Paperback, 222 pages
English language
Published Nov. 22, 2021 by AK Press.
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 that challenges every premise of contemporary society.
Short novel of imagined collective non-hierarchical resistance to imperial war. Reminiscent of For Whom The Bell Tolls, but in this case I wish the central plot were not one of war and violence.
This short novel kept me reading – there are some bits that are obviously detailing political systems, but I never found them tedious. I recognized some of the processes from actual communities I have been involved with. Those descriptions are balanced by the vivid, poignant characterizations of people, places and culture and a story full of adventure and incredible bravery. There's a certain grit to the story, some violence – never gratuitious, though; and still it left me with a positive sentiment. Definitely a "would read again".
Born in an empire modelled after a 19th century European power, a journalist is embedded with colonizing troops. Instead of covering a campaign of subjugation of unorganized villages, he discovers an anarchist confederation of people and communities, and joins up their fight agains the invader.
Killjoy's utopia is of course not a blueprint, but a demonstration that it is possible to imagine how an anarchist society could work. Imagining utopias, showing anarchism in practice, is important. Kim Stanley Robinson (who provides a praise on the backcover) has written many times about how dystopias are all well and fine, but utopias are more relevant to our time of crises. How to act for a better world, if you've never encountered ideas of better worlds in media and litterature?
It's a short read, and you won't regret it.
it is still a story of war, but i like the attempt of showing how a "country" following anrchist principles might look like. this scenario, although fantasy, is much closer to us that the alien and very pragmatica annares (sorry, le guin, but that's true).
A well-constructed world with real though put into how societies could construct themselves differently, and how they would interact if they did.
