Babel thoughts here!

Loved the magic system and how it is a core part of the narrative. Somewhat reminiscent of "The name of the wind"'s sympathy. The story is somewhat like a Harry Potter where the big bad is the society rather than the one single bad person. I found the overall anti-colonialism message quite on point. As a foreigner in the US working on _text extruding machines_ + Automation it also hits close to home. I just recently finished reading "Blood in the Machine" which is mostly about the Luddite uprising. I am now radicalized in the space of ideas, and yet in the physical world, life continues as usual. The empire continues extracting away. --- Somewhat odd: I thought Letty's shooting of Ramy was clearly a result of him pushing Robin out of the way. But then the characters seem to remember that she aimed for him? Robin is so sure that she's "a good shot" and must have done it on purpose, even though he was initially surprised to see her holding the gun, and only saw her shoot that one time? (Yes, Admiral's daughter, w/e). ... And why was Letty there in the first place? I feel like the betrayal would have worked just fine without her outright shooting Ramy. Victoire's train of thought about how Letty's lifelong mission is now to hunt her seems also over the top. Other minor things: - The audiobook had quite jarring transitions from one speaker to the other (I guess that was footnotes?), but also with what seemed like do-overs of a few phrases here and there - Some of these footnotes felt like a weird way to deliver extra information. Most glaring example being Griffin's backstory with Sterling Jones. /e: I have to attend something precisely at 7pm EST so I don't imagine I'll make it to the chat :(

I live not too far from Oxford, and I was tempted to go and see where Babel ought to be. Overall, the book did a fantastic job of highlighting my own ignorance and really went a long way in putting me off my tea (a mug may have been put down to ponder whether I was drinking the fruit of exploitation). As an example, I was unaware that "Cantonese" was named after a place derived from a Western mispronunciation of a Chinese region. I also had no idea that the abolition of slavery was forwarded in parliament partly on economic grounds — that the French were profiting too much from it — rather than purely on moral reasoning. Structurally, I think the narrative would have been better served if it had opened with a scene detailing what happened to Evie. Having some sort of core mystery at the start would have helped provide a reason to keep reading in the earlier chapters. The tempo picked up significantly in the middle, and while the ending slowed down again, I felt that was appropriate as it built a heavy sense of inevitability around the outcome. Where it did do well, in the way that all good books do, is it changed the way I thought, and saw myself in the world by forcing me to accept an uncomfortable truth. The novel's central premise is that violence is necessary to bring down an empire. I would go one step further: if we accept that there was no way the Empire could have fallen without violent intervention, then we must accept that violence is inevitable. Refusing to fight doesn't eliminate violence — it simply means accepting the passive, systemic violence of the Empire under the status quo. Ultimately, if non-violent intervention won't change anything, either you accept the exploitation of Chinese citizens or you use violence to bring the system to the ground. As much as I would have liked to pick a third option, for example a simpler argument on the necessity of sacrifice, the discomforting reality that the book makes me face is that given the circumstances, I, much like Lettie, would have chosen a passive self-preservation, but I'm not entirely sure I would have felt much better having chosen an active revolution.

This is my ~ 7 minute YouTube review of Babel. I tend to mark my reviews for adults in an attempt to move the culture towards a more sheltered approach in learning. YouTube could have a completely voluntary adult content collection if creators could risk their monetization enough for the 18+ audience to develop norms. Anyway, I digress. These videos were more about me improving my public speaking and reading habits. It could be a 2 min vid if I was not improvising and one-shotting these book reviews. https://youtu.be/0Qv53eBTpS8?si=Lxa-YCjd_Ihp6OWz

It is super fun to see an important philosophical idea - in this case, Quine's indeterminacy of translation - play a major role in a modern novel. I was sad about Letty's decision, but it was well foreshadowed, so I wasn't too angry at Kuang. But still.

So, 3 for 3 on male protagonists that have subdued queer experiences, huh? Look, I'm not complaining, but someone's gotta acknowledge it! Consider this my formal demand that whatever poll choices we have for around June of this year need to have at least one (1) yuri option. A balance simply must be restored. So, big picture. I really enjoyed the book. I was enjoying the book in the first half, but the second half is where it really sank its fangs into me and I couldn't put it down. I have some style/structural criticisms that I felt were most prominent in the first half (and why I wasn't so enraptured until later), and I have some minor theme/content criticisms for the second half, but my overall experience was highly positive. Great pick. Delighted to have had it put in front of me. The two halves of the book almost feel like separate books to me, so I'm going to write about them separately. ======= The First Half A boy becomes an orphan and is rescued from squalor by enrollment at an ancient English school that teaches him magic? That's right! It's... Kingkiller, and no other book series. In all seriousness, how much the early chapters reminded me of The Name of the Wind definitely made me eager to read more. I thought those first setup chapters (Canton, the voyage to London, growing up at Hampstead) were paced really well. When we finally got to Oxford, I thought Robin's tender moment with Ramy on the bank was adorable, and I was ready to see these two grow close over their next few years, knowing from the Foreward that the book would end around the time they're meant to graduate. But something Kuang does throughout the novel (although it grated on me more in the first half) is to close out chapters with these broad-strokes overviews, often dictating to us off-camera relationship building that we barely see. Having finished the book, I can understand that telling stories about young people feeling socially isolated finding found family in each other is not really The Point, but I think how little of it we actually see robbed us of what could've been /much/ more impactful climactic moments in the back half of the book. Don't get me wrong; those moments still did plenty for me, but I did often feel like the ceiling was a bit higher than we hit. I wouldn't have minded an extra ~50 pages in total length to include more bonding moments for our core cast. I felt like Victoire was way less meaningfully present in conversations, in particular. Ramy and Letty both had very strong personalities, so giving Victoire some more moments to highlight what distinguishes her personality from the others' would've been nice. Briefly circling back to the comparison to Kingkiller, I think one of the things that impressed me the most early on was how clearly /inconsequential/ the magic of this world was to us as an audience. With a Fantasy Land setting, the not-Europe of it all is usually filled with loose analogues whose histories diverge with ancient magic and cataclysmic rituals, and I really felt like the magic was mostly present to highlight how much it /doesn't/ change: the forces that shape society are still the same, invisible technologies of culture, enforced through violence. Silver-working is a technology. It exists within capitalism; it does not create some new octarine mode of production. Fantasy Land settings often just throw a monarchy at it and then feel empowered to hand-wave most any direction they want to take things via the idiosyncrasies of the ruler and their court. Keeping things rooted in actual history with just as much intrigue and tragedy as any good entirely fictional account does a lot to bolster the arguments made in the back half of the book, and perhaps more importantly, it's a good prompt to the reader to reflect on the role of these setting differences so common to genre fiction. Also, the linguistic focus was guaranteed to get me to bite. I am exactly that kind of sicko. This is really the sort of book whose experience is greatly elevated by an e-reader, as well. It's really nice to be able to just long-press random words whose etymologies you're unsure of and see what the on-storage OED traces it through. It was also helpful for the Oxford-specific usages of words. A bit of an "oh shit" moment to wonder in what sense the word "scout" was being used, long-press, and see the 4th definition mentions an Oxford-specific usage, to which you wonder "what an esoteric thing to even include", and then you remember what dictionary you're using. Also also, it was interesting to try looking up every non-English word used and seeing which were included in the dictionary and which were not. Results had about the biases you'd expect. Super fun little metatextual elevation. Obviously, the big thematic drive in the first half is the social isolation of being a minority in a place that was never meant for you. While I'm certainly far from having the experience of being a POC in the oldest academic institutions of the Anglosphere during the hey-day of the British Empire, it still resonated with me a lot and felt true to my (more limited) version of the experience. I grew up in rural SC. The view from my bedroom window was a cow pasture (our neighbor's). We were dirt poor: a "mobile home" in a yard of sand and crab grass, the floors warped and rotting from the year-round intense humidity. You know, patchy hand-me-downs and eats-school-lunch-too-enthusiastically poor. It turns out that the state that proudly wears the crown of "first to secede" has a very strong culture of wanting to consider itself separate from all society that surrounds it. This echoes at basically every level of locality to the point where I remember a family moving down from Durham (NC) and getting called "yankees" in elementary school. It's my mother's side of the family that led to me being born in SC. My dad was born and raised in NH. His dad was Quebecois, and his mother was Scottish, so my childhood was pretty odd compared to other people in town. Most people's families had been in the area for generations, as far back as any of them could remember, and that was largely true on my mother's side, but I was one of the few I knew who would travel actual distance for some holidays. More peculiar was that my Memere would visit home a few times a year and always bring back Scottish candy for me, so I was able to share, what was for a tiny town in the sticks, exotic food with the other kids. When my dad was growing up in NH, the whole town still spoke French. He'd tell me about running down to the gas station in the middle of town where the owner didn't speak any English, which was a problem for my dad since he was a terrible student and the only one of his siblings who doesn't speak any meaningful amount of French. My Memere and Pepere were both quite proud of the cultures they came from, and I loved learning as much as I could about how their childhoods had been different from my own. So, I was, most of the time, just trailer trash from SC. But, in some contexts, I was sort of a yankee. In some contexts, I was sort of Scottish or Quebecois. There was this weird fluidity of identity that I both very much loved indulging but that was also alienating from everyone around me, who seemed to have much deeper roots and be less thinly spread. One of my earliest memories is my mother kneeling down, holding both of my arms, and telling me that I was especially smart and that I would study hard and become a doctor or a lawyer so we wouldn't have to be poor anymore. It was never really a choice for me. On one front, my mother forced an early education on me in a way I don't think most other kids had. I don't think any of it is actually that impressive, but for where we were and my parents' levels of education (my dad had only graduated high school because a teacher who did not want to have to teach him again gave him a passing grade he didn't earn, and my mother dropped out after 8th grade), it was rigorous. I remember being in first grade and helping the neighbor kid (who was 2 grades above me at that point, I think, though he'd fail twice and graduate the same year as me in the end) with his homework regularly. I remember being so sick of my mother correcting me while practicing my handwriting that when she tried to take the pencil from me, I tried to wrestle it back, the point jabbing into my palm and breaking off. But I was good at school, and although I'd be quite bored for the first few years, in 3rd grade, PELICAN (a "gifted and talented" program) entered the picture, and I started to really fall in love with learning. The PELICAN teacher exposed us to poetry and Greek myths, had us do little engineering challenges with popcicle sticks and the like. On the other front, my sister was both severely mentally and physically disabled, and being a family of four on a single income of about $19k/yr, we relied on a local donation-based place for diapers, her wheelchair, Ensures, etc. When she was 2, 3 years before I was born, my sister was in a car crash that left her unable to walk, her legs and feet (as well as one of her arms) contorted in a way where it was simply not possible. Another of my earliest memories is being in the lobby of Shriners, looking up and seeing the open walkways above, the enormous staircase, the huge panels of class and indoor trees. I had never been in a place so nice. I remember being told that the doctors were going to operate on my sister to make it so she could sit in her wheelchair more comfortably and hopefully have better use of her arm. I remember being told to make sure to thank them when I met them because they were doing it for free. However little I understood, I remember that being the first time I really wanted something for myself. This is what a doctor is? They work in what might as well be a castle, so abundant with riches that they spend their time helping people for free? People who would otherwise suffer indefinitely? I didn't need to be forced to commit to studying after that. I had purpose. Going to PELICAN meant leaving class once a week for a couple of hours. You didn't miss anything you had to make up; you just diverged from the people who didn't go. In 5th(?) grade, it became a larger time block with more structured and involved work. This is also when I noticed there was only one other poor kid left in the program. In 6th grade, PELICAN fell away to separate Honors classes, and suddenly I didn't just skip out on class with my trailer trash friends once a week; I /never/ had class with them. I remember the awkwardness of trying to catch up at recess or lunch, just being out of the loop on whatever was being talked about and feeling adrift. I was also spending time with another family that my mother were friends with. They had come into a bit of money through inheritance, and the small-business-owner patriarch had strong opinions about how to be sophisticated and distinguish one's self from the rabble. I started hearing "ain't ain't a word" a lot and becoming very conscious of how I spoke. I had just turned eleven when 9/11 happened. My formative years would be entirely under the Bush administration. The '08 election was the fall semester of my freshman year of college. This is also when I was forced to form new social ties due to the Honors split. You didn't need any meaningful understanding of the politics at play to know that everyone treated Dubya as an idiot. It was impossible to not be aware that much of American society saw this man from Texas as a buffoon who reflected the poor education of the South (nevermind he was a Yale graduate whose family was from Connecticut), and, aspiring to one day be viewed as educated and be able to make good money in Not-Nowhere, I really started to internalize the view that the South was this monolithically bad thing, its people worthy of scorn for their ignorance. The more well-off kids around me had no shame of their accents, but they had the luxury of big, educated families with plenty of land to inherit. The South became, to me, a thing you worked to distance yourself from as much as possible, and so I began actively working to lose my accent, to sound broadcaster "neutral". The older I got, the less Southern I wanted to be. Through his work, my dad got our first (and, ultimately, only) family computer, a Gateway with a comically deep CRT running Windows 98. Its hard drive was a whopping 13GB total. I had that computer and a 56k connection until I got my laptop for college. I started spending a lot less time hiking through the woods or mudbogging with my redneck neighbors and a lot more time online, getting exposed to all sorts of people from all over. I was downloading a 480p rip of a foreign film with hardcoded subs over the course of a week. I was being told by an online friend to download "Dead Flag Blues" and subsequently having my entire conception of what music could be changed. I was reading people tells stories about the punk shows they went to or how well-stocked their local record shop was. I was learning about all the ways people hated our government and why and what they wanted to be different. I was spending time on game dev forums, picking up bits of various scripting languages when my school didn't have a single computer science class. It became clearer and clearer to me that the thing I wanted to aim for was entirely separate from the place I had been given. I lost my drive for a bit in high school, but ultimately, I regained it and crushed AP/IB as much as I cared to (I dropped AP/IB English my senior year to take Jazz Band, which it conflicted with). Having been bored and largely unchallenged, I was excited to finally be off to college, where I imagined that suddenly it'd be all rigor and endless wonder. It turns out that public universities in the U.S. aren't really like that. I got hit from both sides. I hated having to take GenEds, and because my high school had been so small, we hadn't had AP versions of some courses, such as Physics, so I spent time taking courses whose content I already knew. On the other end, I was the first person in my family to go to college; everything was being paid for by a combination of grants, scholarships, and loans; I had never lived on my own before (and was not well-prepared to); and the financial precarity of it all dawning on me left me extremely anxious. Most people there clearly were not first-generation students, and it seemed like everyone else had a much better understanding of how to navigate things and also the material means to make those processes as smooth as possible. I was floundering with a constant panic that any indecision or mistake meant irrecoverable ruin and a total loss of what I had spent my entire life up to that point working toward. It was a harsh reminder that I was still very much a poor kid from the sticks, that the most important things into assimilating into this culture were not how you spoke or who looked down on. My sophomore year, I had dinner with my partner's family at an Olive Garden. It was, at the time, the nicest restaurant I had ever eaten in. I looked over the menu, reading the descriptions to try to figure out what I might enjoy since I didn't know what most of the dishes were just by name. Their father asked me what I was considering getting. "This NAH-chee sounds good." All four other people at the table, including my partner stop and look at me. Her father looks concerned, finally responds: "NYO-kee". He does a conspicuously deep exhale as he looks back down at his menu. My partner looks terrified, clearly very concerned about their father's approval and my apparent failure to win it. I had a lot of those moments in those years. All of that's to say that while I certainly never experienced racism, I was sometimes made to feel "foreign" to varying degrees, even if they were white brands of "foreign", and I experienced a lot of classism, including turning it inward for many years, so while much less significant or traumatic, I did empathize with our cohort's experiences in this first half of the book. As I read about their experiences in this first half, I also found myself thinking of all sorts of people I've known over the years who clearly did have more directly similar experiences, but as I thought about them, they didn't really feel like mine to share. I will just say that across my time at a national lab and in grad school, I met a lot of people of color who were born outside of the country, and the ones who didn't come from money clearly carried a lot of weight on their shoulders and often wrestled with various forms of self-hatred, usually masked as some common sense acknowledgement of the realities of the world. They got sent here with $50 and no second chances as a kid. What was anyone else's excuse for not succeeding as much as they had? Yeah, the British were monsters, but obviously their country is better off with all the infrastructure they built; they wouldn't have done all that themselves. If you pursue higher education in this country, in the heart of empire, you will meet Robins and Ramys and Victoires. I didn't really have anywhere else to weave this in, but I wanted to bring it up. When they're discussing their research projects, Ramy mentions he proposed translating Omar ibn Said's manuscripts. As with all historical references in the book, I stopped and looked this one up when I came across it. I was surprised to see that he had died quite close to where I grew up. I messaged a friend from my hometown who makes local history a bit of a hobby, asking if he'd ever heard of him. He told me that he had, that the Post & Courier (a major SC paper) had done an extensive piece on him just a few years ago and that treasure of the Carolinas, Rhiannon Giddens, had written an opera about his life around the same time, putting it on in Charleston, where he had been auctioned into slavery. This would've been around the time Kuang was writing the book, as far as I can figure. I wonder if she knew of either piece while she was writing. The P&C piece is here: https://www.postandcourier.com/omar/a-quest-for-the-true-identity-of-omar-ibn-said-a-muslim-man-enslaved-in/article_cb1875c0-9ae5-11eb-a36e-eb1811fc743d.html ======= The Second Half I was quite surprised when the midpoint of the book was Robin killing his father. I had figured Robin would kill him eventually, but I had set my expectations too low, assuming it'd be some end-game metaphor. In a similar vein, after the alt. title "The Necessity of Violence" excited me when opening the book, "The Necessity of Atheism" being name-dropped reduced my expectations significantly. I assumed it was a subtle tease that our scholarly protagonist's revolution would be to make people reflect on the empire's atrocities through the power of a strongly worded essay. The entire second half of the book was me forming a suspicion about the angle she was setting up, being disappointed at some ideological disagreement but happy enough to be along for the ride, and then being pleasantly surprised when it was her slowly walking the reader through missteps she wants them to avoid. This is primarily explored through Robin's relationship to Griffin, which starts in the first half, but the exploration in the second half is what I found much more interesting. The earlier bits seemed, to me, to more transparently be setup for a refutation: young person dips their toes in radical politics, sees another young person (slightly older) with delusions of grandeur grinding themselves to dust against an unconquerable foe, and then decides to dip rather than subject themselves to the same fate. This is the template for the path a lot of liberals take when someone first introduces radical politics to them. You're working against a lifetime of indoctrination about the "right" way to address problems in society, so this felt like pretty standard fare. The question, then, was what would the follow-up would be. Are we doing some golden mean? Insurrection bad, but also, only politely raising concerns bad? As I indicated before, I was a bit concerned at this point that the extent of our protagonist's direct disruption would be in trying to win hearts through rhetoric, maybe with the unavoidable "destruction" of the tower (because of course Babel must fall in some way) being some reformist policies that change its societal role, with the empire becoming less destructive to other cultures so as to not eat its own tail, since the silver-working depends on these other cultures remaining independent and thriving. By the time they were in the Old Library, I was really starting to fret. We're going to let Griffin go literally blow some things up and benefit from that, but everyone else will isolate from him, keeping their hands clean and only doing Respectable Politics™? I was delighted at how quickly she stopped entertaining that thread. Letty's sudden but inevitable betrayal was executed wonderfully, and the torture scene with Sterling was even better. I had been wondering if she was going to totally fail to explore that her magic system would, in my mind, obviously result in what are effectively super soldiers for the empire's war efforts, a la Fullmetal Alchemist or Watchmen. I think it was a wise choice to show restraint and leave it implied by Griffin's comments about Sterling and Sterling's brief appearance earlier in the book. The torture scene itself made me think of Evey's torture in V For Vendetta. As Kuang narrated Robin laying on the hard stone, bloody and in despair over his loss of Ramy (and all forms of sanctuary), focusing on the overwhelming mix of physical and psychological pain, I just kept thinking about Valerie's letter. "For three years, I had roses and I apologized to nobody". But Robin never had his roses. He only apologized, constantly, in every facet of his life. Intellectually, I knew the book still had a good chunk left, but god I fucking cried. Would she let him die here? Maybe just be maimed? Was the big stand-out for the book going to be a swap to Griffin as the POV? When Sterling threatened Victoire and Kuang (through Robin) explicitly pointed out how insanely precise such a maneuver would have to be on the part of their captors, I knew ("knew", believed through sheer desperation) that Victoire would be safe. That like Evey's torture, that some sort of fake-out was at play. We get out action sequence, and then we get our duel. Honestly, the duel didn't do much for me, especially with Kuang doing the same pull-back that she did for the two previous killings ("The next moment, several things happened almost too quickly to register", paraphrased), but now we're set up for our end-game. Let's see this tower fall! It's the first thing you anticipated when the only part of the book you had read was the title! ...Aaaaand they're doing a strike. Okay, I get it. The book's walking Letty the Reader through all of their objections in the order they'll have them. Kuang wants to do her due diligence and hand-hold across the finish line. Fine. Victoire's and Robin's words at the close of Book IV seemed a bit more... lively than that, but fine. One step at a time. At this point, things started to feel like "How To Blow Up A Pipeline", which if you're unfamiliar is a book of sort of "soft" political theory, the reflections and advice of someone with decades of direct action under their belt who wants to guide newer participants so they don't have to repeat methods that have been proven to be either ineffective or counterproductive. So, they take the tower, but they let anyone who wants to leave. They make sure decision making stays democratic. They talk about being the proximal cause of various forms of harm being inflicted on the general populace and how they're disproportionately affecting the poor through their actions. All good work and all prudent. It takes up until the end for them to finally realize and accept that nothing they've done has changed the structure of the thing they oppose, and so they have not achieved any long-term victory. They finally acknowledge that the tower must come down, that they must remove the institution itself. You cannot simply put the tool down; the tool must cease to exist. A job well done. There's a pretty significant angle to the writing that I've ignored up to this point. From the first time Griffin is haggard while meeting with Robin, I wondered if Kuang might be romanticizing self-sacrifice a bit, but since I still wasn't sure if the book would even ultimately advocate for direct action, I didn't pay it much attention. After the Old Library, I was a bit more concerned. Not only has our ragged big brother been validated, but, through the power of ✨silver-working✨ (and explosives), he's going full John McClane to save us! This was, to me, the first time the magic system felt like it was /really/ present in the events of the book. As I said (much) earlier, a thing I liked about the magic system early on is that it felt like it was drawing attention to how inconsequential it actually was to what the book was examining. I didn't necessarily /mind/ this shift, but I couldn't help but think about how the change served to glorify Griffin. Again, not /necessarily/ a bad thing in my mind. However, I was starting to feel like Kuang might be angling to really glorify a misinterpretation of Huey's "revolutionary suicide" to an irresponsible extent, not just paint a positive picture of direct action. This was, in large part, due to what she was clearly doing with Robin (and had been since Canton). Is martyrdom the only thing we want from art about revolution? It's certainly common enough. It's how Moore resolved V For Vendetta, for example, although at least that death was /also/ a symbolic act to pass the torch, relinquish the reigns to self-governance; it wasn't /only/ our traumatized protagonist seeking relief through death. I both love and hate Robin's ending. I love it for doing something I wasn't sure I'd ever see any work of art ever do again, which is to rip off Frodo's suicide at the end of The Lord of the Rings and it feel just as earned and tender as when Tolkien did it. The thing I hate about it is that it ripped off Frodo's suicide from the end of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, a catholic, was giving all the men who had come back from World War I unable to reintegrate into society permission to let go. He knew there were some things you couldn't come back from, he saw its grip on people all around him, knew that their culture couldn't condone it, and said "I get it. It's okay". I don't think that gets acknowledged enough, but it's also not why we're really here. We're here because in our art that largely seems to want to move you toward revolutionary acts, Kuang spends considerable effort to prepare us to accept the same for Robin: There are some things you can't come back from. I get it. It's okay. But it's not! Look, I really enjoyed this book, and no matter how much this was bouncing around in my head like an untethered drum set while reading the ending, it still mostly worked for me in the moment! ...But I'm so fucking tired of glamorizing our suffering, man! So tired! I don't want the baby gay ethnic minority who survived physical abuse from their parent to give up on life as a teenager, actually. I've known way too many people who tick one or more of those boxes meet that fate, actually. I'm fucking sick of it. "Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory". I do not need wish fulfillment from my fiction about revolution, but I would at least prefer to not also be maneuvered into approving a hurting child's suicide. Earlier, I briefly mentioned Huey P. Newton's concept of revolutionary suicide, which he coined in his autobiography of the same name. From the very start, Huey made it clear what he meant. Revolutionary suicide is to be contrasted with reactionary suicide. Reactionary suicide is one seeking death because the conditions of the world are such that they feel unable to go on living. Revolutionary suicide is the acknowledgement that if the conditions of the world are what are making you so despair, then you ought to change the conditions of the world, that seeking to do so will itself almost certainly lead to your death, but you will have done everything in your power to at least move the world closer to a better state. He reiterates again and again that revolutionary suicide is /not/ a death wish, but as with most political theory, eventually what permeates the periphery is just jargon out of context, where people just invent whatever they assume it must mean based on its name. There's an Against Me! line I kept thinking about, first regarding Griffin, and later Robin: "All of a sudden, people start talkin' 'bout guns, talkin' like they're going to war 'cause they found something to die for". This type of person pops in and out of punk spaces constantly. They're usually quite young, very unhappy about the state of the world (reasonable), and feel otherwise hopeless about the future. They want relief from this feeling, and so they start fantasizing about acts of resistance that, essentially, would give them permission to indirectly commit suicide. These people are a danger to any scene they enter. They should not be encouraged. They deserve compassion, but their behavior should be corrected. I do not like that this type of person is what our primary protagonist became. I do not make the mistake of resenting Robin. A fictional character though he may be, I want it to be clear that I am not making the all-too-common mistake of blaming the suicidal for their mental health. I /do/ resent Kuang for making the act of destroying the tower /necessitate/ that people stayed behind so that the already suicidal character is provided an "acceptable" means of realizing their suicide. This is not revolutionary suicide, but I think she wants us to pretend it is. At least we have Victoire. That's our real ending after all, right? She refused suicide, quite actively. She tells Robin, in no uncertain terms, that she does not want to be just another victim of empire. She wants to imagine a better world and attempt to create it until her last breath. As critical as I want to be of Robin's fate, Kuang also acknowledges a lot of what I'm talking about through Victoire. Sure, Victoire is the least developed of our core four and Robin gets the entire book to build our empathy toward him whereas Victoire only gets one chapter, but it /is/ the last chapter. Does that make up for it? I mean, it's gotta make up for /some/ of it. Enough of it? That I'm not convinced of. ======= Stray Thoughts I have some notes on things I wanted to talk about that I didn't manage to weave into any of the above, but I've been writing this in fits and spurts over the last couple of days, it's already /quite/ long, and now it's also quite late (for me). I guess I'll briefly gesture toward them here in case their spur interesting thought for anyone, and maybe I'll circle back to expound later. I wanted to talk about how LLMs have changed the software industry, how that does and doesn't analogize with the silver industrial revolution in the book, and the contemporary legacy and historical reality of Luddites. I wanted to talk about the book's (very good) portrayal of intersectional struggle and talk a little bit about misogyny (which the book doesn't explore as much since Letty and Victoire are somewhat secondary to Robin and Ramy in the time they're given), transphobia (which is obviously not touched on), and the close relationship between the two. I wanted to talk about the phrase "no war but the class war", how it succeeds and fails, and how to approach the struggles of minority groups when seeking to address broader root causes. I wanted to praise the book's portrayal of a diversity of tactics, get on my soap box for a bit about anarchist conceptions of "violence" and talk about the elections going on in the U.S. right now, voting, its (current) necessity, and also the inherent limitations of electoralism. This is the bit probably most worth circling back to, and I might do so tomorrow. I also wanted to just chuck out various media related to anticolonial struggle, as well as some works about other forms of struggle by minority groups, so we'll end on that. ======= Media Dump ------- Let's start with film. The Battle of Algiers (1966) is an all-time film, no qualifiers necessary. Made roughly a decade after its namesake, you know the film stands ten toes down because several of the characters are played by actual Algerian revolutionaries who lived through the war. If you have not seen this film, go watch it. The Wind That Shakes The Barley won the Palme d'Or for its year, and Ken Loach has had a long career, but I still don't feel that this film is talked about nearly enough. Irish struggle against the British is a long history with plenty of interesting stories. This is the story of only a handful of years in that bigger picture, but it's very much a story worth telling, and it's incredibly well-realized. The Weather Underground (2002) is a documentary about the American group of the same name. You might recall that in the wake of the George Floyd protests, we got a handful of big-budget films about radical American politics in the 60s and 70s. In particular, I'm thinking of Black Messiah, which focused on Fred Hampton, and the hack Aaron Sorkin's very bad The Trial of the Chicago 7, which briefly includes Hampton but otherwise focuses on some major players from that time frame, namely Tom Hayden of the SDS and Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies, whose politics were in conflict with each other. If you ever wondered about the direction the SDS went after that mess, the Weather Underground is one of those answers. If you enjoyed thinking about how the Hermes Society might work, what it was capable of, and what life in it would be like, this is a real-world example you can learn about, and I think it's a fantastically made documentary. The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) is a dramatic adaptation of the non-fiction book of the same name. If you have never heard of it before, go in completely blind; don't look up anything about either the film or the book. I think the fact that it doesn't focus on what comes after is what makes it such an effective film. Heval (2021) is a documentary about a minor actor's (Michael Enright's) time fighting for Rojava with the YPG. There is precious little good coverage of the Rojava Revolution, but I think exploring the war through the eyes of a foreign volunteer who was giving up quite a lot to fight for a cause they felt compelled by is an interesting lens if you have no frame of reference going in. I'd love to be able to point to a good documentary on the YPJ (the armed units of Kurdish women), but as far as I can tell, one unfortunately does not exist. There's a documentary from 2023 ("Dream's Gate"), but people seem to think it's quite bad, and it also doesn't seem readily available. Harlan County U.S.A. (1976). I won't claim to be an authority on documentaries, but of those I've watched, this is handedly the best I've ever seen. Even if you have brain damage to the point that you are somehow completely uncompelled by the struggles of labor, it's simply a fantastic film that will have you captivated by its drama. It also does something I almost never see art about labor movements do: in its last few moments, it acknowledges the the limitations of union activity. Also, the soundtrack (for some reason not released until 30 years later) is all bangers. La Haine (1995). A riot in paris. A young man is beaten so badly by cops that he has to be hospitalized. We follow a single day of a friend group of three immigrant teenage boys (one Jewish, one Arab, one Black) in the wake of this. The Internet's Own Boy (2014) is a documentary about Aaaron Swartz. Do you remember Robin repeatedly, desperately asking why Oxford won't help the people around the world that could benefit from all this amassed knowledge? Do you remember him understanding that it was clearly wrong to horde it while simultaneously feeling unable to set it free? Swartz was as bright as they come. He worked on RSS, CC, Markdown, and was a founder/co-owner of reddit. He was in Stanford at 15. In 2010, he put a laptop in a closet at MIT, set to mass-download papers from JSTOR with the intent of making them publicly available. He was the author of the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (https://openaccessmanifesto.wordpress.com/). The U.S. government levied $1M and 35 years against him, and facing that down, he took his own life. ------- For television, I'll be real brief. Say Nothing (2024) is a miniseries you probably heard buzz about. It is also based on a book, which I have not read, but a friend tells me it is quite good. I said that The Wind That Shakes The Barley is just a tiny slice of that history. This is another, less tiny slice, covering the more well-known Troubles and what it was like to be a Provo. ------- Games are slightly less sparse. Hell Clock (2025) is an ARPG (think Diablo) roguelite with a surprisingly deep dive into the War of Canudos in modern-day Brazil. 1000xRESIST (2024) is the first game made by a small Vancouver team with backgrounds in performing arts who formed as sunset visitor 斜陽過客. It's quite light on the gameplay, but it's writing worth experiencing. Penguin Colony (2026) is, admittedly, quite janky, but if you can look past the jank of a /very/ low-budget indie title, you'll find an interesting semi-adaptation of Lovecraft that acknowledges his racism and confronts it (and various colonial efforts) in an interesting way. ------- Books. Speedrunning the descriptions, both because I want to get to bed and because these are all either talked about in my post or in Babel itself (Kuang did use a Said quote, didn't she? I'm not checking). Andreas Malm's "How To Blow Up A Pipeline" (2021). See my previous description. It won't teach you how to make or set explosives. That's not the sense in which "how to" is being deployed. Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961) examines the effects of colonization on the colonized. Kuang quotes it for a reason. Edward Said's "Orientalism" (1978) examines how "the West" views "the Orient" and how much of the mythologized Orient was woven by Westerners for Western audiences, something that Kuang touches on occasionally in Babel. ------- Graphic Novels V For Vendetta (1982-1989). I promise it isn't long; these things just take a long time to produce due to all the art. Just go read Alan Moore more generally. The man's a treat. V isn't perfect, but it's quite good. ------- Music. We're going rapid fire at this point. Mount Eerie - Non-Metaphorical Decolonization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJSpnzDfG6k Skip to the midpoint if you're impatient and just want to hear the lyrics. Against Me! - Those Anarcho Punks Are Mysterious... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ega3pghcFdA This is the song I was quoting when talking about the type of person Robin became. Against Me! - 8 Full Hours of Sleep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLYGhh8sSew The closer to the same album. Just something to meditate on. Matana Roberts - Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis https://matana-roberts.bandcamp.com/album/coin-coin-chapter-four-memphis I haven't listened to the other entries in the series, but this album is devastating. It focuses on women subjected to American slavery. PISS - you made me / skin on linen https://pisstheband.bandcamp.com/album/you-made-me-skin-on-linen This one technically isn't out until Friday, but a perk of physical media is that you can often get things before the street date. The lead singles crushed me, and the full album wasn't any more relenting. I mentioned that Babel doesn't explore misogyny as much as some other forms of discrimination. I'll give the content warning that this is an album about sexual assault and what, according to these women, should be done about it. One of the tracks' titles makes reference to Rote Zora, an anarcha-feminista group that carried out a series of bombings. The music video for that track features shots of Angela Davis and the YPJ. Spoonboy - Sexy Dreams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGGWw3hN7Ns Including the music video because I think it's very much worth seeing. Not sure what happened to the original YT of it from many years ago. Like I mentioned earlier, Babel also doesn't touch on transphobia, so here's a song I love. Obligatory acknowledgement that there are about a billion hip hop tracks that talk about colonialism in various ways, but the nature of hip hop is that tracks often bounce between several things, verse to verse. Go listen to some billy woods. I'm not going to try to cherry pick individual verses. ------- Video Essays. You thought you were free? None of us are free until all of us are free, and I am currently enslaved by my brain to finish this damn post. A lot more could go here, but this is the sparse list I was willing to curate in my exhaustion. The Bisexual Problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2ou2A_-8JU Yes, it's two hours and seems to, at best, be tenuously connected to anything we've talked about. Yes, I am telling you that the payoff for the unexpected direction it takes toward the end makes it all worth it, and yes, I am saying it's very much relevant to your consideration in the context of Babel. Trust me on this one. Two videos from Philosophy Tube, one quite old and one from a couple of years ago. They're what they say on the tin. The first is a good, brief intro to the anarchist conception of violence. The second is a longer, deeper examination and leans heavily on How To Blow Up A Pipeline. Intro To Anarchy: Power & Violence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCAUmh99hMI Violence & Protest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh4G1Gjv7bA ------- One last thing, an article I saw a few hours ago. This could be a whole-ass other section to the main part of the post, but I am both too tired and too unwilling to be sad about this story again, so I'll send it your way. I wanted to talk about this in the aforementioned bit that would've talked about LLMs' impact on the software industry. The intersection of various forms of institutional violence here is just heartbreaking. https://archive.is/jXv3A ======= Apologies for such a long post (posts? I might find out what the character limit for Patreon comments is in a minute). The book resonated with me much more than I could've anticipated, and when art does that to us, I think it's very much worth reflecting on. Typing up something like this in response to good art is also useful to me just to work out my own thoughts and force greater rigor upon myself. I hope it can be useful to others as well. I still feel like there's a lot more I could say, but diminishing returns and all that. Thanks for reading (if you have). Great pick. I look forward to the next one.

I feel like a pest but don't mind putting my two cents in. All done, I stopped at Katabasis, my copy includes it. I hope we stay with Babel only, but other references of course, in the discussion. And now I find Cambridge interesting.

So many good points and observations, not a very well read person here but I usually browsed around. Someone mentioned language does not necessarily have one specific, fundamental structure. This may be true but they exist as well defined ones and quite usable. It is interesting that these ideal, expert linguists in the novel, found the point of diminishing returns---so honest yet so powerful. We (they actually) found the tips of the roots and so there is no more structure to be learned from those, but that is a whole lot to work with. If there is a balance then maybe it is struck with a cruising speed concept rather than maximum or simple purity. Perhaps these are elements and the speeds are adjustable, but that would be over my head.

(I've noticed that in these Book Club sessions, there are at least two kind of notes that tend not to make the cut: one is about personal pleasure and displeasure related to a book (because that's too superfluous, quality writing deserves quality critique), the other is about random related personal experiences that don't generalize very well. In this case it's rather easy to me to omit the latter, because although translating things badly is a part of my life, but everybody in this novel is way out of my league, so I am just in silent awe of them. But I cannot resist the former and I must note this was my first book from Rebecca where I was not able to go with the underlying ethos. The concentrated cynicism of Yellowface suited me very well, the desolate, self-inflicted hell of Katabasis is my daily routine, but but the core of Babel is pure romantic idealism. It's hard to localize, because it is always paved over with realism and indeed the main arc is 100% realistic, which is a rare feat in a fantasy novel, but time after time it peaks out: one place is at the very end, the "victory may be in the portents" passage, which says a truthful society is at least in theory achievable through a game of inches. Another place is the book's view on translation, which is described as a sacred and mystical process of the human soul that can release true magic and can alter the fabric of spacetime - in the age of LLMs where machines are doing most of the translations for us I find it very hard to believe in anything like that. You know, there is the established literary motif that in a serious book about resistance and revolution the hero must not just lose but his soul and his ideas must be getting annihilated during the aftermath - think of books like 1984 and Darkness at Noon and in some extent also For whom the bell tolls. In contrast, idealistic books have the tendency of being rather dumb and silly. Nevertheless I'd still put Babel at the same level with the previously mentioned two or three, because as far as I can judge the actions of Robin Swift applicable to the real life, especially for those who "tremble, but don't break", especially for those who take up the gauntlet to play the power games. Anyway, the strong contrast between the idealistic subtext and the fully realistic story is something I wanted to mention anyway and I also wanted to clarify my biases beforehand - I don't count silver magic unrealistic because we are living in the age of scientific marvels.) One thing I kept thinking about during reading was whether the story is a good alternative history novel or just an arbitrary fantasy story. I mean in an alternative history novel, I prefer to have a clear Point of Divergence and then the rapidly diverging alternate history backed by the Butterfly Effect, think of The Man in the High Castle, Watchmen, A Sound of Thunder, etc. Babel approaches this curiously, because historic events tend to remain the same, the British defeats Napoleon in the exact same battles, daguerreotypes are invented the exact same year, Queen Victoria starts to reign about the same time, the Opium Wars are about to break out about the same time between the exact same actors, etc. Even the modified events are typically serving narrative purposes, like the earlier opening of the Oxford-to-Paddington railway, "I needed to get my characters to London a bit faster". This is curious because it's always emphasized how much difference silver magic makes and I just don't see that in the story, I feel it gives excuses to everyone to be lazy and to ship bad quality products. E.g. if there is a building in real life and in the book its counterpart is augmented with silver to serve the exact same purpose and it collapses when silver stops working then I feel the builders are just doing a really really bad job. I am not sure whether this is lazy world building or a clever build-up, because the main arc actually makes a lot of sense: it is well known that too much success can be more dangerous than failure and indeed it can ruin entire nations, see the story of France and Napoleon. Maybe Babel and the magical silver pampered and spoiled the Englishmen who became careless and they put all their eggs in the very same basket. This is something I just could not decide, in one hand, my intuition says life is a chaotic, dynamic procedure, having too much unchanged details is very suspicious, in the other hand, maybe oppression is very persistent unless someone successfully overturns it. This is something I can approve intellectually but I cannot approve it intuitively. All the three R. F. Kuang books I've read share similar qualities: first, the characters are extremely bright and talented and those are notoriously difficult to write because it's very hard to keep up with them and to keep them busy with tasks that match their skills and it's also very hard to make them sympathetic for the wider audience. (I feel that's why Rebecca not always gets as good reviews as she deserves - some reviewers are either envy or just misses the point because of ignorance.) Second, the main storyline is always very bare-bone, very cliched, very banal and Rebecca always relies on her brute force and on her pure writing skills to dress it up and to sell it. (I mean before reading, what did you expect, what would happen with a tower that is literally called the Babel Tower? We all knew how this book would end. Or think about the characters, all of those are very basic archetypes, like the hero, the mentor, the rebel, the traitor, the evil father, etc. ...) When I try to dissect her books, I'm constantly surprised by the quality of the components: her combativeness to steer the story into the sharpest confrontations, her willingness to hurt and to destroy the characters, the anatomically accurate psychology she sculpts, the research she does, the books she quotes, the rythm of her prose, etc. etc. etc. (I could write pages about that, but since I see no flaws, that would be entirely pointless.) Compared to Yellowface and Katabasis, I'd say Babel is the most ambitious project, here she sends her characters against Moloch from the famous Ginsberg poem. (And here I could write about colonialism, imperialism, the sins of the Western people, but because the stakes are so high in the book I feel that also would be entirely pointless - Robin's greatest enemy is his own shadow self. I feel the characters are fighting against all the evil in the world.) Because this is the most ambitious project out of the three books, here are the most opportunities to fail, and sometimes I felt this during reading that this presentation is less perfect and less confident than Yellowface or Katabasis, but I never really could not put my finger on it. Maybe I'm just not well equipped enough to identify those tiny errors, or maybe the secret world of the translators and etymology was just too new and too pleasant to me and it provided enough distractions to overlook small imperfections. I know much less about the science behind translation than about math, so compared to Katabasis I enjoyed this book even more because of its freshness to me, but I also liked the math in Katabasis quite a lot. I mean obviously nobody is good enough to turn a rigorous scientific field like math or linguistics into a pop story without cutting corners and cheating, and that may upset some people, they probably feel that's heresy, but it invokes very different emotions from me: I feel in her books what I felt in academia and in industry too, that there are just details that are crucial but nobody truly grasps them although everybody pretends he does and when we are touching them in a conversation people just rush to move forward. In some sense, her books help me to feel the vastness of science again I felt as a child once, so I don't really care whether she cheats and how she does that. As final note, I must remark I deeply appreciate and I agree with the overall message of the book. The main storyline works as a manual of how to think and how to act against oppressors. The gist is very similar to an average Stephen King novel, but this description is more verbose, more vivid, more backed, more accurate, more scientific. I'd encourage anybody to be like Robin Swift, and I'd also encourage anybody to understand his own revolution in the same depth as Robin does.

I read this one a few years ago based on a recommendation from the Lingthusiasm podcast (a great rec for anyone with interest in linguistics)! Coming to it with that background, I was very charmed by the magic system. I think to people who have never learned another language or who don't have a linguistic background, it's easy to assume that words generally have a 1:1 translation between languages, and it must have been somewhat cathartic for Kuang to reinforce the reality that translation is as much an art as it is a science through the application of a really unique and original magic system. An aspect of the book that I really appreciated was the complexity of the author's relationship to Oxford University. I won't pretend to be able to fully relate to the experiences of a person of Chinese ancestry at a place like Oxford, but I did somewhat relate to my own experiences at my University—I had such incredible experiences there and met some of the most amazing people; it was a place of incredible growth, opportunity, and camaraderie, but I also used to wait every morning at a bus station named after the most prominent American eugenicist of the 20th century. I was impressed by the many and varied ways Kuang was able to express a similar (and ultimately far more profound) dichotomy about her own experiences. I enjoyed all the story elements in a vacuum, but ultimately I couldn't help but feel that the book was halfway between a magical historical fiction YA novel and a hardline manifesto about the necessity of violent resistance. I'll be very interested to hear other people's takes, but as I closed the book I had the impression that the magic wasn't well developed enough for the former and there were too many paragraphs waxing nostalgic about life at Oxford for the latter. I saw another comment here suggesting that the book felt directionless, and while I wouldn't go that far, I would say that it seemed to me that this should have been two books. As it stands, I think the novel was trying to do a lot of different things, and while all of those things were worth doing, there wasn't the requisite page space to flesh everything out satisfactorily. When writing the above, I do wonder if there's an extent to which that's intentional. The jarring disconnect between loving something and being horrified by it (e.g. Oxford University) is, in a sense, reflected in the discordance I tried to describe in the last paragraph. And while the latter half of the book could feel haphazard at times, I do feel that the frantic nature of the plot following the murder of Robin's father was effective. After all, few would disagree that Dr. Lovell deserved to die, but what exactly *happens* after you actually try to give the bastards what they deserve? What is the *right* or *best* way to fight your own oppression? Outside the premise of the magic system, the individual characters were the highlight for me, with Letty's arc striking me as particularly tragically profound. The actions and reactions of the core 4 characters forced me to question and think critically about my own actions and inactions re: the systems of oppression relevant to my life in a way that really stuck with me. Ultimately I'm glad I read this book and still think about it years later, and I'm very interested to hear what others think!

‘You are the proximate cause,’ insisted Professor Chakravarti. ‘You can make it stop.’ ‘But that’s precisely the devil’s trick,’ Robin insisted. ‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.’ ---- Babel is a straightforward critique of colonialism but a light fantasy sheen and I found it to be a hell of a read. The characters were believable, compelling and prompted real feelings of sympathy. I felt the moments of stress in my bones, and I did that thing where I dealt with tension by putting the book down, then a few minutes later, picked it back up again to read further. Then rinse and repeat. The worldbuilding was clever, making clear use of Kuang's language skills and applying that to the silver-magic in a way that felt believable. I particularly enjoyed the footnote-asides to the meaning of words and how the difference in terms resulted in a particular magical effect. It wasn't always necessary, but I'm sure that language nerds really appreciated it. I wasn't sure I'd get the book done in time, but then, a week later, I had finished the book. Great choice, gang. This was a good selection.

As far as nature versus nurture it is quite prevalent here, but maybe better to say innate verses environment, with a little bit of an emphasis on individual experience within an environment. Interesting that Robin, perhaps properly, associated him having a cohort as a feeling support system and his brother not having that kind of thing.

And the high stakes debates they got into seemed more like an intellectual banter, in hindsight after they agreed to work together

is about.

One curious takeaway could have been something referring to DNA with matched pairs or not, so my comment would have been that we have to look at the microworld but that we should be careful it doesn't look back at us, a cautious point but I guess that is not what the book a

I am 61% through the book so I don't know how it will turn out but intend to finish it by November (acouple more weeks wouldn't hurt but don't go by me).

Aw, I guess the book decision was announced in that video I still haven’t gotten around to watching. I did grab a copy of Babel because it was the most appealing to me of the choices so I guess I will just be the in the Very Delayed Book Club. 😆

I love the magic system. Like I do find Kuang to be a bit... reiterative on themes & moods & times (especially between the poppy war books & this one), but the way she here deploys the metaphor that is magic is spicy. That the misalignment is what is externalized is particularly fascinating. The gap between synonyms & translations; the act of interpretation; the world-dulling drudge of empire & assimilation.

Note: I do not directly talk about full details, but there are plenty of spoilers you could infer from this, so beware before reading, if you haven't finished the book yet. A lot of this book felt oddly directionless? Or at the very least, very much like a novel the author was making up as she went. Which is somewhat appropriate, as that’s what the main cast of characters was doing for most of the second half of the book. Although it very clearly isn’t - there’s setup and payoff to a number of things. Not only that, but the story is very much a wrapper for a commentary on colonialism, imperialism, and racial justice, and goes to specific places at specific times to raise certain points and ideas in that theme. As for that aspect of it, I kinda felt mildly annoyed that all of it was captured in a fantasy story. Not because those two don’t mix, but because it’s clear Kuang is mixing actual history with this fantasy world, and many times I had to look up, “Okay, was this thing she talks about here a real historical event/person/whatever, or is it part of her fantasy world?” As it happens, most of them were real. It would’ve been nice to read about the real things in a proper context, without the doubt that fictionalized fantasy history introduces. I think Babel would be served by a companion volume that actually just goes through the nonfiction history she was trying to highlight. I think this aspect of the book sticks in my craw so much because anti-imperialism was the overarching theme of the book, and if your fantasy is (sort of) getting in the way of your message, maybe you should fix that - at least annotate your footnotes as “this is real history” somehow. By the time I reached the end of the book, my brain was basically SCREAMING for the characters to use the Chekhov’s Gun introduced practically at the very beginning. I think she was hoping her readers would forget about it, but the way it was introduced in the story, it was more like Chekhov’s Big Ass Laser Beacon. I certainly couldn’t forget it, and I knew it was going to be how things came to a head. Most of the last chapters of the book, when things were escalating, was kind of annoying because of this. The Monty Python “Get on with it!” chorus came to mind. I don’t know how you fix that, but it did stick out to me in a bad way. I think she’s a little clumsy with getting the reader to feel the way she wants them to feel, and to understand how the characters feel. She’s fond of a device where she gives us a glimpse of the character looking back at a moment we just experienced and using that to basically say, “This is how the character felt about it later.” That can work, but it doesn’t feel as interesting as getting me to just be invested in the feelings being felt in the moment. And it feels a little like a crutch and a bad habit that maybe a future editor can knock her out of. As far as the world’s magic system, it’s pretty light, pretty arcane, largely understated, and perhaps underutilized. It’s an... OK metaphor of how all these colonized peoples underpin and support the Empire through the subjugation and use of their unique traits - although you personally have to infer that yourself, if you want to get there, as the story doesn’t really talk all that much about how the more exotic non-European languages were being used. But as a fan of fantasy in general, I would’ve liked it to be a bit more involved. As it is, most of the silver used in this fantasy world actually just stood in for normal technological advancements that we, in the real world, made without it. After the end of the book, I truly wonder what this world will look like without that power. A sequel that addresses the silver collapse could be fun, but I don’t think that’s a thing Kuang wants to write. The book also focuses heavily on language. Brought me back to a lot of the stuff I learned in the single linguistics course I took in college. Intro to Linguistics could be brutally boring and rote at times, but the best parts were when we discussed the different meanings and ideas around language in general and how it was shaped by, and helped shape, the social order. But it does kind-of undermine the whole concept of silver for me. Because if there’s one trait of language that I learned from that class that I keep with me, it’s that language is arbitrary. There is no inherent, logical reason that I use the word “tree” to identify the large, fibrous plants that make up forests. That’s just the word that we assigned in English, and this bears out for every single word in every single language. It’s what can make translation so difficult. But if that’s the case, the whole idea that “made-up” languages don’t work with silver would mean the whole system shouldn’t work, logically. Because all language is made-up. It’s just that with broadly-spoken languages, we generally agree on what the made-up thing means. But not always! For example, consider the meaning of the word “theory” to the scientific community, then colloquially, then what the religious fundamentalists who want to deny the validity of evolution think. Of course, the distance between these different meanings is not vast, but it is clear that not all usages are equal. Or consider something like “awful,” where today we use that word to mean something is bad or objectionable, but English speakers in the 1400s would have understood that word to mean “inspiring reverential respect, mixed with wonder or fear” (quote from the Oxford English Dictionary). Those meanings couldn’t be more divergent, but the word remains the same. What would silver do in that case? After I finished Babel, I moved on to start reading Hollywood, Ending by John Green. No spoilers, but there is a moment where the main characters are on a tour through an art museum, and the tour guide asks something like, “How do you paint innocence? How do you paint grief?” and this made me think about how we do, in fact, have ways of expressing that which is typically lost in translation, through art. I get that silver in Babel is supposed to be this magical, mechanical thing that manifests through specific linguistic properties, and what is lost in the translation between two words. But I feel like the Babel translators were entirely blind to the means by which this kind of thing is otherwise expressed. Because something being lost in translation is the defining characteristic of, essentially, misunderstanding. I might describe the taste of pumpkin pie as emblematic of having dinner with family on Thanksgiving - seeing friends and relatives you might not otherwise get to see, tastes and aromas that specifically accompany that occasion, American football, and falling asleep on the couch afterwards. You might describe the taste of pumpkin pie as the feeling of the culmination of autumn - the end of the joys of summer and the peace of a transition to gentler temperatures, before the long dark of the winter covers us. Neither is wrong, but they aren’t equivalent, either. This kind of disconnect covers way more than just language, and while Kuang wasn’t really building a fantasy magic system of this kind of complexity with Babel, after John Green, describing a mundane, real-world kind of magic, reminded me of this concept, it feels like a hole in Kuang’s own art. The potential opportunities she could’ve explored by realizing these concepts in silverworking could’ve created a lot of opportunities for exploring other aspects of the story. Indeed, the nature of Chinese characters comes specifically from an evolution of a pictographic script into logographic, which is a way of portraying language as art. But, it seems to me that Kuang was much more interested in tackling the colonial aspects with this book than worldbuilding. In a brief preface to the book where Kuang addresses representing England and Oxford differently than we know it, she mentions expanding the space on campus to make a new open green for the Babel tower - as though she clicked and dragged the land there to make room for it, and there’s very little else that’s different from the reality we know. That’s also how I feel about silver in this world. It is central to the conflicts, infrastructure, and inciting incidents. It is the means by which Hermes recognizes the colonization and exploitation the Empire imposes. But it’s more of a thing that was dropped in the middle of actual history to serve as a physical manifestation of that power, than it was a desire of Kuang’s to actually world-build something more engaging out of it. Is that a bad thing? I don’t know, but I do feel like it’s not the strongest use of something like that.

Got a late start and have been busy, but I still hope to finish in the next few days and will leave thoughts then. If I feel like I'm not gonna finish in time, I'll drop my thoughts up to wherever I manage and just watch the VOD once I'm done. I think it was a fantastic pick and have found a lot to love in it. I certainly have thoughts. If I manage to finish in time, the chosen dates/time will be fine