A Country of Ghosts

A breath of fresh air. It was extremely healing to read some actual anarchist fiction--something that can make me feel good about myself and the world. If you wanted a inverted, optimistic Dishonored, look no further.

It's definitely a shorter read (by the metrics of my 2-hour-podcast-addled brain) and parts of the prose are surprisingly sparse. Something will happen, or you'll meet someone, and you'll think "Gosh, that was fast! I liked that bit! Why couldn't we have gone into more detail?" The map at the front is a perfect metaphor--the capital cities of Borolia and Vorronia, but the only other fleshed out place is Hron.

Ultimately it makes sense. This is a story written by Dimos, and Dimos is explicitly emphasizing certain parts of his story to explain what the hell Hron is to the people living back in Borolia. Writing any story at all is a massive undertaking anyway. This story leaves me wanting more, and I was sad to see it end, so I guess you can read all of this as one big backhanded compliment.

Margaret treats death in such a fascinating way--as a sad, unexpected, almost prosaic thing. People don't get long dramatic death scenes. But they are mourned by the author and the reader. I was absolutely tearing up by the end--and I'm so, so happy that it's not a story of doomed revolution. It's a story of a hard fought victory and an uncertain future.

There are some incredibly poignant quotes, memorable characters, and god-tier end-of-chapter cliffhangers. I literally laughed out loud several times when I got to the end of a chapter, thinking "Dammit, I've got to see THIS."

Anyway, I think this book is a really fantastic primer on what the hell a lot of anarchists believe in. It is not a blueprint or a prophecy for the future: it's the picture of a society's spirit, of a kind of place and a way of thinking. Every bit of worldbuilding we see is vivid and fascinating and, well, fantastical.

You can tell it was written in 2013, and in 2013 I think this book would have hit me like a truck. But it's 2023, and I'm already an anarchist. What I personally love about this book is not its exposition on how anarchist societies can work in practice. I love that it it's a fantasy novel, a hope-punk adventure, that I can feel good reading. For a lot of stories, I have this constant tension in the back of my mind as I'm frustrated with the author and the characters for missing the bigger picture, dammit. Having a piece of entertainment that actually reflects my values for once was really, really nice. I am so, so fucking tired of dystopian fiction about how sad it is to be rich and how awful the police are and the woe of our cynical world, guess we just gotta live with it. Give me this over Succession any day.

Also there was some unexpected poly rep that I found really nice.

Cette collection "Black Dawn" est décidément très prometteuse. Après [b:Grievers|58505022|Grievers (Black Dawn, #1)|Adrienne Maree Brown|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1633374629l/58505022.SX50.jpg|91886516] qui m'avait déjà beaucoup plu, je crois que le deuxième roman de cette collection m'a encore plus séduit.

Margaret Killjoy nous plonge dans un univers de fantasy inspirée de notre XVIIIe ou de notre XIXe siècle pour nous parler de notre monde. Le protagoniste est un journaliste embarqué au sein de l'armée impériale dans une guerre de conquête coloniale. Sa mission est de suivre le général en chef de cette armée et de livrer à l'opinion publique la propagande attendue par l'Empire.

Evidemment, rien ne va se passer comme prévu et nous allons suivre notre journaliste à la découverte de la population indigène. Loin des sauvages et des barbares décrits par la propagande - celle qu'il était chargé d'écrire - il découvre une société basée sur la liberté, l'autonomie, la solidarité, et l'aide mutuelle. Il découvre une utopie anarchiste, en tout cas telle que l'autrice l'imagine.

Ce roman est peut-être l'oeuvre de fantasy la plus politique que j'ai lue, la preuve qu'un univers fictif ne peut être qu'un moyen idéal pour parler de notre société. Ce récit est également l'un des meilleurs romans de fantasy que j'ai lus. Une oeuvre remarquable pour présenter l'idéal anarchiste et le rôle de la fiction pour imaginer des utopies. Les imaginer, pour ne pas seulement les rêver, mais commencer à les construire.

I was originally going to be harsher on this one, but the printing that I have has an afterward from the author that was basically like, "look, I wrote this a few years ago, and there are some things I would change if I were to do it again," and I appreciated that. They were mostly points that I agreed I would've liked to have seen changed.

Basically a war correspondent for a newspaper gets sent to the frontlines of a war in an alternate world with roughly mid-19th century technology. He gets separated from the army and gets captured by the anarchist rebels up in the mountains that his country has been fighting against, and starts to learn about their side. There's no magic or elves or anything like that, but I'd still classify this as fantasy because there is a ton of worldbuilding going on, even if it's largely mundane and comparable to our own history. Also this journalist is gay, which was a fun little surprise for me (and was actually plot-relevant at one point without involving homophobia, so kudos for that as well).

It made sense to make the protagonist a journalist because this is exactly the kind of character who would be naturally inquisitive and equipped to ask guiding questions in a conversation. And boy were there a lot of conversations. It felt like the protagonist had a one-on-one interview with almost every character that revealed another tidbit of this culture he found himself immersed in. My biggest gripe with the book was that sometimes the agenda of depicting an idealized anarchist society without a central government, currency, or military got in the way of the actual plot. At times it felt like characters were introduced specifically to bring up another example of how this culture would deal with a conceptual problem like the lack of a prison system or how to handle murder if there are no police.

Still, it was a fun take on an alternate-history military fiction with tons of worldbuilding (and I especially liked that language barriers often came up and were relevant between characters of different countries). And while I never usually mention this kind of thing in reviews, I think this was one of my favorite physical books I've ever read. The size, the feel and look of the cover, the font sizes and types, the page layout and chapter headers: it was just a very nice physical product. The publisher did a really nice job.