Review of Babel, or the Necessity of Violence.

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I purchased this book for my monthly SF book club event. I think we expected it to be on the Hugo ballot (it's not) but I did read the book and find it interesting if a bit slow.

The story starts with a small Chinese boy in 1828 who is dying of cholera, which has taken his family. He is rescued by an Englishman, Richard Lovell, and taken to England where he uses the name Robin Swift. Under Lovell's instruction, Swift ends up going to Oxford. It's not our Oxford - at the center of town is Babel, a tower where silver bars are inscribed with word pairs, giving the silver magical qualities. Swift and a few other translators eventually understand the exploitive system they live under and take action to fight it.

I found the novel interesting, and as a student of history I found myself carefully looking for where the author's history diverged from ours. I also found the novel a bit slow - by starting when Swift was a small boy we spend many pages merely observing him as he observes the world. The second half of the book has a lot of interpersonal drama as Swift and his friends deal with some very complicated interpersonal relationships. These bits were just this side of soap opera for me.

Overall, and enjoyable if long read and I hope to find out why it did not get on the Hugo ballot.



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Review of Translation State

Translation State by Ann Leckie

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Things seem to run in cycles, and this is the second novel in a row I've read with deals with translations - the first was R. F. Kuang's Babel, or the Necessity of Violence. I'm a fan of Ann Leckie, and I found this novel the more enjoyable of the two.

The novel is set in Leckie's Imperial Radch universe, but there is enough difference of setting and time that I believe you do not need to have read any of her previous stuff to follow along. Translation State opens with Enae, a middle-aged woman getting kicked out of her ancestral home on the death of her grandmother and sent on a diplomatic make-work trip as a consolation prize. We then see Reet, an adopted mechanic who has never fit in, and finally Qven, an alien hybrid created to translate between the extremely alien and extremely powerful Presger. Only a treaty protects the humans from being hunted by the unstoppable Presger.

I found that this novel moved along at a brisk pace, although allowing time for all three main characters to develop in logical and interesting ways. Ann Leckie's aliens are very much alien, and her humans are both very human yet different then us. The diplomatic make-work mission proves to be critical for humanity and there is a weird but important romance plot as well.

I will say that this is definitely a post-Covid novel as a key plot point is that one political faction of humanity believes that the Presger are a hoax, created by the Radchaai Empire as a means of control. (Sound like something ripped from today's headlines?) Slight spoiler, but this belief proves problematic in the end for its adherents. I found this book highly enjoyable.



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