“Everyone said they were against violence until violence seemed able to solve a problem that was close enough to throttle,” protagonist Alefret muses in Premee Mohamed’s novel The Siege of Burning Grass (382). The Siege follows someone struggling to solve problems peacefully in a world where war seemingly makes every issue “close enough to throttle.” This science fiction novel explores the limits and power of pacifism in a modern world of internecine violence.

Alefret’s odyssey begins in a fictional world vaguely resembling our own where two superpowers, Varkallagi and the Meddon, are locked in year-long rapacious war. Imprisoned and tortured for his peaceful activism among the Varkallagi, Alefret agrees to help his government infiltrate the last Meddon stronghold, exacting promises from his co-conspirators to avoid bloodshed. However, Alefret’s torturer and minder Qhudur sees little reason words should stop him from taking the most expedient path to ending the war, and it falls to Alefret to choose how far he is willing to go to avoid violence in the face of a tantalizing end to the conflict.

The strength of The Siege inheres in the novel’s balance of ethical dilemma with embodied prose. Alefret and Qhudur exhaustively debate pacifism throughout their encounters with the ravages of mechanized warfare and scorched-earth tactics. But the struggle for peace hits hardest when Alefret pushes up against his personal limits—the leg amputation he received from his own government’s bomb, his status as a political prisoner, and the ableism of strangers judging him monstrous by his congenital disfigurement. Combined with Mohamed’s lyrical, surreal writing, pacifism stands out as a challenging but rewarding path through pain. In particular, Alefret’s struggle with the eugenics of his bloodthirsty opponents leads to some of the novel’s most moving scenes. Indeed, while The Siege is not a clearly allegorical book, Mohamed’s bio-engineered and automatic weapons, starvation tactics, and “double-tap” bombing (the reprehensible act of bombing a target once and then shortly thereafter to kill first responders, discussed in this Guardian article by Peter Beaumont about the War on Gaza) ground the narrative in nightmarishly familiar territory. Alefret’s struggle is therefore against not just one war but all of them.

If The Siege has a weakness, it’s that this meditation on pacifism comes to an abrupt conclusion. Important characters occasionally get lost in the narrative in the final act, and Alefret’s ultimate confrontation ends suddenly, almost tidily. However, as a story of a man’s agonized work against hostility, Mohamed’s conclusion resounds with the ringing call to continue his work. Both in The Siege of Burning Grass and our own world, peace is vitally important, and this novel offers thoughtful considerations on how to achieve it.