Reading Wednesday
Nov. 29th, 2017 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Everfair by Nisi Shawl. A steampunk alt-history of the Belgian Congo. (Summary of the real-world history, though trigger warning for about everything ever. When even Wikipedia is almost unreadably horrifying, you know it's a bad time. As a side note, Everfair itself is not nearly as traumatic as it could be. Atrocities are mentioned, but they happen off-screen and without detail.) Or at least that's how the book is generally described, though in fact that summary only covers the first half; Everfair goes on to follow its characters through WWI, the Spanish influenza epidemic, and a local civil war, encompassing about thirty years overall through the eyes of at least a dozen main characters.
My own summary: a group of settlers (both black and white, American and European, socialist atheists and Christian missionaries – all forced together to share resources) buys land in the Congo from the Belgian government and moves there with the specific goal of somehow helping the local people against their oppressors. They are shortly afterwards joined by a group of Chinese, escapees from forced labor under the Belgians. Together, they name their new settlement Everfair. Although they ultimately succeed in this original mission, the community is torn apart by its internal divisions as well as the difficulty of integrating the immigrants with the already-established African kingdom they have dropped into the middle of, not to mention somehow establishing a recognized modern independent country in the early part of the 20th century.
There is a lot to love about this book. If the image of nuclear-powered zeppelins staffed with African tribal warriors dropping bombs on Belgian colonizers does not get your heart pumping, you need more joy in your life. There are multiple queer (lesbian particularly) romances and poly romances. There are characters with good intentions who nonetheless fuck up spectacularly. There are disabled characters, and the awesome bronze gear-powered prosthetics invented to replace their missing limbs. There are assassination attempts and devious characters manipulating propaganda for their own ends. There are magic charms that really work, including a swarm of bees to rekindle a lost love and a school for spies that teaches girls to shapeshift into cats. There is a beautiful, worldly, shrewd queen, who makes alliances and offers advice; a French spy who writes stories about talking animals; a Chinese engineer who designs better and better airships; a greedy young black woman from small-town Florida who's determined to find fame on the stage; a Protestant reverend who finds himself chosen by the Yoruba god of lightning and metal.
It's all pretty great! And yet, and yet... if only there was more room for any of it to breathe. Which is my main complaint: there's so damn much going on here. Everfair is only about 400 pages long, but the content could easily have filled a seven-volume series of doorstoppers. As it is, wars come and go, romances are formed and broken, children are born and reach adulthood, but it all happens so quickly and ephemerally that it's hard to emotionally engage with any of it. Everfair reads more like a series of loosely-connected vignettes than a novel, and as much as I admire its ambition, I don't think Shawl quite pulled off a successful work. The ideas are wonderful, but they're missing the depth of exploration they need.
Still. They are some pretty great ideas.
What are you currently reading?
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes by Adam Rutherford. Nonfiction about ancient DNA. It's getting off to a slow start, but I have high hopes.
Everfair by Nisi Shawl. A steampunk alt-history of the Belgian Congo. (Summary of the real-world history, though trigger warning for about everything ever. When even Wikipedia is almost unreadably horrifying, you know it's a bad time. As a side note, Everfair itself is not nearly as traumatic as it could be. Atrocities are mentioned, but they happen off-screen and without detail.) Or at least that's how the book is generally described, though in fact that summary only covers the first half; Everfair goes on to follow its characters through WWI, the Spanish influenza epidemic, and a local civil war, encompassing about thirty years overall through the eyes of at least a dozen main characters.
My own summary: a group of settlers (both black and white, American and European, socialist atheists and Christian missionaries – all forced together to share resources) buys land in the Congo from the Belgian government and moves there with the specific goal of somehow helping the local people against their oppressors. They are shortly afterwards joined by a group of Chinese, escapees from forced labor under the Belgians. Together, they name their new settlement Everfair. Although they ultimately succeed in this original mission, the community is torn apart by its internal divisions as well as the difficulty of integrating the immigrants with the already-established African kingdom they have dropped into the middle of, not to mention somehow establishing a recognized modern independent country in the early part of the 20th century.
There is a lot to love about this book. If the image of nuclear-powered zeppelins staffed with African tribal warriors dropping bombs on Belgian colonizers does not get your heart pumping, you need more joy in your life. There are multiple queer (lesbian particularly) romances and poly romances. There are characters with good intentions who nonetheless fuck up spectacularly. There are disabled characters, and the awesome bronze gear-powered prosthetics invented to replace their missing limbs. There are assassination attempts and devious characters manipulating propaganda for their own ends. There are magic charms that really work, including a swarm of bees to rekindle a lost love and a school for spies that teaches girls to shapeshift into cats. There is a beautiful, worldly, shrewd queen, who makes alliances and offers advice; a French spy who writes stories about talking animals; a Chinese engineer who designs better and better airships; a greedy young black woman from small-town Florida who's determined to find fame on the stage; a Protestant reverend who finds himself chosen by the Yoruba god of lightning and metal.
It's all pretty great! And yet, and yet... if only there was more room for any of it to breathe. Which is my main complaint: there's so damn much going on here. Everfair is only about 400 pages long, but the content could easily have filled a seven-volume series of doorstoppers. As it is, wars come and go, romances are formed and broken, children are born and reach adulthood, but it all happens so quickly and ephemerally that it's hard to emotionally engage with any of it. Everfair reads more like a series of loosely-connected vignettes than a novel, and as much as I admire its ambition, I don't think Shawl quite pulled off a successful work. The ideas are wonderful, but they're missing the depth of exploration they need.
Still. They are some pretty great ideas.
What are you currently reading?
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes by Adam Rutherford. Nonfiction about ancient DNA. It's getting off to a slow start, but I have high hopes.
