Entries tagged with steampunk

I'm starting to think I should just read Andre Norton novels for the rest of my chemotherapy, because I'm finding complex, ambitious novels like this one difficult to parse in my current mentally-lethargic state. There are a lot of characters, a lot of locations, and a lot of story thrown at us in short bursts that form a kind of shifting mosaic. It's dazzling, but I tended to lose my way at times.

I know Nisi Shawl socially, and I remember a conversation with her when she had just started writing Everfair in which she said that steampunk was too Eurocentric and that she wanted to write some Afrocentric steampunk. So this is an alternate history about King Leopold II of Belgium's atrocities in the Congo, which amongst other things inspired Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. What Shawl does is posit the creation of a new nation in the vicinity of the Congo, founded by a coalition of British Fabian socialists, freed American slaves and American missionaries, and local African tribes. This nation is called Everfair. At first I thought the steampunk aspects of the story -- steam bicycles and airships -- were tangential and extraneous to the alternate history, but what I eventually realized is that Shawl was speculating on how advanced technology could have been introduced into Africa in the late 19th century and how that technology might have allowed the Africans to defend themselves against Leopold. Leopold's forces were infamous for maiming their victims in gruesome ways, and Shawl makes good use of steampunk prosthetics as a response to these atrocities.

It seems from her Historical Note that Shawl sees Everfair as a kind of multiracial Utopia, but it's an ambiguous Utopia full of tension and conflict. Colonization of Africa by Europeans does not completely stop because of Everfair, and Everfair itself is depicted as having colonial aspects. The white members of the nation are still racist in the ways that white people of that era were. Despite the fact that Leopold is ultimately defeated by the forces of Everfair, it of course doesn't stop World War I from happening or Everfair and other African nations from being sucked into the war as proxies. Africa as a whole is still subject to European power rather than a driving force in the international economy. In the end, however, a balance is struck between contending forces in Everfair that could well be called Utopian.

One of the things that confused me as I was reading the book was the approach to technology. The way the airships are powered initially has to do with special earths provided by a tribe in Africa. I couldn't tell if this was a reference to something real, or whether it was kind of magical property. Likewise, characters have special powers such as being able to inhabit animals, that seemed like pure fantasy to me. Shawl seems to be incorporating African folklore into the supernatural elements of the story, which fit well with what was going on, but to my mind militated against reading this as science fiction.

This is a high concept novel that's worth reading for it's offbeat take on a piece of history that has, as far as I know, been largely ignored in the science fiction world. The closest thing to it that I've read before is Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain, in which a slave rebellion in the US connects with European revolutionaries and creates a socialist state in North America called Nova Africa. Shawl delves more deeply into the details than Bisson did, but alas that made it harder for me to understand in my current state of mental incapacity.

I read this book because it's a nominee for the Hugo for Best Novel, although even before I knew it was a nominee I had been intrigued by the title and the cover. When I found out that it was a novel of court intrigue, I developed doubts, but I remained curious. I have read novels of court intrigue that I enjoyed, but it's not a sub-genre I seek out. Also, Elfland and court intrigue are not something that I associate with each other. But I do love stories about Elfland and Faerie, so yeah, I was curious.

The protagonist is Maia, who is the half-goblin, half-elf son of the elvish emperor, living in exile since his mother's death because the emperor thinks nothing of him. The novel begins with Maia learning that his father and all his other sons (by other, elvish wives) have died in an airship crash, leaving Maia to inherit the throne. Maia enters a world of hostile high born elves, and he is completely unprepared. As he negotiates his way from one personal and/or political crisis to another, it quickly becomes clear that the airship crash was not accidental. Someone plotted against Maia's detestable father, and it appears they are plotting against Maia too.

Indeed, if the airships weren't enough, the court intrigue tells us this isn't the Elfland of Lord Dunsany. In my list of quibbles and complaints about the book, the primary one would be that it falls afoul of some of the criticism Ursula Le Guin leveled against Katherine Kurtz's Deryni books in her essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie". The injection of Machiavellian (and later, Marxist!) politics into Elfland feels like the injection of the mundane into the magical. I suspect I'm out of touch with modern trends in Elfland, but I was actually uncertain why this particular story involved elves and goblins at all. Traditionally Elfland has been an otherworldly realm that works by different rules than the human world. Why bring what looks like human political struggle into Elfland? Why create an Elfland where time flows just as it does in the human world, where elves are mortal, and where magic is rarely spoken of and never actually practiced? By the end of the book I was beginning to see a glimmer of an answer to this question, but more on that later.

Related to this primary complaint was my feeling that the elves weren't very elvish. To reverse William Atheling's old formula, calling the people in this book elves is like calling a smeerp a rabbit. They look like elves, but they don't act like elves. Again, partly this is because what these elves do is plot and scheme for political power, which is a terribly worldly thing for an elf to do. But even physically there's a major oddity, which I struggled with from the start: the elves (and goblins) apparently have floppy ears that can be moved around, drooped, and pinned back to express emotion. They are like animal ears, specifically dog ears. This is a new feature in elves, and for the most part I didn't like the bathetic animal overtones it created. However, if the intent was to bring elves down to the level of the human animal, which is what I suspect is going on in a variety of ways in this book, it does succeed.

I felt equally unimpressed by the steampunk aspect of the novel in the beginning, because it just seemed as though airships and pneumatic tubes had been pasted on in a completely ornamental, unintegrated way. As the story progressed, however, the steampunk engineering ideas became more central to the plot, and in fact a big steam-driven engineering project developed thematic resonance with the story of Maia's unique political temperament. Furthermore, the steampunk elements were used to introduce a theme of Enlightenment and of scientific revolution in Elfland that seemed to directly challenge the idea of Elfland as a magical realm. As much as I continued to feel that this was a misuse of Elfland, this was the point at which I began to understand what the book was really up to. This wasn't really fantasy, this was a form of science fiction, and the intent was very much to haul Elfland into the mundane, mortal world. The elves were the aristocracy, and they were being dragged kicking and screaming into modernity. Once I understood this I thought, well, okay, if that's what you're up to, why not give us elves building steam spaceships and landing on the moon? That might be fun, actually, and this seems pretty obviously the first book in a series.

And despite my complaints and quibbles (elvish comic strips, really?), I did find this book completely gripping and enormously fun. It's a real page-turner. The death of the emperor and his heirs and Maia's succession to the throne are announced in the very first chapter, and the story moves from crises to crises, problem to problem, and from mystery to mystery after that. The science fiction novel it most reminded me of was C.J. Cherryh's Hugo-winning Cyteen. Both feature smart, isolated young people thrust into a world of constant crisis, constant confusion and fear, groping their way through an obstacle course of hidden menace toward an uncertain goal with only their wits and compassion as guides, desperate for any kind of kindness or friendship. Like Cyteen, this seems like a very fannish novel to me, with the half-breed Maia standing in for the kind of awkward, anxious, blushing, knowledge-hungry, socially-clueless, ostracized adolescent who reads the literature of the fantastic. He's ugly, and he doesn't know what to say to girls (or anybody else, for that matter). It's also a feel-good fairytale about kindness and justice being rewarded with power and loyalty. Maia must overcome the racial intolerance of elves (whose extreme whiteness is constantly emphasized and contrasted with goblin blackness), and he shows an enlightened attitude toward women, gays, and lesbians, too.

The Goblin Emperor has a pretty good shot at winning the Hugo both because it wasn't on a Puppies slate and because the other novel that wasn't is a sequel to the book that won the Hugo last year. The high fannishness of it doesn't hurt either. I would still say that this elves-without-glamor approach to Elfland is highly problematic in all the ways that Le Guin enumerated in her great essay (including a not very convincing attempt to Elizabethanize the language), but if Katherine Addison (a pen name for Sarah Monette) sends elves to the moon, I might just take the trip with her.

Everfair by Nisi Shawl

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison