Georeactor Blog

Babel: An Arcane History (R. F. Kuang, 2022)

After the YouTube algorithm sent me many R. F. Kuang book talks, I decided to finally dig in. Long, but with readable chapters.
My first thought was that there's something going on here with the 'discovering your true self and powers at magical boarding school' trope now being a college, maybe for a reader of this genre who has grown up. Reddit reviews outclass me on references here with comparisons to The Secret History and Jonathan Strange.

The setting in 1830s is an opportunity to reflect on:

• the rise of English as a lingua franca surpassing France and Rome
• the UK leading the Industrial Revolution
• the real-world silver trade's role in colonizing China
• completing the story before the Taiping Rebellion hits Canton / Guangzhou

A good way into the book I was tuned in and had started to imagine a snarky British narration. The word pair / translation mechanism reminded me of the aliens which say two words simultaneously in Embassytown (2011).
Our main four young students seek approval and promotion within academia in the way that the faithful may want to become church leadership and avoid excommunication. For me this theme stands out even among recent books set in modern academia (The Guest Lecture, The Laughter).
Kuang's past ventures into fanfic are a little evident in the Azkaban-esque discovery of an earlier Babel cohort.
IMO some time progressions are jarring, whether it's breezing through an entire summer or multiple encounters with a mysterious group. One mystery is explained early on and then hinted at multiple times before being 'revealed'. On the other hand, magic Oxford's connections to pre-Civil War America are left unspoken until super late.

300 pages in, there's a diversion which overwhelms the whole plot. I went from thinking Oxford was getting a little stale, to wondering so this is what the book is really about? There could be many readings of this - for starters if we're supposed to look at real-world Oxford and the Ivy universities today, in the same way as the treasures hoarded by the British Museum or the Vatican.
To get to the title component "the Necessity of Violence" the reader is guided past old arguments about global trade and dealmaking, about corruption and vices, or the British crediting themselves for abolition. Colonial institutions are a form of violence, or they've been imposed on the country with the threat of violence, so how else to respond?
Wikipedia gave me a little help here: Governor General Lin Zexu (who appears in the book) in real life wrote an open letter to Queen Victoria requesting a halt to the opium trade, which was even published in a London newspaper. Instead the post-Babel activist is supposed to choose direct action, here including strikes and corporate sabotage and maybe being a decent professor. Everything up to and including violence has to be part of your discussion when it comes to histories like South Africa. But because I'm halfway through A Continent Erupts -  to me decolonization and violence brings to mind colonies occuped by Imperial Japan, or the Partition of India, where the European colonial side is the one quick to say violence couldn't be avoided?

On American education

I was recently reading an exchange about tech bros and right-wing media. One person said we need education to turn from STEM back to the humanities. Someone else pointed out that Peter Thiel studied philosophy and law, and Mark Zuckerberg loves the classics (noted to quote the Aeneid in 2010). The use of the classics, literature, and a comfortably distant academia to back a colonial empire seems on the mark here.

In school I learned about colonialism through the original 13 colonies, or alongside terms like triangular trade. We did learn about segregation and discrimination, stories from Americans who were not allowed to lead themselves, police themselves, or be educated as equals. But core postcolonial thought is that white Americans and Britons cannot understand what it means for a whole country to be subjugated like this.

Some healthy meta topics

Ramy proposes a translation of Omar ibn Said, who wrote in Arabic about being captured and sold into slavery in America (I read I Cannot Write My Life in October 2023). Very few people would be aware of his writing, but it's a good reference from the time period.

This was weird to read at the same time as Malala's new book tour about finding herself at Oxford.

The title of the book can be elusive:

• The Los Angeles Times reviewed Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution. I believe this is the correct longform.
• The Wikipedia article is reasonably titled Babel, or the Necessity of Violence; the page has included a title with two colons.
• Amazon's two-colon SEO-friendly title is Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution―An Historic Fantasy of Dark Academia, Perfect for Fans of Historical Fiction and Nineteenth Century England
  (One GoodReads reviewer from 2023: "Dark academia is hot right now" (??????))
• I checked the author's website before choosing Babel: An Arcane History, which appears often in indie book reviews.

A review of the Bahasa Indonesia translation

It's unusual to see footnotes in a fictional book, and with certain descriptions you get the sense that Kuang wants to include anything peculiar from her research (e.g. the London omnibus system), or at times play a dungeon master for this world, or an interpreter for a less-well-read reader. I appreciated this phrasing from a fantasy subreddit post:

Babel is a novel that could only have been written by someone with a very particular skillset (or at the very least, a very particular set of obsessions)

The unhealthy meta

This book is interesting and a reader should not be consumed by internet meta commentary before picking it up. But I do want to include online criticism in this post, beyond the generic 'X was strong, Y was weak' reviews.

Responses to the fantasy subreddit review cover a whole range of criticisms. The text's references to etymology, linguistics, and history get it recommended to experts who then might find the references not deep enough. To me the footnotes were interesting (better than Arrival) and often helpful to catch a reference.
It could be that Reddit is overly mean in criticisms of Kuang… this comes up frequently with explanations tied to the current book ecosystem: BookTok and YA discourse, the lack of subtlety, or the ambitious positioning of each book:

I feel like there has to be some middle path between how her books are currently marketed as genre-redefining literature and not marketing at all

A recent New Yorker profile has a few examples where I can see people feeling resentment toward the author's cultivation of PR:

I'd never been so curious about another writer's routines, habits, and time-management skills.

That article also includes a flashback to Kuang as debate kid and coach (for the gamified version with high school and college competitions) which recompiled my understanding of what people like and dislike about her public persona. Maybe that's nuts! But if we can have a 'debate kid' Senator, why not a 'debate kid' author?

The discourse could also be fueled by each of Kuang's books getting a TV or movie deal. Better to hammer out your opinion online now before everyone watches the Poppy War series. And then hmmm -  when that series fails to materialize, is the critic vindicated?

The booktuber Cindy Pham has a 30-minute review of Yellowface, sharing issues with the book, including that the premise is "very chronically online rather than reflective of the real-life publishing industry". This gels with Kuang describing "hours of doomscrolling" during the pandemic as an inspiration.
After watching Pham's review I had it in my head that Babel would totally lack class consciousness, but instead it drops a scoop of it at odd times, particularly with references to factories and mines at the end to assure us that the common man would support the resistance. But the class discussion is often a way for people to gossip about how Kuang got published in the first place, which I don't know anything about.

Previous Reads / Notes

I watched House of Dynamite in a theater. It's an upgrade to Madam Secretary's well-researched Night Watch episode. People predicted from the cast and early reviews that Netflix did a theatrical release for Oscars consideration, but I can't agree. Some thoughts:

• In the trailer, the ICBM appeared to launch from the Russia-China-North Korea border junction. In the final cut, they talk about missing a sea / submarine launch, which makes more sense.

• Modern media has two go-tos for nuclear war: the possibility of a cyber attack, and the president being rushed into responding.
  Other countries were able to track the missile, which makes a cyber attack or mishap unlikely. One character suggested that a cyber attack means we should still escalate as it means we're about to face a larger (kinetic) attack?
  I've read books from the 1980s when the US planned more deliberate, targeted strikes over a week or more. Nearing the end they hadn't ruled out North Korea or a rogue commander, yet the president is about to launch.
• Every ~12 minutes the movie jumps back in time to follow other characters. Multiple people went to the bathroom at the start of these.
• A few lines took me out of the movie. In the first minute (?) there was a chapter title card saying "inclination is flattening".
• They show soldiers and national security officials breaking protocol, calling home, or leaving their posts. Maybe they asked real people what they would do in a 'game over' scenario, but here they should be ready for a second missile or a US counterattack.
• No mention of MIRVs (multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicles)
• The target city and suburbs could use tornado sirens and emergency phone alerts.
• I wonder if the original concept was situation rooms only, then Netflix sent an extra check to quickly add conceptual film of people receiving the call in Gettysburg, the African savanna, etc. The FEMA character, one of the Secret Service agents, and an AV guy likely had their scenes cut.
• Based on the Gettysburg scene... is this all happening just before the Fourth of July???

The outbreak of GitHub crypto spam has left me shocked how many people make an effort to maintain GitHub Inbox Zero (deleted issues are leaving a notifications dot).

Bosnia's Republika Srpska has accepted Dodik was removed as president, and appointed an interim leader. In an op-ed in the Washington Times, former Illinois Governor Blagojevich calls for a Croatian state within Bosnia.

Were early bicycles invented because of the volcanic "year without a summer" and a shortage of horses? https://www.jcfj.ie/2025/07/27/the-prophetic-origins-of-the-bicycle/

I started a new maps + science channel ( Berlin Wall, delayed cord clamping ), and experimented with two real estate listings on YouTube Shorts.
Monetization treats 1 million Shorts views the same as 1,000 hours of regular video, so you need to push out viral Shorts on a regular basis. I got ~1,300 views and an OK number of likes on each. One thing which puzzled me was YouTube correcting the number of likes and dislikes throughout the day.

Kind of an experimental theater / truecrime podcast piece at this point, but the Doggy Bag episode of "Who Shat On The Floor At My Wedding?" shares an urban legend with a specific place and time. Most people in the chain wrongly thought they were only 1–2 degrees of separation from the source. Details were added and modified quite recently in the chain.

Whale Hunting is unraveling a crypto scam which went as deep as hiring an actor to play the CEO at an event. https://whalehunting.projectbrazen.com/who-is-benjamin-berger-the-key-to-mauer/

A recent terrorist attack reminded me of the 'hypertext game' created by Dan Hett about his brother's death in 2017. This has stuck with me over the years and I'm relieved that it hasn't disappeared from the internet. https://danhett.itch.io/c-ya-laterrrr

This might come up more in the year after Jane Goodall's death, but what will be the legacy of The Trimates? It looks like people connected the dots on Leakey in earlier books and Simple English Wikipedia, and Goodall was rumored to share stories in private. But try finding a video about it.

A scientist competing with Lumina on dental microbiome transplants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bc5jhCDWg8

Mysterious pre-colonial leaders of the Cherokee, which are often believed to be fire priests, mound-builders preceding the Cherokee, or parts of various conspiracies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ani-kutani