Metal From Heaven
Sep. 28th, 2025 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraMetal From Heaven, August Clarke, 2024 fantasy novel. I am not shy about how much I like a book with momentum and this is definitely not one - after a promising (and intense) opening, I spent a good two-thirds of it slogging my way through. It took until midpoint for anything like a plot trajectory to develop (along with a sudden dump of new characters) and I don't even know now what the hell was happening between 10% and 50% and why there was so much of it. And then even when the plot emerged, it was disjointed and muddled. But! I can't simply disrecommend it, because there's good stuff here too. It's a big ambitious book and I appreciate that; Clarke does some nice work with details of setting and place and aesthetic; when the geopolitical plot shows up, this is the kind of book where all the world's key players happen to be queer women and that doesn't feel forced. If you get tired of cozy and its sometimes-lean into twee, this is a book where people are messy to the point of being awful, and sex might be a way of genuinely wanting to hurt each other (or hurt oneself). There was a wildly funny gonzo sequence around the 80% mark that felt worth a lot of the slog and then a development around 90% that gave the last arc of the book all the motivation and urgency that had been missing. Recommended for fans of Catherynne Valente, the Locked Tomb series, and people who are faster readers than me, who will take fewer weeks wading through the slow parts.
Spoilers: Something very ironic to me that the twist that saved the narrative, momentum-wise, was killing the POV character! But it was like an exchange of the ability to act for the ability to want - alive-Marney felt so passive and drifting, even when she was running around doing things, and then ghost-in-the-underground Marney had *objectives*. She had *yearning*. Like, that's the key ingredient in making characters engaging for me - they have to want things! How can I care about what happens to them if I don't care about what that is. Marney sorting out her consciousness and trying to communicate with her friends was finally something to care about. And the end, what a huge ending! Such a wild over-the-top deus ex machina fantasy solution to injustice and extractive capitalism/imperialism, what if all the oil and plastic turned back into dinosaurs and flew away, literally uprooting/overturning all the institutions of authority and oppression, and the protagonist gets to turn into a giant stompy version of herself and become undeniable/unignorable, gets to insist to her difficult ex (who is also capitalism) that their past be remembered. That is hardcore id stuff on so many levels, that's amazing.
Spoilers: Something very ironic to me that the twist that saved the narrative, momentum-wise, was killing the POV character! But it was like an exchange of the ability to act for the ability to want - alive-Marney felt so passive and drifting, even when she was running around doing things, and then ghost-in-the-underground Marney had *objectives*. She had *yearning*. Like, that's the key ingredient in making characters engaging for me - they have to want things! How can I care about what happens to them if I don't care about what that is. Marney sorting out her consciousness and trying to communicate with her friends was finally something to care about. And the end, what a huge ending! Such a wild over-the-top deus ex machina fantasy solution to injustice and extractive capitalism/imperialism, what if all the oil and plastic turned back into dinosaurs and flew away, literally uprooting/overturning all the institutions of authority and oppression, and the protagonist gets to turn into a giant stompy version of herself and become undeniable/unignorable, gets to insist to her difficult ex (who is also capitalism) that their past be remembered. That is hardcore id stuff on so many levels, that's amazing.
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Date: 2025-09-29 02:49 am (UTC)From the little of it I’ve seen so far, I agree with you that Clarke’s work is ambitious. I guess I’m hoping that at some point they’ll take their wild intensity and energy and focus it a little more, if that makes sense—I wouldn’t want to dull the glittering edge that they’re bringing to the work, but I feel like they don’t quite have full control over their tools yet? Maybe? Or maybe not—that’s more a vague gut feeling than a fully thought-out belief.