5/30/2023 0 Comments Babel an arcane historyThroughout England, such bars are buried in gardens to facilitate growth and beauty, installed in bridges to strengthen them, placed in boats to expedite travel, all to improve British lives. For example, a silver bar with the Chinese word wuxing (“formless, shapeless, incorporeal”) engraved on one side and the English word invisible on the other could be activated if both words are spoken aloud by someone fluent in both languages-thus the speaker would be able to hide from view for several minutes. Kuang’s take on early nineteenth-century England, translators, rather than inventors, are the major force behind industrial innovations, with bridges, factories, banks, carriages, and more operating at beyond-peak efficiency thanks to pairs of silver bars activated by language. It is this kind of leading (or perhaps distracting) element that mars what is otherwise a unique, if not wholly convincing, take on what the Industrial Revolution in Britain would have wrought had silver, rather than steam and other technologies, driven innovation. Given the subtitle of this alternate-history novel about language, translation, colonialism, and war, one would be forgiven for spending most of one’s time analyzing each of the novel’s events to gauge whether or not said violence will indeed be necessary.
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