Elon Musk as Issac Newton Wearing His Alchemy and Prosecutor Hats: A Short Review of Alchemists of Dawn
Should I Read This: Yes
Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Alchemists of Dawn a book by G S Valiant
Author’s Website: Posts | G.S. Valiant
My headlines not only get dorkier, they get more obscure. Pretty soon I will be the only one who understands them at all.
Alchemists of Dawn by G.S. Valiant is an entry into what I think of as industrial fantasy. These are books with magic infused into a modern world, but they are not, in my mind, magical realism. These are fully formed second world fantasies — fantasies that have created an entirely new world, like Middle Earth. But these books do not work with the tools and palettes of medieval or medieval adjacent societies, European or otherwise. These books color with the sharper, metallic paint of the modern world. And Alchemists of Dawn is one of the better entries in the field.
It follows two women, mother and daughter, through a world where magic is refined as oil is in ours, as they try and navigate the overt sexism of their employers and their world, which is incredibly unequal and unstable as a result. Protests hound the firm they work for, and losing one’s job can often mean losing one’s life. The split narrative allows for us to follow both the people in power and adjacent to it as well as those forced to endure power, whether the poorest of the poor or mid-level bureaucrats trying to keep their morals in an immoral environment. The story is told with sure handedness, balancing the perspectives generally well, and interesting characters. It is an ambitious book as well.
This book is bursting with ideas. One corporation controls magic — created by refining certain rare minerals into a magic gas, for lack of a better term, that can then be used to enchant items. Everything from transportation to police weapons depends on magic, and it is largely controlled by one corporation. Monopolies, as any of my readers already know, are bad, and this monopoly is the worst. But the book is more than just a critique of private control over public goods — though it is most certainly that. It touches on office politics, AI, sexism, capital exploitation, economic inequality, political power, police abuse, and the corrupting influence of wealth. It even glances at the peak oil conversations from my youth. This embarrassment of ideas might actually be the book’s weakest point — some ideas are well explored and given some depth. But some are almost tossed out as afterthoughts and given their resonance with today, I would have liked more depth than this novel could afford to give them. That is a loss, in my mind, but not a serious one.
The novel is also a really fun read. I could almost sound like an ad for a 1930s action movie — thrills! spills! action! adventure! romance! The novel really does have all of that layered on top of its more intellectual pursuits, and they generally work. At its heart, the book is a story about how people navigate living under power they do not control and the book does not pretend that it has easy answers. People use violence, persuasion, fear, mutual aid, and self-imposed ignorance to fight the sometimes literal monsters that concentrated power produces. Each tactic sometimes works and each tactic sometimes makes things worse. As in the real world, dealing with power is messy and uncertain.
Alchemists of Dawn is the best kind of science fiction/fantasy in my mind. It uses unreal elements to hold a mirror up to the way our real world works, and shows us something interesting and important about it and ourselves. And while this novel has too many ideas to treat all of them with the depth I would like, it does provide a deep and interesting exploration of its core question: how do you live a good life in a world where the power in the world is aligned against that good life? It doesn’t provide easy answers, but it does provide a fun story as you think. Recommended.
Cross-posted at Bookstack