(no subject)

[skygiants]

I've seen a lot of people saying August Clarke's Metal From Heaven is very good. Which it is! But somehow none of these recommendations managed to convey to me what the book was actually about, so up until about a week ago when genarti stole it out of my library pile before me I was somehow under the impression that it was a sort of surrealist space opera? Which it is emphatically not. It is not even science fiction.

Metal From Heaven is a fantasy novel, and fantasy in several ways: one, in that it takes place in a world that is not ours, which is right in the middle of a fantastical industrial revolution; and two, in that ninety-five percent of the characters, no matter where and in what situation they are encountered, turn out to be devastatingly hot lesbians. This is an incredibly, joyfully self-indulgent book. I'm not saying this as a complaint but a compliment. The rich worldbuilding and revolutionary politics and bloody background and constant high-key lesbian sexual tension are all wrapped up self-indulgently and inextricably together, and once you are in it you are in it.

The book begins with a massacre: workers in the ichorite factories are striking on behalf of their children, who are increasingly born with a mysterious sickness and sensitivity to the mysterious substance that is ichorite. Marney Honeycutt, our heroine, is one of these children, and the only person to survive the protest when the industrialist who runs the factories decides to silence it.

Marney, fleeing the city, falls in with a group of highwaywomen who turn out to belong to a collective of Hereafterists -- essentially, revolutionary socialists who've made a religion out of it -- who have murdered the baron of a remote area and have created a temporary socialist utopia by diligently maintaining the pretense that he's still alive but Very Eccentric. Life in the socialist utopia is joyous and beautiful and full of hot lesbians -- there are many people in the community who are not hot lesbians but Marney broadly speaking pays little attention to them -- but also dangerous; Marney and her hot lesbian friends and mentors all contribute to the general wealth of the collective via train robberies and general banditry, which is frequently fun but also frequently fatal. Moreover, everybody knows that at some point, questions will start being asked about the baron (dead) and his daughter and heir (also dead).

However, they have a plan! One of Marney's friends is being trained up as a fake heir. Marney also has a plan! When the fake heir is ready to be launched into society, Marney will go as her valet, and take her opportunity to revenge-murder the increasingly powerful ichorite industrialist, with the hopeful fringe benefit of destabilizing the establishment enough to give the Hereafterists a chance at establishing the utopia of the future. Things do not all entirely go to plan, but the end result is that the baron's heir gets politely invited to join the competition for the hand of the ichorite industrialist's daughter, and Marney and some co-conspirators end up at a house party populated entirely by another set of hot but more evil lesbians. (Despite the number of hot lesbians, this is not a world that one would call queernorm; most of the cultures in the book, of which there are many, have fairly conventional attitudes towards sexuality -- but it is a world where norms are in the process of evolving along with industrialization and also where a very wealthy man's daughter can utilize a legal loophole for gay marriage if she wants to throw a courtship competition for every aristocratic lesbian she knows.)

Challenges abound, including the fact that the whole house is full of ichorite, which Marney has a particular power over but which also makes her ill and gives her seizures! and that Marney and one of these hot aristocratic lesbians had a swordfight during a piracy situation just a few weeks before all of this went down! and that Marney herself is not a particularly good liar, and is also covered all over with tattoos that scream "I'm a socialist bandit!" and that the whole continent is a powder keg on the verge of devastating war, and the sizzling political and personal tensions between these hot lesbians could well kick it all off!

Clarke's world is dense and complex, and the book does a far better job than most sff at evoking real-world messiness and avoiding simplified generalizations: culture, religion, politics, class, and sexuality are all their own separate axes and all the characters fall in different places along all of them, not always in the ways one would expect (aside of course from all being hot lesbians.) It's also just beautiful, and beautifully described. One of my favorite small details is that early on we are introduced to a fruit called azurine, a clear statement if you're looking that this world isn't ours: no fruit that we have is pure blue. Occasionally characters will turn to Marney and spend two pages explaining their political or economic philosophy, which in another book I would find annoying but in this one really does just feel like part and parcel of the intense, chaotic, furious fever dream that is Marney's whole life, and the book.

Comments

[evewithanapple]

oh my god???????

[skygiants]

it is a book that has committed itself to itself with everything it's got

[brownbetty]

fever dream is exactly the right phrase.

I really enjoy how balls-out queer this book is. It's like, what if you're doing a revolution, but sometimes you are just Too Gay to function. Also you're having a hallucination seizure.

(You're on a train.)

[skygiants]

YOU'RE ON A TRAIN. to be honest I wish they had been on trains more but I'm glad of the trains we got!

[sovay]

One of my favorite small details is that early on we are introduced to a fruit called azurine, a clear statement if you're looking that this world isn't ours: no fruit that we have is pure blue.

Although it seems close enough to our world to have had the Etruscans and a different Italic city than Rome rising to imperial prominence, which got my attention from the list of dramatis personae because even if it was just done for the unusual quality of the language, basically nobody doing secondary worlds steals from Etruscan rather than any other substrate of our ancient world and it attracts me just as much as the fact that this entire book sounds like it could be soundtracked to a really punk version of "Bread and Roses," point me toward one if you know it.

(I was able to read the first couple of chapters before Google Books punted me and I get that people in this world also have intermingled Anglophone names, e.g. the protagonist, but seriously do not name your cities Cisra or Bellona or Veltuna—or your characters Ramtha or Uthste or Prumathe—if you do not want your prospective reader to go absolutely feral over the possibility of an Etruscan AU even if it's more like Turner's Little Peninsula.)

(Although in a book this queer, Bellona is probably a Delany homage as much as anything.)

[genarti]

The author's afterward mentions having studied classics and drawing on "the Etruscan names for Greek heroes," though namechecks Delany also, among many others; I don't know how deeply they were intending it to lean into potential Etruscan AUs, but it was a choice they knew they were making!

[sovay]

I don't know how deeply they were intending it to lean into potential Etruscan AUs, but it was a choice they knew they were making!

Hooray!

(Some of their choices of Etruscan names aren't even mythological-heroic, although two of the examples I cited were: Ramtha comes from one of the two sarcophagi that I used to visit every time I was at the MFA.)

[skygiants]

GOD I WISH I DID. We spent so much of the lead-up of our wedding looking to good danceable punk versions of things like Bread and Roses and Daloi Politzei and NO ONE is scoring the viddable danceable versions of these songs! what are we doing out here!!

(I do not know enough about the Etruscans to pick up that that's what the book was doing and I'm delighted to know it, that's so cool!)

[sovay]

We spent so much of the lead-up of our wedding looking to good danceable punk versions of things like Bread and Roses and Daloi Politzei and NO ONE is scoring the viddable danceable versions of these songs! what are we doing out here!!

IT'S NOT A REVOLUTION IF YOU CAN'T DANCE.

(I am sincerely surprised about "Daloy Politsey." That one is an actual banger.)

[rachelmanija]

I had no idea there were hot lesbians! Or any of that very entertaining sounding plot. I had been under the impression that it was a grim and gloomy book about grinding oppression, set mostly in depressing factories.

[skygiants]

Yeah I mean it's not that there's not grinding oppression and depressing factories but we are LEAVING the factories. we are all living DELICIOUSLY. if, frequently, not for very long --

[rachelmanija]

From your description it sounds a bit China Mieville esque but with more lesbians.

[skygiants]

VERY China Mieville-esque, specifically in his Bas Lag vein. You've got to picture the plot with a sort of Annihilation shimmer over everything that's happening in it.

[rachelmanija]

This sounds surprisingly up my alley.

[skygiants]

I would love to hear your thoughts on it if you end up reading it!

[raven]

Yes yes yes I loved this for all these reasons! I will be so annoyed if it isn't on the Hugo list. I think my only minor criticism is that I think it's too far on the edge of fever dream just at the point where we need to know who the various political players are - I kept on being like.... general? ....war criminal? ...industrialist? Or, hell, even a list of players in the front. But such a minor criticism, because such a good book.

[raven]

Oh I forgot my favourite thing! I love that Marney never really learns how to love or relate to people in an ordinary way, because her entire family were massacred when she was a child and she was traumatised forever by it! Like, I love how that commits to the realism of the situation; she never magically gets over it, she can never quite handle the world because of it.

[genarti]

Yes!! I loved that. I was telling Becca, there's a spoiler that I would be yelling at many characters COME ON, PUT TWO AND TWO TOGETHER but with Marney I fully believed that she was just not able to wrap her head around the possibility of thinking about it. Everything post-massacre is sort of a fever dream in multiple ways, for her. It's a hard trick to pull off novel-long, but it really worked for me.

(Also, I loved all the religious worldbuilding; that was another favorite thing, for me. Not the metaphysics per se, but the multiple faiths with multiple different takes on it, ways of being devout or not, ways of being observant or not, things in their metaphysics that overlapped with other faiths or didn't, etc.)

[skygiants]

YES -- I loved how you see her trauma in how she imprints on people without, actually, communicating with them ... everything about how she latches onto the Idea Of Sunny (breaks into her boyfriend's house! gives him a shovel talk! for no reason!) without actually keeping her promise to talk to Sunny and how that mirrors her obsession with the idea of a person that lives in her mind and has no connection to the reality of that person here and now. Everyone is a ghost in her head, even people that are still alive.

[skygiants]

god I would have LOVED a list of players in the front, especially when we get to the party -- I had to put a bookmark in the section where she's getting all of them introduced to her and keep flipping back to it because I could not even keep the book's Only Two Boys straight, let alone keep track of who was the priestess and who was the princess and who was the school mean girl.

[starlady]

Hmm, I guess I have this one confused with the one where the protagonist gets metal wings...in space...or something?? Thanks for this review, I definitely need to read this book.

[skygiants]

This does sound very plausibly from the title like one where a protagonist might get metal wings in space!

[chestnut_pod]

Extremely late here, but I feel like you might be thinking of Valerie Valdes' Where Peace is Lost?

[starlady]

Inspired by your comment, I actually went and tracked it down--I was thinking of The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills!

[chestnut_pod]

Delightful that there are multiple books which might fit this description.

[regshoe]

...Wow, this sounds fun :D Tragically my local library doesn't have it, but I'll put it on the list to try and find at some point.

[skygiants]

I hope they manage to get hold of it -- sometimes asking does work!

[passingbuzzards]

This sounds FASCINATING and I would certainly read it if the ebook were not a whopping TWENTY-THREE DOLLARS everywhere but Amazon and unavailable through my library. :,D

[skygiants]

My friend helpfully reminded me the other day when I was complaining about a book I couldn't get hold of that I can politely ask the library to buy things for me, a thing I always forget, and so I am passing that along in case it is helpful for you as well!

[bloodygranuaile]

This reminds me that I still have to read the third Scapegracers book even though I am over YA but once I do that I gotta check this out as well.

[skygiants]

What are the Scapegracers books like?

[bloodygranuaile]

They're pretty good! I think they get the feral energy of being a teenager whose town is too small for them down pretty well, and the stuff that goes wrong goes wrong enough enough that it doesn't feel too self-indulgent even reading it as a cranky old adult (my patience for self-indulgence in Teen Girl Gets Powers stories is much lower than it was when I was the target audience--I'm currently watching Sailor Moon for the first time, to see what all the fuss is about, and it's cute but it is not a show for thirty-seven-year-olds)

[marginaliana]

This sounds delightfully fever dream and I must find a copy. Pretense that a member of the aristocracy is "still alive but Very Eccentric" is one of my favorite tropes that is not seen often enough.

[skygiants]

A classic! Yes, for SURE we've still got our local aristocrat, he will NOT be attending your party he is TOO WEIRD for that and please ask NO more questions about it!

[qian]

I also thought this was a space opera! It must be something about the combination of the cover and title. It does sound a lot of fun, thanks for explaining what it is about!

[skygiants]

The cover does have a very purple color scheme that I associate with Space! I don't think I had ever looked at it closely enough to figure out what all that purple actually was...

[ehyde]

Omg this sounds like amazing fun? Onto the libby hold list it goes

[skygiants]

I hope you dig it if you read it! :D

[sophia_sol]

holy shit I need this book in my life, is what I'm hearing!!!!!

[skygiants]

I would LOVE to hear your thoughts about it if you get round to it!

[scintilla10]

Oh wow! Put me down as someone else who is going out immediately to find a copy.

[skygiants]

I hope you enjoy it if you read!

[chestnut_pod]

I had very mixed feelings about this book (felt that it was not quite in control of itself, and not in a Meaningful Thematic way), but I do appreciate the way that 99% of all the characters were devastatingly hot lesbians, and the Evil Blue Tangerines.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I think maybe that's sort of what I mean by self-indulgent -- it feels like much of the book is steering by id rather than by plot-map, and I think it'd be quite easy to get thrown out by the rapid turns that this entails, but I was so enjoying the scenery!

[shadaras]

I kept this post open until I actually finished the book, because I love your takes on books but wanted to read all of them at once without spoilers. xD

This is a novel that I assumed would be a mecha novel! It was not a mecha novel! Except for uh sort of the last 20 pages, where it absolutely had a specific kind of mecha novel vibe without exactly being a mecha novel. (When I saw Evangelion named as an inspiration in the afterword, I was like "ah, yes, I see".)

Truly a glorious iddy mess of a lesbian novel! I enjoyed it greatly but also feel like it might have benefited from titlecards like "THE RIOT" "THE CHOIR" "THE RUSE" "THE ASCENSION" at the major pivot points to help ease the reader into the various genre/vibe shifts. (I am seeing this in my head like the titlecards in Everything Everywhere All At Once.)

[sleepnoises]

I read the first six chapters, put it down for three weeks, including taking the library book on a road trip and not opening it, and just now finished it in the bath. I did *not* guess [identity I see from the other comments you guessed ably] and between that and the last two chapters it was a delightful rollercoaster ride to the end.

I think the characters had too many names per each for how fast and messily I read. Similarly the prose/syntax/pacing choices felt like they created an unstable surface underfoot–I woefully described the book as "prosey"* while in my phase of not picking it back up–but I came out thinking it well served the vibe and POV.

I was also really charmed by the inspirational works section in the acknowledgements. The one I'm calling most novel to see shouted out in print: D20's A Crown of Candy.

*prosey appears to have a dictionary definition and then a fool's definition, held by me and some redditors, approximately "Wow, That is a Lot of Words." I should perhaps have just called it poemy.