Margaret Killjoy

Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he's embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life. A Country of Ghosts is a novel of utopia besieged and a tale that challenges every premise of contemporary society.

The Rise and Decline of Citizenship

A Country of Ghosts

i had been wanting to check this one out for a while. i think fiction/fantasy makes an effective vehicle for political education, and i enjoyed falling into the anarchist world this author created despite not loving the characters and story development. 

ryan page

Mark Wadley

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.

Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he's embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all the while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life. From the editor of Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction and author of What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower comes a seditious novel of utopia besieged, a novel that challenges every premise of contemporary society.

A Country of Ghosts The Rise and Decline of Citizenship

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