The Fantasy of Revolution: Review of Metal from Heaven by august clarke
Fantasy problems require fantasy solutions. Fantasy capitalism requires fantasy revolutions.
Published: October 2024, Kensington (Erewhon Books)
Genre: Fantasy / Action & Adventure
Summary: Ichorite is progress. More durable and malleable than steel, ichorite is the lifeblood of a dawning industrial revolution. Yann I. Chauncey owns the sole means of manufacturing this valuable metal, but his workers, who risk their health and safety daily, are on strike.
They demand Chauncey research the hallucinatory illness befalling them, a condition they call “being lustertouched.” Marney Honeycutt, a lustertouched child worker, stands proud at the picket line with her best friend and family. That’s when Chauncey sends in the guns. Only Marney survives the massacre. She vows bloody vengeance.
A decade later, Marney is the nation’s most notorious highwayman, and Chauncey’s daughter seeks an opportune marriage. Marney’s rage and the ghosts of her past will drive her to masquerade as an aristocrat, outmaneuver powerful suitors, and win the heart of his daughter, so Marney can finally corner Chauncey and satisfy her need for revenge. But war ferments in the north, and deeper grudges are surfacing…
There are smart books; there are fun books. It takes tremendous talent and work to achieve one or the other; Metal from Heaven is both.
On one hand, august clarke’s adult debut is a dazzling and sexy lesbian revenge fantasy, a searing criticism and dissection of an industrial-military complex perpetuated by neoliberal “progressives,” and as tumultuous and exhilarating as a motorcycle joyride.
On the other hand, ichorite strap?
While it takes a slow burn to get to the crux of the plot, not for a single moment was I not wildly entertained, delightfully surprised, or mind-blowingly in awe.
Part of this is the heart-striking prose, part rallying cry, part gut spill. The wild yet seamless tonal swings provide a thrilling sense of whiplash, where political monologues and hallucinatory sequences are often punctuated with salacious quips.
Part of this is clarke’s ambitious world building, with multiple religious, national, ideological factions scattered yet entangled across a vast continent. It’s a triumph and a rarity for a standalone novel to encapsulate such an epic scope; Metal from Heaven achieves this primarily by reenacting large-scale power dynamics in the controlled microcosm that is Gossamer Dignity Chauncey’s estate, where she has invited an incestuously intertwined polycule of politically powerful and personally messy lesbians (and Mir) to vie for her hand.
In their Doyalist status as archetypal characters and their Watsonian status as power-wielding aristocrats, each of Goss’s bachelorette candidate embodies both a personal identity as an individual, with their own petty feuds and quirks, and a political identity, representative of a larger paradigm and/or people. (This is explicitly depicted by characters who subscribe (or pretend to subscribe) to the Stellarine faith, each aspiring to a Virtue that they’ve made part of their name: Industry for Yann, Dignity for Goss, Perfection for Perdita, and—both fittingly and ironically—Truth for Marney.) As Goss’s suitors clash over dances, dinner parties, and hunting trips, their personal and political identities mix and mash to elevate the stakes of the game. Some examples:
Countess Alichsantre holds a deep vendetta against Goss’s ex-lover and current business partner Vikare because Vikare took out Alichsantre’s eye, which also fuels the hatred that Alichsantre as a noble feels toward the merchant class.
Warmonger Princess Perdita Perfection and the pirate Mir carry out a terrible affair (with deeply questionable ageplay), but their alliance also shows how war and plunder (the ideals they embody) go hand in hand.
Goss does not claim her Drustlands heritage as a survival tactic and as a coping mechanism for her abandonment issues, but her refusal to align with her homeland culturally parallels her willingness to sell weapons to further Royston’s conquest of the Drustlands.
For all the ideological and personal reasons these wannabe tyrants are at each other’s throats, it’s clear that all of them—except for the Drustlands delegates, whose homeland is being invaded on flimsy pretenses in order to further Royston’s empire-making plans (gee, doesn’t that sound familiar)—are all too happy to profit from ichorite and the wars it’ll fuel. And none of them would ever risk their stations to help those suffering the brutal price of their so-called progress.
The rich will always protect the rich. Even as merchant heiress Gossamer—a liberal with a populist flair, especially in comparison to her father and her aristocratic suitors—pushes for social mobility, for better working conditions in the factories, and for non-baron representation in the Senate, all this veneer of social progressiveness is merely a superficial balm for the planet-destroying, people-crushing, war-making industry she’s determined to perpetuate.
Yann Industry will send enforcers to gun down a worker’s strike; Gossamer Dignity will shower them in little ichorite-laced luxuries, allowing them this facsimile of wealth, to coerce their consent.
Then there’s our protagonist, Marney Honeycutt, who stands as Gossamer Dignity’s exact opposite. While Dignity implies a mask of formality and composure, Marney chooses Truth, out of all possible Virtues, for her own pretense. A straight shooter despite the masks she wears (as bandit or pretend baron), Marney makes quick judgements about new people she meets and always asks the first question that comes to mind. If I may use D&D terms, she’s a Rogue at first glance but a Paladin at heart, who makes her cause and her family (both lost and found) her idols of worship.
Borderline masochistic with how little regard she has for her own future and body, Marney defines herself by the two motivations for her suicide mission: her political goal, to serve the socialist-anarchist cause of her bandit band; and her personal goal, to keep the vow of vengeance she made to her deceased loved ones. This willingness to serve others also manifests in Marney’s romantic/sexual relationships, where she always strives to pleasure her lovers and take their orders, but is uncomfortable with being touched in return.
Though Marney’s inclination toward devotion sometimes makes her willfully dismissive of her loved ones’ faults (or pick questionable bedfellows), it is still wickedly sexy to see a butch main character who sheds all repression and doubt about her sexual desires or her political ideology (not to mention her huge cock). It’s only natural that the narrative would force her two greatest loyalties—her heart and her ideals—to contradict each other in a way even she can’t reconcile.
Spoiler warning for the ending of Metal from Heaven.
Seriously.
I warned you.
august clarke wrote a list of sources that influenced Metal from Heaven in their acknowledgements, including but not limited to works by Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, and James Baldwin; Stone Butch Blues, Disco Elysium, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Princess Bride; and curiously, Dimension 20’s A Crown of Candy.
A big fan of Dimension 20 myself, I also thought about my favourite millennial D&D players while reading this book, though my point of comparison was The Unsleeping City: Part II, the season that—akin to Metal from Heaven—criticizes capitalism through a fantasy lens, depicting a magical substance (the Umbral Arcana) and the multinational corporation (a stand-in for Amazon) that exploits it.
Similarly, one of my all-time favourite books, Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence by R.F. Kuang, also depicts an empire (1830s Britain) powered by magical metal (silver bars imbued with translation magic) to further its colonial conquests.
All three works masterfully translates the stakes of our real world problems into truly excellent and thought-provoking stories. We adore speculative fiction for its capacity to depict imaginative settings and characters, but also for its ability to reflect something true about our world and ourselves. However, the common pitfall of these allegorical fantasies is that, in service of a climatic and cinematic ending that befits the genre, the personal and political themes of the work are sometimes overshadowed by flashy magical elements.
Fantasy problems often require fantasy solutions. Fantasy capitalism problems are often solved with fantasy tools of revolution. But at what point do imaginative revolutions depicted through SFF works become too wholly imaginary, and thus unattainable and inaccessible? TUC II, Babel, and Metal from Heaven all attempt to overcome this pitfall by depicting a human solution alongside the magical one:
As TUC II’s Dream Team tracks down a dragon’s nest, the worker’s strike against Fantasy Amazon materially affects the outcome of this magical final battle.
Babel centres around a translator students’ revolution, supported by industrial workers, while the main characters also debate what to do with a cache of magical silver and their translation magic.
In the final chapter of Metal From Heaven, we are shown the far-reaching consequences of the Hereafterist revolution, though the hatching of the Lustrous, that final and absolute killing blow on Gossamer Dignity’s ichorite empire, is wholly fictitious.
Even with these dual solutions, the revolutions depicted in these SFF works might still feel out of reach. It’s not just because these characters can wield magic that we do not, but also because these fictional forces of oppression partly rely on a specific magic too, which can be identified, isolated, attacked, and destroyed for direct, world-changing impact.
When Marney becomes the Lustrous at the end of Metal from Heaven, we—just like her friends and family—are left on the ground, looking up, watching her ascend to a level of existence we could never hope to reach. But while the power fantasy of becoming a magical metal giant is unattainable, change through collective action is not; it’s up to us, the readers, to translate that Hereafterist rallying cry back into the real world.
At a panel I attended during the 2024 Edinburgh International Book Festival, R.F. Kuang talked about the themes of Babel and expressed that sometimes she wonders if she ought to quit writing to become a full-time labour activist. Back in 2023, she did indeed join the publishing workers’ strike against her publisher, HarperCollins.
In a similar vein, Dimension 20’s creator and dungeon master, Brennan Lee Mulligan, led a special D&D-themed picket during the 2023 Writers’ Guild of America strike.
For all that fiction can open our minds and engage our empathy, we must also take that next step to bridge the imaginary with the real, and start acting upon the ideals of activism we learn from stories in our everyday lives.
Your analysis on their namesakes and fantasy solutions to revolutions is 🤌 Love the article