august clarke’s adult fantasy debut is a nuanced development of the conversations and themes that he explored in his YA Scapegracers trilogy (2020-24), yet with the intensity dialed all the way up. If this book were an epic punk-rock union ballad (which it kind of is), the guitars would be distorted past coherence, the lyrics would be divinely messy—and shouted—and, if you were lucky, there would be a fistfight between rival polycules in the mosh pit. As in Scapegracers, the narrative here is interested in the intersections of queer community and revolutionary organizing, and argues for necessary solidarity with what Eileen Myles has termed “pathetic literature" and Le Guin called “despised genres.” To read Metal from Heaven is to devour a feast of glass shards, to bend the wide world to your meager will, and to weep lustily from every pore in shame.
In an era of critically divisive, boundary-pushing SFF, Metal from Heaven seems tailor-made to spur debates. The novel constructs its stage with a familiar toolkit of genre conventions, but the usage of those tools is entirely unique, and aimed towards rebuking those same conventions. At first glance, the premises would seem to be a grab-bag of splashy tropes: the resource-driven machinations of Dune-like hard SF, the serendipitously chosen protagonist with unique magical abilities, the idyllic utopian/anarchist community, the beautiful princesses, the motions towards a statement on class and labor. However, clarke’s novel does not stop at a motion towards a statement, and instead follows to their logical conclusions the lines of reasoning that “class warfare,” “resource-driven machinations,” and “beautiful princesses” entail. These are conclusions that previous generations of fantasy novelists have conveniently resolved “off-screen.” “We’re fucking warlords … that’s the only kind of lord there is!” says one of clarke’s princesses. When Metal from Heaven depicts upper-crust finery, clarke leans into the absurd horror of that wealth; when the story inevitably leads back to the violences that are so common in fantasy novels of this sort, clarke leans into its horror as well.
As powerful a book as this is, though, it is equally frustrating. The plot structure is sprawling and unconventional, and it simply would not work in the hands of a less talented writer. I find myself at a loss to summarize it. Protagonist’s family is massacred. Protagonist joins anarchist/bandit society. Protagonist infiltrates upper-class betrothal competition with hidden motive to assassinate billionaire technocrat who has a chokehold on society. Mayhem ensues. The prose, too, is dizzyingly decadent, and it’s easy to get entirely lost in the turn of a sentence and forget the narrative thread of a scene. The difficulty of the book is compounded by the aggressive and unforgettable complexities of the framing device that this novel utilizes—written in the second person, addressed to the dead childhood crush of the narrator, who spends her entire life pursuing a quest to avenge the killing of said childhood crush. The book is tailored for that specific audience of one—we’re just lucky enough to be listening in.
To further enhance all this complexity, Metal from Heaven begins at its ending, as Marney Honeycutt tells her story of revenge to that elusive, ubiquitous “you.” Marney was born to a family of factory workers, devoutly religious folk. The factory Marney was raised in is concerned with the refinement and development of “ichorite,” a magical ore with nigh-endless possibilities for application. Unluckily for Marney, ichorite has a strange toxicity, and Marney is particularly susceptible to its effects. The book’s story proper begins at a protest against the working conditions in the ichorite factory. In flashes, Marney tells of her family suffused with joy, singing protest songs, hoping for a better future in which their children will not become poisoned by the ichorite, or “lustertouched,” but instead be both compensated and properly protected. Then, the strikebreakers move in. Marney’s family is butchered in a matter of minutes, and she barely manages to escape the massacre.
I can lay out things empirically, with clarity: plot information, character traits, literary techniques. But Metal from Heaven is so evidently a novel of distortion, a story viewed through the warped glass of our experiences. clarke continually raises the question of how we, as individuals, incorporate our biases when telling stories about collectives. How we return to them unthinkingly like picking at a scab, worrying at a sore tooth. Says Marney, compulsively resurrecting “you” in her thoughts, compulsively reflexive against that urge, that bias:
Tullian death is like this: when you die, your spirit returns to heaven, men to day and women to night, and your body returns to the Torn Child below, who knows flesh is androgynous and inescapable, a part of its vast material nothingness. You’re distinct and individual in life alone. The burden of selfhood is abandoned once you’re gone. Unless you’re a revenant, you as you don’t exist anymore. You’re unhewn. The closeness I wanted with you and my family would rob you all of restful edgelessness. Asking you to haunt me is cruel to you.
clarke seems to wonder, both through Marney and despite her, if we can behold any person beyond the second person, those ghosts we pursue and are pursued by. It’s not just that the personal is always political; it’s that the political is hardly anything, that the political has no substance without the dimension our experience gives it.
Marney says again and again that this is a story about her and “you"—her lost love she obsesses over. But in a summary of the major plot beats, the novel becomes a story of an uprising, of the exploitation of workers and imperialism, a story of all peoples in all places. The reader’s capacity to interpret the events is additionally mediated through their interpretation of the narrative frame. In other words, clarke forces the reader to choose what sort of story they are reading.
Marney herself fears the enormity of her journey, choosing to call it revenge instead of revolution, retribution instead of liberation. It is easier for Marney to tell herself that she is the same child that huddled beneath the bodies during the massacre, easier to choose to tell herself she is motivated by a small, personal love, rather than a titanic, all-consuming rage at the tragedy of existence. These sentiments oscillate. At times they feel wonderfully, painfully simultaneous.
As much as this is a novel about class and revolution, then, it is inextricably a novel about queerness. The world of Metal from Heaven, which has undergone its own imperial waves and globalizations, has a different, but similarly numinous, word for queerness—"crawly,” a term both sexualized, derogatory, and reclaimed. The novel is particularly preoccupied with how class cuts across queerness. For Marney’s adopted family—that bandit-gang/anarchist-commune known as “the choir"—queerness is the ultimate liberation. For seemingly everyone in their society, some form of queerness holds meaning, be it in ubiquitous, drag-inflected fashion, often polyamorous and protean relationships, or alternate and reparative forms of religion. In Marney’s birth family, queerness was frowned upon, repressed, was a point of rupture. In the choir, Marney becomes a devotee of a nonbinary-inclusive sect of her religion that she had never heard of, which finds meaning and purpose through the destruction of harmful binaries.
However, in the second half of the novel, Marney spends a great deal of time in an upper-class house with a group of rich young queer women, courting the adopted daughter of the ichorite baron she aims to assassinate. The differences in their experiences of queerness are stark. The heiress, Gossamer Dignity Chauncey, and her compatriots don’t call themselves “crawlies,” which they term a slur, but instead “lunarites.” They advocate for greater sexual freedom in the social circles that they inhabit, yet in their diplomacies and war rooms orchestrate geopolitical changes which will lead to the deaths of “crawlies” across the world. They profit off of the labor and repressive imposition of the “traditional family unit” while co-opting the cultures of liberation created by lower class crawlies as a form of survival. The simultaneity of the choir’s queernesses inverts. Exclusivity, by definition, reigns.
At one point, Gossamer visits Marney’s home with her. The whole town puts on a show of normalcy, pretending Marney is their noble overlord, not a factory kid in stolen silks. clarke seems to wonder why we interminably insist on casting the stories of our lives in the mold of genres that can never exist. Revolutions don’t end in terms of happiness; they’re either just or unjust. Marney and Gossamer have to choose what kind of story they’re living.
I wondered abstractly if this could end sweetly. If Gossamer could fall in love with this place and defend its strangeness with her unstoppable monetary might. This was lunacy, of course.
We are the natural enemies of her monetary might. We stand to rob her of everything she owns and redistribute it to everybody alive. We could never resolve this peacefully.
Our existences were mutually exclusive. The symbol of her existence would cease, or we would. She leaned her cheek against my shoulder.
Metal from Heaven has a lot to say; it covers a lot of ground. There are labor politics, world-shaking inventions, psycho-magical element manipulation, impending war, imperialism, impending genocide, natural disasters, ecological destruction, massacres, love, sex (lots of it). There is a sense that this story holds in tension a lot of distinct ideas and questions, that the story is curious about what it means to try to hold more than you can carry, to go on a journey knowing you are underequipped. Alternately, clarke steadfastly refuses to be reductive: These parts, when summed, add up to something massive, insurmountably so. The scope is infinite, the whole beyond the envisageable. We readers of the postmodern, late-stage capitalist era are all too familiar with the endless inextricabilities of all things, bound together with the adamantine cables of capital and violence, doomed by the narrative because there are no other narratives to escape into. But! clarke seems to interject—But! There is escape. There is hope. Hope in strangeness. Hope in making oneself unpalatable, indigestible by the Leviathans.
If debates over change-through-violence are a crumbling rhetorical cliff, clarke makes their argument in the fall, in the bursting and battering of bodies on the distant ground. In this book, bodies are given voice to cry out against the ruthless arithmetic of theoretical arguments. Is change possible without violence? Is survival possible after violence? Or do we become new selves after molting scars, mourning, among all those lost, our more innocent past selves? When organizations are shattered on the bulwark of the behemoth, all that’s left is to reorganize, and to pass down knowledge if we can’t muster the movement. To my fellow queer readers, I’ll put it like this: This book says no fucking cops at pride. Be a faggot, write like a faggot, read like a faggot, and scream like a faggot.
For this reason and many others, Metal from Heaven is an essential read for any reader interested in SFF that says fuck-you to boundaries. It is magnetic on both poles—that is to say, it is a book that enacts attraction and repulsion as the same thing. It is an emotional book, a book that demonstrates how enormous emotions exhibit gravity on narratives, warping them into something bloated and odd. After the tighter and more dynamic plots of clarke’s previous series, this feels like the assertion of a kaleidoscopic talent.