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Mar. 26th, 2025 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI'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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-27 04:41 am (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2025-03-27 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-27 07:04 pm (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2025-04-01 10:52 pm (UTC)(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!)
no subject
Date: 2025-04-02 01:42 am (UTC)IT'S NOT A REVOLUTION IF YOU CAN'T DANCE.
(I am sincerely surprised about "Daloy Politsey." That one is an actual banger.)