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.

This book is aggressively, in your face queer in a way that is hard to come by. Reading it was mildly hallucinatory, partly because the protagonist has a disability that causes her to hallucinate, and the prose echoes this, becoming disjointed when she is experiencing this. (The book is extremely written, and the prose required a little bit of alertness from me.)

This book is about a child whose world is detroyed by capitalism when her family and loved ones are gunned down at the factory they are striking at. She survives this to become a train robber, and when she grows up, the only way to give the people who took her in and gave her a new life a chance at survival is going undercover in a society of rich capital class lesbians, all of whom have been trained from birth to viciously claw their way to the top.

And everyone agrees she's not really the ideal person for the job, but that person's dead, and so maybe her ability to smooth talk her way into a lady's pants and/or skirt will help?

She does her best, but she is never going to make a good decision when faced with a hot girl, and things are so much bigger than her, and as a warning, if you're hoping for an ending where they enemy is defeated and the hero and her sweetheart ride off into the sunset, this is not... that. (The book's cover expresses that it is for "fans of Princess Bride and Gideon the Ninth." I do not think this accurately conveys much about the book except swords and lesbians!)

I enjoyed this book immensely, partly for its own sake, and partly for giving me something I have not found elsewhere.