Babel advertises itself as a fantasy novel about the power inherent in the act of translation, but it's really an alternate history about the moral complexities of colonialism and revolt. The fantastical element is an energy generated when one inscribes each side of a silver bar with related words from multiple languages: the bar manifests the difference in meaning. It's an interesting idea, the physical manifestation of an incorporeal force like the daemons in His Dark Materials, but it's a MacGuffin. The story is an alternate version of events leading to the Opium Wars between Britain and China.
The full title is Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution. The writing level and style are comparable to the Harry Potter books, with Oxford standing in for Hogwarts and Empire in place of Voldemort. Kuang does an excellent job of showing the radicalization of its main character Robin, and of communicating the tangled motivations of the colonizers and colonized. Our heroes' dilemmas have real weight.
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