The Fall of Babel

 
The Fall of Babel

by Josiah Bancroft

Orbit Books

2021
 

 

The Fall of Babel concludes the quartet of books that begins with Senlin Ascends, and it's a big one. The other books in the series all fell in the 300-400 page range; this one is almost 650. Bancroft uses this space to tell a story in three parts.

 
Part one tells Adam's story, picking up when he left the others in the Sphinx's Lair in Arm of the Sphinx. He wanted to seek his own fortune and find his own adventures, rather than always chasing his sister, trying to keep her from getting hurt. He arrives at the golden city on the roof of the Tower, finds it well-defended but sparsely populated by the descendants of the original builders, living in what is basically a scifi utopia. Usually no one is allowed in - and everyone who tries is vaporized by lightning guns. But for reasons he doesn't initially understand, Adam is famous here.

 
Adam makes friends with a local, and eventually learns how it's possible that the people here know his life. More importantly, he learns that something is happening in the Black Trail that winds all through the Tower walls, behind the scenes, and is used exclusively by the debt-enslaved Hods. And whatever that something is, it's imperiling all the Hods' lives. Taking a risk to trust his new friend, Adam helps thousands of orphaned refugees and their caretakers immigrate into the golden city without getting vaporized. The final scene of this section is the locals voting on whether to let the orphans stay, or to kill all the refugee children, and Adam along with them. This part of the story runs alongside the latter half of Arm of the Sphinx, the three parallel storylines of The Hod King, and the events of part 2 of this book, merging back into the main action at the start of part 3.

 
Part 2 alternates viewpoints between Senlin onboard The Hod King, the giant robotic centipede / doomsday device built by aspiring usurper and wannabe tyrant Marat and his army of escaped Hods, and Edith and the rest of the crew on the Sphinx's airship, The State of the Art, which is held aloft by what seems to be antigrav technology in a world where every other flying craft uses a hydrogen balloon. (I would call the specific blend of scifi and fantasy here steampunk. It is probably more like a scifi story dressed in the trappings of fantasy, as opposed to science fantasy, which I think of as being the reverse.)
 

So Senlin, who was enslaved last book, has reached Marat, convinced him that he is a sincere convert to the cause, and joined the crew of The Hod King, along with a couple familiar faces from the first book. Marat trusts Senlin so much that he welcomes him into his inner circle, which includes four other cybernetic Wakemen (former servants of the Sphinx, like Edith,) and reveals that he doesn't believe his own antislavery rhetoric. He just wants a loyal army, to overthrow the Sphinx, and to rule the Tower as a monarch. Edith's arm is functional, even powerful, but still mostly human looking. The other Wakemen we've seen are mostly so horrific that it's unfortunate, but perhaps not surprising, that they were all rejected by the people they're supposed to serve.

 
The Hod King is literally digging through the walls of the Tower, causing the local equivalent of earthquakes, and occasionally erupting to the surface to climb straight up the walls, sowing terror among the Ringdoms in its wake. (This is the something that's forcing the orphans to the top of the Black Trail.) Senlin and his friends want to sabotage the vessel, a task made harder by their separation. Bancroft managed to get me to guess the solution just before he explicitly revealed it, which I thought was a neat trick.

 
On The State of the Art, the crew is trying to find some remaining paintings that act as a key to a door in the Sphinx's Lair. But Marat and his spies got to almost all them first. They're also trying to track The Hod King, and shoot it off the side of the Tower whenever it emerges.This game of cat and mouse is what structures the alternations between the two viewpoints.

 
The main interpersonal drama here is Edith and recently-rescued Marya, damsel no longer, trying to figure out how to live on the same ship when they both want to be the one to end up with Senlin. Personally, I think Edith actually likes him better, and she's been by his side for most of the past year, which has been transformative for all of them. Marya seems decidedly ambivalent about Senlin, even as she seems determined to be reunited with him. I won't say how Bancroft resolves this particular love triangle, except to say that Senlin ultimately gets to decide, and the one he leaves behind reluctantly agrees with his decision. But that won't happen until part 3.

 
There's also some individual drama with Voleta. After getting shot and revived by the Sphinx's alchemical liquid, her personality is significantly changed. She's also gone from being daring and acrobatic, to essentially lacking fear or pain (among other emotions) and being able to accomplish superhuman gymnastics. She's also probably taking too much of the chemical, and shortening her reborn life in the process. There was a time when I thought Voleta would be the replacement Sphinx, but Bancroft has a much stranger fate planned for her.

 
In part 3, all the plots converge. After their last gunbattle, Marat abandoned The Hod King in a smaller lifeboat digging robot, and has reached the Sphinx's Lair, where he forces Senlin to help him find his way around. Edith and the others reached the golden city, reunited with Adam, and descended from the roof to the Lair. Senlin escapes Marat and rejoins his friends, but any happiness is short-lived, because Marat and the Wakemen are right behind him. What follows is an absolutely brutal fight that not everyone survives.
 

Eventually Marat is defeated, and the Brick Layer's extremely long-term plan finally comes to fruition. If you paid enough attention to the description of the golden city you might guess its true purpose (in the book, not here, where I haven't said enough to reveal it.)

 

Senlin is reunited with one of the women he loves. The Sphinx gets a successor who takes over the role of figurehead and arbiter of disputes between Ringdoms. And some of the characters get to be intimately involved in the Tower's secret purpose. You get the sense that in the near future, the Ringdoms will be forced to become somewhat less exploitative, and the Hods will be emancipated from their debt-slavery, all of which will lead to a juster society, but also probably a great deal of unrest for the new Sphinx to manage.

 
The first book in this series could probably stand alone, and after just it, the series probably could have gone off in different directions. But starting in the second book and continuing through this one, Bancroft selects a plot and puts his foot on the accelerator. One consequence of this is that while the first book is largely character-driven and more literary, they become increasingly plot-driven and action-focused as they go. The proliferation of cyborgs, giant robot vehicles, and alchemical superheroes also ratchets up the genre-ness of the later books. Though Bancroft does still take time to give each character an inner life, and to find insightful metaphors to describe the action. He also continued to surprise me up to the end.

 
It was interesting to see Senlin get increasingly sidelined in what had started out as his story, but the result is a much larger and richer cast, and also perhaps, some added realism, in that he is not infinitely able to rise to every occasion. Sometimes someone else can do whatever it is better than him, including leadership in Edith's case. This is, I think, also the series' feminism in action. Bancroft and his characters are aware of the sexism and other forms of iniquity in the Tower. Part of fixing it means that the heroes don't just rely on a lone man to make all the decisions for them.

 
One final thing I want to call out for their quality are the epigraphs, the fake quotes at the start of each chapter. Across the series, these quotes come from probably over a dozen fake books, mostly about the Tower, and each has a unique voice, including the famed poet Jumet. The epigraphs are a great bit of worldbuilding, because they both tell us about the Tower and show how it's seen from different perspectives. I think they're always taken from a book one of the main characters is carrying or reading, they often provide a kind of ironic commentary of the events of the coming chapter, and in a couple occasions, they're a source of metafictional delight, when you realize that the character is interacting with the quote to a greater extent than you previously knew. There's a moment like that in the first book, and another one here. The epigraphs probably aren't vital to the series's success, but they do enliven and enrich the text to an extent you don't usually see.