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psocopteraAfter being in the library queue since February I had a moment of impatience and bought this one; $2.99 on the Kindle is hard to resist. The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang, book was a Nebula finalist and Kuang is up for the Campbell. This is a big impressive debut (and the first book of a trilogy, so I don't think we can even say yet what all Kuang might be doing here once the whole story is told). I'm going to talk about it more behind a cut but I want to put a content note out here for heavy war-atrocity violence (mass murder, mass rape, mutilation, genocide), and please feel free to ask questions about specifics if you're trying to figure out whether you want to read this one.
Spoilers behind cut. So, this opens as a military-academy story - our protagonist Rin is a little bit Alanna of Trebond, a little bit Ender Wiggin, and a little bit Ged. (And maybe a little bit Kvothe but who even knows what's going on with those.) Training, prejudice, rivalry, weird assignments, cryptic masters. Partway through, though, war breaks out, and the second half is more like military epic fantasy coupled with fantastical recapitulation of some very dark parts of 20th century history including the massacre of Nanjing, Unit 731, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think the first part deliberately obscures how grim and brutal the rest of the book is going to get - among other things, I think Kuang is very deliberately writing against Ender Wiggin here and the whole idea of military training as an enjoyable story.
Kuang is apparently a grad student in Chinese history, in addition to being a writer (that's a lot going on!) and mentions in an author's note that the history she's drawing on here isn't often taught in American classrooms. I actually *had* encountered a lot of this in classrooms - in IB World History we did Sun Yat-sen through Mao, iIrc, and then in college I took a "Chinese Civilisation" survey class, like, Shang Dynasty all the way through the 20th century, that is honestly probably the one class that I've gotten the most mileage out of, in terms of giving me a clue/cultural context for *so much* art/literature/history etc. (I would love to take that same class for, like, India, or Persia/Iran... possibly I should stop reading so much low-satisfaction fiction (see recent romance novels) and read more nonfiction. There probably is a good survey textbook for the history of India. I could probably put together a "syllabus" with some art and poetry and shit. Anyways.) So, I don't know, I feel like I was a good audience to appreciate how Kuang both simplified the complexity of long-term Chinese history into an easy-to-follow fictional history for her fantasy country, and did some really interesting recombination of 20th century history into the main plot/recent history. Like, the island of Speer is arguably doing triple duty here as Taiwan, Indochina, and Hawaii, and naming the backstory wars the First and Second Poppy Wars obviously invokes the Opium Wars, but the Japan-analogue takes the place of the British, who have been folded here into generic Westerners with the Americans, who intervened to end the Second Poppy War for Pearl Harbor-like reasons, but the big atomic vengeance act is reattributed to the last survivor of Speer who's been raised in the main China-analogue country... okay, that was convoluted, but it's fascinating. Specifically, I think rewriting Hiroshima as an act of vengeance by someone traumatized by Pearl Harbor, Nanjing, and Unit 731 is a really interesting choice - like, I think Kuang is really asking readers to grapple with the question of whether it was justified and sort of making the strongest possible case for it while also being unequivocal about how terrible it was.
I'm really curious where the remaining two books will go - the next one is apparently called "The Dragon Republic" which makes me think she's taking on Chiang Kai-shek next, and then maybe Mao and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in book 3? Or possibly more like the Vietnam war?? Definitely plan to keep reading these to see. I do feel like I should say though that if you don't know or care about the historical analogy stuff, there's some really solid and powerful fantasy material here about the price of power and the nature of the gods (who are more like powerful elemental forces here that people can use, than players in their own right) and the mindset of what it means to be a victory-at-any-cost military leader.
I'll do the Campbell in its own post for spoiler avoidance.
Spoilers behind cut. So, this opens as a military-academy story - our protagonist Rin is a little bit Alanna of Trebond, a little bit Ender Wiggin, and a little bit Ged. (And maybe a little bit Kvothe but who even knows what's going on with those.) Training, prejudice, rivalry, weird assignments, cryptic masters. Partway through, though, war breaks out, and the second half is more like military epic fantasy coupled with fantastical recapitulation of some very dark parts of 20th century history including the massacre of Nanjing, Unit 731, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think the first part deliberately obscures how grim and brutal the rest of the book is going to get - among other things, I think Kuang is very deliberately writing against Ender Wiggin here and the whole idea of military training as an enjoyable story.
Kuang is apparently a grad student in Chinese history, in addition to being a writer (that's a lot going on!) and mentions in an author's note that the history she's drawing on here isn't often taught in American classrooms. I actually *had* encountered a lot of this in classrooms - in IB World History we did Sun Yat-sen through Mao, iIrc, and then in college I took a "Chinese Civilisation" survey class, like, Shang Dynasty all the way through the 20th century, that is honestly probably the one class that I've gotten the most mileage out of, in terms of giving me a clue/cultural context for *so much* art/literature/history etc. (I would love to take that same class for, like, India, or Persia/Iran... possibly I should stop reading so much low-satisfaction fiction (see recent romance novels) and read more nonfiction. There probably is a good survey textbook for the history of India. I could probably put together a "syllabus" with some art and poetry and shit. Anyways.) So, I don't know, I feel like I was a good audience to appreciate how Kuang both simplified the complexity of long-term Chinese history into an easy-to-follow fictional history for her fantasy country, and did some really interesting recombination of 20th century history into the main plot/recent history. Like, the island of Speer is arguably doing triple duty here as Taiwan, Indochina, and Hawaii, and naming the backstory wars the First and Second Poppy Wars obviously invokes the Opium Wars, but the Japan-analogue takes the place of the British, who have been folded here into generic Westerners with the Americans, who intervened to end the Second Poppy War for Pearl Harbor-like reasons, but the big atomic vengeance act is reattributed to the last survivor of Speer who's been raised in the main China-analogue country... okay, that was convoluted, but it's fascinating. Specifically, I think rewriting Hiroshima as an act of vengeance by someone traumatized by Pearl Harbor, Nanjing, and Unit 731 is a really interesting choice - like, I think Kuang is really asking readers to grapple with the question of whether it was justified and sort of making the strongest possible case for it while also being unequivocal about how terrible it was.
I'm really curious where the remaining two books will go - the next one is apparently called "The Dragon Republic" which makes me think she's taking on Chiang Kai-shek next, and then maybe Mao and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in book 3? Or possibly more like the Vietnam war?? Definitely plan to keep reading these to see. I do feel like I should say though that if you don't know or care about the historical analogy stuff, there's some really solid and powerful fantasy material here about the price of power and the nature of the gods (who are more like powerful elemental forces here that people can use, than players in their own right) and the mindset of what it means to be a victory-at-any-cost military leader.
I'll do the Campbell in its own post for spoiler avoidance.
