This was excellent - I was lucky enough to get an advance copy from the publisher, and it's right up my alley. I always enjoy reading different types of utopias, and this one was particularly environmentally focused, which is especially relevant right now. I also very much appreciated how much diversity was built into this utopian setting: it's a feature of the cultures represented that they realise that not everyone wants to live the same way, so the potential to adapt and split off and live in different configurations and different types of societies has been carefully integrated into the world-building. (One of my typical first responses to any utopia is "Okay, but who is this utopia for, exactly?" and that's frequently a lot less addressed than it is in dystopias, so it was good to see that this had clearly been carefully considered in Inversion.)

Unsurprisingly, there's an outside threat to the utopia of Germinal, and while the threat itself is less interesting to me (there's only so much that can be mined, I think, from the desire to force the same sterile existence on the entire universe) the real focus on this side of the conflict is not the antagonist, but on the people who have been forced to work for him. There's a fine line between victim and accomplice here, but McBay handles it well by always treating Graft with a thoughtful sense of dignity that balances sympathy with the growing realisation that sympathy alone is not enough - not for Graft, or for Germinal, or even for the reader. It's just all very very well done, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.