Book Review: Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

 A core theme worth exploring, obscured by lacklustre storytelling and the inability to trust the audience even one tiny bit

Before I get into the meat of this review, I want to talk a little about localisation of books, specifically for the US market. It's not a new topic - authors like Sascha Stronach and Emily Tesh have both publically discussed their experiences of this impacting their own works - but it is a persistent one, and one that absolutely plagues R. F. Kuang's new novel Katabasis.

The novel is set in a university in the UK - Cambridge, specifically - and the main character is a PhD student at the very same. And yet, within the first two paragraphs, I counted six errors in terminology/process for something in such a setting. US and UK academic terminology are bogglingly different, and so I'm used to ignoring the odd few in reading US published books set in non-US settings. It just comes with the territory. But as the first chapter of Katabasis went on, the sheer volume of them was kind of impressive. Nearly every bit of terminology that applies to the academic setting either of the UK or of Cambridge specifically was got wrong*. And it was this consistency that brings me to an assumption - that this is an editorial decision, rather than a set of authorial snafus, especially as I know Kuang has studied in the UK, and her previous academia-centred novel Babel is much, much better on the terminological accuracy front.

If it is editorial localisation... I then have to wonder why? Is there a belief that using non-US terminology will make the book inaccessible to its US market? If so... I would like to hope that's untrue. Coming from the not-US as I do, I know first hand how easily we as a set of reading cultures have adapted to US-specific references. Baffling and nonsensical** as they are, you learn to remember what a sophomore is, what "Greek" means in a university - sorry, college - context, and an array of other tidbits of cultural richness that don't exist elsewhere. Clearly, readers of all sorts are fully willing and capable of adapting to this kind of vocabulary shift (even leaving aside that we're SFF readers who pick up a whole new set of neologisms half the time we read a book). And yet, this kind of USification persists. I assume that publishers know what they're doing and want to make money, so I have to believe based on those priors that there is a benefit to doing all of this, but even so... it frustrates me to no end.

And you might say, what's a bit of terminology among friends? Why does it matter if the person in charge of her PhD is an advisor, not a supervisor, or that she's doing a dissertation instead of a thesis? On the face of it, I would agree, it is a kind of silliness to get all het up about it when the core concepts are still being transmitted and understood, and perhaps even that localising this way means those concepts are better understood by their majority market. But to this I would say - the terminology is just the tip of the iceberg. It's an easy thing to spot. But it signals deeper, more fundamental problems, all of which build to an overarching attitude issue - the need for curiosity and willingness to understand things on their own terms, to see the world as the varied and multiple thing it is, rather than needing it to be condensed into the narrowness of a single understanding.

It says: the world can only be understood through the lens of the USA, and the dominant culture there. Where I might be spotting it in terminology, who's to say there isn't more and deeper in how the work views that world? It certainly comes up in enough works that deal with race outside of the US, because there is a wide gulf in how that topic is tackled in different cultures. Or where works centralise a Christian view of the world. As a process, it stakes a claim to a default from which other things deviate, and that should be a pernicious and discomforting thing to read, no matter where you're from.

And, yes, very simply as someone from outside that default... it rankles. I'm being shown an uncanny valley version of a thing I know so very well, and that's just unpleasant. Not only is it signalling that the things I know about are only worth including when adapted to US understanding (as an aesthetic that can be tweaked, rather than a real place out in the world), but also just that I, as an audience member for this work, am less worthy of consideration than the market it's being adapted to.

Which is a lot to pile onto a bunch of terminological inaccuracies in one book, but it isn't just one book. This is part of a pattern. And when it's a book like this, which has been released with a heap of anticipation and fanfare, it matters all the more. R. F. Kuang's work is the sort of thing the publishers are expecting to rake in the cash, getting the big marketing push all in the run up to release, and so what we see here, I think, very clearly signals what publishing thinks matters, and what will make them money. If that's "make sure a US audience never has to think about things in terms other than the ones they already know"... god help us all.

With that all being said - and inseparable from the work, because the text is not purely a story an author has come up with, but the product of all the decisions that went into creating the final version I get into my hands and brain - let's get onto this as a story object.

Katabasis follows Alice Law, who is (at some point in the late eighties to early nineties***) midway through her PhD in Analytic Magick at the University of Cambridge, under the... direction... of Professor Jacob Grimes, one of the brightest and most controversial lights in the field. Grimes is notable for the excellence of his work, especially the work he did during WW2, but also for the high failure rate of his students, and the intensity of his expectations and approach with them. He is a tyrant, and known for it, but a name that can open doors and make or break careers. More importantly, however, is the fact that he is currently dead. In order to have him open those doors and make that career that Alice so desperately wants, she has to head down to Hell and try to fetch him back. Unfortunately, her fellow student (and academic rival) Peter has had exactly the same idea.

Together, they head into an Underworld not trodden by magicians in the recent past, armed with research of a swathe of texts going back through the academic highlights of centuries all the way past the Ancient Greeks into the Hittites and Egyptians. They must use their knowledge and intelligence to try to navigate the Hell they think they know to find Grimes and bring him back, no matter the cost to them.

Through those reminisces, and their interactions, Kuang attempts to critique the idea of the genius, as well as to undercut the allure of academia by highlighting the physical and mental costs suffered by those trying to enter it, using the magic of the story (which is powered by paradoxes) to highlight the flawed thinking and uncomfortable cognitive dissonance needed to struggle through everything academia, and Grimes as its avatar, throw at them. I say "attempts", because I'm not at all sure the book succeeds either at this, or, perhaps more so, in the necessary twin aim of telling a story that engages you as a narrative object.

To tackle the thematic issues first, there are two complementary issues at work in this book. The first - Kuang seems unable to have any thematic feature of the story that she does not explain in plain, straight up text. There is very little show, no imply, no suggest. Instead, everything is laid out in clear, unambiguous language for the reader. In small doses, this can be fine, and even welcome. It's a tactic that was there plentifully in her previous novel Babel (which I enjoyed). But where in Babel it tended to be relegated to footnotes, here she just whacks it straight into the middle of the text. That alone would shift how it feels, and certainly curtail the stalling effect on the flow of the prose, but where in Babel it overshadowed the earlier part of the text and then receded, here it is omnipresent and obstructively lingering.

Which links in nicely to the second issue - Kuang dwells. On everything. Features of geography, vignettes from a character's past, little nuggets of maths or logic or literature (we'll come back to this) that turn up all over and, indeed, on those thematic explanations. The cumulative effect is of a book that cannot, on any level, let the reader get it themself, whatever "it" might be, which ultimately builds into something patronising and condescending. I found myself muttering "just get on with it" no end of times, because I wasn't getting anything from the lingering. In another book, I might not be so impatient, but that straight up, uncomplicated language for every single thing being spelled out means there's no value in the dwelling; it exists to convey a point, and once the point is conveyed there's nothing of joy to extract. I don't revel in any of the descriptions. The vignettes don't give me a deeper sense of the person. They serve, each, their single purpose and overstay their welcome, continuing on and on through the whole, not particularly short, book.

It feels, on the whole, rather more like a lecture than a story, and a lecture pitched fairly low at that.

While predominantly the reviews of Katabasis and Babel I've seen have been glowing, there is one thread that occurs in common in the negative ones, and it is one I will pick up on too: it feels like Kuang simply does not trust the reader, at any point. We can talk about how justified this may or may not be (and invoke some of the clanger discussions people had about Babel in which they demonstrated that they absolutely did not get it), but I almost think that doesn't matter. This is dark academia - intended to be in the original sense, a book that looks at what academia is and highlights the darkness inherent in it by playing it up. Satire. Caricature. And the problem with both of those approaches to themes is that there will always be someone who misses it. That is just inherent in satire, because of the way it plays with ideas. So if you try to write to avoid that, to make your point so abundantly, simplistically clear that no one could possibly ever miss what you were trying to say... it stops being satirical, because the satire needs the playfulness between ideas, rather than overt explanation. The inability to trust in the reader has cost Kuang the very essence of what she's trying to do.

Which is also a problem that comes up in another of her approaches.

To step back slightly, in the run up to its publication, I saw a number of early readers (predominantly but not exclusively on TikTok) providing reading lists of books one might read to better understand Katabasis. Those lists unsurprisingly contained a fair chunk of Renaissance and Classical literature that touched on the Underworld and journeys there (your Dantes and your Virgils, your primers of Greek mythology), alongside a grab bag of philosophy from Socrates all the way up to the 20th century. I had the slightly unkind thought that some of these readers were doing a speed run recreation of the traditional "western canon". But for all my amusement at the approach, it did make me interested in what Kuang was going to be doing - if those early readers thought reading those texts would bring greater insights into Katabasis, I wondered, how thoughtfully, how interestingly is Kuang engaging with the ideas those texts present.

She's not. I could talk around it, and phrase it more nicely, but she's not. Oh she namedrops them, don't get me wrong. And she cherry picks concepts or motifs from a goodly number. But every single goddamn time, she will explain why that thing matters in plain prose immediately afterwards, to the extent that the text reference itself no longer really serves a purpose except to say "I have read this".

Now, obviously, most of these moments happen in character. It is Alice (and Peter) who are dropping names. Surely, these two characters are doing it because this is the shibboleth they both have, the language they both speak, as people immersed in the study of all these tracts of magic and philosophy and logic and mathematics? These are PhD students! But they don't sound like any PhD student I've ever met. The way they talk about the texts, even the ones that become a little more plot crucial at various points, is horribly surface level, if it even goes that far. They came across to me, more than anything, as insecure first year undergraduates dropping names as a desperate bid to peacock their intellect, and undercut every time one of them - or the narrative - makes everybody pause to check in with the class that they understood what was being discussed and were there any follow up questions?

The whole premise that Kuang is trying to attack rests on - as Alice says, in plain text a number of times - the idea that these students are running a horrible gauntlet for the promise of a prize at the end. That prize might be prestige, or it might be the time and funds to pursue the study that they so desperately crave (Alice falls more into this bucket, though not entirely). As PhD students, Alice and Peter have already run a fair chunk of that gauntlet. They are already immersed in this world, its languages and its pitfalls. They may be more familiar with the darker side of things (oh they are), but they are also the ones who wanted or believed or craved hard enough the allure of the thing at the end. The balance, and the crux of the story, is whether the cost is worth it for that final prize, and indeed whether the prize even exists, or is a rotten, poisoned facsimile of the shining apple it appears to be. But for that to work, you need to sell the dream that these two have bought into. We need to understand what it was they were striving for, why it sold itself to them. At the start of the story, and long before, they both thought the prize was good and worth it, and that they would, in this horrible process, become the knowledgeable, clever, incisive people who could get to it.

By failing to present them as that, by failing to create even a whiff of the alluring intellectual bubble that is the overt sheen of academia that hides the rot underneath that forms the "dark" half of the equation, Kuang fails at the first hurdle. By then cramming her book full of those references, by creating all these lists of names and works, all these famous texts from the traditional (and much critiqued) canon, she's falling into the trap of the very thing she's trying to undercut. Those creators with their reading lists show us that. Read these works, they say, and know the code to Kuang. Except there is nothing to decode. None of it is necessary. You could take out those names, the sassing of Heraclitus**** and the grumbling about Dante, and the text would be the same, because she doesn't effectively use them to craft this semblance of academic glamour in the first place. The thought that kept occurring to me as I read was that this was all surface, and no substance. There are facts and names and works, but none of the connecting tissue necessary to make them all feel valuable as a coherent unit, or to sell us on the very critical idea that Alice and Peter are really very very clever.

Before I seem to be suggesting that this is a failure on every possible point, a pause. There is, under all the not particularly good writing, the core of something... if not quite good then perhaps promising. There are moments when Alice is introspecting, when Alice is examining how much she wants academia and everything she's willing to give up to get it, that approach what dark academia can do well (even if the thing she aims for is never really sold to the reader). There's one moment around half way through, where she describes drunk, giddy, silly grad students being playful with their topic, and that feels right and true, like a moment that could have happened, and would have had the effect it does in the story... but the infrequency of those moments just underscores how flat and un-right the rest of the book feels.There's an essence. But it is no more than that wisp, ephemeral, and lost under the drudge of the story apparatus.

It suggests that, underneath it all, she does get it. Her Alice and that drive for academia. Or perhaps just a very particular sort of person (given how Alice does seem to rhyme quite well with some of the characters in Babel). But getting it isn't enough. You have to make a story out of it, something that works on a sentence by sentence level, on a plot and theme level, that coheres from the granular up to the macro, rather than trading on glamour and the wisps of ideas, and these brief moments of having looked at the world and caught something real as a butterfly in your fingers. It needs to be a story, and it's there it truly fails, far more than any inaccuracy or overexplanation.

Some of that is the plain and overburdened writing I've already mentioned. But there are other key flaws. Despite that core of something true, neither of her primary characters manage to feel interesting and worth following for the majority of the time with them. Alice is introspective, but when that introspection doesn't yield substantial character depth, it just begins to feel self-important rather than worthwhile. And, more to the point, she's just not all that interesting to spend time with. Peter, whom we only see through her eyes, begins as the caricature man from seemingly all of dark academia, who comes from privilege and is easily both attractive and intelligent, and who sails through the academic world with ease in contrast to the heroine's grit and struggle. There are glimmers that he might have something more to him, but those don't resolve until fairly late in the story, and then, because of the way the narrative turns out, his development just gets dropped for a whole section, and only resolved in part by the end. Their chemistry is nearly non-existant. Even their rivalry - which is absolutely critical to the resolution of the story - feels flat and empty.

And when it comes to plotting... it's not so much that Kuang loves a bit of foreshadowing as that she signals with effusive clarity what's coming, unfailingly. There's no tension and no twists. Another victim of that plain and over-explaining style. If it evokes anything, it might be horrible inevitability, but even that implies a management of the story direction that I think might be undeserved. It's just... a sequence of events, with heavy telegraphing of the following steps, such that you must, like her characters, trudge through the wide expanse of grey sand to get to where you want to go (the ending).

Which is... a let down. If you're going to skewer academia, I think you need to do a better job of it than "the power of love" with a bit of vengeance sprinkled on for spicy seasoning.

But maybe the magic system will save it? The translation magic was one of Babel's most interesting points, no? Well... not really. There's actually a lot of similarities in how magic is described in both books. Where for Babel there's a spark that comes in the frisson between words that can't easily be translated, that cognitive texture, in Katabasis, Kuang is playing with the idea of paradox, and has her magicians need to be able to hold conflicting ideas in their head at the same time to essentially put one over on physics. The two ideas aren't the same, but they feel like they approach similar theoretical ground from slightly different angles, and so some of the sheen is worn off the paradox magic. I'll admit, I also just have less time for being walked through formal logic problems than I do for discussions of linguistics. But there's just much less time given over to exploring it as a potentially fascinating idea than perhaps it could have merited. Instead, there's much more lingering on the practicalities, the chalk and the blood and research. Which makes sense in a Watsonian sense, but from a Doylist perspective makes for much drier reading. Once again, there's a possible core of something fascinating here being let down by the connective tissue of storytelling.

And that's my main takes on this book - I just think it's a story told badly, in a number of the key ways in which a story can be told. The prose styling is weak, the plotting unexciting, the tension nonexistent and the characters insufficient to carry the load left for them. All of which then fails to present in a coherent and persuasive way that thematic core. Yes, by the end, she has absolutely conveyed the "academia can really suck and many of the ways in which it sucks are baked into the structures of it". But she's conveyed it by just straight up telling us that. It may work as an idea being passed from author to reader, but it fails at every step on an intuitive level, because she cannot for a moment let it be free of that urge to explain. To tell this story in an emotively effective way, it needed freedom, and showing, and a trust that we could follow into the (frankly not particularly intellectually difficult) territory she was leading us to. A book does not need to be able to be for everyone perfectly and without friction. In removing the friction, she has removed what might have made it a story at all.

Between this, and the fact that none of it was ever allowed to be itself in the first place, but instead translated to be more easily consumable by a specific audience, what's left is something hollow and insubstantial. Both the author and the editorial direction needed to have faith that a reader could do even a tiny amount of work for the story that this was trying to be to work. They both needed to assume anything but the worst and least of their audience. Neither of them did. And so it all falls flat, perpetuating some of the very problems that it theoretically seeks to condemn, and telling the audience in distressingly plain language how little it thinks of them.

--

* The vast majority are indeed switching Cambridge/UK terms for US ones, but a small few are actually switching Cambridge specific ones for Oxford specific ones. Those... I struggle to account for, given the author did a year at both universities. Maybe Oxford just sticks harder in her memory.
**I say this tongue in cheek, but child me did take ages to internalise the freshman/sophomore/junior/senior thing.
*** This isn't specified, but can be dated via events referenced in the text. I suspect the events of the story are taking place in 1991, but it could go a year or two either way.
**** She is very briefly very dismissive of him, because like many of the pre-Socratic philosophers he presents some ideas which, now, look absolutely batshit. But what she fails to mention in her mockery of him is that he, and the other pre-Socratics, were working from first principles to try to understand the universe, and they paved the way for the more accessible later works like Aristotle. Shoulders of giants and all that. No Heraclitus sass here.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10

Reference: R. F. Kuang, Katabasis [HarperVoyager, 2025].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Microreview [Book]: Babel by R. F. Kuang

 It's definitely dark, it's definitely set in academia, but this is far more powerful and far less aesthetic than that label implies. 

Cover art by Nico Delort

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution, to give it its full title, is not a gentle book. It is not a book inclined to mince words about its topics. It is about a lot of things - colonialism, both physical and cultural, racism and classism, white fragility, love, linguistics and the power of belonging, and of not belonging. To quote the author, it is a "love letter and break up letter to Oxford". It is a story of how a small group of people try to find a way to fight against the seemingly insurmountable force of the British Empire in the early 19th century, in a world where we imagine magic powered by silver and language exacerbates the technology and various societal effects of the industrial revolution. It is unflinchingly critical and honest about history, academic culture, and the untrammeled self-interest of those in charge.

In the world of Babel, languages can make magic - by inscribing words that translate, but with some meaning lost in the process, onto a bar of silver, the linguistic dissonance can cause some thematically similar effects in the real world, when the match pair of words is spoken by someone fluent in the languages. Collecting more words, more translations, more languages, allows the translators of Oxford to find more effects, which in turn are sold for exorbitant profit, or used to fuel the expansion of the British Empire. This in turn brings in more silver to inscribe, more languages to plunder and more speakers of those languages to exploit - because native speakers of the more "foreign" languages, ones who have had less cross-pollination with English, are particularly prized by the Translation Institute, and what better way to get those speakers than when they are young and can be moulded to fit an English lifestyle?

Our protagonist Robin is one such, taken from his home in Canton after the rest of his family died of cholera, himself on the brink of succumbing, healed by the English Professor Lovell, then raised in his house on a diet of languages until he was ready to take a place in Oxford.

By getting Robin's perspective, raised to think of Lovell with gratitude for saving him, to focus on nothing but language, starved of affection and people his own age, Kuang is in a position to give us the authentic feeling of coming up to Oxford as an undergraduate but on overdrive. And at this, she is devastatingly effective. The passages of the first years having their first tutes, discovering their intellectual curiosity, the sparkling feelings of joy talking to other people their age about the things they've all been raised to hold most dear, they feel so palpable, so painfully real. The bond between Robin and his three cohort-mates is immediate and vivid and so earnest, and all of their bond together with Oxford as a place and a feeling is so instantly, intensely passionate, a sense of sudden belonging after a childhood of various hardships.

Which makes the rest of the book all the more bittersweet. Because the thesis of the book is about how that belonging is false, an impossible dream none of them could ever realise. The carrot dangled before them to lure them along, alongside the stick of what would happen, what their lives would be, if they didn't give in to the temptation. And watching them realise this in slow motion, as events unfold that force them to see what was there all along, force them to realise they can't shut their eyes to it all, is devastating. It is a story of the shattering of pleasant illusions by bitter realities, and it is impossible not to grieve with the characters for the lost dreams, even as we and they know those dreams were never going to actually happen. The whole thing builds slowly through the course of the book, but by the end it is entirely gutwrenching.

As an emotional journey, the story is pretty flawless. Robin's slow progression from childhood ignorance to youthful academic zeal to disillusionment is beautifully, poignantly told, as are his relationships to both England and Canton, and China more broadly, and his own sense of nationality and identity. We move from mood to mood in smooth progression, and it is incredibly easy to latch onto his changing feelings, and slip from one to another as events dictate.

On the flip side, some of the early parts are a little repetitive in their world building and exposition. The beginning of the book has a lot of telling us about slavery, oppression and exploitation in the world of the early 1800s. All of what it tells us is true, clear, unambiguous and necessary, but is occasionally undercut by some of the footnotes - where the text will give us a pretty well-drawn picture of the world, the footnote spells it out so basically that it feels almost as if it doesn't trust the reader to have understood what it was telling them, which is occasionally a little grating. However, this mostly clears up once Robin reaches university, so it's possibly some of the tone is meant to be through the lens of his understanding of the world (or lack thereof), and if so, some of that heavy underscoring makes a little more sense. There are also so many delightful bits of historical accuracy, in the details. For instance, Robin once asks the Professor "what do I need Latin and Greek for?" and is met with "to understand English", which is such a 19th century view, and there are enough nuggets like this hidden among the childhood parts that it becomes relatively easy to forgive some of the overemphasis where it crops up.

Once we reach his time at university, there is a definite shift in the way the narrative moves - we speed up, steadily at first, matching the pace of his own growing understanding of the world and his place in it, and this match of prose and tone to content is both subtly and skillfully done. By the time the book reaches full flow, it feels impossible to put down, and utterly immersive in its worldbuilding.

We also go from his limited character interactions as a child - seeing really only Professor Lovell, his tutors and the cook - to a more richly peopled world. The sparseness of the childhood parts again mirror in the reader Robin's experience of his narrow world, and emphasise again the sheer emotional intensity of his coming up to Oxford, and the friends he meets and makes in his cohort.

And what a cohort they are. The four characters, who comprise most of the books main social and emotional interactions (alongside the Professor and one other), have a beautiful web of love and hate and co-dependency, understanding and ignorance, between them. There is the tension between the two boys and the two girls (who have their own struggles in an Oxford that barely accepts women might be capable of study), between white Letty and the other three, and then between Victoire and Ramy, and the sometimes-white-passing Robin. It is a book, encapsulated in these four, that really wants us to see the many, many different ways the world chose to oppress people, and how difficult it could sometimes be for people to see outside of their own struggle to those of others, even those nearest and dearest to us. The progression of the four way relationship in the Babel cohort is one of best written parts of the book (which is saying something), and it is just so, so good. It's "emphatic hand gestures while failing to find the right words to tell people how good it is" good.

It is also to some extent the tension of the main plotline writ small - because when we come to the events of the latter half of the book, Kuang manages to encompass so much of what was going on in the world of the 1830s, and so well, and it is brilliant. She draws in threads of the social and economic harms of industrialisation, the struggle of the working class, sexism, racism, the self-serving nature of apparent philanthropism, the intersections of religion with both liberation and oppression, the sheer hubris of empire, the self-sabotaging nature of colonialism, the blindness of people to the harms around them, and so, so much more, and connects and contextualises them with each other. And she manages to do this without flooding us with extraneous information that the reader might juggle to hold in their head all together. We don't need to know every single piece and part of every struggle that forms a part of the whole - she gives us what we need for the narrative to work, and for it to feel immersive, coherent and natural as a world, and this is absolutely critical for both allowing the story to move along at the speed it does, and for it to balance so well with the arc of the character relationships. This is, of course, to some extent helped by the fact we view the world through the lens of sheltered academics, and so can be presented information as somewhat new that many outside of the Oxford bubble would have been well aware of, but even so, it is extremely well-handled.

As is the magic system, and the necessary smattering of linguistics that gets thrown in as part of it. Because the silverwork relies on translation, and understanding words and how they come to be as they are, it is necessary to explain some various bits and bobs of philology to move the story along. And obviously, these are all factually good and sound, but more critically, what is included, the real and fake scholars' works that are quoted, work together to build such a perfect vibe of linguistics as a discipline in the early 1800s (with some tweaks for the story, of course). The ubiquity of Latin and Ancient Greek, as well as the abundance of German scholarship, the insistence on biblical underpinnings, the inter-country feuding and prides at stake, all builds together to create a great pastiche of the linguistics discipline as it did, or could have, looked.

And then, of course, the brutal honesty of the end thesis - on the necessity of violence. The crux of the novel. It is an inexorable, powerful, sophisticated and sharp conclusion to an argument we've been led along through the book. It is devastating and it is brilliant, and that is all I can really say about it.

As I was reading, several other books came to mind as drawing on similar themes in different ways, but the one I would most pick up is how the portrayal of the poisoned-fruit lure of Oxford in Babel is extremely resonant with Mahit's infatuation with the Teixcalaanli culture in A Memory Called Empire. Both manage to capture exactly the feel, the siren song of that beautiful, cursed and toxic coloniser culture, through the eyes of someone immersed but othered, whose highest possible aspiration in the eyes of that culture will be "one of the good foreigners", as though that were the best compliment that could be paid. And both manage to capture the impossible position it puts those who live between the worlds in, and how, whatever they pick, whatever path they walk, whatever life they lead, they will never win.

 --

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 I very nearly cried at the end. God, the ending.

+1 Almost painfully accurate in the portrayal of the allure and awfulness of academic culture

Penalties: -1 some of the early parts feel a little repetitive

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: R. F. Kuang, Babel [Harper Voyager, 2022]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

The Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards: Results

Over the past almost-year, a top secret group of bloggers and fans has been plotting the most nefarious of plots: to decide, subjectively upon the best genre works of 2020, and then throw rocks at them. By "throw" we mean "lovingly post", and the rocks all have a nice message painted on them, and it's... an award? We suppose?

Yep, it must be time for Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards (SCKA) again!

SCKA last made an appearance on Nerds of a Feather at the longlist stage, when our team of epic jurors (including Adri and Sean) nominated their favourites across the seven categories. Since then, we've read furiously, narrowed each category down to a shortlist of two or three nominees, and then picked our favourite from among them. I'm therefore excited to introduce both our winners and other shortlisted works in this post: all are worthy of your consideration, so go and check them out!

Without further ado, the winners:

Best Short Story

Winner: "You Perfect, Broken Thing" by C.L. Clark (Uncanny Magazine Issue 32)

Our jury said: This is a story about an athlete competing in a Race which forces her to push her sick body to its limits to win a cure. There's a perfect blend of cameraderie between the main character and their training partners, and the desperate, unfair competition they are pushed into to survive; these are characters still fighting in the face of constant, overwhelming struggle and that's a powerful, challenging, necessary thing. 

Also Shortlisted: "Yellow and the Perception of Reality" by Maureen McHugh (Tor.com)

Adri says: These two stories rose to the top of a strong, wide-ranging ballot, but there was only ever one choice for me, and that was Clark's Ignyte winning story.

Best Novella

Winner: The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo (Tor.com Publishing)

Our jury said: The Empress of Salt and Fortune is an epic tale in miniature: a mosaic of moments and manipulations that resolve into a bigger picture of rebellion

Also Shortlisted: Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark (Tor.com Publishing)

Adri says: Our SCKA shortlists don't often overlap directly with the Hugo awards, but this pair happen to be the two I am agonising about most on that ballot too. Empress of Salt and Fortune is a well deserved winner, but this really could have gone either way.

Best Debut Novel

Winner: Legendborn by Tracy Deonn (Simon & Schuster)

Our jury said: With a young woman discovering magic at an elite school, Legendborn could have felt like we’d read it all before. Instead, the panel were impressed with how Deonn combined familiar tropes and well-known legends into something different, avoiding the obvious to deliver a tender exploration of grief and Black girl magic in a richly crafted world touching on slavery, privilege and secret societies.

Also Shortlisted: Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas (Swoon Reads); Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko (Hot Key Books)

Adri says: We ended up with three excellent books shortlisted from a very YA-heavy new category: I love all of these books, but Legendborn's smart, sideways take on a classic genre story set it apart.

Best Blurred Boundaries Novel

Winner: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Jo Fletcher Books)

Our jury said: This stylish thriller blends Gothic tropes with 50s noir and body horror. Expect modern themes of prejudice and complicity in an unapologetically creepy tale of controlling families and psychedelic fungus.

Also Shortlisted: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (Pantheon Books); The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart (Orbit)

Adri says: Blurred boundaries is always a very diverse category, as "blurred" encompasses anything we think crosses lines of genre and/or style. Interior Chinatown was a great literary dark horse, and The Bone Shard Daughter brings really interesting SF elements into a fantasy setting, but it's ultimately fitting that ultra-talented genre-hopper Silvia Moreno-Garcia took this one in the end.

Best Fantasy Novel

Winners(!!) The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow (Orbit); The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk (Erewhon)

Our jury said: Alix E. Harrow has crafted something truly special with The Once and Future Witches. Her prose is by turns powerful and deft of touch, and blends together fantasy, fairytale and history into a thoroughly modern classic.

The Midnight Bargain is not only a wonderful story about witches in a richly imagined Regency-style setting, but it’s a clever exploration of reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. It is a thoroughly modern and political book while masquerading as a gorgeous escapist fantasy, and that makes it a fantastic read.

Adri says: Two winners! Yep, we had a tie in our final round of voting, and while we could have gone to some sort of dramatic internal tiebreaker, instead we decided in true chaotic fashion to give out a second rock. This pair both utterly deserve it.

Best Science Fiction Novel

Winner: The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson (Hodder & Staughton)

Our jury said: A beautiful intelligent story exploring the parallel worlds concept but also combining it with issues of racism and classism, with a core of hope running throughout.

Also Shortlisted: Goldilocks by Laura Lam

Adri says: One of my favourite things about SCKA is getting to focus on books that feel like they've been overlooked in the more mainstream awards, and both finalists here certainly fit that bill. The Space Between Worlds really pushed the envelope for me, an excellent dimension-hopping tale in a category full of space and cyberpunk and all sorts of sub-genres.

Best Series

Winner: The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang (HarperVoyager)

Our jury said: R.F. Kuang's trilogy starts off as an academic fantasy, transforms into a military historical fantasy, and ends as a grimdark narrative. This Asian-inspired series delves into the layers and the consequences of power and warfare.

Also Shortlisted: Dominion of the Fallen by Aliette de Bodard

Adri says: Another powerful pairing - and another underrated gem, in de Bodard's Dominion of the fallen series - but in the end, it felt inevitable that The Poppy War was going to take this home. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.

Microreview [book]: The Burning God by R.F. Kuang

Fang Runin's journey comes to a fitting close

Look, if you're here reading this review of the third book in a trilogy, especially one that's had the reach and popularity of The Poppy War trilogy, one of three things is probably true: you've read the previous books in the series and are looking to confirm whether the last one is going to live up to the expectations you've already developed about the series; you've avoided or bounced off earlier books and are wondering if my opinions are going to change your mind about if the series is for you; or you've read the book and you're wondering if I can a) contextualise what just happened or b) otherwise add to your reading experience with my #opinions. Let me put you all out of your misery quickly: Group A, the answer is yes, Group B, the answer is no, and Group C, I have no idea but I'll do my best for you. The Burning God brings to a close a very particular series in a way that stays very true to its core themes and aesthetic. If its what you're here for, you're going to like this one very much.

The Burning God picks up right where The Dragon Republic leaves off, with Fang Runin - a shaman able to harness the power of a super destructive god called the Phoenix - having thrown in her lot with a Southern Rebellion after being betrayed by the other rebellion forces she had helped to overthrow the Empress Su Daji. From that starting point, The Burning God proceeds to cover so much ground that it's hard to know where the scene-setting stops and the spoilers begin: there's the return to reclaim her southern home from foreign occupation by the remnants of the Mugenese troops who Rin and co. fought off in The Poppy War; her attempts to build relationships with rebel leaders who refuse to see her as anything more than an inconveniently powerful young girl; the reconnection with former enemy powers and the attempt to harness them to her cause; and of course, the reckoning with the forces of the Dragon Province, led by sometimes-ally mostly-enemy awkwardly-also-a-love-interest fellow Sineguard graduate Yin Nezha. Also thrown into the mix is the ongoing agenda of the Hesperians, the more technologically advanced, scientifically racist foreign power which has thrown its lot in with the Dragon's elites in order to further their own religious and cultural agenda. And, of course, the effects of the previous two books, including Rin's connections with the Cike, the Empire's now decimated shaman forces, her reckoning with her legacy as the last surviving descendent of the Speerly ethnic group, and her relationships with the few remaining allies she has from her time at the Sineguard academy. Getting through all of that is a serious undertaking, and while none of the events of The Burning God feel rushed, per se, there's certainly a relentless sense of action driving things through to their conclusion, and there were certainly emotional moments (particularly those involving Chen Kitay, Rin's oldest friend and ally) which could have benefitted from more space to breathe. I also suspect that the amount of shifting scenery in The Burning God was what allowed a transparent Tibet parallel called "Dog Province", complete with a reference to its people as "Dogs", to slip through sensitivity reading without challenge: an uncomfortable moment of unexamined, throwaway chauvinism that sailed far too close to oppression in our own world for my liking.

In-keeping with the rest of the trilogy, there are historical parallels here to the war between the Nationalist and the Communists, including a surprisingly understated (mild Cannibalism notwithstanding) version of the Long March from Rin's forces. There's also depictions of famine brought on by the war, and scenes of villagers turning on and punishing collaborators after occupation in various creatively brutal ways. Most of the descriptive brutality takes place at the beginning of the book, and I definitely felt there was a difference between the various horrors depicted, particularly towards the end: large-scale destruction seems to pass almost without comment from Rin, entire armies and cities just disappearing into the maw of destruction, whereas the pain and death inflicted on individuals outside the main battlefields is far more detailed and emotionally affecting. It's a difference that's very much inkeeping with Rin's emotional arc, as she progresses from a frustrated general trying to undo the horrors of war in her own home, to a leader drawn to increasingly bold and high-risk tactics to turn the tables on her enemies and secure herself enough power to do things differently. To me, it quickly became clear that it's Rin's emotional journey that provides the storytelling beats here rather than any hope of systemic change. Readers who know my tastes will know this isn't really where I personally wanted things to go, but that's really besides the point: The Burning God has always been clear that this is Rin's story, albeit one that draws heavily on its backdrop to inform who Rin is and why her journey takes place in the way that it does.

The way that this series takes on historical events in Sino-Japanese history has been extensively covered elsewhere, and I recommend this particular primer to understand where Kuang draws parallels not just from 19th and 20th century events but from classical Chinese stories as well. Having studied a bit of 20th century Chinese politics, what intrigued me most about the character work in The Burning God is how, more so than the other two books in the series, it plays with parallels between the characters of the series and the major historical figures whose cults of personality dominated what came next in our own history. Rin's attempts to establish herself as a leader in the rebellion - first one among many, and later as its head - are easy to compare to Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese communist forces and ruler of the People's Republic of China from the end of the civil war until until his death in 1976. But Rin has been through a great deal of other experiences, not least those shaped by her identity as a Speerly and a woman, both aspects which are absent in her historical counterpart. It's that tension between the historical record and the character's experience that made The Burning God's ultimate dilemma so compelling: when faced with a choice between embracing the feeling of total power over her people bestowed upon her by her god, or following the forgotten heroes of her own heritage along a different path, it's impossible to know what Rin will do until the book's last, dramatic pages.

I can't call The Burning God satisfying - it's not meant to be. It tells the story of a society that was broken from the very beginning, and whose subsequent experiences have only driven it further into ruin, and of a character whose attempt to escape poverty within that society turns into a desperate, miserable struggle for survival that was never going to turn out well. I come away from the Poppy War feeling I've read an important series, one that is likely to be talked about for a long time to come, and which readers should go into with their eyes open to the difficult subject matter it covers and the historical context on which it draws. For those who have been waiting for this moment: you're not going to be disappointed, but you are going to need a calming beverage and something to cuddle afterwards. Good luck.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 character work that blurs the lines of historical events and the book's own powerful mythology to great effect

Penalties: -1 There's so much ground to cover that some secondary characters don't get much time to breathe

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy

Reference: Kuang, R.F. The Burning God [Harper Voyager, 2020]

New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 new and forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about? 

 
Harrow, Alix E. The Once and Future Witches [Orbit]
Publisher's Description

In the late 1800s, three sisters use witchcraft to change the course of history in Alix E. Harrow’s powerful novel of magic and the suffragette movement.

In 1893, there’s no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box.

But when the Eastwood sisters — James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna — join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women’s movement into the witch’s movement. Stalked by shadows and sickness, hunted by forces who will not suffer a witch to vote — and perhaps not even to live — the sisters will need to delve into the oldest magics, draw new alliances, and heal the bond between them if they want to survive.

There’s no such thing as witches. But there will be.

An homage to the indomitable power and persistence of women, The Once and Future Witches reimagines stories of revolution, sapphic love, motherhood, and women’s suffrage–the lost ways are calling.

Why We Want It: When she wrote her breakout Hugo Award winning story "A Witch's Guide to Escape" Harrow dealt with both witches and portal fantasies. Her debut novel was all portal fantasy. This, her second, returns to witches. That's more anecdotal than anything, but interests me all the same. The real reason we're excited for The Once and Future Witches is because her previous novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January was fucking excellent and we'll read anything she writes. 

 

Kuang, R.F. The Burning God [Harper Voyager]
Publisher's Description

The exciting end to The Poppy War trilogy, R. F. Kuang’s acclaimed, award-winning epic fantasy that combines the history of twentieth-century China with a gripping world of gods and monsters, to devastating, enthralling effect.

After saving her nation of Nikan from foreign invaders and battling the evil Empress Su Daji in a brutal civil war, Fang Runin was betrayed by allies and left for dead.

Despite her losses, Rin hasn’t given up on those for whom she has sacrificed so much—the people of the southern provinces and especially Tikany, the village that is her home. Returning to her roots, Rin meets difficult challenges—and unexpected opportunities. While her new allies in the Southern Coalition leadership are sly and untrustworthy, Rin quickly realizes that the real power in Nikan lies with the millions of common people who thirst for vengeance and revere her as a goddess of salvation.

Backed by the masses and her Southern Army, Rin will use every weapon to defeat the Dragon Republic, the colonizing Hesperians, and all who threaten the sh
amanic arts and their practitioners. As her power and influence grows, though, will she be strong enough to resist the Phoenix’s intoxicating voice urging her to burn the world and everything in it?

Why We Want It: Let's face, we're gluttons for punishment and want our hearts stomped repeatedly. Lucky for us, we have R.F. Kuang to do exactly that because the first two Poppy War novels have been brutal and perfect bits of epic fantasy filled with betrayal and incredible personal sacrifice. There's no way this ends well for any of the characters and we wouldn't have it any other way.

Lethem, Jonathan. The Arrest [Harper Collins]
Publisher's Description

From the award-winning author of The Feral Detective and Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original post-collapse yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car.

The Arrest isn’t post-apocalypse. It isn’t a dystopia. It isn’t a utopia. It’s just what happens when much of what we take for granted—cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters—quits working. . . .

Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn’t hurt.

Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way. Plopping back into the siblings’ life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza? Whatever he’s up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him.

Written with unrepentant joy and shot through with just the right amount of contemporary dread, The Arrest is speculative fiction at its absolute finest.

Why We Want It: The description from the publisher is a touch pretentious because, really, fuck you about this not being post apocalyptic or dystopic when technology stops working. That's exactly the tradition Lethem is working with and he damn well knows it, regardless of how the the publisher wants to market the novel. I haven't read Lethem in thirteen years since the incredibly disappointing You Don't Love Me Yet - but his earliest work was inventive and exciting even as he slid farther away from genre while still touching its edges. Regardless of what the publisher wants to call The Arrest, it's the sort of thing I like to read.

Muir, Tamsyn. Princess Floralinda and the Forty Flight Tower [Subterranean]
Publisher's Description

When the witch built the forty-flight tower, she made very sure to do the whole thing properly. Each flight contains a dreadful monster, ranging from a diamond-scaled dragon to a pack of slavering goblins. Should a prince battle his way to the top, he will be rewarded with a golden sword—and the lovely Princess Floralinda.

But no prince has managed to conquer the first flight yet, let alone get to the fortieth.

In fact, the supply of fresh princes seems to have quite dried up.

And winter is closing in on Floralinda…

Why We Want It: Taking a pause between Harrow the Ninth and the forthcoming Alecto the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir has a shorter and completely unrelated work. I'm not familiar with her short fiction before Muir exploded on the scene with Gideon the Ninth - but I'm excited to see what else Muir can do.

Polk. C.L. The Midnight Bargain [Erewhon]
Publisher's Description

From the beloved World Fantasy Award-winning author of Witchmark comes The Midnight Bargain, a sweeping, romantic new fantasy set in a world reminiscent of Regency England, where women’s magic is taken from them when they marry. A sorceress must balance her desire to become the first great female magician against her duty to her family.

Beatrice Clayborn is a sorceress who practices magic in secret, terrified of the day she will be locked into a marital collar that will cut off her powers to protect her unborn children. She dreams of becoming a full-fledged Magus and pursuing magic as her calling as men do, but her family has staked everything to equip her for Bargaining Season, when young men and women of means descend upon the city to negotiate the best marriages. The Clayborns are in severe debt, and only she can save them, by securing an advantageous match before their creditors come calling.

In a stroke of luck, Beatrice finds a grimoire that contains the key to becoming a Magus, but before she can purchase it, a rival sorceress swindles the book right out of her hands. Beatrice summons a spirit to help her get it back, but her new ally exacts a price: Beatrice’s first kiss . . . with her adversary’s brother, the handsome, compassionate, and fabulously wealthy Ianthe Lavan.

The more Beatrice is entangled with the Lavan siblings, the harder her decision becomes: If she casts the spell to become a Magus, she will devastate her family and lose the only man to ever see her for who she is; but if she marries—even for love—she will sacrifice her magic, her identity, and her dreams. But how can she choose just one, knowing she will forever
regret the path not taken?

Why We Want It: I'm not as familiar with C.L. Polk's fiction as I'd like to be, but Witchmark was superb, I have Stormsong on deck at home and I remember a long time ago she wrote several episodes of Shadow Unit. Shadow Unit, mind you, is one of my favorite things - which doesn't have a lot to do with the fiction she's written since Witchmark, but it built up an immense amount of goodwill on my part. The Midnight Bargain is also one of the first books published by Erewhon Books, the imprint founded by Liz Gorinsky (Hugo Award winning editor) - it's a pairing I don't want to miss.

Sanderson, Brandon. Rhythm of War [Tor]
Publisher's Description

The Stormlight Archive saga continues in Rhythm of War, the eagerly awaited sequel to Brandon Sanderson's #1 New York Times bestselling Oathbringer, from an epic fantasy writer at the top of his game.

After forming a coalition of human resistance against the enemy invasion, Dalinar Kholin and his Knights Radiant have spent a year fighting a protracted, brutal war. Neither side has gained an advantage, and the threat of a betrayal by Dalinar’s crafty ally Taravangian looms over every strategic move.

Now, as new technological discoveries by Navani Kholin’s scholars begin to change the face of the war, the enemy prepares a bold and dangerous operation. The arms race that follows will challenge the very core of the Radiant ideals, and potentially reveal the secrets of the ancient tower that was once the heart of their strength.

At the same time that Kaladin Stormblessed must come to grips with his changing role within the Knights Radiant, his Windrunners face their own problem: As more and more deadly enemy Fused awaken to wage war, no more honorspren are willing to bond with humans to increase the number of Radiants. Adolin and Shallan must lead
the coalition’s envoy to the honorspren stronghold of Lasting Integrity and either convince the spren to join the cause against the evil god Odium, or personally face the storm of failure.

Why We Want It: The Stormlight Archive is Brandon Sanderson's Magnum Opus, a ten volume series likely spanning decades of work even if we don't consider the other tangentially related  Cosmere based novels that will bring the total upwards of thirty. This is doorstopper fantasy and Sanderson is the truest successor to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time that we are likely to come across, for everything that entails.

 

POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.

Interview: R.F. Kuang, author of The Burning God

photo credit: Kobi C. Felton

Congratulations to R.F. Kuang, for her Astounding Award win, at the Hugo Awards last weekend.  I highly recommend watching her powerful acceptance speech, in which she talks about the stark realities of how new authors and "bright new talents" are "welcomed" into the genre.

The Burning God,  the third book in Kuang's Poppy War series, will be available this November,  which means you have plenty of time to read the first two books in the series, The Poppy War, and The Dragon Republic. The series follows an orphan named Rin, who earns her place in an elite military academy. When a brutal war lands on their doorstep, the students realize how ill prepared they are to make the decisions necessary in a war. Sure, any soldier can fight, but it takes a different kind of strength to face collective decisions and collective trauma.  When interviewed at RT Book Reviews about the first book in the series, she said of The Poppy War: "I chose to write a fantasy reinterpretation of China's twentieth century, because that was the kind of story I wasn't finding on bookshelves".

For those of you who are caught up on the series and eagerly awaiting The Burning God, you can look forward to untrustworthy political allies, Rin's return to her roots, and the difference between who wields the power versus where the power actually lies.  This last installment in the trilogy promises to be an emotionally brutal experience for readers. The gorgeous cover art for all three books was done by the incomparable JungShan Chang, whose ink artwork could easily inspire a thousand more novels.

Kuang took the time to answer my questions about her writing process,  the pressure of writing this last installment, her future projects,  her interest in diaspora literature and translation studies, and more. You can learn more about Kuang by visiting her website RFKuang.com  or following her on twitter, where she is @kuangrf.  She has been nominated for the Nebula, the Locus, and the World Fantasy award, has won the Astounding Award, and The Poppy War won the Crawford Award and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel.

spoiler alert:  While this interview does not contain any spoilers, I can not guarantee the same for the articles and websites I have provided links to.

(this interview was conducted prior to her Astounding win,  which is why mention of the award and the acceptance speech is absent from our conversation)

NOAF: When you first started outlining and writing The Poppy War, did you know how the trilogy would end?

R.F. Kuang: Yes, I knew the ending before I knew the beginning. I always come up with the ending first. I'm a pantser rather than a plotter, but I can't get started on a story unless I know where it's all going; I need to give some direction to the story engine. I've been picturing the final scene in my mind for years and years, so it's a relief to finally get it down on paper. So yes, I actually always conceived of The Poppy War as just the prequel material to the stuff I really wanted to write.

NOAF: You wrote The Poppy War when you were nineteen. How has your writing style, and your writing goals, changed since then, if at all?

R.F.K: Probably the most positive change is that I don't sound like a teenager anymore. I think my writing has matured simply because I've matured. I've (hopefully) gotten rid of a lot of the tell-tale younger writer quirks. I've worked very hard at my craft through a combinations of workshops (I can't recommend Odyssey enough), craft books (have currently acquired Wonderbook, edited by Jeff VanderMeer under enthusiastic recommendations), and reading everything I can get my hands on. I'd like to think my prose has gotten sharper and leaner in the past five years.

My writing goals haven’t changed–all I want is to write great books that lots of people read. But I have found myself moving away from epic fantasy. The next project, set in Victorian Oxford, is more of an alternate history, and the project after that will likely be a contemporary thriller. Maybe I'll come back to fantasy at this point; I'm just getting a bit tired of it at this point in my career. I'm ready to stretch my wings and see what else I can do.

NOAF: You mentioned in an interview you did at Tor.com that the "whole trilogy has been about cycles of violence, abuse, and responses to trauma".  Was writing this trilogy emotionally taxing for you?

R.F.K: Of course it was.

NOAF: Across the whole series, who has been your favorite character to write?

R.F.K: This answer changes every time I give it. I've become so fond of all my main characters' voices; it feels like they've really become a part of me. In The Burning God, I think I had the most fun writing Master Jiang's scenes. Some of them were extremely fraught and complicated, but others were so lighthearted and funny. I think he's the character with the most radically different sides (literally), so balancing those shifts in personality was challenging in a very fun way.

NOAF: Without giving too many spoilers, can you tell us which scene was the most fun to write? Which scene was the hardest to write?

R.F.K.: The last scene was the hardest to write by far. Aside from the obvious emotional heft, there was just a lot of pressure. This is what I've been building up to for three years, so of course I wanted to get it absolutely right. It's also a rather complicated scene – a lot of emotions shift in a short period of time, and the characters have to make incredibly difficult decisions – so it took a lot of tries to get right on a technical, craft level. Once I was structurally satisfied with it, I still spent months poring over every last sentence, particularly the dialogue. It was difficult to write and difficult to let it go.

NOAF: You're currently pursuing a MSC in Contemporary Chinese Studies at Oxford. "Contemporary Chinese Studies" sounds, um, huge and nearly all encompassing. Do you have a particular focus? Why did you choose that as your focus?

R.F.K.: Well, Contemporary Chinese Studies is just the name of the program. I focus on modern Chinese literature. Right now, I'm working on a thesis on Chinese sf novels by Liu Cixin and Chen Qiufan, focusing on the ways they deal with the anxieties about colonial modernity. I don't know if sf will remain my focus when I transition to doing my PhD, but generally I'm interested in diaspora literature, translation studies, and representations of war and violence.

NOAF: Thank you so much for doing this interview, and congratulations again on your Astounding Award!

POSTED BY: Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. She can be found on twitter, @redhead5318 , where she posts about books, food, and assorted nerdery.

Reading the Hugos: John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

Welcome back to Reading the Hugos: 2019 Edition! Today we're going to look at the writers up for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

I know. I know. The Campbell is "Not a Hugo". It is only "administered" by the World Science Fiction Society. It is sponsored by Dell Magazines. But, beyond those technicalities, I'm not sure I really care much about the distinction. It's not a Hugo. It's totally a Hugo. It's not a Hugo.

The Campbell is an award for a writer whose "first work of science fiction or fantasy was published in a professional publication in the previous two years." See here for eligibility rules, but it mostly follows the SFWA definition of professional publication or professional rates above a nominal fee. With the vagaries of publication, short story writers can be somewhat disadvantaged if they get one story published professionally and then years pass before they are truly noticed or place additional stories. Novels often make larger splashes, even if there is only one published in the eligibility window.

It is not unusual to have some overlap year to year, but a cursory glance through the last several decades of finalists suggests that it is unusual for four of the finalists to be the same from the previous year. With that in mind, I am going to recycle some of my thoughts from last year, making minor changes where appropriate.

Let's see how big of splash everyone has made over the last two years. It's a weird category.

Katherine Arden
S.A. Chakraborty
R.F. Kuang
Jeannette Ng
Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Rivers Solomon


Jeannette Ng: Ng is one of four writers on the Campbell ballot on the back of a single novel, which for a novelist is not necessarily unusual because there is only a two year eligibility window. Under the Pendulum Sun is Ng's debut novel. In Victorian England, a missionary who journeyed to the realm of faerie in order to proselytize and bring the fae to Christ, has disappeared. Catherine Helstone, his sister, undertakes her own search of faerie and the estate of Gethsemane to find him.

Under the Pendulum Sun is beautifully written and atmospheric as hell. The weight and weirdness of Arcadia shines through on every page. The novel feels Victorian without bogging the reader down with faux Victorian prose. The only problem, and this is quite clearly my problem and not Ng's is that there is something about the novel that I struggled to engage with and care about. There was a distance growing between me and Under the Pendulum Sun and it wasn't one I cared enough to overcome. It's a weird dichotomy, understanding the novel is a beautifully written piece of fiction and still not being able to fully appreciate it. Even so, that's where I'm at with this.


Vina Jie-Min Prasad: Prasad is on the Campbell ballot on the strength of four stories. Two of them, "A Series of Steaks" and "Fandom For Robots" were finalists last year for the Hugo Awards for Novelette and Short Story, respectfully. "Portrait of Skull with Man" (Fireside Fiction, 2017) and "Pistol Grip" (Uncanny, 2018) were not Hugo Award finalists.

It continues to be a difficult and uncomfortable thing to compare and rack and stack writers against each other. The stories, yes, but this is an award for Best New Writer. Are Prasad's four stories stronger than the single novels of Rivers Solomon, Jeannette Ng, R.F. Kuang, and S.A. Chakraborty or the two eligible novels from Katherine Arden?

That's the real challenge here. Both of the Hugo finalist stories are quite good and show an author I want to follow and read more from, the story from Fireside is a trippy bit of goodness, and I really have no idea what to say about "Pistol Grip". The stories are all high quality, but for this award, I'm not sure that they truly measure up to the best of the novels.


Katherine Arden: Arden is eligible for the Campbell following the publication of her novels The Bear and the Nightingale and The Girl and the Tower. Comparatively, it is more similar to Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun in that the prose is more deliberate and beautiful on a sentence level than City of Brass or An Unkindness of Ghosts. That’s the only worthwhile comparison to the other novels because they are all so different in tone and function and story and emotion. The Bear and the Nightingale touches on Russian folklore and is a tight family story mostly set in remote regions of Russia.

I absolutely want to see more from Katherine Arden (and hey, she’s written two more books in the Winternight sequence that began with The Bear and the Nightingale). She’s an author to watch and follow and I’m as excited to read The Girl in the Tower as I am to see what she’s doing ten years from now. The Bear and the Nightingale is the announcement of a major new talent. It’s a slow burn of a novel, but it pays off and it sucks you in.


S.A. Chakraborty: Oh, how I regret having waited so long to read City of Brass. The novel had been on the periphery of my attention since it was published in 2017 and I'm not sure if I would have picked it up if not for Chakraborty making the Campbell ballot this year. I would have missed out. City of Brass is a spectacular debut and is damn near an instant favorite. Chakraborty blends 18th century Cairo with fantasy, the magic of the djinn are very real and there is a culture at war with itself and sometimes with the human world. I don't have the words to describe City of Brass in a way that the beauty of the novel comes across as deeply as it hit me from the start. Chakraborty's writing is smooth as silk and it draws the reader in to one hell of a story.

City of Brass would have been on my Hugo ballot had I read it upon publication, but I appreciate that I have this one more opportunity to recognize Chakraborty's novel. S.A. Chakraborty is a novelist to watch and I'll be there for this year's Kingdom of Copper (not eligible for consideration as part of Chakraborty's Campbell nomination, if you're more fortunate than me and have already read it).


R.F. Kuang: The age of a writer has no particular bearing on her ability to produce outstanding work nor does it say much about the amount of time that writer has put into learning her craft. A writer in her fifties may have only one or two years into developing as a writer while a writer in her twenties may have been writing every day for more than a decade and working to improve and tell better stories. Which is to say that I did a small amount of research to figure out who the youngest winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer was out of curiosity. R.F. Kuang was 22 when The Poppy War was published and when the Hugo / Campbell Award finalists were announced. She is now 23. As near as I can tell, the youngest winner of the Campbell was Lisa Tuttle, who was 21 when she tied Spider Robinson in the voting for the Campbell in 1974 (though I *think* E Lily Yu was fairly young when she won in 2012) . This really isn’t much more than an interesting data point because there is no one path to professional publication and the window for a Campbell nomination is so small for a writer to get noticed. It’s the sort of trivia I find interesting, if not particularly meaningful.

The Poppy War is an extraordinarily accomplished novel. It has echoes of a coming of age story set in a military academy, except that your average coming of age story doesn’t go a fraction as hard as R.F. Kuang goes with The Poppy War. Kuang is unrelenting. When I wrote about the novel in wrapping up my Top 9 Books of 2018, I wrote that “there’s a very real sense of ‘if this is what I did to get here, what do you think I’ll do to stay here?’ It’s brutal from the start.” That also means that even the part of the book that is about training and school is flipped on its head when the hinted war breaks out. At that point The Poppy War almost feels like two different novels, similar to how Full Metal Jacket plays out. It’s a difficult task to decide between R.F. Kuang and Rivers Solomon as the “Best New Writer”, though that difficulty is definitive of how good the new class of writers coming up is and I can’t wait to see what Kuang (and Solomon) have in store for us in the coming years.


Rivers Solomon: Solomon is here on the strength of An Unkindness of Ghosts, a debut that is as much a novel as it is a statement and announcement of arrival. I have long loved the concept and often the execution of a generation ship, but I have never read anything quite like An Unkindness of Ghosts. It is not uncommon to read a generation ship novel that focuses on the divide between the more affluent privileged class and the poor workers living in squalor in the underbelly on the ship. It is uncommon to read a generation ship novel that takes that conceit and drives a knife straight in the gut by running the ship like a plantation. The white overseers are in the upper decks and have significantly greater freedom and luxury. The darker skinned workers are exploited, stigmatized, and brutalized for their very existence.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is a deeply uncomfortable novel to read, but every time I put the book down for the night I immediately wanted to pick it up and keep reading deep into the night. Solomon describes their novel as "a science fiction meditation on trans-generational trauma, race, and identity" and if you take that into the novel, you can see what they are doing. Slavery and trans-generation trauma is central to the storytelling of Unkindess of Ghosts, but so is that idea of identity. Through the generational trauma, so much family and personal histories have been lost. Characters barely know who their parents were, let alone grandparents or farther back. More, Solomon's writing of their protagonist, Aster, is so vital and central to the novel. Aster's voice and characterization of a neurologically atypical narrator is so incredibly well done and distinctive that it is almost impossible to imagine the novel written any other way.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is an almost impossibly accomplished and incredible novel and marks Rivers Solomon as an essential writer to watch.


My Vote
1. Rivers Solomon
2. R.F. Kuang
3. S.A. Chakraborty
4. Katherine Arden
5. Vina Jie-Min Prasad
6. Jeannette Ng


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Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 3x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about? Is there something we should consider spotlighting in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Brennan, Marie. Turning Darkness into Light, by Marie Brennan [Tor]

Publisher’s Description

As the renowned granddaughter of Isabella Camherst (Lady Trent, of the riveting and daring Draconic adventure memoirs) Audrey Camherst has always known she, too, would want to make her scholarly mark upon a chosen field of study.

When Lord Gleinheigh recruits Audrey to decipher a series of ancient tablets holding the secrets of the ancient Draconean civilization, she has no idea that her research will plunge her into an intricate conspiracy, one meant to incite rebellion and invoke war. Alongside dearest childhood friend and fellow archeologist Kudshayn, must find proof of the conspiracy before it’s too late.

Why We Want It: Turning Darkness Into Light is a follow up to Marie Brennan’s Hugo Award finalist Memoirs of Lady Trent series featuring the granddaughter of Isabella Camhurst and that’s really all that I need to know about it. I’m overdue to finish the Lady Trent novels, but Turning Darkness Into Light is a must read when I do.

DiLouie, Craig. Our War [Orbit]

Publisher’s Description

A prescient and gripping novel of a second American civil war, and the children caught in the conflict, forced to fight. 

Our children are our soldiers. 

After his impeachment, the president of the United States refuses to leave office, and the country erupts into a fractured and violent war. Orphaned by the fighting and looking for a home, 10-year-old Hannah Miller joins a citizen militia in a besieged Indianapolis.

In the Free Women militia, Hannah finds a makeshift family. They’ll teach her how to survive. They’ll give her hope. And they’ll show her how to use a gun.

Hannah’s older brother, Alex, is a soldier too. But he’s loyal to other side, and has found his place in a militant group of fighters who see themselves as the last bastion of their America. By following their orders, Alex will soon make the ultimate decision behind the trigger.

On the battlefields of America, Hannah and Alex will risk everything for their country, but in the end they’ll fight for the only cause that truly matters – each other.

Why We Want It: Our War is a novel painfully reflecting some of America’s greatest fears – that a President once impeached will refuse to leave office and America descends once again into a Civil War. It’s a story that could be ripped from the headlines of five minutes from now. While I hope Craig DiLouie’s novel is not prescient, it looks to be a searing near future worst case scenario of a novel that I both can’t wait as well as slightly dread reading.

Jones, Gwyneth. Joanna Russ [University of Illinois Press]

Publisher’s Description

The creative original who helped open the door to feminist SF 

Experimental, strange, and unabashedly feminist, Joanna Russ's groundbreaking science fiction grew out of a belief that the genre was ideal for expressing radical thought. Her essays and criticism, meanwhile, helped shape the field and still exercise a powerful influence in both SF and feminist literary studies.

Award-winning author and critic Gwyneth Jones offers a new appraisal of Russ's work and ideas. After years working in male-dominated SF, Russ emerged in the late 1960s with Alyx, the uber-capable can-do heroine at the heart of Picnic on Paradise and other popular stories and books. Soon, Russ's fearless embrace of gender politics and life as an out lesbian made her a target for male outrage while feminist classics like The Female Man and The Two of Them took SF in innovative new directions. Jones also delves into Russ's longtime work as a critic of figures as diverse as Lovecraft and Cather, her foundational place in feminist fandom, important essays like "Amor Vincit Foeminam," and her career in academia.

Why We Want It: Part of The University of Illinois Press’s Modern Masters of Science Fiction Series, Gwyneth Jones’ look into the life and the work of Joanna Russ is essential for readers looking to get a bit deeper into one of science fiction’s most notable and important writers. I read Paul Kincaid’s commentary on Iain Banks from the same series when it made the Related Work ballot last year, which brought the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series to my attention. This may well be the single volume of the series so far (though I’ll be looking forward to forthcoming works on Ursula K. Le Guin and Roger Zelazny as well)

Kuang, R.F. The Dragon Republic [Harper Voyageur]

Publisher’s Description

Rin’s story continues in this acclaimed sequel to The Poppy War—an epic fantasy combining the history of twentieth-century China with a gripping world of gods and monsters 

The war is over.

The war has just begun.

Three times throughout its history, Nikan has fought for its survival in the bloody Poppy Wars. Though the third battle has just ended, shaman and warrior Rin cannot forget the atrocity she committed to save her people. Now she is on the run from her guilt, the opium addiction that holds her like a vise, and the murderous commands of the fiery Phoenix—the vengeful god who has blessed Rin with her fearsome power.

Though she does not want to live, she refuses to die until she avenges the traitorous Empress who betrayed Rin’s homeland to its enemies. Rin’s only hope is to join forces with the powerful Dragon Warlord, who plots to conquer Nikan, unseat the Empress, and create a new republic.

But the Empress and the Dragon Warlord are not what they seem. The more Rin witnesses, the more she fears her love for Nikan will force her to use the Phoenix’s deadly power once more.

Because there is nothing Rin won’t sacrifice to save her country . . . and exact her vengeance.

Why We Want It: The Poppy War was a revelation. A debut novel and one of the best of 2018 (it was on my Hugo ballot and was my runner up for the best novel I read last year), the novel deserved every bit of praise it received. In a year filled with major releases from some of my favorite authors, not to mention a surprise sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Dragon Republic is one of the top two or three novels I’m looking for this year. The Poppy War was that good, and I have no doubt The Dragon Republic will live up to the promise of Kuang’s debut.

Modesitt, Jr., L.E. The Mage Fire War [Tor]

Publisher’s Description

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., continues his bestselling Saga of Recluce with The Mage-Fire War, the third book in a story arc which began with The Mongrel Mage and Outcasts of Order. 

Once again, prejudices against the use of chaos magic force Beltur and his companions to flee their refuge in Axalt. The rulers of nearby Montgren have offered them sanctuary and the opportunity to become the Councilors of the run-down and disintegrating town of Haven.

Montegren lacks any mages—white or black—making this seem like the perfect opportunity to start again.

However, Beltur and the others must reinstitute law and order, rebuild parts of the town, deal with brigands—and thwart an invading army.

Why We Want It: The Mage-Fire War is the 21st Recluce novel from L.E. Modesitt, Jr and the third to feature Beltur as a protagonist. If my math is correct, this is the first sequence to feature the same main character for three books. Otherwise, we’ve had a number of two book sequences. While offering few of the delights and discoveries of the earliest Recluce novels, the Beltur sequence has been solid fantasy fiction and Recluce is a series I will always come back to.

Moreno-Garcia, Silvia. Gods of Jade and Shadow [Del Rey]

Publisher’s Description

The Mayan god of death sends a young woman on a harrowing, life-changing journey in this dark, one-of-a-kind fairy tale inspired by Mexican folklore.

The Jazz Age is in full swing, but Casiopea Tun is too busy cleaning the floors of her wealthy grandfather’s house to listen to any fast tunes. Nevertheless, she dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. A life she can call her own.

Yet this new life seems as distant as the stars, until the day she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather’s room. She opens it—and accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who requests her help in recovering his throne from his treacherous brother. Failure will mean Casiopea’s demise, but success could make her dreams come true.

In the company of the strangely alluring god and armed with her wits, Casiopea begins an adventure that will take her on a cross-country odyssey from the jungles of Yucatán to the bright lights of Mexico City—and deep into the darkness of the Mayan underworld. 

Why We Want It: Each of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s three previous novels have been stupendous and as different from each other as can be. It has come to the point that it doesn’t matter to me what the book is about as long as I know it was written by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. With that said, a novel featuring the released spirit of the Mayan God of Death seeking help to get his throne back? Yeah, I’m there for that, too.


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 3x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.