theletterelle

Women and girls covered in fungal growths cut them off to make themselves into wives for human men; one girl-become-wife, Nicole, is more drawn to her fungal friend, Teagan.

If you're in the mood for weird, surreal, sapphic, feminist, mushroom body horror, this book is for you. It does a great job of presenting Nicole's very alien point of view, and also how she sees human men as the true aliens. It's novella length but could have been shorter than it was - there's a long middle stretch where nothing much is happening but a long string of lushly surreal descriptions - but what it's generally going for, it does well. Think The Stepford Wives meets The Girl With All the Gifts by way of Jeff Vandermeer.

Content notes: Violence against women, suicide, forced pregnancy, TONS of body horror. There is also detailed and pervasive rape and sexual assault, though the main character doesn't perceive it that way because she's mostly a mushroom.

A Better World has a great concept: folk horror in a near-future dystopian company town. The setting is unpleasantly plausible in a “20 minutes into the future” manner. Everything is miserable, but some giant corporations have company towns where people can get health care, housing, etc. They don’t get salaries, working only for benefits, and can get fired at any time and for any reason. But it’s so much better than everywhere else that spots in town are very competitive.

The book starts promisingly, with the main character and her family getting hired, moving in, and discovering that the town has some very strange traditions (instantly recognizable to anyone who reads folk horror), and also a lot of strange genetically engineered birds wandering around.

Folk horror often works more by anticipation than surprise. Readers know the town has weird cults and the new people are probably marked to be sacrificed. The enjoyment is in following their slow realization, learning the creepy details, and finding out whether or not they’ll escape their fate. But A Better World is too predictable. It’s obvious what the town’s dark secrets are, to the point where the heroine seems slow. There’s also an odd thread where she and her family are hazed to the point where they consider leaving, only for Sarah to be randomly befriended by a powerful woman. It’s a pointless plotline with a random resolution.

The birds do play into the ending, but nowhere near as satisfyingly as I had hoped. ( Read more... )

Generally, the book felt underwhelming. It does have very fun interstitial bits of town propaganda.

You may know Killjoy from their podcasts, “Live Like the World Is Dying” (prepping for anarchists and other community-minded folk) and “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff” (cool historical figures, mostly leftist.) They also write fiction, sometimes as Danielle Cain. I’d read a couple of their novellas and didn’t much like them, but I love their podcasts and other nonfiction work.

In a world close to our own in the early 20th century, a young journalist on assignment to cover a hero of an imperialist army falls in with the anarchists fighting them, and discovers a different and better way of life.

Hrun is a loose collective of towns and villages, most of which have been anarchist for hundreds of years, plus a new city founded by new anarchists who fled other countries. So it has both a new and purposeful society, and many others that have been doing their thing for ages and know it works.

Killjoy excels at sketching characters convincingly in not too many words, and the group of guerilla fighters that the journalist Dimas falls in with are very sympathetic and easy to care about. There’s enough quirky details to charm and convince, like the widespread use of ostriches as farm animals, a mourning custom involving teeth, and a very good use of characters speaking different languages.

A Country of Ghosts is a good, solid novel about solidarity, war, and freedom, as well as a nice exploration of what an anarchist society might be like, answering many questions an outsider might have. The answers are not always completely convincing, but it makes an extremely good case that even if it’s flawed or wouldn’t work quite as well as depicted, it sounds a hell of a lot better than our current way of organizing society.

A Country of Ghosts is very much in conversation with The Dispossessed, though it’s Ruritanian rather than science fiction and the POV character is the one coming to an anarchist society as a stranger. They’re very different takes both on what an anarchist society would be like and what exterior and interior forces might threaten it. In The Dispossessed, the exterior force is mostly that their moon is barren and generally hostile to human life, while the interior force is a falling away from ideals.

In A Country of Ghosts, the exterior force is an invading imperialist army with better weapons and greater numbers, while the interior force… well, there isn’t really one. The answer to “But who cleans the toilets without money” is that people don’t need to be paid to clean their own toilets, so if they feel that the whole town is their own, someone will step up to clean the public ones. People who believe in freedom without responsibility to the community can go (or be booted to) a neighboring community which is basically Libertarian.

The aspect of society that I found least convincing is that there's no organization around public toilet cleaning and other unpleasant tasks that need doing and aren't clearly the responsibility of any one person. I can absolutely believe that a society can exist where those tasks are shared by, say, a rota. I find it hard to believe that a society can exist where there is always someone who volunteers to do that stuff, and it getting done relies entirely on that. If nothing else that seems likely to breed an incredible amount of resentment on the part of the person who always does the shit jobs so they'll get done.

(The other society that makes an interesting comparison, is Graydon Saunders’ Commonweal. That one isn’t anarchist but it has enough similarities to bring up the comparison, with the philosophy of “everyone or no one,” a commitment to making sure that everyone eats and no one is forced into labor, and with norms largely enforced by social approval/disapproval. It also has a major external threat (invaders AND an inimical landscape); the internal threat is complicated.

In both the Commonweal and Anarres, rotas for tasks figure heavily. I can more easily believe in a society without laws than one without rotas.)

When thinking about those books and their utopian/dystopian societies, a few things struck me. One is the use of violence. In Killjoy's books, a huge theme is when and how it’s necessary to defend their societies by violence, and when and how it’s acceptable to inflict violence on its own people. In Le Guin’s book, almost all of the overt violence is committed by the capitalist society, Urras. On Anarres, there's subtler levels of coercion and force at play, but the effects are oppressive and against their ideals. Le Guin isn't concerned about the necessary uses of violence, and in fact implicitly questions whether it's ever truly necessary by writing a story about a society in which it isn't.

Another theme is the meaning of freedom. Killjoy’s Hrun has complete individual freedom for people to do whatever they want so long as it doesn’t significantly harm others. Beyond that, there’s no laws and no rules. Anarres has a lot of rules but they’re collectively approved and enforced by social pressure rather than violence. Its freedom is conceived of more communally than individually.

A Country of Ghosts is a good, thought-provoking book whether you're anarchist-curious or not. I recommend it to anyone who likes scrappy guerilla fighters or fiction exploring invented societies.