mutterwingwhirr

i've been sitting on this for far too long. and i know i won't cover everything this book made me feel, but. i need to try to get some thoughts down while it's still fresh.

babel is a story that doesn't pull punches. the machine of empire is, despite being speculative fiction interacting with the magic of silver, whole and complete. it's the stuff that all the textbooks leave out when we learn about the british empire in school. it's the emotion, it's the disgust, it's the hatred and violence and the desires to survive, to assimilate, to blend in. and love. it's so very full of the love of the illusion created by empire to justify its own perpetuity. how tantalizing it is to live on the outskirts of its promises. it doesn't pull punches. this book is not for the faint of heart. every heartbreak experienced in this book is escalated by a footnote that drives that hurt further, systematizes the mindset that makes these hurts possible.

where even do i begin?

i think i want to frame this book as a story about survival-- especially because of how it ends, but also because that thread exists. i've been rereading the book after finishing it and i'm surprised now at how many spaces have been left to talk about what survival inside the empire looks like. so let's talk about how the topic of survival in this book makes itself known.

( spoilers within. )

so much of this book hinges on robin's desire to survive by any means necessary. he loses his friends' respect for doing so, but he can't apologize for it. and... i don't know. i understand why he's so scared all the time. how can you function on your own if you're only ever scared of fucking up so bad you're sent off somewhere to wither and die? can you really ever act in violation of that instinct?

i know i already talked about this but. i feel like i didn't do it justice last time. i loved seeing how sissix let down her walls and became fully herself-- especially with rosemary acting as audience surrogate and just kind of enumerating the differences and appreciating them as fully alien. ive been thinking about this concept a lot where it's like... something something science fiction serves as a venue to highlight concepts already present in society and push them to an extreme so that they feel alien, so that they can be examined more closely and without "oh everyone does that" as a bias inhibiting real analysis. ive been thinking a lot about feather families, about aandrisk culture as a whole. the model of found family, of committing to offspring and raising them into curious people, of valuing people and their ideas moreso than valuing life given legs. of course, it's different when examining human children, because kids very much have ideas of their own and are people from the moment they start observing the world they're born into. but the rest of it? like. i dont feel like any of the rest of aandrisk culture contradicts a version of the human world that could exist. the idea that you're expected to leave your home (to go off to uni) and become your own person. the idea that you can choose the family you grow into (roommates) as you form your opinions based on lived experiences. with a little queer extrapolation, you get fluid polycules and cottagecore communes. those are spaces that already exist in the world and are dynamic and, from what i've seen, genuinely refreshing places to live, existing in defiance of an overarching system but also putting a lens of optimism, of living with the land, of choosing who you surround yourself with and how you apply your time, on top of such a stark act of rebellion. to have a life.

i mean, i was just thinking about how many internet spaces i've been part of, navigating long distance friend/relationships throughout the years, finding people who Got Me in a way my parents could not, and yeah, losing friends as our interests changed and diverged. getting ghosted when drama reared its ugly head. finding solace in friendships, new and rejuvenated, always always trying to bridge the gap between how i wanted to feel and how people around me made me feel. it may have been exclusively digital, but i could with certainty call those groups, and the journeying between them, as equivalent to feather families and their natural dissolution over time. i'm going to be thinking about this concept for a long, long time.

am i a little surprised about the events that followed between sissix and rosemary? yeah, although that's partially intentional due to the narration pov being sissix's and not rosemary's. we were supposed to discover it together. but i also just like... don't really recall that being part of rosemary's characterization? i never would have clocked that. i don't even know if i would clock it now, knowing what to look for. i wish there had been something to build up that anticipatory like.. crush? phase? more? but i guess that wasn't the focus of that little vignette. like i'm happy for them or whatever but it does really feel like two players at the table just kind of announced that this was happening at the top of the session and the gm was just like "alright, yeah okay sure. um. so. let's have that conversation. where does this discussion happen" and then that's kind of that.

and then there's the matter regarding ohan. i haven't gotten to the resolution of this yet, but i'm. processing how it would feel to be them. like. to have a little voice in my head that tells me i have to let it take over so that i can do cool math? and that payment for being able to see literally how space moves and the idk galatic forces that play into it is letting it slowly kill me? i can see why it's such a precious space for ohan to be in. the fear of committing to the death of the one for the salvation of the other when the two of you are so intertwined. and sissix's reaction to the whole thing really. kind of hammers home the other half of the equation. that it is those things but it is also very clearly a disease that is smothering out the life of its host. i'm not sure i agree with sissix, but i am glad she cared enough to try to get involved.

anyway. the rest is sort of hard to put on a timeline. like, i like this book a lot and i'm sure i'll revisit it many times over the years, but man does this book truly feel like a handful of vignettes without a real sense of time passing. it's just the moments that were noteworthy. i think that's why it feels so much like a summation of a ttrpg campaign. you know how sometimes you roleplay and it's just like, a means of getting to the next big thing? and then sometimes you roleplay and you're putting your whole entire pussy into acting out your character's impulses and reactions and letting the conversation swell and become this huge memorable thing that expresses not just your character's desires or the conflict of the moment, but some bigger question of what kind of world would have to exist to make this conflict come to a head and make you, of all people, have to weigh in on the decision at hand? yeah. this book feels like a collection of these latter moments. /pos

man. so i just finished the pirate/negotiation scene. and once again i'm just delighted (and a little flabbergasted) that so much of this book explores things that we explored while we were playing space legs.

curbing that thought for the moment, i do just want to say: it's so fucking delightful to hear that someone has proficiency in a language and then watch as the plot continually creates opportunities for us to see that yes, they are indeed proficient, and look at what they are able to create in spaces where the need arises. i don't think i could do that, really, since all my second languages are rusty and decaying. i've done it once, to sell hair extensions to a family that only spoke spanish. but not since, and not before. it wasn't something i really noted when i moved to arizona, but having moved back home, i realize how many spaces it's easy to see where spanish can bridge the gap more easily than english can. i guess there are a lot more spanish speakers in forward-facing roles here, where in arizona they were less so. or something.

but anyway. space legs. we had the opportunity to negotiate the same kind of "we're holding you at gunpoint because we need something from you" situation. and just like wow, what a game! i loved being in a space where we were allowed to just interact with different aliens where they were simply, like us, people with needs. being able to explore the spaces where our needs could be met by others, and how we could meet theirs... to me that stands out as the highlight of what that game/playtest campaign was for. sorry jack.

i'm really delighted by this book. i truly feel like this is a kind of science fiction that feels so... real? so genuine? in a way that other scifi media fail to grasp. it's not about how wide open space can be, or how exotic the distant horizons can turn out to be so much as it is about negotiating what the spaces around you, whether near or far from home, can look like. this could have easily been a story about armed robbery where all the robbers only spoke... idk greek or something. and then the translator, having studied russian to proficiency, was able to find common throughlines that allowed them to communicate effectively. (i'm not saying greek and russian come from a common ancestor language; this example is based of purely anecdotal data. i've heard of someone who went to greece and was able to scrape by with their russian. i love how languages interact.)

not much more to say here. i feel like one thing that's perhaps more lacking here than in other books is the clear division between events-- there's no downtime between events in a way that feels right for a chapter ending. things just melt together event after event after event. a delightful mix, but tricky to negotiate when you're waiting for the chapter break to like. go pee and grab a snack or whatever.

and, more than anything, i fucking love a story about a good interpreter.

well then. this 13 hour novel is definitely a strange one for sure. it reminds me a lot of everything i never told you by celeste ng (god, what a beautiful novel) but without a lot of the emotional gut punches that that book is all about. for all that this book is written in a roving first person, delving first into one character's thoughts and then another, it's written to be strangely on-the-nose. "i felt an absurd prick of jealousy" is certainly a thing someone can say in retrospect, but it feels strange to hear a narrator say it in response to an action that has just occurred. a weird combination of first person, past tense, and... what to call it? an excess of self-awareness? every character in the book is so quick to acknowledge their flaws in a way that feels surreal and out of place.

even so, the novel does a really fantastic job of making you feel ill-at-ease. i'm waiting to see the big TWIST, where all the pieces fall into place. there was a pretty hefty one just a few chapters ago, but there's still a lot missing when it comes to the Mystery.

( open me for a spoilery synopsis of the story so far )

but that's just it, with this novel. you think you know just enough to point the finger at the perpetrator, but you don't have quite enough evidence. you keep switching your target, as jess' unease with her surroundings and gut instinct to distrust everyone in her vicinity, brings in more and more inconclusive information. and jess doesn't know why she feels uneasy with everyone. but i think i do. i have to know for sure, though. i want to be able to figure it out with clarity-- not just everyone involved, but how it happened, what happened after, where ben ended up. because, despite learning plenty about the other residents of the apartment and their various impressions of ben over the months he spends living among them, we don't get the crucial information we need to make the pronouncement.

it's a strange way to build a relationship between the reader and jess. at many points, we know more than she does because she's hopping in at the conclusion of ben's story, when we were privy to the climax. and yet, on the points that she's pursuing, neither she nor we gain headway. and so we are made allies in our ignorance. jess is not a likeable character-- she snoops around more than she ought to and excuses it from past experience; she's restless and on edge and medicates her anxieties and tells herself she knows how stupid it is to get into danger right as she charges on in; and she chooses to trust people that it feels incredibly risky to trust at all. but even if i don't agree with her methods, she's certainly doing a great deal more than i am at learning secrets, even if she doesn't get flashbacks to her brother's perspective to fill in the gaps like i do. not the sort of thing i think i would do to write a mystery, but definitely effective.

though, on saying all of that, i realize that jess is remarkably holmes-esque in her knack for poking around where she's definitely not wanted. she just doesn't have a watson to smooth out her abrasiveness. i wonder how much that's intentional, the resemblance.

tl;dr i'm still on the fence about this book, but if the ending pulls through, it'll be a solid novel. here's hoping. for now, i'll go with 5 bears out of 9.