Probably Dance

The book Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution is fascinating. And I’m not sure how much of this the author intended. It’s mainly fascinating because it’s trying to discuss colonialism, technological progress, and inequality with characters who are all stuck in the 19th century and are unable to reason with history in mind. And throughout the entire book the author acts like this is the right way of thinking. This review will contain major spoilers, partially because I don’t think the book is actually worth reading. I found it very frustrating and nearly stopped a few times.

The main reason for this frustration is that the “good guys” are often quite evil and get nearly everything wrong all the time and don’t achieve any of their goals. There are very few actual good people in this book, and those actual good people get treated badly by the story. The “good guys” think that the actual good people are evil.

The story is about a kind of magic (“silver working”) where you can use a bar of silver for direct effects (heal someone from cholera, kill someone) or imbue the silver with a kind of aura that affects things near it. So you can embed the right bar of silver in e.g. a steam engine and the engine runs more efficiently. Or you can embed it in a buildings foundation to make the building stronger. The magic spells require fluency in multiple languages, so being a translator is a very prestigious job. The story takes place at the University of Oxford in the 1830s, where silver working has recently gone through its own industrial revolution (at the same time as the actual industrial revolution is going on) so that these aura effects have been scaled up, creating enormous benefits for society, and enormous wealth for the people in charge.