For justice thunders condemnation / A better world's in birth!
Sometimes we wake up mad as hell and decide we aren’t going to take it anymore, but then plod along with our days under neoliberal capitalism and do the same thing we do every weekday, pining for the two days we get off, while feeling our despair at the state of the world exacerbate as we are faced with new horrors both within and beyond our comprehension. But now and then we ask ourselves in irascible voices—can’t we just get rid of the damn thing and start again?
That instinct, that latent discontent that the world feeds as we try to survive, is the core of Jacob Dallas-Main’s fantasy novel They Called Her Rebel, published by Roundfire Books in 2025. It bills itself as “a fantasy novel about late-stage capitalism, people power, and queer love,” and it delivers on all of those.
Your protagonist is a young, working class woman who spends her days toiling away for an insurance company, living in a dorm, and spending credits only on approved goods. But during a major facilities accident, she and her closest friend end up saving the life of a rich heiress with anti-establishment intentions. From there they are whisked into the world of a covert resistance cell seeking to overthrow the corrupt empire that oppresses its own subjects and the world at large.
What I particularly appreciated in the book’s depiction of the revolutionary cell is its heterogeneity. Leftist infighting is a common internet joke, and not without reason, but that so often happens because it is the inevitable consequence of people from so many different walks of life working together for a better world. There are rich and poor, like the wealthy heiress and the main character, whose worldviews and philosophies and attitudes towards the nature of social change are so vastly different, as you’d expect from such radically opposed upbringings. One is genteel, with some respect for decorum, and the latter has only seen such niceties as the velvet glove around the iron fist. I was reminded of a book I once read about the anti-Apartheid resistance in South Africa, with the stark difference between what white and Black South Africans could realistically get away with under such a system.
You may remember that I mentioned that the book’s subtitle mentioned “queer romance,” and I cannot imagine it is terribly surprising to the reader of this review that the aforementioned romance is between the main character and the heiress. In terms of pacing, I found it odd; hinted at, vaguely, in the first third, given a fairly detailed chapter in the second, and left mostly in the background in the final. I will say, though, that Dallas-Main wrote that important chapter, their first date, the great collision of their worldviews, in a very sweet and believable way. The two of them are clearly at odds in so many ways, but you also get why they are falling for each other. There is a pervasive awkwardness there that exists when people who have become used to acting on behalf of others must then seriously talk about themselves, and credit to Dallas-Main for grokking that.
Another aspect of the book that I found to be very interesting, but may give some others pause: the depiction of violence. This is a book written in a radical tradition that does not view nonviolent action as the be-all and end-all of resistance. This is a book whose philosophy has a place for violent direct action directed at an oppressive state; the second act of the book is about the planned assassination of the head of the state religion (which, of course, does not go exactly as planned), something that will probably rankle those of a more liberal or centrist disposition. Readers may find it shocking to contemplate propaganda deed as an alternative to leaflets, but these are the discussions that have historically happened among these groups, and no matter what he believes, I appreciate that Dallas-Main was willing to really discuss this complexity. In our world, we had nonviolent civil rights marches of the like led by Martin Luther King Jr., but we also had the smaller rural marches where peace was asserted through guns. In this manner, this novel reminded me a lot of Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which asks the question “why hasn’t there been large-scale terrorism in light of capitalism’s omnicide of nature?” and then goes on to discuss the peculiar framing of the research that contends that nonviolent resistance is more effective, and how he doesn’t find it particularly convincing.
Another thing I found compelling about this book was the combination of classic fantasy elements with a setting that otherwise feels agonizingly current. You have elves and dwarves and other fantasy races coexisting with a form of capitalism terrifyingly close to our own; in that regard, it’s something like Fonda Lee’s Jade City brought forward a few decades. The religion here is something like modern toxic white evangelicalism under a more centralized hierarchy, something like the Russian Orthodox Church under Vladimir Putin. There is mass media that we would recognize, and a social structure that is distinctively bourgeois. The protagonist’s job in the first third of the book could be right out of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. Like many great works of speculative fiction, this is a funhouse mirror of our world, where the differences serve to emphasize the reality behind it.
This book’s emotional core, beyond its character arcs, is ultimately a form of wish fulfillment that I don’t really see a whole lot in openly leftist fiction. Leftist speculative fiction is generally very heady, very much based on not merely dismantling the old world but also with building another. Kim Stanley Robinson has done a lot of this, like his gargantuan Mars Trilogy, or his New York 2140, the book that ultimately made me a socialist. Robinson is the vanguard of that headier sort; there is also a more romantic sort, the type that focuses on the joy of community and the strength of human interconnection. I would count in this category works such as Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and Eman Abdelhadi’s and E. M. O’Brien’s Everything for Everyone.
They Called Her Rebel is neither of those, partially because it is a fantasy novel, and therefore in a genre traditionally more concerned with whimsy than with theorizing. The core emotional pull of this book is not the possibility of designing a better system, or living a life without the isolation and alienation of contemporary capitalism, but rather a life in the warmth of community. To the contrary, this is a novel that is selling a fantasy of revenge. This story is about being given the chance to strike a meaningful blow against neoliberal capitalism and its attendant miseries, a mode of resistance that cannot be co-opted. The book has plenty of violence, including scenes of outright warfare against the government, and they are all told thrillingly, but it isn’t exactly an intellectual stimulation there. It’s the emotion that made so many Americans cheer Luigi Mangione as a hero. On the one hand, part of me worries that this sort of catharsis may lead to hasty thinking, but on the other hand, I have to respect the fact that Dallas-Main has chosen a side, the side of messy, uncompromising zeal, and asks you to live with what that would truly mean.
I do wonder, though, if he undoes his thematic premise just a tad with the fact that the plot is kicked off by a rich reformer. Capitalism traditionally tries to defang mass movements by hyperfocusing on single individuals, as well as crediting change to the elites that responded to mass movements rather than mass movements themselves. It is the presence of this rich woman who allows the core cast (herself included) to meet, but on the other hand, it is the main character’s choice to help her that really starts the plot rolling. Taken another way, this first third is about how any spark can light a pile of kindling, and it can come from the unlikeliest of places. I enjoyed this novel enough to give Dallas-Main some grace.
They Called Her Rebel is an anguished roar against the state of the world, a novel that is doing something akin to Bertolt Brecht’s distancing effect, but with setting rather than character. The focus of most fantasy novels is to get lost in another world with characters that you have come to cherish. Dallas-Main very much wants you to identify with your protagonist, but wants you to go farther than simply immersing yourself in the world. Much as Brecht wanted his plays to start riots, Dallas-Main wants you to take a hard look at your circumstances and find the hope that you can change it. All fiction, speculative fiction very much included, is a way of making sense of the world in varying degrees of metaphor. Dallas-Main here channels what Karl Marx said: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
Reference: Dallas-Main, Jacob. They Called Her Rebel [Roundfire Books, 2025].
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
