Metal from Heaven

This is one of those 5/5 ratings where I don't think the book is perfect, but it gets it because it is so intensely targeted at my own interests and I'm so grateful to have read it. Some bullet points to entice you:

• anti-capitalism, anti-cop
• train heists
• found family vibes
• first person point of view with an internalized narration to a second person "you"
• fantasy religions that don't feel like direct analogies of real ones
• revenge plot and revolutionaries
• gaaaaaaay

The book is so unapologetically queer and kinky, it's great. The author credits Stone Butch Blues (among many other things) in the end notes, which feels entirely unsurprising. The gender-y and queer bits also both intersect with the in-world religions in realistic ways.

It's a book that desperately needs a map; there's a pile of countries, religions, and politics especially when it hits the Chauncey estate section. The book does a good job of keeping it all ~~straight~~ queerly differentiated but the world has so much texture--it's a ttrpg campaign setting crying out for illustration! It also feels like a living world; characters having a life both off-page and outside of the protagonist make it feel even more real.

The book opens with a labor dispute and police violence and sworn revenge, but from there it doesn't shy away from critiques of power and incrementalism and reformers. There's some wild rich people monologues where they unintentionally bare themselves as soulless vampires. There's a bandit charade of a hidden equitable country, pretending to be part of a baronial system.

Sunlight licked between bruisy limestone smokestacks and telegraphy spires, and the crumbling knuckled colonnades of an empire that's long gone.

I found the writing to be a delight: the narrator is at times unreliable, and the writing is full of dreamy metaphors. At times, somebody will bust out with a multi-page exposition about religion, or a set of introductions to a full dramatis personae worth of baronets. The final lap of the book has its own tonal shift that I won't get into for reasons. Somehow this all held together for me; maybe it's that none of these parts overstayed their welcome. I'm sure some folks will bounce off of this writing style, but I'm not folks, that's for sure.

Being a Hereafterist is a commitment to creating a brand-new world all the time. It is the method of making a new world, it does not stop, we are never there yet. We have never arrived at a restful Hereafter, we must keep making. We will become a liberated collective, a plague will roll over us, and a famine, and fifty thousand bullets, and we will need to make choices. We will need to change. We must resist the ossification of precedent. We march toward Hereafter, not tomorrow, we march past tomorrow, we know tomorrow will be hard.

In the end, this is a fuck yeah revenge story about disaster queers fighting capitalism with violence. It's less about answers or even hope, and more about conveying a sense of angry determinism working for a future none of them will see.

You could call this novel steampunk, or maybe even steampunk with a dash of dieselpunk, but in any case the emphasis would be on the punk. Rather than using industrialization or the existence of a wealthy nobility as background aesthetics, the book builds a complex world, and explores how such factors make it rather dystopian. At the same time, it doesn't use the grimness simply as a gritty background for the story. Rather, a lot of the story is about how people that are subjects to the horror of the dystopia manage to carve out spaces for each other on the edges of their society, often in ways that are clever, underhanded, and ultimately in opposition to the system they exist under. I'd argue that this approach characterizes the best works of cyberpunk, and other related -punks, and in this area, Metal from Heaven excels.

Another thing to note about this book is how queer it is, and how it approaches queer characters. Pretty much all major characters are some form of queer—which fits, since the book is about people living on the edge, or outside of society. The way the characters interpret their sexuality or gender is, however, colored by their cultural background, in the context of the book's universe. The book manages to echo the way queer people in real world history often would understand themselves—and, indeed, be understood, or even hated by others—in ways different than those in our current time. This aspect makes the book stand out in the areas of both worldbuilding, and treatment of queer themes.

The book is written in first person, and the writing style fits the main character, though it can take a bit to get used to. There's rather run-on sentences, and there's short, clipped sentences taking abrupt turns. It takes some writing skill to make such things work, but apparently, Clarke is up to the task.

Perhaps the one complaint about the book is that at time, it introduces a number of new characters on the reader, all at once. They are all introduced with their names, appearances, ethnicities, religious backgrounds, and other assorted details. These exposition dumps make sense in context, when a bunch of characters show up, and these details are often relevant (an indication of quality worldbuilding), but can leave the reader scrambling later on, trying to recall who is who.

Overall, though, this is a great novel. It scratches a particular itch for a story about queer outlaws and revolutionaries trying to do their best in a world that is broken and hostile to their existence, that is neither too grim, nor too saccharine, and instead is about hope, joy, and love amidst the ugliness.