So, cards on the table: I was the editor who bought Adam Rakunas’s first published story. I mention this not to make claims upon his subsequent success, but to confess a bias on my part to the themes that animate his work. 2008’s “The Right People” was concerned with social networks—presciently so, with hindsight—but there were already numerous writers sketching that oncoming iceberg; what really sold the piece was the way it situated the impact of change in the social dynamics of a community, rather than focussing on individuals.

So I’m pleased to see that social focus sustained in his second novel. A continuation of the characters and world of Windswept, Like A Boss stars smart-mouthed rum distillery owner Padma Mehta, who’s trying to hold together her business, her sanity and her whole home town in the wake of a massive disruption of Santee City’s fragile socioeconomic balance. Padma’s backstory includes a stint as a reluctant yet righteous union organiser, and as the jeopardy starts piling up—frequent bombings, marches and riots make this a rather Zeitgeisty tale—the struggle between Padma’s self-preservation and her social responsibility acts as a mirror for the fragmented and factional conflict that’s tearing this city of stubborn refuseniks apart.

Or, more succinctly: Like A Boss is a science fiction novel which unashamedly foregrounds the social mechanics of labour movement organisation. There are those to whom such a theme will always seem “worthy” (say it with your lip curled in a sneer), and there is certainly an extent to which Santee City is a utopian creation—but that’s only a problem if you choose to parse utopias as blueprints rather than thought experiments. The question at the heart of Like A Boss isn’t “how could a unionised cane-cutting planet give the finger to corporate capitalism?”, but “how do you get marginalised people to come together in the face of divisive rhetorics orchestrated by structural power?” Which isn’t to say you’d want to use it as a manual for would-be union organisers, especially given how Rakunas doesn’t flinch from highlighting corruption and ossified power on all sides… but it makes an accessible argument in favour of unions in principle, which is more than any union in this country has managed since Thatcher.

The necessities of utopian texts are manifest in the novel, and not always to the benefit of literary standards: the whole point of the secondary-world setting is that it’s socioeconomically distinct from the reader’s world, and so there has to be some socioeconomic exposition in order that the reader understands what’s actually happening on-stage. But it’s done with a deft hand, and it helps that Rakunas’s prose style—dialogue-led, and replete with endearingly overblown banter—keeps things squarely in the vernacular, so it rarely feels that the characters are infodumping for your benefit. That’s in contrast to, say, Cory Doctorow’s rebel-raising YA novels of recent years, with which I feel Like A Boss bears some similarities: the breakneck pacing, sassy protagonists, and anti-authoritarian agenda, f’rex. But Doctorow tends more toward the didactic, zooming in on the individual’s use of the technological tools of sedition and protest, while Rakunas keeps the community dynamics and rhetorical jousting of street politics front and centre.

So if you’re looking to corrupt young minds and turn them against our neoliberal overlords—and why would you not?—you’ll wanna give them Doctorow, so they know how to fight the system. But first you’ll wanna give them Rakunas, so they know what they’re fighting for.