• Blog
  • About
  • Reviews
  • Great Series Read Project
  • Archive

SciFi Mind

Visions of Future Worlds

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Goodreads
You are here: Home / Fantasy Fiction / Babel: An Arcane History by R. F. Kuang

Babel: An Arcane History by R. F. Kuang

By John Folk-Williams

Babel, the new standalone novel by R.F. Kuang (author of the Poppy War trilogy), has the lengthy subtitle: or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. It may seem strange to talk about violence, revolution and academic translators in one breath, but make no mistake, this is a compelling story of revolution in response to the concentration of wealth and power and the impact of racism in the British Empire in the 1830s. And it’s also clearly about the world as it is today.

Babel An Arcane History

Babel is part bildungsroman, part disquisition on language, part adventure of anti-colonialism and empire building, part love of Oxford and privilege, part alternate history of early industrialization, part story of deep friendships, part analysis of racism and power, and more besides. I was skeptical at first how this could all come together, but it does so quite brilliantly.

The story begins in Canton, China, where a young boy is dying from cholera after seeing the rest of his family wiped out by the disease. He is rescued by a gruff Englishman, Professor Lovell, who brings him back to health with the aid of a strange silver bar. When he’s better, the Professor offers the boy the chance to be raised and educated in England and then to go on to Oxford. Or he can go back to live in the poverty of his Cantonese home without family or much hope for any kind of future, just as early death. Not really a choice.

The Professor insists the boy adopt an English name. He uses Robin, taken from a children’s book earlier in his boyhood, and chooses Swift as a surname because of Gulliver’s Travels and the parallel between himself and the adventures of a man thrust into strange new worlds. Robin agrees to the Professor’s terms and sails to England. He lives in the Professor’s house where he is tutored in several languages but gets little or no personal attention or affection from Lovell. The Professor seems interested only in his development of linguistic proficiency, for his goal is to prepare him for attending the Oxford Translators Institute, housed in the massive tower named Babel in the heart of the exclusive Oxford campus.

It turns out in this alternate England of the 1830s that the whole country and much of the world is in the midst of the silver industrial revolution, and the center of the special magic within silver is Babel. The work of the Oxford translators is to inscribe silver bars with pairs of words from different languages that are rough translations but have important shades of meaning that provide an energy that the silver can work with. The result is a vast number of silver bars that do most of the things that keep British life and the empire going. They heal, make engines more efficient, smooth out coach rides, give structural strength to bridges, speed up the British fleet and can also kill. Babel is not only the central repository of silver bars as well as the translation and inscription process, it also contains a special room that generates the resonances that keep the silver energies working. Because of its importance, Babel is heavily protected by wards or spells that block intruders but admit the staff whose biometrics it recognizes.

In their search for linguistic talent, the elder scholars of Babel, Professor Lovell foremost among them, have persuaded Oxford, a bastion of white male English privilege, to admit foreigners and women. So it is that Robin, who is half Chinese, is allowed to study at Babel along with Rami, from India, Victoire, from Haiti, and Letty, who is white and English but a woman. These four meet and form a great friendship, as they share their love of languages, Oxford and each other. Though most of the novel records Robin’s point of view, we gradually learn the backstories of Rami, Letty and Victoire in interludes.

Their friendship is the lively center and the emotional heart of the novel. They are close but subject to explosive moments, angry separation, and betrayal. But the bond among them still holds, for better and worse. The four are forced to face the reality that Babel is the only part of racist and sexist Oxford that is accepting of them. As they learn more about how the system based on silver really works, they see their own roles in the exploitative British empire.

That knowledge is heightened by their meeting up with members of the secret revolutionary Hermes Society. One of its leaders turns out to be Griffin Lovell, Robin’s half-brother, who deeply believes that violence rather than working from within is the only way to deal with the raw power of imperial rule that accumulates more and more wealth while ignoring the needs of the rest of the world and its subject peoples. Babel closely interrogates through the conflicted relationships of the four friends the hard choices facing oppressed people living in a privileged world.

Babel also challenges the assertion of the subtitle, that violence is necessary to effect change, through the head-on clashes of its major characters. That makes for powerful scenes as the field of possible actions to change the world at all becomes more and more confined as the story progresses. Kuang builds the story to a mighty climax, but it is not one that ties everything neatly together or offers simple solutions to any of the characters.

This is a remarkable novel that has its nerdy components (criss-crossing notes on many languages and a supply of footnotes) but becomes an exciting story of friendship caught up in revolutionary times. Babel examines every aspect of the hard choices, brutal consequences and interplay of external forces and personal needs that beset its characters. R. F. Kuang is an impressive writer with four big novels in print, not to mention a batch of advanced degrees, at the age of 26. Fortunately for us, she’s just getting started.

Related Posts

  • Communicating feelings in Babel-17
    Communicating Feelings in Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17

    I’ve never felt so close to a brilliant mind playing with the possibilities of language…

  • Vintage SciFi Month - The Dispossessed
    My Vintage Science Fiction Month Reading List for 2021

    I'm an enthusiastic follower of the Little Red Reviewer's Vintage Science Fiction Month Not-a-Challenge, and…

  • Bliss Montage
    Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

    One of the things that makes Ling Ma’s stories in Bliss Montage so extraordinary is…

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction Tagged With: alternate history, colonialism, empire, friendship, identity, language, power, R.F. Kuang, racism, revolution

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Subscribe to SciFi Mind Posts



About SciFi Mind

nebula SciFiMind

Something is struggling to be born in this damaged and inspiring world, and I believe science fiction and its speculative cousins are helping us figure out what it is. It’s pushing the imaginations of fiction writers to bend and twist familiar forms to try to capture the forces that are hurling us into a barely conceivable future. This blog is my small way of exploring the half-perceived … Read More about About

Search SciFi Mind

Recent Posts

  • Nine Princes in Amber by Roger ZelaznyNine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny – #VintageSciFiMonth
  • Isle of the Dead by Roger ZelaznyIsle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny – #VintageSciFiMonth
  • Ringworld by Larry NivenRingworld by Larry Niven – #VintageSciFiMonth
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric SheepDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick – #VintageSciFiMonth

Categories

Twitter

John Folk-Williams Follow

SFMind

alwsparrow Thank you for following me!!

Reply on Twitter 1621424477350363137 Retweet on Twitter 1621424477350363137 Like on Twitter 1621424477350363137 Twitter 1621424477350363137

Elizabeth Adwoboa Thank you for following me!!

Reply on Twitter 1621288679166689286 Retweet on Twitter 1621288679166689286 Like on Twitter 1621288679166689286 1 Twitter 1621288679166689286

jenny Thank you for following me!!

Reply on Twitter 1620533386765897730 Retweet on Twitter 1620533386765897730 Like on Twitter 1620533386765897730 Twitter 1620533386765897730

Now this is scary: The Space Review: Space-to-ground capabilities are the answer to deterring invasion of Taiwan https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4522/1

Reply on Twitter 1620416035601154049 Retweet on Twitter 1620416035601154049 Like on Twitter 1620416035601154049 1 Twitter 1620416035601154049

Top Ten Tuesday: first encounters in 2022 https://onemore.org/2023/01/31/top-ten-tuesday-first-encounters-in-2022/ via @imyril

Reply on Twitter 1620414490222432258 Retweet on Twitter 1620414490222432258 Like on Twitter 1620414490222432258 1 Twitter 1620414490222432258
Load More...

About the Author

A late-comer to the worlds of science fiction, John Folk-Williams circled around it, first by blogging (primarily through Storied Mind) about inner struggles and the mind’s way of distorting reality. Then he turned directly to SFF as an amazing medium for re-envisioning the mind and the worlds it creates. He started this blog as a way to experiment with writing science fiction and to learn from its many masterful practitioners.

Follow

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Goodreads

Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Cookie Policy

Cookie Policy

© 2023 Copyright by John Folk-Williams · Dynamik-Gen On Genesis Framework