Babel

Like #TedChiang's ‘Seventy Two Letters’, Babel is set in a fantastical alternative history of England during the Industrial Revolution. In Kuang's universe, the revolutionary tech is yínfúlù, silver talismans engraved with a word in one language and it's translation in another. When a bilingual utters the words, the subtle differences between their meanings are released by the silver, working magic on the physical world. “The power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language the words are incapable of expressing - the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what's lost and manifests it into being.” Like in #UrsulaLeGuin's Earthsea, words have magical power, but also like Earthsea, the magic is taught to adepts in cloistered academies, in Kuang's case the Royal Institute of Translation. Translators are not only key to great leaps in productivity for British Industry, but also at the nexus of Britain's project for empire and colonisation. The empire's next target is China, and the novel opens with a boy, the only survivor of Asiatic Cholera in his Canton household, is rescued and cured with silver-work by a mysterious Englishman, Professor Lovell. The professor spirits the boy off to London, forcing him to choose an English name (Robin) and abandon his native Cantonese in favour of the more ‘useful’ Mandarin tongue. Like #PhilipPullman's The Golden Compass, the hero is a youth of ambiguous parentage, growing up in an Oxford college, mentored by a distant, dismissive father figure. He's brought up studying Latin and Greek, and afforded a ‘opportunity’ to enter the Royal Institute of Translation, with a small cohort of foreign-born multilinguals. Like the Le Guin's academy, the he finally finds recognition and love amongst his peers, and a long lost sense of belonging, a salve for his lifelong alienation. Robin loves student life, but glossing over the underlying racism of Britain in general and Oxford in particular, and ignoring the growing realisation that silver-work is a tool for oppression in the colonies and a weapon of imperial expansion, become increasingly unsustainable. He realises the ‘opportunity’ is slavery wrapped in a false promise. The novel's civilised beginnings are misleading. The tension, violence, and stakes rise inexorably amongst revelations about his origins, shadowy resistance groups, betrayal, excruciating torture, and sudden death. Ostensibly about English colonial hegemony in centuries past, the novel has a lot to say about Silicon Valley's global imperial projects of similar magnitude, digital and linguistic sovereignty violated by today's magic: machine learning in general, and natural language processing in particular. Kuang's 'Babel' is action packed, and also bristling with etymological curiosities and translation theory. I loved it not only because of its germane themes and because I'm a nerd linguist, but also because it was a great, heartrending adventure, with a great deal of resonance not only presumably for colonised people and immigrants everywhere, but anyone who's spent time bathed in alienation or crises of identity.