Babel is the winner of the Nebula award for Best Novel on 2022. The question isn’t “Why did it win the Nebula?” but “Why wasn’t it even nominated for the Hugo?” It is an excellent book which deserves all of the awards it has won or been nominated for. I read it in one day, which was tough even for me as it’s long.

The length of the book is one of the two things I would quibble about. I’m not sure what you would cut to shorten it, and I don’t think it would work as two books, or that it would be better if you left things out. It’s just long, and one of the reasons that it took me as long as it did to start it. The other quibble is the footnotes. They aren’t necessary and, from what I can tell, are just the things that Kuang couldn’t fit into the story but still wanted to share.

As well as just being a good story, Babel addresses the evils of capitalism and colonialism, and discusses the difficulty of being a minority in a society. The main character, Robin Swift, is a Chinese boy who is “rescued” by Richard Lovell and brought to England, to eventually be trained at Babel in Oxford and become a translator and silver worker, or mage. Said like that, it doesn’t sound bad, and for much of the book, Robin doesn’t complain much about it. However, as the story progresses, the evil to which Robin, and others like him, have been subjected to become more and more apparent. By the end, the consequences of those evils are shown. More than that will spoil the ending, which I won’t.

I found this a “quick” read (for its length; it took me all day), but there’s a lot going on. Of the Nebula nominees that I’ve read, it is the best by far. It definitely deserves to have been nominated for the Hugo.

Kuang, R. F. Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. New York, New York: Harper Voyager, 2022. 198,265 words. 5 stars.