Bite the Hand That Thieves

A review of August Clarke's "Metal from Heaven"

This book review begins in the Acknowledgments. Flip to the back with me.

Acknowledgments sections these days are allowed to be sprawling. In addition to your spouse and your editor you get to thank the Whole Team At Spaceship Publishing, Inc., your boss and your mom, all your friends and pets, and, in August Clarke’s case, every single literary inspiration you have ever had.

Here is an incomplete list of Clarke’s inspirations for Metal from Heaven (Erewhon Books, 2024):

• Karl Marx (generally, as a person)

• The End of Evangelion (1997)

• Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

• Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

• Emma Goldman (generally, as a person)

• Confessions of a [sic] Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

• Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

• Octavia Butler (generally, as a person)

• The video game Disco Elysium (2019)

• The Princess Bride (1987)

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

• Dennis [sic] Johnson (generally, as a person)

• The Picture of Dorian Grey and The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde

• “A Crown of Candy,” the fifth season of Dropout TV’s popular tabletop roleplay show

• Sylvia Rivera (generally, as a person)

• James Baldwin (generally, as a person)

• Jane Bennett (generally, as a character)

• The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Kramer

• “and, for better or worse, The Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.”

This list is intended only to illustrate the breadth of influences claimed for this specific book. It represents less than half of the total.¹

Well, we are all the sum of our influences. Both Clarke and I are in the audience for many of these works. Stone Butch Blues lives in my heart as it does in his. I agree with him that Disco Elysium has serious literary merit. I had to read Marx to get my international economics degree—in English and German, while we’re gratefully acknowledging our own precociousness—and that’ll be carved into my neurons forever whatever my politics.

But listing out your sources of inspiration this way is risky. It invites any reader familiar with your influences to compare your work to that which inspired it. This is nice if you’ve got favorable reviewers eager to place your work in the canon with which it is in conversation. It’s not so great if you’ve got a reader who showed up to the Acknowledgments section fresh off your book and primed to hate-read.

What follows is a very long negative review of a harmless work of fiction. I acknowledge that this is probably more words than it warrants.

…But people love this book. It contains fifteen gushing blurbs describing it as “rich with lush prose,” “a work of feral and furious imagination,” “challenging,” “transgressive,” “poignant,” “dangerous.” Authors I love have raved about it. It won a Lamba Literary Award. I read these reviews and I feel like I am losing my mind, like the copy in my hands must have been dropped out of an alternate dimension and I am simply not reading the same words that everyone else is.

All I can say is that sometimes something so perfectly encapsulates everything that irritates you, it lights your brain on fire and only writing 5,000 words about how much it annoyed you will allow you to move on with your life. I don’t expect anyone will like this book more or less because of what I had to say about it. I had to write this in order to stop thinking about it.

The Plot

Our narrator, Marney Honeycutt, is a child who works in a factory that refines ichorite, a recently-discovered metal that can be used in everything from construction to furniture to women’s clothing. Exposure to ichorite during pregnancy renders one’s child “lustertouched,” which allows them to magically manipulate ichorite with their minds at the cost of pain, weakness, and hallucinations. Marney is one such child. The book opens on her community of factory workers going on strike to demand an official inquiry into the case of the lustertouched children. The villain, an evil CEO whose middle name is literally “Industry”, responds by ordering all of them massacred in the street.

Marney, age 12, is the sole survivor. She swears revenge on Mr. Industry in the name of her community, particularly her dearest friend and first love, to whom her narration is addressed. She joins a group of outlaws called the Choir, who live in a big idyllic antihierarchical commune together, kill and rob people and then redistribute the wealth among themselves, and value her for her ability to do things like melt ichorite bullets and tear the hinges off ichorite doors with her brain. Marney is inducted into their revolutionary anarcho-Communist philosophy (called “Hereafterism”) and their lesbian subculture (called “crawlies”) alike.

The Choir enjoys its communal life, free of outside oppression, because for twenty years it has been successfully pretending that the barony its original members overthrew still exists. But the rest of the aristocracy is getting suspicious, and circumstances conspire to reveal their secret and bring the forces of capitalistic authority down upon them. To buy time to prepare for the inevitable war for their existence, they have no choice but to send Marney, disguised as the dead baron’s reclusive daughter, to compete in a Bachelorette-style contest of lesbian noblewomen to marry the daughter of Mr. Industry the family-murderer in order to get close enough to assassinate him. Marney goes to live in a luxurious house among a crowd of cutthroat capitalist lesbians, trying to hide her origins long enough to impress Industry, Jr. and fulfill her life’s purpose.

Each noblewoman has a different reason to want to marry Industry, Jr., ranging from real love to a need for the necessary resources to complete an ongoing ethnic cleansing. Marney has a long, kinky sex scene with one of them. In exchange for the orgasm, her partner gives her information about ichorite’s origins that she can use to impress Industry, Jr. Eventually it happens that they are all required to go to a place where Mr. Industry will also be. Marney fails to kill him so catastrophically it leads to her winning the marriage contest.

In the aftermath, Marney discovers that her fiancée is in fact the childhood best friend to whom the book has been addressed up to this point. She uses her new familial tie to get a second chance at the assassination attempt; this time it succeeds. Industry Jr., who does not remember Marney and is horrified to see her father killed in cold blood, kicks Marney into a table made of raw ichorite. This causes Marney’s consciousness to be absorbed into the godlike hivemind of all the ichorite in the world, where she can coordinate the global revolution through telepathic communication with lustertouched children. As Industry Jr.’s mighty drill pierces ichorite-Marney’s glowing molten heart, Marney rises up and draws all of the ichorite in the world out of its industrial contexts, causing the collapse of the city where she was traumatized and the total destruction of all capitalist industry in the world at once. A new day dawns. Curtain.

The Characters

Transitions between segments of this book make a noise like a very old train violently switching tracks. This is because Clarke pays homage to his influences by plucking bits he likes from them and sticking them together without any particular thought for how they will look when assembled. He enjoys narrative elements like complex geopolitical worldbuilding (a la Disco Elysium) and communes of badass anarchist lesbian outlaws (a la Confessions of the Fox) and communities of working-class queer women in butch/femme relationships (a la Stone Butch Blues), but never justifies why any of them should be part of this specific narrative. Elements are stacked on top of each other like Tetris blocks, connected only by their proximity. Events simply happen in succession, with Marney pulled along by the scruff of the neck between scenes that require her viewpoint to start the camera rolling.

There are 59 people in the dramatis personae included at the front of the book, and of them only Marney has anything that could generously be called an arc.² New characters are continuously paraded across the page, described as passionate and sexy and violent and brilliant and unsettling, thrust against each other like Barbie dolls being made to kiss while Clarke looks over their heads into our eyes and goes, Do you like that? Isn’t that hot? But they all arrive in a near-vacuum, unaccompanied by any reason the reader should understand or care about them. The dull, static Choir-girls who populate the first half of the book vanish for most of the second half. The characters abruptly introduced in the second half are empty caricatures, obvious villains to a one, each dragging a cart full of undeveloped political and religious backstory behind her. When they all pile off the stage together one cannot really say why they had to be there to begin with.³ Marney as narrator is permanently on the edge of a mental breakdown over how much she loves and admires and fears these people, but I’m just stuck here watching an evil femme named Perdita Perfection deliver an impromptu two-page monologue about her desire to commit genocide in the name of the economy, wishing I’d seen any of the ten full episodes of television Clarke clearly has written in his head about her. And there are twelve Perditas.

Even Marney, through whose eyes we see this world, is not much of a character. There is a lot of intention behind Marney; Clarke has said that he originally planned a more conventional third-person omniscient narration, but later decided to switch to first person:

“I think it’s really interesting to ask somebody to really be in somebody else’s body. Not just in their head, but in their body. … Our body is our whole mind, right? And I also think it’s an experience that, particularly in genre fiction, we don’t see often, where we’re just in somebody else’s embodied experience of navigating the world sensationally, in a way that isn’t pulled back in an intellectualized [way] or stripped down to its component parts.”

This is tied, Clarke goes on, to Marney’s experience of being a “boycrawly” – a butch, a top – in her working-class lesbian subculture. Marney’s descriptions of the ways in which she touches and refuses touch, the tools she uses as a highwayman and as a lover, and the sensations she experiences when an ichorite-induced fit comes over her, are intended to tell us the most important things about her.

The problem is, Marney is pulled back in an intellectualized way. She expounds about everything and everyone around her like she’s got a BA in Philosophy and an MFA in Creative Writing. She’s barely literate, we’re reminded many times, she worked in the factory for her whole childhood and reading never came easily to her, yet she constantly addresses her absent object with sentences like your body returns to the Torn Child below, who knows flesh is androgynous and inescapable, a part of its vast material nothingness.

Much of the prose is abstract and dreamy, often so weighted down with figurative language that it’s hard to figure out where anything is in physical space. Paragraphs are regularly more than a page long. There is no single image, only lists of run-on images. Marney describes herself walking “through the monochrome foyer, into the frondy garden courtyard where a party unfolded slowly, as though the scene were underwater, or the honeyed air had gone tar thick.” She describes the quantity of books in a library as like “the rays of the sun,” and “honeycomb,” and “an antiquarian’s jewel box,” all in quick succession. Any distinct sense of Marney’s voice is lost in the avalanche of detail.

This is already a distinctly un-embodied reading experience. But Marney mostly fails as a character because, whatever Clarke’s intentions, she is forced to do the work of a third-person omniscient narrator. She has to explain the many fiddly political and religious details of this world, drawing on a well of knowledge the text itself keeps telling us she shouldn’t have. Having to explain everything also means Marney can’t ever be wrong or misunderstand anything going on around her, because the story is too convoluted to sustain any level of subterfuge without totally losing the reader.

Clarke says that it “demands a lot” of a reader to engage intimately with a character’s physicality. He is right in theory, wrong in practice. Marney’s physicality doesn’t actually tell us much, aside from what she likes sexually and the kinds of pain touching ichorite puts her through, which once established do not change. There is no conflict between Marney’s embodied experience and the reader’s experience of that experience, no development of Marney’s character through her interactions with the physical world. With that tension stripped away, there’s just not much to grab me about a longwinded woman with a strap-on having the same headache over and over.

The Canon

Clarke’s chosen style of aesthetic maximalism is dominant in mainstream queer speculative fiction right now. It’s inherently more queer, I guess, to luxuriate in over-the-top prose, to wring every drop of juice from a metaphor, to lick the milk of pure aesthetic pleasure from the between the lush breasts of… you get it. Done well it can be turned to many uses. I’ve seen trans men lean purple in their prose to communicate a sort of effete, academic affect, to walk a line between masculine woman and feminine man with constructed poise.⁴ I’ve likewise enjoyed the work of authors who use a wealth of detail to obscure and reveal their characters and the truths of their narratives like they’re waving big feathered fans around.⁵ Worldbuilding-heavy spec-fic explorations of colonialism and sexuality are all the rage, and filling one’s made-up world with one’s personal enthusiasms is much encouraged and often very effective.⁶

I understand why queer writers latched onto this style. First of all, we’re total sheep when it comes to aesthetics, anxious to cultivate a community-defining style through which we can exclude the uninitiated and compete for each other’s recognition, jealousy, and lust. But more importantly, queer literary maximalism seeks to engage all of the senses, to make everything in the world throb and moan a little. Nothing in these books is off limits to desire—not pain or trauma, not architecture, not landscape, not gore, not religion, not the jackboot and the nightstick. Desire is the thick drumbeat underlying all experience and observation of experience, ever tearing the world apart and drawing the bodies within it back together again.

This maximalism thrives within speculative fiction. Authors take a real or real-ish place and time and pass it through a kaleidoscopic narrative lens, bringing out certain colors and shrinking others to nothing, then add in supernatural or science fiction elements that tie into their themes. See, for example, Indra Das’ immortal werewolves in Calcutta; Vajra Chandrasekera’s magic physics-breaking doors in Colombo; Jordy Rosenberg’s testosterone-guzzling revolutionary lesbian pirates in London; Isaac Fellman’s cryogenically frozen trans aristocrats in post-apocalyptic pseudo-Montreal; Arkady Martine’s memory-storing brain implants and lower-class diplomats in an interplanetary Aztec-ish Empire. Writers selectively excise reality so they can turn the dial up on their chosen focal points (colonialism, gender identity, revolution, linguistics, archival history,) and blast them to high heaven.

I see Clarke reaching for this aesthetic in Metal from Heaven. He paints a sort of mid-industrial-revolution pseudo-Europe, with ichorite and its attendant powers as the supernatural element. To the extent he’s reaching for any specific time and place, it’s most notable in Marney’s place in the Choir, which is a version of a working-class butch/femme subculture as most famously laid out in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993).

And here again that damned Acknowledgments section gets in the way. I caught references to Feinberg in Metal from Heaven as I was reading—it is clearly an intentional and loving homage. But that direct invocation leads to a direct comparison, and this does not work in Clarke’s favor.

In Stone Butch Blues, there is a scene in which the police beat the narrator, force her head into a toilet filled with shit, then rape her in front of witnesses. Her crime was being caught emceeing a drag show while wearing men’s clothes. It’s a major source of the trauma that makes her stone, capable of giving love but walled off from the loving touch of others. It brings an abrupt and bitter end to her early forays into the queer underground. It drives into her the message: This is the price the world will always exact from you for daring to seek joy in who you are.

Marney doesn’t have the word stone in her world, but she has the same shame, the same fear of touch, and she also gets brutalized following a police raid on a gay bar.

Clarke is of the newer school; thirty years on from Stone Butch Blues, a stone butch narrator’s victimization by fascistic authority is permitted to come with a sexual charge. Marney’s encounter with a vindictive cop bluntly parallels fellatio:

She pressed the baton against my mouth. Into my mouth. Nudged it against my bottom teeth. My jaw pulsed, something was wrong with it. She pushed the baton deeper, over my tongue, jammed it against my hard palate. It had a greasy, laminated taste. My gut turned to jelly. She forced it deeper, skimmed my gag reflex. She pressed the back of my throat. I couldn’t get in air. She twisted her wrist, something vile scraped off the baton and onto my teeth. I thought she’d break through the membrane of my throat to bludgeon my spine.

The problem is not that this is #problematic. I don’t consider it some desecration of Feinberg to put an erotic spin on police brutality. Frankly, I think it’s high time the bright lights of contemporary queer literature stopped pretending they don’t get off on the idea of a villainous anti-revolutionary cop hating them, personally, so much they have to do a BDSM scene about it. The problem is that this cop is a cartoon, and the scene is neither sexy nor politically salient nor emotionally moving. Here is the speech the cop makes to Marney right before she shoves a baton down her throat:

“Your band,” Courtesy sneered, “will never kill another enforcer again. You will never disrespect us again. Your stain on the force and the industry is over. … I’m scraping you off this floor and dragging you behind my lurcher to [Ignavia City], and you’ll be strung by the ankles, and everyone will look upon your little girl corpse and rejoice the end of superstition. Whatever is wrong with you won’t be wrong with you anymore. I’ll fix it. You killed my partner, you bitch.”

I have Feinberg’s work in my head reading this, at Clarke’s direct invitation,⁷ so I’m remembering what I felt for Feinberg’s narrator in this situation. I remember my horror, my vicarious humiliation, my protectiveness and anger. There is a nightmarish moment where the police make Jess choose between fellating a cop and putting her head in a toilet; she chooses the latter and still gets assaulted.

I do not feel anything about Marney’s abuse at the hands of the cartoon cop. It’s not a pivotal moment for her in the narrative, as it is for Jess; Marney was already sad, gay, traumatized, and working all that out sexually. We already knew cops in this imaginary world were cackling sadists. We already knew they hated Marney in particular because of her vendetta and her particular effectiveness at murdering them. It’s a juvenile revenge fantasy – imagine if Jess Goldberg had had a gun! – and it’s not even hot.

And, well, once the floodgate of comparison has opened, there’s no closing it. Feinberg’s lesbian subculture is a working-class subculture, something Clarke knows well. “So much of my understanding of butchness is so closely related to work,” he says in the above-linked interview, and lists a series of jobs historically associated with female masculinity.

But reading, again, with Feinberg fresh in my head, her afterimage glowing over the text because Clarke told me to think about Feinberg, I realize that there are plenty of “working-class” characters in Metal from Heaven, but there’s not a single laborer. Marney works in a factory until she’s 12; after that her occupation is “Robin Hood.” Her only remaining connection to the means of production is her allergic reaction to ichorite. The only actual job held by any working-class lesbian in her circle is “sex worker.” Some of them were literally born into the commune. The text repeatedly reminds us that Marney is in solidarity with workers, that her heart goes out to them when she is reminded of what they suffer, that she notices their discomfort and pain when it is directly in front of her, that her working class-ness and her butchness put her at automatic odds with the catty educated noblewomen with whom circumstances force her to compete—but the fact right there on the page is that narratively, her job is “anarchist” in the exact same way their job is “capitalist.”

This kind of problem is one with which any author of spec-fic must grapple, a downstream effect of the kaleidoscopic dialing-up and dialing-down of details to make the theme pop. When you’re deciding what details from reality to take and which to leave in furtherance of your theme, what you choose to leave on the table will be telling. I believe it is emblematic of the core weaknesses of this book that Clarke airlifted a real-life working-class butch/femme subculture into a fictional industrial revolution and did not notice that he failed to give anybody in that subculture a job.

The Revolution

A fourth of the way into Metal from Heaven, a character delivers a multiple-page lecture about the true meaning of utopian anarcho-Communism (called “Hereafterism” in this world), prompted by Marney saying, completely unprompted, “Can someone here please explain the true meaning of utopian anarcho-Communism to me?”

This book is loudly, proudly political, to the point it verges on camp. The villain’s middle name is Industry. Marney is literally allergic to the product of the underclass’s labor, so ideologically pure she cannot touch ichorite without experiencing physical agony. She brings cruel, violent, assimilationist noblewomen to screaming climaxes (and, in at least one case, political revelations) but they don’t get her off. As a reward for cutting the rotten head off of the industrial system, she becomes the spiritual embodiment of the utopian collective, with the power to instruct lustertouched children to spread the Gospel of the revolution through her magic hivemind.

This is an ambitious line to walk. The attempt is not absurd in and of itself—on-the-nose worldbuilding and a surrealist turn at the climax are accepted genre conventions in queer spec-fic.⁸ Queer love and collectivist activism break all boundaries, including the conventions of narrative. Nothing wrong with a massive swing.

The problem, again, is in the execution. Most characters in this book, including Marney, don’t have personalities, just politics, and at no point do their politics drive any conflict. Of course there is fundamental misalignment between the goals of the revolutionary anarcho-Communists and the scheming capitalists, but no one in this book, least of all the first-person narrator, ever experiences any internal conflict to complicate this bare-bones, good-guys-versus-bad-guys plot.

Everybody in the Choir is good. Everybody rich is bad. Occasionally Clarke will gesture at some moral or ideological complexity, allow Marney to wonder aloud whether it is perhaps not straightforwardly good that the Choir kills people all the time, acknowledge that within the collective there are people with different academic interpretations of the Hereafterist philosophy, or introduce a rich character who’s enough of a sympathizer not to end up against the wall. But Marney’s early misgivings fade away unchallenged, and all other ambiguities are disposed of by multi-paragraph character speeches explaining what the reader is expected to take away from any given action.

The reader must never wonder whether any character will be redeemed, or whether it is wrong that someone should die. The bad faceless cops get their guts spilled out all over the place, the screeching duplicitous noblewomen drop chandeliers on each other, the revolutionaries gaze solemnly up at the ceiling as the light leaves their eyes and their comrades weep and curse the fascists.

It’s all so much and yet so cozy. It is amazing to slog through a work so impressed by its own radicalism and so devoid of any ideological challenge. I feel confident not a single reviewer who called it transgressive or dangerous disagreed with a single word in it.

There is no catharsis in this revolution. It is carried out by characters whose goals I never got invested in, in a world whose future doesn’t matter to me. A big hollow egg with THE QUEER REVOLUTION!!! printed on it in six-foot-tall letters, graffitied with the likenesses of better authors and better works, is no substitute for real engagement with this canon, these influences, these politics. I don’t care about these boring cartoon dykes and faggots.

The Point

I realize this is a lot of ink to spill over a slightly cringy novel by a young author just trying to put something they love out into the world. It’s not Clarke’s fault his book seemed factory-made to bother me, specifically, and I wish him the best in all future endeavors. Still, here we are.

It was supposed to be enough, I guess, that they’re dykes and faggots. That was supposed to be enough to make me gush. All these sad bad things happen to these fictional members of my community, people with whom I, the lesbian reader, am already assumed to be in solidarity. Many individual reviews of this book, even those that acknowledge the badness of the prose and the weakness of the narrative, give it points simply for having lots of kinky queers in cool outfits and speculative gender fuckery in it.

I reject this premise. I call upon my queer brethren to have some goddamned standards. It’s not some great blow against the oppressive publishing industry to write in a hot bitch and a kinky gay sex scene anymore, it’s the price of admission. We live in the only time and place in history where the straights are falling over themselves to hand out awards to queer spec-fic, desperate to prove they’re cool enough to hang with us. This is maybe the one place we are not actually on the margins. We can ask for better. We can ask for bare, basic storytelling competence.

Clarke very much wants to be seen saying something profound about class warfare and revolution, about the self-destructive striving toward utopia, about the forbidden desire that sustains and destroys us. He’s read the new classics and the old classics; he knows what gets him off, practically and narratively speaking, and he is desperate to tell you about it. It’s not enough. Metal from Heaven is a gesture at the idea of transgression nakedly terrified of alienating anyone. Clarke’s list of 47 influences is an anxious reflex, a shield thrown up against accusations of shallowness, an attempt to elevate bad ideas by association. The product is edgy like an R-rated bumper sticker, hollow like Karl Marx’s face on a votive candle—available now on Amazon for $18.95.

The Acknowledgments

Thank you to my wife and editor, Emily, who provided several rounds of detailed notes on this review and who brings life, intelligence, and coherence to everything; Professor Rook-Koepsel, who taught Postcolonialism 101 at the University of Oklahoma in 2011; Streetlight Manifesto, who provided the title; and the whole team here at Weird Emails.

1. Clarke also acknowledges himself twice—once for his decision to study Classics, and once for having been “an insufferable Shakespeare nerd” at a formative time.

2. It resembles Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth, which also includes a long list of characters organized by their alignment with the book’s political and religious factions.

3. It resembles Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth, which also involves a crowd of upper-class people all having to compete to solve a mystery in a house together while having lots of sexual tension.

4. Jordy Rosenberg playfully slips in and out of this style in Confessions of the Fox; Isaac Fellman sustains it for the length of his beautiful character portrait Notes from a Regicide.

5. Vajra Chandrasekera’s Saint of Bright Doors and Indra Das’ The Devourers are not alike at all, except in being set in South Asia, using this style of maximalism to explore themes of colonialism, sexuality, and religion, and being very good.

6. Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire and its sequel beautifully incorporate her knowledge of linguistics, anthropology, and city planning.

7. “No one ever offered a name for what was wrong with me. That’s what made me afraid it was really bad. I only came to recognize its melody through its constant refrain: ‘Is that a boy or a girl?’” -Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

8. It resembles the ending of Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, which also involves a goofy, violent, self-sacrificing collectivist revolutionary fantasy.