A Country of Ghosts

Black Dawn Series

By: Margaret Killjoy

Narrated by: Bea Flowers

Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

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

It felt like a chapter was missing.

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

Anarchist Utopian Fiction

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.

this is way more than your average fantasy novel

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!