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psocopteraBabel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution, R.F. Kuang, 2022 novel. I started writing this while up with a sick kid (he finally tested negative for covid like four days ago and had an evening of Bad Stomach Bug, we're having a great month here) so please excuse any greater-than-normal incoherence.
Babel! The most interesting 2022 novel I've read so far; I expect to see it on various ballots. (The Nebula, if not the Hugo, but probably both.) Very interesting to read after the Poppy War trilogy - Kuang is obviously still interested in a lot of the same things, but Babel is a much tighter book. Like the trilogy is doing so many different things at once (and many of them very well), but in Babel it's all focused and aligned. (There's also a lot less heavy content than the Poppy War books; although it's about the harms of empire, it keeps a tight focus on one character and does not spend time with, like, every other harm.)
I have seen various things suggesting that it's in dialogue with The Secret History or Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but I have read neither and it seemed perfectly readable as a book without that context, so hey.
Spoilers behind the cut .
Perhaps unwisely, I read some goodreads reviews of this book, and so now half of my thoughts about this book are why I liked things about it that other people didn't like. So here are some things you might not like, and why I didn't mind them.
This is definitely a case of "people with contemporary perspectives and vocabularies in an 1830s setting". I was fine with that - I read a lot of historical romance - but it was occasionally jarring even to me when someone said something like "colonizer" or "narco-military". But Kuang is interested in talking about what she's interested in talking about, and not in playing games with 19th century vocabulary that we would have to translate (heh) back into contemporary terms.
I thought the whole concept of the silver word-pair magic was really cool - a neat take on "magic words" - but some readers seem to be really bothered that Kuang didn't write a whole alternate history of the world to go with it, that the conflicts of nations and industrialization and stuff were still all the same. I love alternate history - at any given time, at least one of the story-worlds I'm playing with inside my head all the time is probably alternate history - but to me it actually heightened the tragedy of the whole thing, that, like, this world had this amazing magic! And all they did with it was to end up with the same shitty history we had! Which itself is like, everything we have, and we haven't done better! If that makes sense.
Letty is a merciless critique of white feminism and women who when it comes down to it are white first. I don't feel like that's an overdone character type, or something that's been overexplored in sff, but it was too polemic for some people (polemic? do I mean didactic?). I almost always feel like the solution to that problem is More Different Depictions, so we can say "well, X does a much sharper and more nuanced job talking about this in Y".
Some people found the footnotes boring. I thought when the footnotes started sometimes being in Chinese, to give the Chinese translation of something, it was a powerful moment for decentering the English-only audience as the reader, like, these footnotes are only interesting and relevant if you have some Chinese, so that they're there speaks to the dual-language reader as the primary audience, and the footnotes were worthwhile if only to pull off that trick. I also like footnotes and little authorial asides though.
The thing *I* thought people were going to be upset about is "is Kuang writing a justification of terrorism, and how do we feel about that". I mean, "suicide bombing to bring down a tower" has a very specific first association for me, and probably most USians, that seems like a... very delicate thing to perhaps write sympathetically. (Although maybe less so for Kuang, who is apparently 26 and may well not have the same kind of personal memories or emotional investment.) Reading reviews, I found myself kind of unsatisfied with how people were engaging with this aspect of the book, or rather how they weren't engaging? I mean, okay, it's fine to say "Kuang isn't making this argument herself, she's exploring this character who does and the events that lead him to this decision", but I think she wants us to actually engage with the argument! Or, well, who knows what she wants, but I think the title "the necessity of violence" points to "is this violence necessary" as the central question of the text. Ending the story where it does - we don't get to know the outcome of these events, we don't get to know whether history diverges much or at all, because that's the question we're being asked to answer ourselves. Does this, in fact, change anything. And is it worth it - how many more Westminster Bridges collapse when the tower collapses? It's definitely slightly softened terrorism - things seem to shake for awhile before collapsing, giving people some chance to evacuate, and Babel itself only has volunteers inside when it comes down (unlike certain other falling towers) - and I'm sure much more thoughtful people than me have written extensively about which-acts-when get framed as terrorism or sabotage or violent resistance. The text admits to "violence" though even if it avoids "terrorism". I, admittedly, have never read Fanon - I was supposed to in first-year Intro English, as I recall, and was in no place to engage with it and was already pretty fed up with the class - so it's hard for me to assess whether Kuang is arguing more towards people who already have, or who don't have, that background. But, assuming both... I think my answer is "I don't know", I would have to go back to alternate history, to the specifics of the first Opium War, and try to play it out, how much could anything shift. I'm a lukewarm pacifist in that I often find myself approving of side-effects of wars (the ending of chattel slavery in the US following the American Civil War, the ending of the Holocaust in Europe following WWII). Even if those effects were not the goals of the wars it's very easy for me to fall into thinking that some war *with* a good goal could accomplish it, or that an act of violence that actually stopped or delayed a war would be worth it. I don't know, do acts of violence ever actually lead to less overall violence, or just different violence? Anyways I thought it was all interesting and worthwhile to think about.
Fic so far seems to be almost entirely Robin/Ramy, either during canon or fix-it. Not surprising... the unspoken homoerotic tension there felt like the most 1830s thing about the book in some ways... I'd really love to see someone tackle some post-canon alternate history vignettes, though.
Babel! The most interesting 2022 novel I've read so far; I expect to see it on various ballots. (The Nebula, if not the Hugo, but probably both.) Very interesting to read after the Poppy War trilogy - Kuang is obviously still interested in a lot of the same things, but Babel is a much tighter book. Like the trilogy is doing so many different things at once (and many of them very well), but in Babel it's all focused and aligned. (There's also a lot less heavy content than the Poppy War books; although it's about the harms of empire, it keeps a tight focus on one character and does not spend time with, like, every other harm.)
I have seen various things suggesting that it's in dialogue with The Secret History or Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but I have read neither and it seemed perfectly readable as a book without that context, so hey.
Spoilers behind the cut .
Perhaps unwisely, I read some goodreads reviews of this book, and so now half of my thoughts about this book are why I liked things about it that other people didn't like. So here are some things you might not like, and why I didn't mind them.
This is definitely a case of "people with contemporary perspectives and vocabularies in an 1830s setting". I was fine with that - I read a lot of historical romance - but it was occasionally jarring even to me when someone said something like "colonizer" or "narco-military". But Kuang is interested in talking about what she's interested in talking about, and not in playing games with 19th century vocabulary that we would have to translate (heh) back into contemporary terms.
I thought the whole concept of the silver word-pair magic was really cool - a neat take on "magic words" - but some readers seem to be really bothered that Kuang didn't write a whole alternate history of the world to go with it, that the conflicts of nations and industrialization and stuff were still all the same. I love alternate history - at any given time, at least one of the story-worlds I'm playing with inside my head all the time is probably alternate history - but to me it actually heightened the tragedy of the whole thing, that, like, this world had this amazing magic! And all they did with it was to end up with the same shitty history we had! Which itself is like, everything we have, and we haven't done better! If that makes sense.
Letty is a merciless critique of white feminism and women who when it comes down to it are white first. I don't feel like that's an overdone character type, or something that's been overexplored in sff, but it was too polemic for some people (polemic? do I mean didactic?). I almost always feel like the solution to that problem is More Different Depictions, so we can say "well, X does a much sharper and more nuanced job talking about this in Y".
Some people found the footnotes boring. I thought when the footnotes started sometimes being in Chinese, to give the Chinese translation of something, it was a powerful moment for decentering the English-only audience as the reader, like, these footnotes are only interesting and relevant if you have some Chinese, so that they're there speaks to the dual-language reader as the primary audience, and the footnotes were worthwhile if only to pull off that trick. I also like footnotes and little authorial asides though.
The thing *I* thought people were going to be upset about is "is Kuang writing a justification of terrorism, and how do we feel about that". I mean, "suicide bombing to bring down a tower" has a very specific first association for me, and probably most USians, that seems like a... very delicate thing to perhaps write sympathetically. (Although maybe less so for Kuang, who is apparently 26 and may well not have the same kind of personal memories or emotional investment.) Reading reviews, I found myself kind of unsatisfied with how people were engaging with this aspect of the book, or rather how they weren't engaging? I mean, okay, it's fine to say "Kuang isn't making this argument herself, she's exploring this character who does and the events that lead him to this decision", but I think she wants us to actually engage with the argument! Or, well, who knows what she wants, but I think the title "the necessity of violence" points to "is this violence necessary" as the central question of the text. Ending the story where it does - we don't get to know the outcome of these events, we don't get to know whether history diverges much or at all, because that's the question we're being asked to answer ourselves. Does this, in fact, change anything. And is it worth it - how many more Westminster Bridges collapse when the tower collapses? It's definitely slightly softened terrorism - things seem to shake for awhile before collapsing, giving people some chance to evacuate, and Babel itself only has volunteers inside when it comes down (unlike certain other falling towers) - and I'm sure much more thoughtful people than me have written extensively about which-acts-when get framed as terrorism or sabotage or violent resistance. The text admits to "violence" though even if it avoids "terrorism". I, admittedly, have never read Fanon - I was supposed to in first-year Intro English, as I recall, and was in no place to engage with it and was already pretty fed up with the class - so it's hard for me to assess whether Kuang is arguing more towards people who already have, or who don't have, that background. But, assuming both... I think my answer is "I don't know", I would have to go back to alternate history, to the specifics of the first Opium War, and try to play it out, how much could anything shift. I'm a lukewarm pacifist in that I often find myself approving of side-effects of wars (the ending of chattel slavery in the US following the American Civil War, the ending of the Holocaust in Europe following WWII). Even if those effects were not the goals of the wars it's very easy for me to fall into thinking that some war *with* a good goal could accomplish it, or that an act of violence that actually stopped or delayed a war would be worth it. I don't know, do acts of violence ever actually lead to less overall violence, or just different violence? Anyways I thought it was all interesting and worthwhile to think about.
Fic so far seems to be almost entirely Robin/Ramy, either during canon or fix-it. Not surprising... the unspoken homoerotic tension there felt like the most 1830s thing about the book in some ways... I'd really love to see someone tackle some post-canon alternate history vignettes, though.
