After we did The Dispossessed for BSpec book club I wanted to do another Very Political book but perhaps one that was not 90% philosophical discussions, so I suggested one that I'd been intending to read ever since I first heard of it at a convention a few years ago before it was published: Nishi Shawl's Everfair, a steampunk novel about the Belgian Congo.
In this alternate history, a coalition of somewhat messianic white English socialists called the Fabian Society, Christian Black American activists, and the actual native Congolese what live there somehow manage to scrape up enough money via donations and a wealthy benefactor or two to buy a big tract of the Congo away from King Leopold of Belgium, who of course sells it to them but then also attacks it to try to conquer in back. But in this history, due to the outside support involved in its founding, the newly formed, uneasily multiracial country of Everfair has access to enough modern weaponry to defend itself. With refugees from King Leopold's Congo often running to Everfair for asylum covered in the precious rubber they'd been harvesting, and an additional small influx of runaway Macao Chinese railway workers--including one extremely gifted inventor known mostly as Tink--Everfair is able to innovate, build military capacity, form alliances between its various factions, and push out Leopold's overseers and police with a gloriously steampunky multifront, multistrategy set of campaigns over the course of several years.
The book is split into two parts, the first covering from the "founding" of Everfair--i.e., negotiating the land purchase and raising funds--to the final defeat of King Leopold and the expulsion of Belgian powers from Africa. The second half of the book covers two, more complex wars: World War I, where Everfair ultimately decides to fight on the side of Whoever's Fucking Up the Belgians (which was... Germany), and a small civil war, an eruption of tensions that have been present throughout the book and that King Mwenda basically decided to deal with in a fit of macho/royal pride that make things worse and ultimately the women in the book have to bail him and the rest of the country out of the whole mess, because women are awesome and kings are inherently sort of dumb, even when they have good reason to be angry at the white socialists who have no idea how condescending they are because they're The Good Guys compared to, you know, King Fucking Leopold of Belgium.
This book has a pretty big and extremely diverse cast of characters, with robust representation of badass women in a variety of occupations, plenty of queer romance, lots of religious tensions, and some interesting age differences in the pairings-up. One of the big steampunk tropes in the book is that a lot of the characters have mechanical limbs, due to the historical atrocities of Leopold's regime, which involved a lot of cutting people's hands and feet off.
While most of the book isn't fantasy-steampunk, leaning much more to the traditional sci-fi/alt-history, things get a little fuzzy when it comes to religion, although I suppose they do in real life too, as some people claim it. One character, a Christian reverend when he starts out, accidentally winds up a priest of an indigenous religion, and he gets imbued with some pretty impressive powers when his new god decides to work through him. It's notable that only native spiritual practices seem to really "work" as magic in Everfair; Martha never gets to actually set people on fire via her dreams or anything cool like that as a result of her devotion to Christianity.
The country of Everfair is not a utopia, despite the best intentions of the Fabians; what it is, however, is an experiment that doesn't collapse, which is an impressive enough win. It's also a complex and institutionally unstable enough country to be really interesting enough to read about, and the personal-political factions and intrigue and the new problems that crop up when old ones aren't quite solved provide plenty of high-stakes plotlines over the 25-year span of time the book covers. By the end, the country's nascent intelligence network, run by a girl who can enter the minds of cats, is in impressive development, and I just think it's really cool to have a spy network of all girls and cats and would read five million sequels about it.
I have a couple critiques but I don't even feel like writing them down; they're quite boring compared to the brilliant, engaging originality on display. I'm really glad we decided to read this one and I'm quite looking forward to discussing it.