Everfair

Nisi Shawl
Completed 9/18/2025, Reviewed 9/21/2025
4 stars

I really wanted to love this book.  It has an awesome premise.  It’s an alternate history of Belgian Congo colonization where a group of people acquire part of the territory from Leopold II and try to turn it into a haven and utopia for the native peoples, the slaves of Belgium, the slaves of the US, Chinese forced laborers, and white people from Europe and the US.  Their economy is based on steam and dirigibles.  And they all fight against the oppression of the colonizers.  Unfortunately, the book suffered from too many characters, POVs, and jumps in the timeline.  While I liked many characters, I found it hard to love and empathize with them.  Still, the book is impressive for the topics it tackles, the grand sweep of alternate history, and the detail of the characters’ personalities.  This book was nominated for a 2016 Nebula Award, among others. 

Lisette is a young Belgian woman who has fallen in love with a man who is part of the Fabian society.  The Fabians join with missionaries to purchase land in the Congo from the despotic Leopold II.  Lisette finds out that her amour actually has a wife named Daisy, another lover, and several children.  Nonetheless, she enters this little non-traditional household.  They move to the acquired land in the Congo, which they call Everfair and begin to found a new country.  Tink, a Chinese man and tinker, helps Everfair with his amazing mechanical talent, creating metal prostheses for people who have lost limbs to Leopold’s cruelty and creating an engineering infrastructure for the country through the use of steam.  There is the king and queen of a local tribe.  There is Martha, the missionary, though black, tries to impose Christian doctrine and principles on the population.  Through changing POVs, the story follows their progress keeping the forces of Leopold out, enhancing their own society, and dealing with the outside world from the late 1800s through World War I.  

My biggest problem with the book was that the characters were all richly developed.  However, because the book followed so many POVs, it was hard to completely empathize and feel intimate with them all.  The closest I came was with Lisette, particularly when her lover goes back to Europe with his other lover and his youngest son, she finds solace in Daisy.  The two women have a short affair, but events separate them physically and emotionally.  Still, they both end up being founding mothers of Everfair.  Tink was also intriguing, building the dirigibles and all the prosthesis limbs.   He falls in love with One of Daisy’s daughters, causing ripples in their society over their interracial relationship.  The same goes for Daisy’s son George who falls for the older black missionary Martha.  Despite Martha’s initial protestation, they marry.  The King and Queen were also interesting as they come to grips with a modern society over their traditional African tribal society.  

Despite trying to have a utopian society, there is still systemic racism present.  There’s the cringeworthy effort by Daisy to establish a national holiday for a white, British man who was one of the architects of Everfair.  There are the interracial relationships between Africans, Europeans and Americans, and the Chinese laborers that are met with varying degrees of acceptance and disdain.  There’s Martha’s efforts to establish Christianity among the “heathens”.  Lastly, there is the adoption of English as the national language rather than a local language.  

Still, the book is an incredible fifty or so year epic boiled down to a little under four hundred pages.  Did Shawl bite off more than she could chew here?  Perhaps.  However the prose is sumptuous without being pretentious, the world building amazing, and the alternate history sweeping.  I give the book four stars out of five because it is better than a three star “good” but lacking the emotional response I get from five star books.  I saw and spoke with Shawl a few months ago at Seattle WorldCon.  She’s sharp and witty.  I know she is more known for her short fiction, but I wanted to try her first novel.  I will read the sequel in a month or so, but I also want to find her short works as they are regarded so highly.