Masande Ntshanga’s 2019 Afrofuturist novel Triangulum has been optioned for TV to California-based film production company SK Global Entertainment, U.K.-based company BlueLight, and Paris-based Black Mic Mac.

SK Global develops and produces global content for international audiences. Its recent successes include the Golden Globe-nominated hit Crazy Rich Asians, International Emmy Award-winning series Delhi Crime, and Oscar-nominated feature Hell or High Water. The three production companies have partnered together in the past to work on Halo Daze by South African director Sibs Shongwe-La Mer.

Triangulum is a 2019 speculative fiction novel shortlisted for the 2020 Nommo Awards for “Best Novel” and named one of the Best Books of 2019 by LitReactor and Entropy. Vast in its scope, Triangulum covers a period of over 40 years in South Africa’s history from the 1990s to 2040s, including events such as apartheid, economic corrosion, and large-scale ecological disasters in the future.

The main plot of the book centers around a mysterious package received by the South African National Space Agency in 2040. The package contains “a memoir and a set of digital recordings from an unnamed woman who claims the world will end in ten years.” A retired professor and sci-fi writer Dr. Naomi Buthelezi is hired to investigate the woman’s claim. The novel then retells the woman’s story.

Read the synopsis below:

Haunted by visions of a mysterious machine, the narrator is a seemingly adrift 17-year-old girl, whose sick father never recovered from the shock of losing his wife. She struggles to navigate school, sexual experimentation, and friendship across racial barriers in post-apartheid South Africa.

When three girls go missing from their town, on her mother’s birthday, the narrator is convinced that it has something to do with “the machine” and how her mother also went missing in the ’90s. Along with her friends, Litha and Part, she discovers a puzzling book on UFOs at the library, the references and similarities in which lead the friends to believe that the text holds clues to the narrators’s mother’s abduction. Drawing upon suggestions in the text, she and her friends set out on an epic journey that takes them from their small town to an underground lab, a criminal network, and finally, a mysterious, dense forest, in search of clues as to what happened to the narrator’s mother.

Masande Ntshanga is an award-winning South African author with degrees in Film & Media and English Studies, and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. His debut novel The Reactive was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature and a finalist for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize. Ntshanga won the Betty Trask Award in 2018, the inaugural PEN International New Voices Award in 2013, and became a finalist for the Caine Prize in 2015.

Congrats to Ntshanga on Triangulum‘s TV option! We are so excited to see his Afrofuturist novel come to life on the screen. Stay tuned for more details.