★★★★☆ Dark and sad alternative history, not very different from Reality

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

R.F. Kuang

Dark and sad alternative history, not very different from Reality

Babel is an alternative history fantasy. But that characterization, while true strictly speaking, is misleading. Babel is actually about real history, and about the present. Before you read Babel, you should be at least slightly familiar with 19th century English history, in particular the Industrial Revolution and the Opium Wars*.

Babel alters the history of the Industrial Revolution. Instead of (or in addition to) the coal and steam-based revolution that actually occurred, there is a Silver Industrial Revolution, that depends on the ability to do magic with silver bars on which are inscribed untranslatable words in two languages. A native speaker, saying the words, can cause an effect corresponding to the gap in meaning between the two words. The upshot of this alternative technology is that foreign language scholars become invaluable assets. The Oxford Institute of Translation, nicknamed Babel, becomes immensely powerful.

Because they need foreign language speakers, Babel admits students who would not normally be admitted to 1830 Oxford: women and non-Caucasians. The story principally follows four such students, Letty (a white English girl), Victoire (a girl of Haitian extraction), Rami (an Indian Muslim boy), and Robin (a half-Chinese boy from Canton). The story is told mostly from Robin's point of view. In the first half of Babel, which is fairly sedate, we follow their first three years as students at Babel. The consistent theme throughout is othering. Letty, Vikky, Rami, and Robin are not the type of students who are supposed to be admitted to Oxford, and they are treated as foreign bodies.

This relatively sedate story breaks into active violence after the four travel to Canton with Robin's English father, Professor Lovell, so that Robin can serve as an interpreter in negotiations between opium merchants and a representative of the Chinese Empire. On return to Oxford, Letty, Vikky, Rami, and Robin find themselves in the thick of a fight, about which I will say no more to avoid spoilers.

Kuang's biography (from her website) describes her as follows:

Rebecca F. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, translator, and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and the forthcoming Babel. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.

There are a few points of note. First, Kuang is herself a person of the type that her alt-history version of the Industrial Revolution brings to Oxford. Second, she has spent time at Oxford. In her Acknowledgements, she writes

Thank you to Julius Bright-Ross, Taylor Vandick, Katie O’Nell, and the Vaults & Garden cafe, who made those strange, sad months in Oxford bearable.

The MSc program at Oxford usually lasts nine months, so that is undoubtedly what "those strange, sad months in Oxford" refers to. (They were strange and sad in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic.)

One last point, as a Chinese-American woman at Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale, Kuang has certainly experienced the kind of othering she portrays.

*The Opium Wars are one of the most shameful episodes in the history of Great Britain. Perfidious Albion wanted to sell opium (which they got from poppy farms in Turkey) to the Chinese. The Qing Emperor forbade the use and sale of opium in China, on pain of death. (Opium sale and use was likewise illegal in England -- Parliament was under no illusions about how harmful the stuff was.) Great Britain, wanting the extraordinary profits to be obtained by pushing addictive drugs to the largest nation on Earth, made war on China. Thanks in part to the gathering industrial revolution, Britain was militarily irresistibly superior to China. They forced the submission of the Emperor and the opening of the opium market. This is one of those historical events that, if you saw it in fiction, you would think implausible.

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