Summaries of the plot suggest a conventional romance story with a fantasy backdrop, but there's a lot more going on than I expected. "What if Notes from the Underground were a fantasy of manners," how I felt reading it.

The framing device is a trio of academic type men imagining a secondary world where magic has been developed in place of gunpowder. The framing segments  position the story as artificial in the second degree; it is not to be taken solely as the preoccupations of the actual author but of those of the fictional imaginers as well.

The story is very reflective, but primarily from the perspective of its unlucky protagonists, which (especially given the framing device) does more to characterize them than to be Real Authorial Opinions about politics, religion and sex. That's good because these characters are not having a good time and there's a thorough misanthropy that colors their meditations. 

Theres very little expository infodumping, and what there is is usually in character and frustrated at one of the protagonists for being dense or failing to know something that they should already. This is a pretty early work in the scheme of secondary world fantasy, and yet it felt like it was doing a sendup of the, "as you well know," style of exposition that is cliche in that genre.

The treatment of sex deserves note; this is one of the least sexy stories I've read for the number of sex scenes it has. They genuinely don't seem to be written to titillate, but (like the political reflections) to characterize. Rodvard kind of sucks, but he doesn't want to suck, and watching him fuck up in his relationships with women is honestly an interesting way to explore that.

My main hesitation is the couple of, "no becomes yes in time for penetrative sex," moments. However, these are frankly realistic and effective characterization. I'll also give this romance from 1952 credit for actually being interested in giving us an explicit "yes," even if it's not clear that the scene would have stopped without it.

I don't have much to say about the book's politics, other than to say that despite portraying two (Amorosian and Sons of the New Day) distinctly flawed revolutions, it does seem like there's an effort not to conclude that revolution per se is always flawed. I'll take it, honestly.