A Country of Ghosts Audiobook By Margaret Killjoy cover art

A Country of Ghosts

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A Country of Ghosts

By: Margaret Killjoy
Narrated by: Bea Flowers
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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.

©2021 AK Press (P)2021 AK Press Fantasy Genre Fiction Ideologies & Doctrines Political Politics & Government

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I like the message, but felt it came off a bit preachy. There was a bit of a time skip.

It felt like a chapter was missing.

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Proposing a positive, alternative social structure in a fictional setting is an audacious endeavor. Most will reject the construct outright, and those (like myself) who mostly agree at the outset will find minor flaws to pick at as the story moves through the theory.

It's a good story, though, so my recommendation is to initially enjoy it without judging the construct too harshly. Afterwards, I suggest letting Hron roll around in your head a while. Maybe it shifts some mental balance points, maybe not. When you do make your comparisons, I ask that you compare it against real systems and not a theoretical perfect society. "Better than what we have" is a good way to start making changes.

Good book, hard to write this kind of fiction.

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Margaret Killjoy's "A Country of Ghosts" is best understood as a work of utopian fiction. Killjoy's utopia is the country of Hron, an anarcho-socialist society in the mountains on the edge of an empire. Hron is the real main character of the book and much of the novella is spent explaining how Hron functions as a country, as seen through the eyes of a foreign journalist from the Borolian Empire.

Leftist critics of anarchist politics tend to agree that an anarchist society would be pretty great in theory, but question how such a society can arise, and more pressingly, how it can defend itself without either a central government or a military. Margaret Killjoy sketches out the answer to the first question—Hron emerged through a combination of revolutionaries and idealists and refugees assimilating into the indigenous society of the mountains—and then answers the second by way of the novella's plot: Our story begins with an invasion of Hron already underway from the neighbouring empire of Borolia.

While "A Country of Ghosts" is utopian, it feels grounded and believable, real rather than rose-tinted. Anarchist societies have existed, and have fought (e.g., the Zapatistas for a current example). Good utopian fiction serves the purpose of encouraging us to imagine better for ourselves. We can make Hron real. We just have to work together.

Anarchist Utopian Fiction

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If you’re the kind of person who enjoys sitting down to a rich hearty stew of ideas, wrapped in a compelling story with well-developed characters, living in a world that isn’t afraid to take you by the hand and lead you to an understanding of a very different society than the one you live in, then I can’t recommend this book enough!

this is way more than your average fantasy novel

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