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    Everfair
    Everfair
    Everfair
    Audiobook12 hours

    Everfair

    Written by Nisi Shawl

    Narrated by Allyson Johnson

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Everfair is a wonderful Neo-Victorian alternate history novel that explores the question of what might have come of Belgium's disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier. Fabian Socialists from Great Britian join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo's "owner," King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated.

    Nisi Shawl's speculative masterpiece manages to turn one of the worst human rights disasters on record into a marvelous and exciting exploration of the possibilities inherent in a turn of history. Everfair is told from a multiplicity of voices: Africans, Europeans, East Asians, and African Americans in complex relationships with one another, in a compelling range of voices that have historically been silenced. Everfair is not only a beautiful book but an educational and inspiring one that will give the reader new insight into an often ignored period of history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 11, 2016
    ISBN9781515983033
    Everfair
    Author

    Nisi Shawl

    Nisi Shawl (they/them) is a writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories and a journalist. They are the co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction. Their short stories have appeared in Asimov's, Strange Horizons, and numerous other magazines and anthologies.

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    Reviews for Everfair

    3.5/5

    101 ratings10 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Abandoned at the halfway point. I love the idea of the central premise but too many incoherently portrayed characters make it so I cannot force myself to turn another page. Reading through other online reviews I see I am not the only one with this reaction.
    • 1/5
      Got most of the way through, on the strength of the worldbuilding, which was great. But I stopped listening because the different stories that make up the book all got so disconnected that I didn't have any characters or plot to really grab onto and I just lost interest.
    • 5/5
      I don't read a lot of steampunk, but I do enjoy alternative histories. Re-imagining the brutal period of Belgian rule in central Africa that gives African people agency, freedom from their oppressors, and allies from other parts of the world trying to establish a Utopia? (Even if there is privilege and colonization in that allyship?) Yes, please.I really enjoyed the multiple and diverse perspectives in this book - European, African, USian, Asian, male, female, gender-non-conforming, straight, queer, lesbian, even a little bit of poly. Love books that do this.The book is quite epic in scope - 30 years or so - and this is accomplished by typically jumping months, if not years, between chapters. I found this frustrating at times (I really wanted to see the scene that happened next, but the next chapter was months past the scene I wanted to read). However, the author still captures intimate scenes and rich character development in the chapters she does include. It's impressive.
    • 5/5
      With Everfair, Nisi Shawl not only redraws the steampunk map, she reworks history itself, revealing points at which change is entirely within our grasp. Within this sweeping narrative, Everfair's characters are beautifully drawn, yet treated with such a level gaze that one expects to find all of them in history books upon finishing the novel. Interlacing subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in hearts, minds, and communities against the background of the rubber trade, WWI, and King Leopold's reign, Shawl builds a fulcrum for change. In short, Everfair embodies wonder: both technologically, as is familiar to fans of the genre, and in the matters of possibility and hope. Nisi Shawl has breathed new life into the genre.

      (From my blurb of Everfair. Reader, I loved it.)
    • 4/5
      This is not an easy novel to read. It took me two weeks, reading with care and patience and, frankly, sometimes needing to take a break. But it is worth the heavy-going. Shawl's careful historicism, the details clear and real even in the context of the alternate history she is writing, makes the weight of the novel evident from the beginning. Her formal and sometimes even academic prose might put off a reader who comes to the book expecting the breezy adventure that the "steampunk" label implies. This is a very different kind of steampunk. Where other novels in the subgenre often ignore questions of colonialism and empire, Shawl focuses her, and our, attention on the imperially-founded mass murders and mass exploitation that took place in the Congo in the late 1800s. Her characters are a mix of native, European, and American people of varying colors, each of whom has a perspective and a stake in overthrowing or escaping the colonial enterprise and its violence. But, as with history, nothing in the novel is simple; relationships form and fall apart much like colonies or intended utopias, and the book follows those efforts with measured care. The book's pace -- which leaps over significant stretches of time from chapter to chapter, particularly in the first half, making each chapter feel almost like an isolated episode rather than a piece of a larger narrative -- may thwart many readers. There is no whirlwind of adventure here; instead, the slow unfolding of espionage, religious conversion, machine-building -- a kind of cross between steampunk thriller and a Ken Burns historical documentary is the resulting tone. Though the airships and mechanical wonders of steampunk are present, it takes time and patience to get to them, and their inspiration comes from violence rather than mere whimsy. Mechanical arms, for example, become necessary because the all-too-historically-real representatives of King Leopold of Belgium tend to chop off the hands of children. Shawl does not hesitate to sink the reader into those details and more, making the reading of the book at times uncomfortable. But sticking with it rewards the careful reader with a lot to think about and more to appreciate. Impeccable research, thoughtful and oh-so-human characters, and a strong awareness of culture make this book stick with you long after you've closed the covers. In truth, Shawl has blown open what steampunk can really be. This is a serious book and one that I honestly expect will only become more significant with time.
    • 4/5
      This is an amazing alternate history of the area now called Zaire; Shawl combines steampunk, Afrofuturist, African mysticism and history into a kaleidoscopic novel that explores colonialism, imperialism, race issues, and other complexities through a group of characters including historical figures.
    • 4/5
      I've read some very mixed reviews on this book, so I kept talking myself out of buying it, but when I saw it at the library it seemed high time to develop my own opinion.

      This is a sprawling, ambitious, steampunk alternative history. It alternates between narrators from an impressive diversity of backgrounds -- Lisette, a "passing" French woman whose tiny fraction of African ancestry comes to define her over and over; black American evangelical missionaries, intent on bringing "the good word back to Africa," white European atheist would-be social engineers, an ousted king, a Chinese steampunk inventor, etc. The story starts out with a lot of promise, and I was enraptured a good third of the way through, all the way in and wondering what people were complaining about. But right about that time it becomes clear that the book isn't going to end with the resolution of the revolt against King Leopold, the book starts to falter. I wondered if this book wouldn't have been more successful as two volumes, if it didn't take on too much, give voice to too many characters.

      But they are such interesting characters, and it's such an interesting world that I stayed plenty engaged, despite wishing for more focus in certain places. I'm very likely to pick up another book by Shawl in the future.
    • 5/5
      Everfair - Nisi Shawl It's an alternate history in which a genocide doesn't happen.
      It's about a utopian society that isn't so cleverly set up as to avoid all problems, but in which people work to find different, practical, solutions.
      It's steampunk that feels utterly plausible.
      It's a book that acknowledges the tremendous breadth and depth of people and cultures throughout Africa, although it focuses on one nation.
      It is a marvelous accomplishment in every sense of the word, and I'm sure it's going to be one of my top reads for the year, and probably every other reader's list, because it is a book that makes you go "ohhh" and "ahhh", that constantly delights and surprises, even though it is addressing many of the darkest aspects of colonialism.
      It's a book that reminded me of how new and appealing are the many voices in scifi these days, and actually makes me feel optimistic about humanity.
      Sweet, fancy Moses, it's just a great, sweeping Victorian "ills of society" novel, such as those of Charles Dickens, but with a light touch. It's just perfect.

      Now goo, read it right away, unless you're devoting October to horror, in which case, okay, but then you have to start it on November first.

      ARC provided by publisher via GoodReads
    • 3/5
      Everfair is a novel that collapses partly under the sheer weight of its ambition. Yet for all that, it still contains some interesting ideas at its core.Essentially, Everfair is a steampunk novel taking place in the Belgian Congo. A group comprised of an odd melding of Fabian Socialists and African American missionaries joins forces to purchase land from King Leopold II to ideally create an utopia, Everfair. But the group soon comes into conflict with King Leopold and with itself.The good news is that Everfair doesn’t annoy me the way a lot of steampunk novels tend to. I feel like too often steampunk novels just take the aesthetic and use it without rhyme or reason, putting very little thought into the divergences of their world from ours. Steampunk stories are also almost always centered on either Europe or America and can overlook the forces of colonization. Everfair doesn’t fall into these traps and instead feels thoughtful and purposeful in its construction of an alternate history.So what’s Everfair‘s problem? It spans thirty years and three wars, and the result is a narrative that feels rushed instead of in depth and focused. I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if it had cut down on it’s time span (maybe moving the later years to a sequel) and had a smaller range of POV characters. As is it felt hard to connect with anyone because we only got brief flashes of their lives. I spent a lot of the novel feeling like I was just grinding through it, and I would not have finished if this hadn’t been an ARC.I think Everfair was fairly effective at showing the racial divide within the supposed utopia. For one thing, the settlers bought the land from King Leopold instead of from the native and display not a little arrogance in thinking the land belongs to them. However, like most of the book, these themes may have benefited from more page time.I’m not adverse to trying out other works by Nisi Shawls, but I think Everfair was lacking in execution. Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.I received an ARC of Everfair from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
    • 4/5
      This book had a really interesting structure. Some combination of factors—the tense it is written in, the fact that jumps of sometimes ten years occur between short chapters, a general forward-looking perspective—makes each chapter feel like a prologue. That, and that fact that a date of death is provided for each character in the dramatis personae at the beginning, have the ultimate effect of really driving home the "history" part of this alternate history. It feels like a story in a history book explaining how things got the way they are—like the real story will begin once this book is over—but the story told in its pages is very different from that which actually occurred. The depiction of a drastically altered past in this manner left me thinking, as I think was intended, about the possibility that a few individuals and their actions can have markedly powerful effects on the present, forever altering what is possible for those in the future, for better or for worse.