A Country of Ghosts

Black Dawn #2

Paperback, 222 pages

English language

Published Nov. 22, 2021 by AK Press.

ISBN:
978-1-84935-448-6
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5 stars (5 reviews)

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.

2 editions

A short and necessary utopia, for anarchists

5 stars

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.

New Best Intro to Anarchism

5 stars

There's always been a problem with recommending theory like the Bread Book to get people interested in anarchism. It is very easy for someone who has never questioned The Way Things Are to go "that's a nice thought, but it would never work" even though it literally has worked in the past. More enjoyable worlds are possible. Worlds free of authority are possible. Fiction allows them to suspend their disbelief long enough to actually consider what we're trying to say.

"A Country of Ghosts" occasionally reads like it's an overly didactic story, but it's trying to present its characters as people responding to the ignorant questions of a person from another culture. It covers their living arrangements, their decision-making, how to maintain services, how they might make war. This is what we should be telling the curious to read. Theory can come later.

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5 stars