THERE ARE THOSE WHO FALL HARD FOR Oxford. And there are those whose feelings are more ambivalent. While she’s an Oxford graduate who earlier this year returned to the city of dreaming spires to give the JRR Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature, Rebecca F Kuang falls into the latter category.
“I have a lot of conflicted feelings about Oxford,” she says. “On the one hand, it’s such a beautiful illusion. I think a common theme in many dark academia novels – Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, for example – involves longing and desire to be a part of this beautiful, aesthetic, deeply intellectual world. But the fact of the matter is that that world is only accessible to certain bodies. That’s something I felt acutely when I was at Oxford.”
Not only was Kuang an American abroad but she was also “a woman of colour at an institution that… still hasn’t done very much to reckon with its colonial roots”. The tensions here are front and centre in Kuang’s new novel Babel, a critique of Oxford set in an alternate 19th-century Oxford where the Royal Institute of Translation, aka Babel, is a key institution of empire. Not only is Babel a world centre of translation but it’s a place where lecturers and students practice silver-working, in which silver bars’ magical powers are manifested through translation.
NO SUCH THING AS AN ACCIDENT
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Denne historien er fra September 2022-utgaven av SFX UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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True Detective - The Only Way Is Essex for Jessica Jones in Lisa Jewell's first Marvel Crime novel
Known for bestselling psychological thrillers such as Then She Was Gone and The Family Upstairs, Jewell says she initially overemphasised the Marvel Universe’s fantastical elements before realising that she should simply trust her natural instincts. “I went too far on many occasions and had to keep cutting stuff out because I’d end up with stuff like a huge underground lab full of mad scientists,” she laughs.
Future Shock - Futurama's David X Cohen talks about what's in store for the show's ninth season
Futurama's David X Cohen talks about what's in store for the show's ninth season
Who Says
The Thirteenth Doctor and Yaz return - we're all ears
Parallel Doomsday
Terminator Zero creator Mattson Tomlin explains where the anime series fits within canon
Growing Your Hare
Daniel Kokotajlo talks about his '70s-set folk horror film Starve Acre
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POWER UP
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