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Ok, this book was very fun and gave me some of those excitement in the streets feels at moments I am just always there for. Going in blind to the story, it took me way to long to feel invested in the story, it being fantasy and starting off with a tale about god, I was pretty much ready to swipe left on this one. But then the world came into focus and I was hooked.

I read a review that said in the fantasy world, it's hip to be exploring the magic/creatures/polygod world's through a lens of the industrial revolution rather than bronze or medieval developments. And within this modern trend this is Adrian Tchaikovsky's contribution to that.

I couldn't help but map Marx's capital onto this world, updated by my stronger and stronger appreciation of Tchaikovsky's work and left politics. We have main characters from the factory works, lumpen proles, sex workers, students, immigrants, and heretic theologians. The book explores a world colonized by an analogue of Roman Catholic conservatism and empire. There is even a parallel of Marx's theory of dead-labour embodied in commodities as magic embed in objects, which lends them value and can be distilled and extracted to produce further value.

Definitely a strong nationalist anti-colonialism bent to the societal tensions, with nostalgia and ghosts of feudal ethnic powers and the folk cultures and traditions lost to urbanization and proletarianization.

Reading it as a Marxist, one would be happy by its interpretation of struggle, class and modernization with greater heed paid to the lumpen proles and gender. Reading it as an anarchist, there are critiques to be made around the appeal of nationalism, hierarchy, and power as little fiefdoms and warlords struggle to remain dominant above and sometimes oblivious to the peoples struggles in the streets.

I would highly recommend this book, 1 of 2 in the series as of yet, as a fun read that gets your heart racing while both escaping from this world to better view it as an outsider.

Probably gonna stay in my top 5 of 2024!

I'm not usually a fan of poetry, I have a lot of taste in my mouth from bad, self-important and unpracticed open-mic performances over the years. But Rosenbergs wielding of words, prose and a few poems, in this book is pretty impressive. Her writing style is generally matter-of-fact but she's able to encapsulate rich emotional meaning in small moments that crack the surface.

I was enticed to read this book for a few reasons... First up, Susan Rosenberg will be speaking on a (n online) panel put on by our local anarchist bookstore alongside Herman Bell, David Gilbert and Eric King, all former political prisoners to speak about the recently published "Rattling The Cages" book (definitely worth a gander, lots of insights from former and current political prisoners on Turtle Island). Second, Susan was involved in the May 19th Communist Organization, a group I don't know a lot about besides that it was an anti-racist and anti-Imperialist organization that included Weathermen, Black Liberation Army, Republic of New Afrika and Prairie Fire Organization. M19CO was responsible for the liberation Assata Shakur and the Brinks heist (and a number of bombings of buildings associated with US Imperialism that mostly succeeded in having no casualties). Third, the experience of someone with a good read on patriarchy spending 16 years in BOP womens prisons (and jails in DC & NYC) was insightful, since many prisoner voices I run across are folks in mens prisons. Fourth, Ms. Rosenberg was also a former member of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, and as an anti-racist Jewish woman had good grounds for critiquing the systemic racism that she saw in US "Justice", but then through the rise of mass incarceration with the "War On Drugs" as well as being in a position to elaborate her experiences of antisemitism and Christian supremacy on a personal and systemic level in the belly of the beast. Fifth, and dovetailing the last point, as a queer woman she also witnessed the HIV/AIDS crisis and was one of the leftist prisoners who worked to shift policy in her facilities as well as engage in grassroots educational and health initiatives as that terrible tide swept the majority poor and Black populations she was incarcerated among. I think lastly, because of the social viewpoint that Ms. Rosenberg exuded throughout the book, her empathy and awareness of social, cultural and systemic inequities and how they distilled behind bars, she had a humanized view of so many of the people she was locked up alongside, engaged with her community behind bars to build solidarity and expressed the heavy losses of people to the cruelty of the US carceral system (through medical neglect, through active counter-insurgency tactics of divide and rule, through the attempted breaking of the spirit into subservient subjects, the criminalization of love behind bars, and through the breakdown of community people had with loved ones on the outside).

It's a heavy book, emotionally, but a really important one. And the poetry is good! I'm pretty sure the book is out of print but it had a big run in 2011 so copies are plentiful and cheap from online sellers.

This was a really fantastic novel and I think you should read it. With a heavy hand in world building and exploration of linguistics and translation this novel gave so many hints and tidbits of the world without creating a complete picture which left you will so many paintings of these worlds with just enough to have you pondering the world just outside the frame.

It is really impressive the amount of world building that was built into a standalone novel, I would read anything, including fan fiction, created in the universe after finishing it.

The story itself and it's interactions were fantastic. There was many times I was left feeling so alien from the valleys that divided characters that I truly believed that there was alien consciousnesses so different than ours, rather than a metaphor for human struggles.

The plot was very hard to predict and kept my rapt attention as it twisted and turned building and referencing with clues and surprises that I honestly didn't know where we were going including the conclusion.

China mieville is one of my favourite contemporary authors because his writings bring in politics, class and revolution in such honest and contextual ways that I am left feeling like through the story I am newly a revolutionary within a different world and power dynamics.

I think everyone should read it. And talk about it with friends.