February 2022 Book Reviews

I post reviews to Twitter and Instagram within a day of finishing a book. Here are the books I read in February.

A Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy

I don’t know if any other books exist in the anarchist utopian military fiction microgenre, but this is a fascinating book and I would take a shelf full of more like it, please and thank you.

Set in a non-magical secondary world comparable to 19th-century Europe, Country follows Dimos, a young war journalist sent to the front who almost immediately falls in with a militia from the anarchist region (Hron) his imperialist homeland (Borolia) has invaded.

We learn about Hron’s culture and politics along with Dimos, and it’s easy to fall in love with the brusque but fundamentally caring anarchists who work together to support each other and combat imperialism. It’s a beautiful depiction of a world that could be or might have been. This is a fantasy novel in the way that all utopias are fantasies. As Killjoy writes in the afterword to this edition, the purpose here isn’t “to set out the path to freedom…but instead, to offer an argument that freedom is possible.” This isn’t a blueprint — it’s a dream.

Like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which I read and loved last year, there’s a strain of hopeful but measured realism in this book I find utterly intoxicating, and it reinforces the parts of me that believe this kind of freedom is not only possible, but worth fighting for.

Acid West by Joshua Wheeler

I don’t read a lot of nonfiction but I found this ARC in an LA thrift store in 2018, the same month I published my book of short stories, and I’m glad I waited to read it because it’s everything I wanted that book to be without making anything up.

In the essay “Keep Alamogordo Beautiful,” Wheeler writes of his stalled-out sci-fi novel “I am stuck at the apocalypse. I don’t know what happens next.” And, like…damn. That just strikes right at my core, as both a wayward SF writer and a fucking human being.

Over thirteen essays Wheeler traces his family history and the culture of Southern New Mexico, a region I’ve never visited but one that feels so familiar, tainted and mutated by lethal government projects and shifty corporate interests. It’s an apocalyptic place, but of the most realistic, mundane kind, where–even in a place defined by nuclear fallout and UFOs–decline creeps in so slowly and steadily we don’t even notice until the land and culture have been hollowed out from the inside.

Wheeler’s writing is beautiful. He connects massive events and ordinary people and small symbols and personal history in a seamless, lyrical rumination–somehow elegiac and funny and profound all at once. I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but this has me thinking I really should.