James Nicoll Reviews

2025’s Blight is the second volume in Rachel A. Rosen’s The Sleep of Reason apocalyptic fantasy series.

In the wake of the cataclysmic Blight, Director of the Dominion¹ Quinn Atherton is determined to provide the Dominion with peace, order, good government… oh, and a lot of mass graves filled with the ethnically unfashionable, dissidents, and the unwisely frank. While progress in the matters of peace, order, and good government is mixed at best, the Dominion has excelled in the field of filling mass graves.

Of course, every ambitious government faces nattering nabobs of negativity. Take Lucy Fletcher, for example.

Lucy Fletcher, famed opera singer, has a comfortable and as-safe-as-is-possible-under-the-current-circumstances job as a regime-approved entertainer. Her journalist husband Tobias was not so lucky. His frankness sent him to a prison cell and eventually death. Some in Lucy’s position might take Tobias’ fate as a hint not to annoy the regime. Lucy instead defects to the Mackenzie-Papineaus.

The Mackenzie-Papineaus AKA the Mac-Paps, are terrorists as far the Dominion is concerned, although no doubt they prefer the term freedom fighters. The Mac-Paps don’t have much use for a singer, but as a trusted minion of the regime, Lucy has access to carefully hidden secrets. That’s enough for her to win an audience with the Mac-Pap’s Maya.

Lucy’s biggest revelation: seer Ian Mallory isn’t dead. Rather, he is a prisoner of the regime, a key component of a bold magical R&D program that thus far is better at delivering casualties than results.

Elsewhere, Blythe Augustine deals with her grief over her daughter’s murder at the hands of a Silicon Valley Autonomous Region (SVAR) patrol ship by doing what she can to assist other refugees to escape the Dominion. Among the costs, a mounting debt to SVAR, which dominates the west coast region in which Blythe lives.

The SVAR are libertarian tech-bros. The Dominion are fascists. While arguably equally awful, they should be also natural enemies because while the SVAR embraces magic, the Dominion officially distrusts it. So why does the evidence suggest that the SVAR and the Dominion are quietly allying? What can be done to prevent the formation of an axis of assholes against which North America would be helpless?

Step one: free Ian. Step two: Revolution in the streets of Toronto!

~oOo~

Fighting fascism is hungry work. No doubt Maya and her friends would like a nice bowl of soup. Prudent revolutionaries own copies of The Sad Bastard Cookbook, recipes for Food You Can Cook So You Don’t Die.

Readers around the world see Canadians as paragons of virtue, wise, generous, and possessed of every virtue, foremost among them, modesty. This is not entirely true. From time to time there has been the occasional Canadian whom no sensible person would take as their model. Please do not embrace despair because of this revelation.

Not so much a complaint as a rambling, poor-structured observation. Yet again, we are presented with a reactionary fascist government that’s surprisingly effective at accomplishing their goals, at least when those goals are achievable. The Dominion can even abandon lines of research when the evidence suggests they are dead ends². Yes, the rank-and-file “Cleaners” are mass-murderous knuckleheads, but Atherton and company pursue their (admittedly deranged) goals competently.

It would be nice to see more fascist governments in fiction that are burdened with time-servers, con artists, and lunatics, which results in self-sabotaging internal conflict. I understand why we don’t (supervillains are more fun), but the effect is to make goons look more competent than they are.

This book falls into the set of novels where it seems that it may not be possible for humans and magic to coexist, adapted as we are for magicless worlds. Too bad for humans that we can’t control the inroads of magic. The choices are adapt or die.

This novel was a grim read… but not without moments of hope. Yes, the bad guys have advanced technology, an ample supply of bombs, and the willingness to use them. This does not translate into inevitable victory. The regimes have proved quite successful at convincing their foes to rise up. If being defeated by the regimes or willingly submitting lead to the same dismal fate, why not try to take some of the bastards with you? Who knows? Maybe you will win.

Blight is available here (Bumblepuppy Press), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

I did not find Blight at Bookshop UK.

1: The nation formerly known as Canada. But at least there still is a Canada, however dismal. USA delenda.

2: Nobody is quite sure why some people gain magical gifts and others do not, but what is clear is that not only can magic not be transferred from one person to another, it’s a bad idea to try.