"Bottoms and tops, we all hate cops" but make it steampunk

 

Last weekend I did so many things that I ran out of willpower by the end and decided it was time to treat myself, by which I meant not check my email, go to Porter Square Books, and buy a fantasy new release and read it in the bath, to give my poor brain a break in between books about Nazis. So I put on my two masks and dipped in real fast to pick up a copy of C. L. Polk’s Soulstar, the third and final book in her Kingston Cycle, a political steampunk fantasy about an Englandish country that is, quite literally, powered by the oppression of witches and the desecration of the souls of the dead. My absolutely deaded brain had sort of been like “Oh yeah, the gay steampunk murder mystery series, I need more of that right now for escapism reasons” and then I started reading it and it was like, whoops, not as escapist as I had intended, I had sort of forgot the uhhh whole point of the series, with its very well done but not precisely subtle subject matter about climate change and capitalist exploitation and imperialism and all the things? Also the main character in Soulstar is Robin Thorpe, a grassroots organizer with the revolutionary democracy group the Solidarity Collective, and let me tell you, we were in some Very Familiar Territory here, only with a suspicious lack of Signal chats. But it had all the rest of it, from gossipy steering committees and tedious strategy meetings in church basements to having to give ~stirring speeches~ on the fly while being like “what the fuck, I’m only here because I’m the only nerd willing to make all the lists” and having the police riot unprovoked all over your public assembly. I occasionally felt like Robin was a bit uptight about direct action but I have also definitely been at plenty of street actions where I was like “if people could stop being DUMB and ADVENTURIST and THINK about their STRATEGY for a second before they ESCALATE, please” and I haven’t even seen half the shit Robin has seen in this series. The bit where they storm the palace reads a little weird after the events of this winter where we had actual fascists doing the “storm the seat of government” thing but that is not really the book’s fault, it is clearly drawing on a long history of people storming palaces because the government was further right and more oppressive than the people doing the storming (that’s even the more common instance, I think). 

There is a romantic plotline here but it is a little different from the previous ones in that it does not start at the beginning of the romance, but instead it already has a history. Robin, it turns out, has a spouse who was arrested and put into one of the power grid prisons twenty years earlier, and who, when khe gets out, promptly denounces kher shitty rich real-estate-mogul family and goes to live with Robin in the Thorpe clan house, which plays real nice for the press in a dramatic scene at the train station but which is then sort of awkward. It’s well done and Zelind is a pretty badass character in kher own right--an inventor of useful and creative gadgets--but I did find some of the obligatory marital strife boring (this is because I find marriage boring, not because of any weaknesses in the actual handling of the subject). But overall I just felt sort of at home in this series where everyone is queer and obsessed with politics in a way that is now normal to me and that makes all the books full of “normal” straight people whose lives don’t revolve around politics feel even more like they’re about aliens than they always did.

I was very surprised but I think kind of pleased that Polk did not have her characters magnanimously wuss out of one very important thing that happened at the end, which seems a bit of a departure from the usual rules of Good Revolutionaries in literature, and I really liked that choice. 

Anyway. Murder! Police kettles! Old hotels! I enjoyed this book and this series very much. I hope once all the turbines are up and running Zelind invents Signal, it will make Robin’s life easier.