On the world building, what drove me up the wall in the book was her refusal to engage with the amount of silver in possession of the Spanish Empire. Again, it Spanish imperial decline might have gone differently in a world with SILVER MAGIC of which their colonies had A METRIC SHITTON. It did not let me go the entire book. What happened to the Spanish Empire?????
Literally like she yada yada yadas the way the British leapfrogged the Spanish. She says airily that the Spanish empire is a shadow of its former self. How? Why?
She even sort of comes up with an inhouse explanation that she could deploy! Match pairs lose potency as languages get wider spread. The Spanish Empire tended to exterminate indigenous cultures and languages. Therefore their pairs would have lost potency. The British Empire's relative linguistic mongrel-ness keeps things funky and fresh. It's an argument, at leasr. But nooo. In the book it's Oh Yeah Spain Used To Have An Empire. But Now Britain Is Top Dog. Welp.
Excellent review. I liked the book well enough, although it’s rather pulpy. For all of Kuang’s linguistic prowess, she does make some elementary mistakes in the use of Chinese and there’s also a cringe-worthy error in her Devanagari (that is, in the spelling of a Sanskrit verb root). If you’re going to flourish “linguistic exotica”, it’s best to double check them.
I suspected as much! (the devanagari was absolutely wonky, but my Sanskrit is rusty.) Reading Katabasis firmed up my suspicion that Kuang's 'scholarship' is only impressive if you know nothing about the subjects she's pontificating about.
Do tell about the Chinese if you care to - I'm wrapping up my two-parter on Babel today and I'd love to know.
無 (wú) means ‘negative, not, without'; 形 (xíng) means ‘appearance, form, shape’. 五行 means not just invisible, but intangible. To illustrate: the poet Zhang Shunmin of the Northern Song dynasty wrote once that 詩是無形的畫，畫是有形詩; that poems were incorporeal (wúxíng) paintings, and paintings were corporeal poems.
For some inexplicable reason — probably a result of predictive text and lazy proof reading — the key expression 無形 (wú xíng), which has just been explained, is now written as 五行 (wǔ xíng), that is the “five elements theory of medicine, life, the world, etc”. A simple typo, but annoying nonetheless.
Secondly, although the poet-painter Zhang Shunmin (張舜民) did indeed use the expression 畫是無形詩，詩是無形畫, it was first used by Guo Xi 郭熙 in his famous treatise on mountains and streams《林泉高致》. However, that’s not the error; the mistake is that our author gives the Chinese as 詩是無形的畫，畫是有形詩. The quibble lies in the use of 的 de, a modern marker of the possessive and one used for attribution. RFK has added an unnecessary colloquial turn to a clichéd fixed expression. Mysterious.
The second note on the same page is a gloss on 幫忙 (bāngmáng), ‘to help, to lend a hand.’ The way the term is used in the text, however, is colloquial and thus should actually be given as 幫個忙 bāng ge máng. That is, ‘give [me] a helping hand’.
There’s another error in the Chinese later on in the text, but I failed to mark it. These first too were too egregious to forget.
Delighted nonetheless to see the use of Chinese in the text — and one should be thankful that the author employs full-form Chinese characters, or 正體字/ 繁體字, rather than the hideous “crippled characters” (simplifications), 殘體字/簡體字 that the Communists imposed on the mainland from the 1950s and 60s.
As for the Sanskrit, the verb root in play here is भिद् ‘bhid’ and what the author is striving for seems to be भिनत्ति ‘bhinatti’, although she inexplicably gives us ‘bhnitte’, a mangled word. Does she mean भिनत्ति ‘bhinatti’ (note the way the double ‘t’ is written, subtle perhaps but crucial). Ramy would have been annoyed.
Cheers,
Geremie
PS: the Latin, Greek, German and French seemed fine, but I guess that they are easier to get right
Nothing comes of it, because Sarah J Maas does not actually plot her books, she just lets the spirit move her and stops when she’s run out of euphemisms for dick
you said it all - a good concept, god if only somebody else had written it !! Kuang is a criminal pinnacle of contemporary lit's celebrity culture Issue.
Ty if I had the money I would run a Tinder For Speculative Fiction where I match Ideas Havers to Executors. I would make no money but by God we would have something to read
You know what? The thing that fucks with me the most is that Robin, growing up in Canton in the 19th century, speaks and thinks in Mandarin. This is so anachronistic, it boggles the mind. It feels so disrespectful that in a novel about the exploitation of languages by an evil empire, Kuang ignores the existence of Cantonese, a language which is slowly being squeezed out of its native region by the Chinese government. I presume this is because she doesn't speak Cantonese, and couldn't be bothered to lean into the linguistic richness that comes from comparing two languages which diverged more than five hundred years ago. No way in hell Robin would have spoken Mandarin natively - that's something that you would expect a court official to learn for his job. If I were her, I would probably have written Robin into Wuhan or something - somewhere still with a relatively big foreign population, and yet with a dialect much closer to Mandarin. Also, the insert of Lin Zexu cracked me up - it's the equivalent of having George Washington pat the main character of a book on the American revolution on the back, and made the whole thing smell of wish-fulfilling fanfiction.
Oh friend, I go OFF on that in the next instalment of this review. RF Kuang says (in a footnote, natch) that Robin is drilled in Mandarin because of the needs of Empire, without considering the rich lode of material she's brought up and promptly ignored. What does it mean for Robin's fluency and ability to 'dream in Chinese' for him to be taught in something other than his mother tongue? Might he use Cantonese 'match-pairs' to defeat Empire, with its blind spots? Why are you refusing to engage with your own world, Rebecca?
Thank you so much for this, this book should have been right up my alley as a mega-nerd and a huge Clarke fan but I loathed it from page one. I've also been extremely frustrated by the wall of defensive praise and accusations of racism hurled my way when I dare criticize it, both online and---upsettingly---a few times in "real life." What really killed the novel for me was the didactism. I probably could have dealt with the rest, if not enjoyed the book, had the footnotes not been present. I ended up abandoning it somewhere after the first third, after finally being insulted enough by one of the "racism is bad" footnotes to refuse to continue.
As an academic myself (but in the sciences) I take it rather personally when people call Kuang's writing "academic" as a defense, because it really is no such thing. Her prose strikes me as essentially cut from the same cloth as other TikTok darlings, though elevated by a more expansive vocabulary and the constant allusions and references to other works. But Kuang's voice comes off as remarkably YA, which I guess is due to her roots in the genre.
Also, I was very intrigued by your note that Amal El-Mohtar's recommendation was a red flag---Time War is another one of those frustrating books for me which I strongly disliked despite it theoretically being perfect for me, and I was curious if you'd written a review anywhere.
*nods gloomily* the tweet where I shared this review has already attracted its fair share of kneejerk accusations of misogyny/racism.
As a recovering academic, I'm also offended at the characterisation of Kuang's writing as 'academic'. Academic writing is typically peer to peer. You don't hector in academic writing, because you're talking to colleagues, not children.
As to Time War: hehehehehehehehe yes I've got a review in the works!
I would absolutely LOVE some recommendations for your 'hours-long breakdowns of insanely popular novels belched from the depths of BookTok' if you can share, that sounds right up my alley.
Reads with Rachel (who's very prolific, and whose breakdown of Fourth Wing has enabled me to imbibe by cultural osmosis far far more than I would ever need to know without touching that behemoth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05Rrb0yt5H0)
Reads with Cindy (whom I first came across drinking-game-ing her way through one of the Court of Thorns and Roses books, so again, you never have to read those books if you don't want to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5-U1KMk7QY)
I'm not a critical reader (in fact, I'm a lazy one that only focuses on the plot and how likable the characters are). Even so, I felt something was off. The way the characters speak and how colonialism and racism are portrayed are too modern-coded for me to simply not notice.
The premise was so promising that I was excited about reading this book, but after 3 months of reading (yes, I was so slow, and sometimes I fell asleep with my e-reader in hand), I can't help but feel disappointed. I can't say I didn't enjoy it some parts (especially the first half), but it fell short, even though it's +500 pages.
Oh, the footnotes... I just stopped reading them halfway.
Yes! A thing I did not point out in my review is that Babel is actually a real slog to get through. It was quicker once I stopped bending over backwards to give RF Kuang the benefit of the doubt, though...
And I also began this book really wanting to extend a lot of grace to the author. It's a cool premise, and it's great to see someone attempt an ambitious piece of speculative fiction touching on big macroeconomic and structural themes. But it feels like Kuang herself gave up so fast in favour of showing how Correct Her Thinking was ouf.
Excellent review! I really liked this book and i’ve been meaning to reread it, i think I’ll have some of ur criticisms in mind. I personally felt like she brushed over a lot of really interesting stuff in favour of making sure everyone knew that RACISM = BAD, but i did enjoy it overall.
I feel like this book is written with the expectation that anyone who is reading it has no idea that colonialism existed and was bad. I suppose that's okay, maybe I'm just not the target audience for it. You're so right in highlighting how even within the world it creates, despite having this slick magical concept, the magic might as well have not existed.
This is the first review of this book I've read which pinpoints one of my main issues with the book, which is the portrayal of Victoire. It seems stunningly racist to throw a Black character in there and make her a complete paper doll of a character with no flaws, motivations, or anything to do, and like you said, pretending as if her experience of Oxford is going to be exactly the same as Ramy's or Robin's. If R.F. Kuang felt as if she didn't have the range to write a Haitian character properly, maybe she should have just skipped it altogether
The only two members of The Gang with any sort of personality are Ramy (dashing gay dude who happens to be Indian) and Letty (evil white BITCH). You can tell Victoire was just there to tick off some sort of internal box RF Kuang had, and then she was terrified by her own internal GoodReads Troll who'd ding her for bad rep, rather than actually integrating the experience of a Black woman in 1830s Britain into a coherent character.
Realizing rn that using my initials on here might be a bit of a jumpscare. Thus - DISCLAIMER - I AM NOT REBECCA. Ok onwards -
Incredible and readable and thorough and approachable, AS ALWAYS, this is why your reviewership is so constructive and valuable to read. I'm a weakling who dipped out at the first dialogue anachronism, because I'm here for the history first and foremost, but you've articulated so precisely the elements that bugged me as well as giving due to the parts that did in fact slap (premise, etc) and WEH all this to say.... best book reviewer out there, tenouttaten, love and support forever XO
Screaming I did sit bolt upright until I saw that it was infinitely the infinitely superior RF. You were absolutely correct to dip out at the first anachronism in fact I realised my title for this review ought to have been ‘None of these words are in the Babel’. Which I might still wind up using. Anyway tackle-hugs and mwah to The Only RF!
I myself never ended up finising the book because I didn't enjoy it ... but one of the two notes I took in the book was on the fact that I myself did actually not like the magic system? To me it just felt like a linguist's power fantasy of their studies having a physical effect on the world as engineering does? If you want the effects of your academic R&D to just make a boat go fast, why not just do fucking engineering? (To be fair, by now I don't remember if there were important magic effects the bars could do, that were more than just what we do with engineering, maybe in the end the magic system is more than that.) Aren't you doing engineering because you're afraid of math? - This was the second note I took on the book, being enraged about a footnote that was just slandering of math. -.-
Important to note: I ofc do not think linguistics and related fields are in any way less important than engineering or other things we do in STEM. But I didn't really feel like the magic system leaned into what makes linguistics actually important in a way that's not just magic engineering i guess?
On the world building, what drove me up the wall in the book was her refusal to engage with the amount of silver in possession of the Spanish Empire. Again, it Spanish imperial decline might have gone differently in a world with SILVER MAGIC of which their colonies had A METRIC SHITTON. It did not let me go the entire book. What happened to the Spanish Empire?????
Literally like she yada yada yadas the way the British leapfrogged the Spanish. She says airily that the Spanish empire is a shadow of its former self. How? Why?
Literally she could have said The Spanish Didn't Do That Because They're Catholic. But she didn't even do that
She even sort of comes up with an inhouse explanation that she could deploy! Match pairs lose potency as languages get wider spread. The Spanish Empire tended to exterminate indigenous cultures and languages. Therefore their pairs would have lost potency. The British Empire's relative linguistic mongrel-ness keeps things funky and fresh. It's an argument, at leasr. But nooo. In the book it's Oh Yeah Spain Used To Have An Empire. But Now Britain Is Top Dog. Welp.
Excellent review. I liked the book well enough, although it’s rather pulpy. For all of Kuang’s linguistic prowess, she does make some elementary mistakes in the use of Chinese and there’s also a cringe-worthy error in her Devanagari (that is, in the spelling of a Sanskrit verb root). If you’re going to flourish “linguistic exotica”, it’s best to double check them.
I suspected as much! (the devanagari was absolutely wonky, but my Sanskrit is rusty.) Reading Katabasis firmed up my suspicion that Kuang's 'scholarship' is only impressive if you know nothing about the subjects she's pontificating about.
Do tell about the Chinese if you care to - I'm wrapping up my two-parter on Babel today and I'd love to know.
This is my rather pedantic response:
On page 65 of the book the first footnote reads:
無 (wú) means ‘negative, not, without'; 形 (xíng) means ‘appearance, form, shape’. 五行 means not just invisible, but intangible. To illustrate: the poet Zhang Shunmin of the Northern Song dynasty wrote once that 詩是無形的畫，畫是有形詩; that poems were incorporeal (wúxíng) paintings, and paintings were corporeal poems.
For some inexplicable reason — probably a result of predictive text and lazy proof reading — the key expression 無形 (wú xíng), which has just been explained, is now written as 五行 (wǔ xíng), that is the “five elements theory of medicine, life, the world, etc”. A simple typo, but annoying nonetheless.
Secondly, although the poet-painter Zhang Shunmin (張舜民) did indeed use the expression 畫是無形詩，詩是無形畫, it was first used by Guo Xi 郭熙 in his famous treatise on mountains and streams《林泉高致》. However, that’s not the error; the mistake is that our author gives the Chinese as 詩是無形的畫，畫是有形詩. The quibble lies in the use of 的 de, a modern marker of the possessive and one used for attribution. RFK has added an unnecessary colloquial turn to a clichéd fixed expression. Mysterious.
The second note on the same page is a gloss on 幫忙 (bāngmáng), ‘to help, to lend a hand.’ The way the term is used in the text, however, is colloquial and thus should actually be given as 幫個忙 bāng ge máng. That is, ‘give [me] a helping hand’.
There’s another error in the Chinese later on in the text, but I failed to mark it. These first too were too egregious to forget.
Delighted nonetheless to see the use of Chinese in the text — and one should be thankful that the author employs full-form Chinese characters, or 正體字/ 繁體字, rather than the hideous “crippled characters” (simplifications), 殘體字/簡體字 that the Communists imposed on the mainland from the 1950s and 60s.
As for the Sanskrit, the verb root in play here is भिद् ‘bhid’ and what the author is striving for seems to be भिनत्ति ‘bhinatti’, although she inexplicably gives us ‘bhnitte’, a mangled word. Does she mean भिनत्ति ‘bhinatti’ (note the way the double ‘t’ is written, subtle perhaps but crucial). Ramy would have been annoyed.
Cheers,
Geremie
PS: the Latin, Greek, German and French seemed fine, but I guess that they are easier to get right
We love pedantry round there 'ere parts. The double t in 'bhinatti' made me facepalm too!
Nothing comes of it, because Sarah J Maas does not actually plot her books, she just lets the spirit move her and stops when she’s run out of euphemisms for dick
I am CACKLING
SJM also finds a dizzying number of variations for the phrase 'a chill ran down my spine'. True death by thesaurus.
you said it all - a good concept, god if only somebody else had written it !! Kuang is a criminal pinnacle of contemporary lit's celebrity culture Issue.
Ty if I had the money I would run a Tinder For Speculative Fiction where I match Ideas Havers to Executors. I would make no money but by God we would have something to read
I yearn….
But also: speak more of Sleb Culture and Kuang 👀👀 I've got a follow-up planned and I'm curious to know your thoughts
You know what? The thing that fucks with me the most is that Robin, growing up in Canton in the 19th century, speaks and thinks in Mandarin. This is so anachronistic, it boggles the mind. It feels so disrespectful that in a novel about the exploitation of languages by an evil empire, Kuang ignores the existence of Cantonese, a language which is slowly being squeezed out of its native region by the Chinese government. I presume this is because she doesn't speak Cantonese, and couldn't be bothered to lean into the linguistic richness that comes from comparing two languages which diverged more than five hundred years ago. No way in hell Robin would have spoken Mandarin natively - that's something that you would expect a court official to learn for his job. If I were her, I would probably have written Robin into Wuhan or something - somewhere still with a relatively big foreign population, and yet with a dialect much closer to Mandarin. Also, the insert of Lin Zexu cracked me up - it's the equivalent of having George Washington pat the main character of a book on the American revolution on the back, and made the whole thing smell of wish-fulfilling fanfiction.
Oh friend, I go OFF on that in the next instalment of this review. RF Kuang says (in a footnote, natch) that Robin is drilled in Mandarin because of the needs of Empire, without considering the rich lode of material she's brought up and promptly ignored. What does it mean for Robin's fluency and ability to 'dream in Chinese' for him to be taught in something other than his mother tongue? Might he use Cantonese 'match-pairs' to defeat Empire, with its blind spots? Why are you refusing to engage with your own world, Rebecca?
Thank you so much for this, this book should have been right up my alley as a mega-nerd and a huge Clarke fan but I loathed it from page one. I've also been extremely frustrated by the wall of defensive praise and accusations of racism hurled my way when I dare criticize it, both online and---upsettingly---a few times in "real life." What really killed the novel for me was the didactism. I probably could have dealt with the rest, if not enjoyed the book, had the footnotes not been present. I ended up abandoning it somewhere after the first third, after finally being insulted enough by one of the "racism is bad" footnotes to refuse to continue.
As an academic myself (but in the sciences) I take it rather personally when people call Kuang's writing "academic" as a defense, because it really is no such thing. Her prose strikes me as essentially cut from the same cloth as other TikTok darlings, though elevated by a more expansive vocabulary and the constant allusions and references to other works. But Kuang's voice comes off as remarkably YA, which I guess is due to her roots in the genre.
Also, I was very intrigued by your note that Amal El-Mohtar's recommendation was a red flag---Time War is another one of those frustrating books for me which I strongly disliked despite it theoretically being perfect for me, and I was curious if you'd written a review anywhere.
*nods gloomily* the tweet where I shared this review has already attracted its fair share of kneejerk accusations of misogyny/racism.
As a recovering academic, I'm also offended at the characterisation of Kuang's writing as 'academic'. Academic writing is typically peer to peer. You don't hector in academic writing, because you're talking to colleagues, not children.
As to Time War: hehehehehehehehe yes I've got a review in the works!
I would absolutely LOVE some recommendations for your 'hours-long breakdowns of insanely popular novels belched from the depths of BookTok' if you can share, that sounds right up my alley.
OKAY, SO. You may well already know these, but:
Newlynova (sample video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJgwLYKRQTs)
Weirdo Book Club (who also reviewed that very same novel, but also broke down the infamous Haunting Adeline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5iHRXzIGMY)
Reads with Rachel (who's very prolific, and whose breakdown of Fourth Wing has enabled me to imbibe by cultural osmosis far far more than I would ever need to know without touching that behemoth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05Rrb0yt5H0)
Reads with Cindy (whom I first came across drinking-game-ing her way through one of the Court of Thorns and Roses books, so again, you never have to read those books if you don't want to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5-U1KMk7QY)
oh my word THANK YOU!! i am very excited to do a deep dive on these, see you in 5-10 business days
I'm not a critical reader (in fact, I'm a lazy one that only focuses on the plot and how likable the characters are). Even so, I felt something was off. The way the characters speak and how colonialism and racism are portrayed are too modern-coded for me to simply not notice.
The premise was so promising that I was excited about reading this book, but after 3 months of reading (yes, I was so slow, and sometimes I fell asleep with my e-reader in hand), I can't help but feel disappointed. I can't say I didn't enjoy it some parts (especially the first half), but it fell short, even though it's +500 pages.
Oh, the footnotes... I just stopped reading them halfway.
Yes! A thing I did not point out in my review is that Babel is actually a real slog to get through. It was quicker once I stopped bending over backwards to give RF Kuang the benefit of the doubt, though...
And I also began this book really wanting to extend a lot of grace to the author. It's a cool premise, and it's great to see someone attempt an ambitious piece of speculative fiction touching on big macroeconomic and structural themes. But it feels like Kuang herself gave up so fast in favour of showing how Correct Her Thinking was ouf.
Excellent review! I really liked this book and i’ve been meaning to reread it, i think I’ll have some of ur criticisms in mind. I personally felt like she brushed over a lot of really interesting stuff in favour of making sure everyone knew that RACISM = BAD, but i did enjoy it overall.
Oo let me know what you think when you reread it!
I feel like this book is written with the expectation that anyone who is reading it has no idea that colonialism existed and was bad. I suppose that's okay, maybe I'm just not the target audience for it. You're so right in highlighting how even within the world it creates, despite having this slick magical concept, the magic might as well have not existed.
It’s such a pity - such a cool magic system and the author’s incuriosity really lets her own creation down.
This is the first review of this book I've read which pinpoints one of my main issues with the book, which is the portrayal of Victoire. It seems stunningly racist to throw a Black character in there and make her a complete paper doll of a character with no flaws, motivations, or anything to do, and like you said, pretending as if her experience of Oxford is going to be exactly the same as Ramy's or Robin's. If R.F. Kuang felt as if she didn't have the range to write a Haitian character properly, maybe she should have just skipped it altogether
The only two members of The Gang with any sort of personality are Ramy (dashing gay dude who happens to be Indian) and Letty (evil white BITCH). You can tell Victoire was just there to tick off some sort of internal box RF Kuang had, and then she was terrified by her own internal GoodReads Troll who'd ding her for bad rep, rather than actually integrating the experience of a Black woman in 1830s Britain into a coherent character.
Realizing rn that using my initials on here might be a bit of a jumpscare. Thus - DISCLAIMER - I AM NOT REBECCA. Ok onwards -
Incredible and readable and thorough and approachable, AS ALWAYS, this is why your reviewership is so constructive and valuable to read. I'm a weakling who dipped out at the first dialogue anachronism, because I'm here for the history first and foremost, but you've articulated so precisely the elements that bugged me as well as giving due to the parts that did in fact slap (premise, etc) and WEH all this to say.... best book reviewer out there, tenouttaten, love and support forever XO
Screaming I did sit bolt upright until I saw that it was infinitely the infinitely superior RF. You were absolutely correct to dip out at the first anachronism in fact I realised my title for this review ought to have been ‘None of these words are in the Babel’. Which I might still wind up using. Anyway tackle-hugs and mwah to The Only RF!
I myself never ended up finising the book because I didn't enjoy it ... but one of the two notes I took in the book was on the fact that I myself did actually not like the magic system? To me it just felt like a linguist's power fantasy of their studies having a physical effect on the world as engineering does? If you want the effects of your academic R&D to just make a boat go fast, why not just do fucking engineering? (To be fair, by now I don't remember if there were important magic effects the bars could do, that were more than just what we do with engineering, maybe in the end the magic system is more than that.) Aren't you doing engineering because you're afraid of math? - This was the second note I took on the book, being enraged about a footnote that was just slandering of math. -.-
Important to note: I ofc do not think linguistics and related fields are in any way less important than engineering or other things we do in STEM. But I didn't really feel like the magic system leaned into what makes linguistics actually important in a way that's not just magic engineering i guess?