A must read for its vividly imagined world

I liked Stronach's The Dawnhounds. The Sunforge, dissatisfied with merely being liked, grabs the reader by the throat and hauls her into a descent into darkness and grief, into a rich and complex narrative about the death of our world and the looming death of another, about fascism destroying everything it touches and leaving only suffering in its wake, about queer survival in spite of everything, about finding and killing god.

The Dawnhounds was set in a biopunk city—the Sunforge is instead set in a schizotech dieselpunk city with a microwave beam weapon of mass destruction searing the streets, robots run amok, and an nuclear reactor beneath the city about to go critical. Everything is having a bad time or is dead. Fascists are swarming up from the subway tunnels and our cast of queers are just trying to survive. The Dawnhounds had trans, gay, and lesbian characters, but the Sunforge increased the thing, with raw explorations of trans love and trauma, explored both literally through its trans characters and metaphorically through its cis heroines wrestling with another, inhuman self locked away in their skulls that they are terrified to release.

I re-read The Dawnhounds immediately after The Sunforge and I see now how the books fit together, puzzle pieces clicking one into the other to former the larger story of the Endsong series. The Dawnhounds convinced me Stronach is an author to keep an eye on. With The Sunforge I am now certain I am going to read everything she writes. I can hardly wait for book 3.

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