Kuang, R F
Entry updated 3 February 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1996- ) Chinese-born translator and author, in US from the age of four. Her ambitious fantasy sequence, The Poppy War series beginning with The Poppy War (2018), casts the twentieth-century story of China as an intensely complex but coherent drama with a large cast and much War. The anguish of lives conducted in the midst of history is conveyed with enough detail and analogy that it is possible to engage with the whole as a ghost-like Alternate History. The Poppy War won the Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award for best debut novel, and Kuang received the 2020 Astounding Award as best new writer.
Kuang's first singleton, the Young Adult Babel; Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (2022), which is technically fantasy, employs an arsenal of devices from the Fantastika toolkit designed to associate the Magic here employed with the SF Megatext. The 1830s Oxford of the tale is dominated by the towering Steampunkish Keep nicknamed Babel which houses the Royal Institute of Translation (see Linguistics). The protagonist, who has been brought from China already fluent in Latin and Greek, and his fellow students, also recruited for their language skills, become deeply involved in the Institute and the Library at its heart. They learn that the magic propensities of silver can be turned into wards – which in our world might be understood as weaponizings of the First Industrial Revolution – which can be used (ie, cast) by Britain to maintain and increase its power as a world-spanning Imperial hegemony. The central action is, ostensibly, straightforward: a silver bar, when its two sides are inscribed with synonyms in two different languages, enables technology-based actions on the world through the magically fillable absence – what might be called an aura – that charges the gap between any two meanings: the act of translation itself "longing" to translate mercantile doctrines into actions of literal power.
A growing realization on the part of the cast that to translate and to conquer are both exercises in exploitative violence motors the tale, shaping passages of engaging erudition as the action moves towards China, where Britain is about to unleash the trumped-up Opium Wars. This tale won a Nebula as best novel and a Locus Award as best fantasy novel; it would have appeared on the final Hugo ballot in 2023 if that year's Worldcon Hugo administrators had not arbitrarily disqualified it with no reason given. [JC]
see also: Silkpunk.
Rebecca F Kuang
born Guangzhou, Guangdong, China: 29 May 1996
works
series
The Poppy War
- The Poppy War (New York: Harper Voyager, 2018) [The Poppy War: hb/Jung Shan Chang]
- The Dragon Republic (New York: Harper Voyager, 2019) [The Poppy War: hb/Jung Shan Chang]
- The Burning God (New York: Harper Voyager, 2020) [The Poppy War: hb/Jung Shan Chang]
individual titles
- Babel; Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (New York: Harper Voyager, 2022) [hb/Richard L Aquan]
works as editor
- The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Mariner, 2023) with J J Adams as Series Editor [anth: Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy: pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry