The residents of Everfair band together to try and create an anti-colonial utopia. This region, Everfair, is set aside for formerly enslaved people and refugees, who are fleeing from King Leopold II’s brutal, exploitative colonization of the Congo.

In Shawl’s version of the late 19th-century, the Fabian Socialists-a real-life British group-and African-American missionaries band together to purchase a region of the Congo from King Leopold II (whose statue was recently defaced and removed from Antwerp, as a part of the global protest against racism). Everfair by Nisi ShawlĪ speculative fantasy set in neo-Victorian times, Shawl’s highly-acclaimed novel imagines “Everfair,” a safe haven in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Whether through a satire that exposes the ridiculousness of banking or a steampunk rewriting of the Congo’s history, the authors below have found ways to critically examine capitalism-and its alternatives-in speculative fiction. Although certain magical elements like talking griffins and time travel might be out of reach (at least for the present moment), fantasy and sci-fi novels allow us to imagine worlds that we can aspire towards. Along the way, it can also challenge us to take a good look at our own reality, and question with an imaginative, open mind: how can we strive to create social structures that are not focused on white, patriarchal, cisgendered, and capitalist systems of inequity?Īs poet Lucille Clifton says, “We cannot create what we can’t imagine.” Imagination is an integral element to envisioning concrete change, one that goes hand-in-hand with hope. Speculative fiction immerses the reader in an alternate universe, hooking us in with a stirring narrative and intricate world-building-or the good stories do, anyways. What if, just as a thought experiment, our works that reimagined current structures of power also had robots? Karl Marx may be famous for his thorough, analytic attack on capitalism (see: all three volumes and the 1000-plus pages of Das Kapital), but let’s be real: it’s not the most exciting to read.

Everfair by nisi shawl