Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

Babel, or The Necessity of Violence

An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

2022 • 560 pages

Ratings610

Average rating4.1

15

In early victorian England, foreign translators at Oxford try to take on the empire, which works on a translation-based kind of magic that involves silver bars. Many times, we think it's all over for our protagonists, and they receive a miraculous rescue, it's quite gutting. Until at the end, they don't.

I liked it, the magic is very clever, the parallels to our real world are there, although events have been altered. There's still an opium war, an abolitionist movement, English exceptionalism and disdain for others, all the loathsome things that make up British Empire.

March 8, 2023