Babel

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution, published by Harper Voyager, is R. F. Kuang's 2022 novel. The setting is an invented Oxford of the 1830s, the action closes in 1840, and the book stands alone rather than opening a series, presented as the history of one student cohort.

It is the 1830s, and the British Empire runs on silver bars enchanted by translation, which is why it needs people who speak languages the empire does not. Robin Swift is taken from Canton to England as a child after his family dies of cholera. Richard Lovell, a professor at Babel, arranges lessons in Latin, Greek and Mandarin to get him ready for admission.

Robin is trained for Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation, known as Babel, where the tower is comfortable and the work absorbing. The enchantments that make the empire rich are written in the difference between languages, and they are paid for by the colonies they are taken from. Robin is caught between Babel and a society working against imperial expansion, while the country moves towards a war with China over silver and opium.

Kuang writes the novel from the point of view of students inside the institution, so the reader learns how the magic and the money work at the same time they do. It is a critique of empire written as a historical fantasy, it is a complete story in one volume, and it ends after the cohort's time at the institute is over.