Book Club Guide

Babel

by R. F. Kuang · 2022 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Translation as the engine of empire — and as resistance
The dark academia setting and what it conceals about its own foundations
Robin's impossible position — educated by the empire that exploits his homeland

About this book

Robin Swift, taken from Canton to Oxford to study at the Royal Institute of Translation — Babel — discovers that the British Empire's power runs on magical silver activated by translation, and that his education is inseparable from the empire's exploitation of the languages and people it has colonised. Kuang's novel is a dark academia fantasy that is also a sustained argument about language, colonialism and the violence embedded in empire.

Published in 2022, Babel won the Nebula Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the Hugo. Kuang, who studied at Oxford, has described the novel as both a love letter to and an indictment of the institution and the empire it served.

Discussion questions

The magic system in Babel is based on the gaps that open up between languages in translation. How does Kuang develop this — and what is she saying about language, meaning and power?
Robin is given extraordinary opportunities by Oxford while his homeland is exploited by the empire that funds those opportunities. How does Kuang develop this contradiction — and how does Robin's awareness of it develop?
The novel uses extensive footnotes — an academic apparatus applied to a fantasy novel. What does this formal choice achieve — and does it serve the story or sometimes interrupt it?
The ending involves violence against the institution that has shaped Robin. How does Kuang develop the case for this — and does the novel ask you to endorse it?
Babel has been described as 'dark academia' but is also explicitly an anticolonial argument. How does Kuang use the genre's pleasures — the secret societies, the beautiful libraries — in service of a political argument that critiques exactly that romanticism?