Babel A2: Silver and worldbuilding
Any thoughts on the worldbuilding, especially how the use of silver has replaced coal as the power source of the industrial revolution? And why haven't other nations caught up with Britain in the use of silver?
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Any thoughts on the worldbuilding, especially how the use of silver has replaced coal as the power source of the industrial revolution? And why haven't other nations caught up with Britain in the use of silver?
Comments
I find myself curiously repelled by the world-building. So far I think she wants to convey that the problem is rooted in the fact that money matters more than technology to our villains, but I think that idea is both crudely implemented, as well as wrong: She is washing out how actual technology is responsible for the harms that we are dealing, or failing to deal, with. Writing about that might be too disheartening for the people who buy a ton of books I suppose.
I think my reaction has something to do with the way she uses magic to replace the actual historical sources for the ascendancy of European colonialism, combined with another story of how the world consists of goodies and baddies. Simple-minded, and while perhaps emotionally satisfying ultimately futile.
So far the story seems to be that the other nations haven't caught up because Britain has universities and magic, needs to corner the silver market, and has mercantile wars? No idea what her reason will be, but I don't expect it to be any kind of accurate trans-national history of the time. Probably she will continue with a simplistic individual moral failings being responsible.
The conceit about finding the matching pairs of words is compelling to me on one level. She doesn’t mention Sumerian or Akkadian (a huge oversight IMO) but for a very long time in Mesopotamian scribal communities, both languages were used. One inscription from c. 2000 BC referred to ‘twin-tongued Sumer). Cuneiform script was used to write both languages, and the art of writing was said to be of divine descent. Because writing was divine, there was ‘truth’ in it, and words that had one meaning in Sumerian and a second, complimentary meaning in Akkadian were considered to be closer to the truth, and thus have more power. So, for example,if a sign meant ‘sky’ in one language and ‘blue’ in the other.
And that’s kind of what the authors is trying to get at in this book, I think, but she seems to be fumbling around with the concept and not quite making it sensible. One thing I don’t think she really addresses, for example, is the role that script plays, and whether a Greek word has more power or the same if written in Roman script, Greek, or Linear B.
Also, the number of words available is nearly infinite, right? We deal with a few in this book because the characters are Chinese, Haitian, etc., but words can be drawn from umpteen languages, including basque, Elamite, Tagalog, Swahili, Inuktitut, or whatever. A cadre of 4 translators per year would barely cover the possibilities, right? So, I don’t know, it feels like the concept is a bit forced to fit the story.
Hmmm, two quite different things here. First, did I like the world-building with silver? Yes, actually I did - I felt there was enough of a bridge between the techno-stuff (silver as a good conductor of electricity) and the more mystical (silver as related to the moon and used against undead etc) that it worked for me. And I could see how the discovery that one substance could trigger a whole slew of arcane development could drive a foreign policy that sought to control and dominate trade in that (and conversely, how a few countries such as China here would try to build up their own stockpiles covertly).
And then language and the whole business of exploiting the ambiguity of mapping a word from one language into another - again I loved this. I certainly far preferred it to the trope one often encounters where translation is trivial, more or less automatic/mechanical, and never leads to misunderstandings!
@Apocryphal in our world the various sources of cuneiform tablets in the near east only really became available for study and decipherment from the middle of the 19th century onwards. So for example the real understanding of Akkadian only really began in the closing decades of the C19th, and alphabetic cuneiform as in Ugaritic had to wait until nearly the middle of the C20th. So while I totally agree that it would have been cool to have brought in the interplay between Sumerian and Akkadian, it would have been anachronistic in the time-frame of the book, unless you also assume a very different history of exploration of the find-spots.
And yes, "A cadre of 4 translators per year would barely cover the possibilities, right?" I think this was part of the plot and the resource constraints in it - by far the majority of work done had been with the classical languages of Latin and Greek, which were running dry in terms of innovation, and the core of real translators were desperate to bring in new blood with deep knowledge of other languages - but thwarted in this by a social system that made it hard for such people to go up to Oxford at all, and a popular prejudice against people who were ethnically diverse. That all worked for me.
Steam power, in history, had a lot of material needs. You needed a lot of coal, and hence miners, mining equipment, and all that. You needed to transport the coal to the steam engines, hence canals then railways, requiring all the people to dig the canals and crew the vehicles. You needed iron, and the extra coal to smelt it, and the know-how to make steel, and steel sheets, so that's a whole other industry. And you need the knowledge to make good steel and use it in boilers that don't explode. And so on...
All that means that a country can't easily go from a muscle-powered economy to a steam-powered one without a lot of effort.
With silverwork, though... you just need a multi-lingual person and a pile of silver. Neither of those is hard to come by. I stretches my credulity somewhat that silvertech hasn't been adopted more widely elsewhere. Plus, is it credible to think that Oxford would only bring in four new people per year? I'd expect hundreds.
Or a lot of inter-university rivalry to set up alternative training centres
>in our world the various sources of cuneiform tablets in the near east only really became available for study and decipherment from the middle of the 19th century onwards. So for example the real understanding of Akkadian only really began in the closing decades of the C19th, and alphabetic cuneiform as in Ugaritic had to wait until nearly the middle of the C20th. So while I totally agree that it would have been cool to have brought in the interplay between Sumerian and Akkadian, it would have been anachronistic in the time-frame of the book, unless you also assume a very different history of exploration of the find-spots.
Ah, yes, of course, though this brings me to another thing that never sat right with me in this novel: the language, and specifically the dialogue, is contemporary and uses so many modern terms (like ‘muscle memory’, which is a modern term for something that was being discussed as ‘muscular memory’ only in the late 1800s, and only in medical circles). For this reason I kept forgetting that this was supposed to be set in the earlier 1800s.
But, would 200-year-old language forms have come across as archaic and stilted, distancing us from the characters? Is what we're reading a translation from that form of language to modern vernacular?
Of course, the far more likely explanation is that Kuang didn't think about that too much and didn't worry about all the anachronisms.
As for Akkadian/Sumerian, the silverworking in this book requires native-speaker-level fluency in the two languages being used. How many native Akkadian speakers are there?
As for scripts, yes, that's a concern especially as the words are written. Do words in different scripts have different connotations? What about spelling reform, or the simplification of writing of Chinese in the 20th century? But perhaps these are questions that would be answered in wider worldbuilding, or preparing the setting for RPG play.
As for ancient languages, There are about as many native Akkadian speakers as there are native Latin and archaic Greek speakers, which is none.
Michael Tomasello argues that it does matter when we learn things, that there are stages of growth when some learning is easy, and when that stage is finished learning the same thing is, well, not the same - more difficult. See his book Becoming Human.
Good points. But the magic in book is about the intersection of the written and the spoken.
@NeilNjae said:
Language and translations thereof seem so important to the book, and more generally to Kuang, that I very much doubt she didn't think about this. My bet is the use of modern terms is a conscious choice here.
The idea of words as magic was compelling, one of the reasons I was really interested in this book, but the execution was poor. Why was only Oxford able to educate word magicians? Why so few languages? Why couldn't other lands also do this? What, China didn't have a tradition of scholarship? It just felt "Because that's the way I wanted it!" underlay far too much of the setting. The world building was lazy and just poor.
I tended to agree with you, after continuing to the end. I make some comments about this in @NeilNjae 's starter for part 2 on gaming that maybe will resonate with your thoughts on this.
After reading all your comments, I think you and I are seeing this synoptically. The whole silver/word magic system is as rootless as "Royal Navy", and thus becomes subject to fiat magic. There is no real structure underlying the magic - no system. The initial idea is clever, but someone would have to be ruthlessly logical in building a real SYSTEM around that idea - maybe homonyms could be a way of hacking/exploiting the magi, for example - because this is all just lazy handwaving.
Interestingly, religion and the nature of the divine do not poke their heads into this novel even once, I don't think. We have this whole 'rational' magic system (which I think we all agree isn't really rational) that works without the hand of God.
Religion certainly didn't surface one for breath in the first part of the book...
Which is odd given the Christian theological position that Christ is the Word of God, and hence one can easily imagine a whole in-book theology building on words as divine vessels.
Which would have been an interesting slant to take!