On the Merits of Unnaturalness

On the Merits of Unnaturalness is a forty-page ebook that presents itself as a document from inside the world of Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series. It is a pamphlet circulated anonymously among the clairvoyants of a dystopian society. It is neither a novel nor a short story in the usual sense.

Within the fiction, the pamphlet comes from the voyant Jaxon Hall, who later becomes known as the mime-lord the White Binder. He is the first to catalogue the known and suspected forms of clairvoyant "Unnaturalness". He sorts them into a system called the Seven Orders.

The text follows what happens when that system gets out. As the pamphlet passes through the voyant underworld, it reshapes the social order of the syndicate. It also sets the newly defined categories against one another in gang conflict.

Bloomsbury published it as an ebook on 7 April 2016. It works as lore and world-building for readers who already know the Bone Season novels, not as a place to begin the series. What it offers is the classification scheme that structures the clairvoyant underworld of those books, set out as an in-world argument that starts a fight.