I finished a book this week. I read R. F. Kuang’s Babel. It’s won awards and it came highly recommended on the internet. I think, back when I was in high school it might have blown my mind. As an adult with decades of novels in my head, I was less impressed.

This book is mostly historical fiction, with a slight speculative twist. In Kuang’s “alternate” history, Europe’s industrial revolution is fueled by magic spells etched into silver bars. The magic is fueled by the differences between languages, so to really make the spells work you need to be fluent in several languages.

This is a really neat magical system, but it’s not terribly fleshed out, and in Babel this magical system has barely changed history at all. Which is my biggest issue with the book. The main characters are translation students at Oxford, drawn from various British colonies for their unique language backgrounds, who are increasingly worried about British colonialism and end up trying to stop the Opium Wars by joining a secret society and convincing parliament to give up colonialism, essentially. (The plot is a bit more dramatic than this but I’m being vague to avoid spoilers.)

In real life, the Opium Wars were awful and China lost. England really wanted to get rich selling opium to drug addicts in China, and when China tried to say no to drugs, England invaded. It was pretty cartoonishly evil. In the book’s silter-based world, though, England also wants to get at China’s vast stockpile of silver.

That’s right. In a world where China is a large and well organized empire (which it also was in real history) with vast silver reserves and a rich and varied set of languages to work with, it can’t defend itself against British drug dealers. It needs a bunch of Oxford undergrads to save it with protests. And not one of these Oxford undergrads suggests just helping China directly.

This felt deeply weird and condescending to me. This book is trying so hard to be an anti-colonialist manifesto–there are speeches about it every few pages–and yet it’s still entirely centered around what privileged white people think and do.

Looking around at reviews, I saw a lot of complaints that the white villains had no nuance or humanity. This is true, but it didn’t really bother me. Speculative fiction is full of flat, cartoonish villains because the authors are concentrating on cool world building or complex magical systems or interesting heroes. What bothered me is that the heroes also had almost no nuance or humanity. They were very much reduced to their racial and colonial identities–the black one, the Chinese one, the Indian one, the white bitch–with very little personal emotion or introspection. It was clear I was supposed to like them and hate the white villains, but I mostly failed to care about anyone in this novel.

Back in high school, I might not have noticed these things as much as I do now. The book has a very clear and modern anti-colonial message and an interesting magical system. It’s got some interesting action in parts. I might have been content with that. Older me just got more and more frustrated. A subject as big as British colonialism and the Opium Wars deserves a richer, more complex, less half-assed treatment. I hear Kuang has an actual series also based on this era that might be better, but I’m not sure I’m willing to give it a shot.

Okay. I’m done ranting and reviewing. Aside from the reading, it’s been a quiet week. I got a new high score of 196 in bowling, which made me pretty happy, and we saw a roadrunner sitting on our fence. I’ll see you off with a picture of the bird. Until next week. –Corvus