Nisi Shawl's Everfair

Tomorrow sees the US release of Nisi Shawl’s long-awaited African steampunk novel Everfair, a book that asks the question: what if the people of the Congo had access to steam power and technology in the nineteenth century, before they were colonized by Belgium? We invited Nisi to come say a few words about her book here.

I told Djibril I would write a paragraph about my novel Everfair. I’d rather offer you something different to read, though: thoughts on this novel’s growth medium. Everfair, I’d better first tell you, is a steampunk novel that’s primarily set in an imaginary Utopia in late 19th and early 20th century central Africa.

So where’d it come from? Yes, I’m the one who wrote my novel’s text. I had help, though. People gave me money, and ideas, and medicine, and food. Books. Flowers. Tea. Places to stay. They combed my hair, treated me with acupuncture, trimmed my toenails. That nurturing environment is what I’m calling Everfair’s growth medium. It holds my novel’s roots.

In my WisCon 35 Guest of Honor speech I proposed the idea that genius is not the manifestation of a single being but of a whole community. I said the same thing on Everfair’s acknowledgments page. I don’t know if what I’m manifesting is genius, but I’m very sure it’s an expression of my community and our concerns, from the pleasures of steeping ourselves in the sensory delights of technology to the ambiguities of fully nuanced interactions between a supposedly united mind’s conflicting yet simultaneously held beliefs.

My community is where Everfair is rooted, where it derives from.

And, in a truly fair turnabout, my community is also the atmosphere into which my novel unfurls itself and the light towards which it reaches.

When you read it, Everfair is fulfilled.

One early reviewer claims my novel is an “important entry in the movement for greater diversity in sf.” It only enters the movement through your eyes, though. It’s only important when it’s important to you.

Thank you for reading my book.

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In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said of Everfair, “A compelling debut novel … Shawl deftly wields a diverse cast of characters to impressive effect, taking readers from the Victorian era to WWI and its aftermath. This highly original story blends steampunk and political intrigue in a compelling new view of a dark piece of human history.”

Nisi Shawl has posted on her website various teasers and extras, including photos of objects that inspired the story, an essay on sexuality and morals in 19th century Congo, the outline of a play performed in the novel, and other materials. There is also an extract of Everfair at the Macmillan website, where you can buy or preorder the novel.

Postcolonial SF/F Twit-fiction writing contest

If you haven't yet read the postcolonial speculative fiction anthology edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad, We See a Different Frontier, here is a chance to win a copy, and a great bunch of other goodies, simply by writing a <140-character microstory.

The rules of the contest are simple:

1. Write your colonialism-themed SFF microstory from the perspective of the colonized (full story guidelines as per the original CFS) in 124 characters or less.
2. Tweet your microstory with the hashtags #twitfic #WSaDF by midnight UTC, November 6th, 2013.
3. Multiple entries per author are allowed.
4. Stories will be judged by Amal El-Mohtar, Fabio Fernandes and Nisi Shawl.
5. One winning microstory will receive a paperback copy of the We See a Different Frontier anthology sent in the mail (an alternative prize of a pb of Outlaw Bodies may be offered if you already own a copy), plus a signed copy of Ernest Hogan's Smoking Mirror Blues, the new Crossed Genres superhero anthology Oomph, and the steampunk anthology Journeys in the Winterlands.
6. Runners-up prizes will include e-books of WSaDF or Outlaw Bodies, and Oomph.
7. The winning microstories may be reproduced by Futurefire.net Publishing in promotion for the anthology, but beyond that they belong to the authors.

Guest post: I Hear a Different Frontier by Nisi Shawl

Fellow geniuses, I have things to tell you that you probably already know. But you may know them in different ways than I do.

For instance, my friend Jaymee Goh knows about postcolonial science fiction and fantasy the way a woman much younger than me would, and in the way someone who was born and has lived most of her life outside the US would, and in the way of someone who has traveled much further into the figurative world of academia than I. So when she was interviewed in early June on the topic of writing postcolonial SF, and a questioner asked, “Do you think belonging to a Non-Western (sic) culture is essential to write a really good, convincing story about it? Being an outsider to the culture you want to write about is an enriching or empoverishing (sic) experience (or it doesn’t matter in the end)?” her reply was much longer and more considered than mine, and also more revealing. I would have said something like, “I refuse to answer your stupid.” Or, in a more cooperative mood I would have talked about my own experience writing about a culture from its outside, which requires work, which I guess might be equated with “empoverishment.”

Not Jaymee, though. She bestowed on the questioner several paragraphs of weighty thoughtfulness while flipping the power dynamic inherent in interview and interrogation right around. She noted that describing non-Western cultures from the perspective of their conquerors, or the perspective of their conquerors’ heirs, is quite a longstanding tradition. My favorite line from her response: "I really have to question why any one writer would ask such a question, and am hard-pressed to come up with any other answer besides 'seeking validation.'" Which validation she then proceeded to deny them.

A couple of weeks before that interchange, I appeared on the “Cultural Not-Appropriation” panel at WisCon 36 with Diantha Sprouse, Sofia Samatar, and Daniel José Older, our moderator. Diantha I’d known for several years, but Sofia and Daniel were new to me.

Daniel is a something of coreligionist—his practice of Lucumi and mine of Ifa are closely related—so that’s a perspective on empire we share, along with US birth and residency. But Daniel’s also younger than me, plus he’s male, and he speaks Spanish. We both differ from colonizers’ cultural paradigms, but in different ways. Our experiences of postcolonialism, and postcolonial speculative fiction, are different. Like yours and mine.

Which is where I would have come from if I’d been seriously answering the question Jaymee got asked. Where I did come from when talking on the WisCon panel about How to Do It Right: from the place of being simultaneously innocent and implicated, and paying attention to what that means.

What we all know, from our many perspectives, is that colonialism bites the flaming donkey weenie. It messes shit up. It messes up most of what could be used to sort shit out and unmess it. It extracts costs from the colonized, costs that are carried across generations. Some of these costs masquerade as benefits. Some are presented as choices.

I do my best not to contribute to the legacy of colonialism in my fiction, but when it comes to certain entanglements I understand that I must use the utmost caution and concision.

I made what I’d call a successful foray into explicitly postcolonial science fiction with “Deep End,” which first appeared in the anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004). Taking Australia as a model, I wrote about a prison ship flying to an extrasolar planet with a freight of disembodied activists; these activists were scheduled to be downloaded into clones of their oppressors. “Deep End” was reprinted in my Tiptree Award-winning collection Filter House in 2008. This summer I’m working on a sequel.

My current novel-in-progress, Everfair, is another deliberate confrontation of colonialism: steampunk set in the Belgian Congo. It arose from my dislike of steampunk’s tendency to privilege imperialism, and especially Britain’s Victorian Empire. It also focuses on the site of one of the worst modern human rights atrocities, an infamous episode intimately connected with the rape of natural resources that lies behind the Industrial Revolution.

To ensure representation of the multiplicities of non-dominant difference, I’m writing Everfair from many viewpoints: white and mixed-race Europeans, African-Americans, and indigenous Africans. Research is sometimes exhilarating, and sometimes heartbreakingly piecemeal, particularly in the case of the indigenes, whose histories were severely disrupted—to say the least—by their decimation. Often the only voice left to tell a tale is that of the colonizer. When using those versions of events, I do what I can to up-end unwritten assumptions. I learn what I can from the examples of nearby, possibly related, people. I dream and make things up.

I know I’m treading on the bones of those who went before me. It’s unsteady ground, even if I’m related to the giants beneath my feet. I walk respectfully, carefully, listening with my outer and inner ears. Repeating what I hear, what you already know, but saying it in my way.

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Nisi Shawl was WisCon 35’s Guest of Honor and the editor of WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity. She is coauthor of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a founder the Carl Brandon Society, and a member of Clarion West’s Board of Directors. She edits reviews for the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a literary quarterly. She’s fairly active on Twitter and Facebook, and she promises to update her homepage (www.nisishawl.com) soon.