings.” (3) The book is then separated into several sections that read like a bildungsroman and a spy novel exploring South Africa’s history, each section leaving on its wake a trail of signs which (mis)lead the reader to the book’s coda. Triangulum thus takes the form of a metafictional futuristic investigation, much like A Spy in Time by Imraan Coovadia (2018). Both novels therefore stand at the crossroad of literary innovation (speculative fiction remains marginal in South Africa despite Lauren Beuke’s popularization of the genre and it has only been recently appropriated by non-white authors) and crime fiction, a more popular genre in South Africa which is very much concerned with investigating the country’s troubled past under a (non)fictional lens. The aim of this article is therefore to map the way history, crime fiction and the future intersect in Triangulum and A Spy in Time and to provide hypotheses on what this reveals on the South African contemporary literary landscape.