Review: Metal from Heaven, by August Clarke

Ichorite is progress. More durable and malleable than steel, ichorite is the lifeblood of a dawning industrial revolution. Yann I. Chauncey owns the sole means of manufacturing this valuable metal, but his workers are on strike. They demand Chauncey research the hallucinatory illness befalling them. Marney Honeycutt, a lustertouched child worker, stands proud at the picket line with her best friend and family. That’s when Chauncey sends in the guns. Only Marney survives the massacre. She vows bloody vengeance.
A decade later, Marney is the nation’s most notorious highwayman, and Chauncey’s daughter seeks an opportune marriage. Marney’s rage and the ghosts of her past will drive her to masquerade as an aristocrat, outmaneuver powerful suitors, and win the heart of his daughter, so Marney can finally corner Chauncey and satisfy her need for revenge. But war ferments in the north, and deeper grudges are surfacing.

"Unalone toward dawn we go."

August Clarke's Metal from Heaven is a genre-bending sapphic epic that defies expectation with its bold use of second person narration, a prose that feels like wading through molasses, and a rich, tight worldbuilding. It deftly explores issues of class struggle and anti-capitalism and what price we are willing to pay to have a revolution.

This is absolutely not a love story but a tragedy, and yet it brims with hope and with a visceral sensuality and with longing devotion that borders on feverish obsession, as main character Marney makes a martyred beacon of her dead best friend. This is also absolutely a novel about butch culture, and the all-female cast is a glorious exploration of masculinity and femininity and all the flavors-in-between, and the intersection of class and queerness, with a very clever distinction between working-class and noble lesbians. Marney is unapologetic in her desires, and pursues many women, although only one has her bleeding heart.

The worldbuilding is rich and complex and almost incomprehensible at times, with a great number of places and cultures and complicated politics governing their alliances, and to complicate matters further, many religions. The crux of the matter, the conflict at the heart of the novel, is the usage and mining conditions of a magical metal that causes unnatural consequences on child laborers and creates a condition of chronic illness on many such children, Marney included; this allows the author to also make a vivid depiction of chronic illness, something that is rare enough in speculative fiction.

The prose is a glorious fever dream of ambitious narrative choices, featuring nonlinear storytelling and long paragraphs that lovingly describe women and hallucinations and sex, and a dizzying muddling of I and you and we. It's also hysterically funny at the most unexpected times.

Metal from Heaven is a modern masterpiece.

✨ 5 stars