With Arm of the Sphinx, the ‘Books of Babel’ Is Quickly Becoming a New Favorite Series

I think we’re reaching Green Bone or Deavabad levels of excitement with this Books of Babel series.

Back in February, I was pretty much gushing about Bancroft’s character work in Senlin Ascends. For Arm of the Sphinx, its the twists. Of course its hard to write about this without giving the game away (which I won’t do), but let’s just say that this book is easily living up to my favorite mantra in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere novels:

“There’s always another secret.”

It seems like even small things are not what they seem, and Bancroft really leverages dramatic irony — when the audience knows more than the character — to great effect. I’m also quite astounded by the thought and planning it must have taken to weave these threads together. Things in Arm of the Sphinx are often unexpected, but never outright contradictory to what we know from book 1 and so it seems he must have had many of these ideas at least in mind if not fully fleshed out when writing that first book.

It has me wondering, and somewhat nervous (in a good way), what groundwork has been laid (that I missed), which will take me by surprise in book 3.

I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that we finally meet the enigmatic Sphinx in this book (they’re right there in the title lol). What a bizarre, eccentric and weirdly sinister character. Despite Senlin and friends flying around in an airship for about the first half of the story (I was actually a little worried this book would just be pirating and we wouldn’t explore any more of the tower at all), I felt that it was the time we spent with the Sphinx in which the book fully embraced its potential as a piece of Steampunk fantasy.

What strange and evocative technological marvels we get to experience, many of which should feel like old news in our modern times, but Bancroft really manages to inject a new sense of awe into them.

During the first levels of our ascent through the ringdoms of the tower (meaning while I was reading Senlin Ascends) I felt the only major weakness of the story was the book’s depiction of women. Senlin’s wife Marya is basically a MacGuffin, and Iren and Edith read a bit like male heroes in dresses (although I guess Iren doesn’t actually ever wear a dress). I finished book one hoping for a Marya POV chapter somewhere in the future, which I felt would give the story some complexity if not some much needed diversity.

In Arm of the Sphinx I’m slightly disappointed we still never got to see the tower through Marya’s eyes, but I’m happy to report that our other leading women take on more nuance and complexity through the course of this second book. In fact, Senlin isn’t even around in one chunk of the book, which just gives Edith and Iren more time to shine.

We also have Voleta taking on a more prominent roll. In my humble opinion, results here are mixed. I think she’s supposed to be around eighteen but read much younger to me. On the surface, this may not have been a problem if there was some backstory reason for her stunted maturity, which given the general anything-can-and-does-happen vibe of The Tower could have probably been pretty easy to explain away.

However, the Voleta we see in book one was essentially a prisoner in a brothel. Though her brother Adam tries to shield her as much as possible, I felt a large part of the dynamic there is that he’s mostly absent and ineffectual. As such, I would have expected Voleta to be more mature/jaded, and less childlike. Her devil-may-care disposition towards authority and personal safety (she should really be more freaked out by spiders) would still fit, but perhaps fit just a little better.

Despite the complaints above, I still managed to love and enjoy so many, many parts of this book. I’ll begin winding this love letter down with a passage which stuck out to me towards the end of the book. It reads:

“The tradition among libraries of boasting about the number of volumes in their collection is well established, but surely, it is not aggregation that makes a library; it is dissemination. Perhaps libraries should bang on about how many volumes are on loan, are presently off crowding nightstands, and circulating through piles on the mantel, and weighing down purses. Yes, it is somewhat vexing to thread through the stacks of a library, only to discover an absence rather than the sought after volume, but once the ire subsides, doesn’t one feel a sense of community? The gaps in a library are like footprints in the sand: They show where others have gone before; they assure us we are not alone.“

I think we just need to hire Bancroft for the Library’s marketing team. Which library? All of them. Just in general.

Obviously given my background, this insight was much enjoyed and highly relevant to me personally, but I bring it up in this post to do more than just prattle on and feel seen. I included it as an example of the level of quality and care that Bancroft brings to every scene within Arm of the Sphinx. I’m sure there are a hundred other pieces of wisdom hidden within its pages which I do not have time to hunt down and record, but it feels like enough to know they are there.

Give This One A Read?

Please yes. The Books of Babbel is quickly joining the ranks of stories like the Greenbone Saga, Deavabad books, and Cosmere novels as all-time favorites. And Arm of the Sphinx only strengthens that positioning. With twist after twist (on things large and small), Bancroft continues to ratchet up my excitement about these novels.

Though we still never saw a point of view from Marya, I felt like we made great strides in fixing some of my issues with Senlin Ascends in regards to “writing women”, and while Voleta’s character seemed a bit off to me, it was not enough to detract from the things I enjoyed about the story, which were its sense of awe and (particularly Steampunk) brand of wonder, as well as Bancroft’s unique insight into a plethora of topics like art and libraries.

That’s all I have for this week. Has anyone been climbing this tower along side me? What are your thoughts so far? How stoked are you for The Hod King? And what has been your favorite part of this series to date?

Leave your answers in the comments. I’m excited to talk about this one!

Should ‘Little Free Library’ win the Hugo Award

So it’s been a little while since I’ve posted any reviews related to the 2021 Hugo Awards. I’ve been pretty busy (first two weeks back to work full time! and a bunch of birthdays, mine included) and while I don’t feel like I’ve been slacking, I have not had as much time for reading and writing as I had before August hit (also before #smaugust hit lol).

Anyway, I think the perfect way to remedy that is to add some Hugo nominated short story reviews to my ever-growing list of Hugo related reviews. It’s been quite a while since I reviewed any short stories on this blog (the last one being a Robert Sharp number in 2018), so I’m feeling a little unsure how to proceed, but I supposed it’s just the same as any other review I’ve written . . . and who cares if it isn’t. I’m here for the funzies.

So, should Naomi Kritzer’s Little Free Library win a Hugo award in 2021?

Hot take: Probably not?

Don’t get me wrong, this is a wonderful short story, expertly crafted with much to love in the moment, but seems to crumble under further scrutiny. It does, perhaps, capture the essence of a portal fantasy, not by the literal use of a Little Free Library as a portal within the text, but in the fact that while you read the story, you are transported away from reality briefly and returned more or less able to continue on, refreshed but not really affected (in the times we’ve been having, perhaps this IS award worthy). I feel, especially since we have books like those in the Wayward Children series such as In and Absent Dream, that as a genre this is too simple a way to look at portal fantasies in general.

But I suppose I should try to break it down a little better.

Stuff I enjoyed:

I think one of the main parts of the story which gives it appeal to a wide audience is all the references to other books. Of course, there is the initial hook, Lord of the Rings, which every reader will recognize and kind of lets the reader know that they’ll be reading a fantasy, or at the very least, something fantasy related (interesting that they didn’t pick anything from The Chronicles of Narnia. I mean why not call it what it is haha).

And then we continue to get bread-crumbed through the mystery of who is on the other side of this portal through the other books which they select. The main character, Meigan, kind of thinks of this mystery as a game, and the reader is encouraged to do so as well, which makes it a fun puzzle. Points to everyone all around for fun puzzles.

Perhaps the second portion that I enjoyed, was simply that it was about libraries, and specifically a Little Free Library. I work for a library, so I’m always excited when one is featured (well) in a story and we have tons of these little book boxes all around (although MY neighborhood just took theirs down hmph) and I’ve always had a great experience swapping books through them. I have wondered where the books came from and who gave them up (although I never imagined something as crazy as this).

It’s just a cool concept, and another aspect of the story which lends itself to wide appeal. Even if people don’t know about Little Free Libraries, they have usually had SOME experience with a library and it’s pretty popular in our culture to romanticize them as gateways to other worlds (which for a lot of people they metaphorically are). I liked that in this case those other worlds were real and the gateway was literal.

Stuff I didn’t like:

Stories that rely heavily on allusion to other works, or references to them, are kind of a double-edged sword. If the reader knows them, or can mostly figure them out from context, the author is in the clear, but if not, the reader will be quite helpless to know what’s going on. It’s hard to imagine — especially reading all the Sci-fi and Fantasy blogs, channels, and books that I do — but there ARE people who haven’t read Lord of the Rings, or seen Starwars.

I haven’t read Ready Player One but I’m told it’s an extreme example of this, where the book is highly referential, and for a niche that actually isn’t all that big. I think this story falls into that a little bit. I’ll admit that I actually didn’t recognize too many of the books Meigan gave away. Some of them had titles that were generic enough that I could kinda get what they were about but, who knows? I don’t think this story did it enough to be ostracizing, but it’s a slippery slope.

Plus the whole thing felt vaguely nostalgic which I sort of have a love/hate relationship with. I’ll work this out someday and look back on these times of loathing and hatred with a fondness as I — Dammit stop that! Anyway, moving on . . .

— SORRY, SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT —

What was most interesting about the story to me:

I’ve been feeling that with a lot of stories these days, other people’s reactions are almost more interesting to me than the actual content of the story. For this book, people seem to feel that it’s very hopeful, and cute (which nothing that is ever called cute wants to be called cute lol) which I would have agreed with, immediately after reading, but actually began to think the opposite of as I pondered further.

Why you ask?

Well, the story essentially ends with what’s (assumedly) a dragon egg, sent through the portal with a note that says all has been lost, please take care of this baby for us. I don’t think poor Meigan is at all prepared to take care of a child out of nowhere (Who would be?), and this particular one has the added disadvantage of not even being a human. Whatever hatches from this poor egg is going to have a hell of a time living in a strange place, with strange people, and no others even remotely like itself to relieve any of the pressure of being (essentially) “the last of my kind”

Through this lens, the story is actually pretty bleak . . .

And what of it? What is the purpose of such tragedy? Not all stories need to have a message, or moral, or theme. It’s ok to have stories which are the literary equivalent of popcorn. Which is what this story seems to portend itself to be.

But even popcorn stories, which are not intentionally written with a theme, will usually still have one, even if it’s just the author’s outlook on the vast topics that happen through the story.

Little Free Library does not seem to give us any clue as to what that theme might be, and when we think deeper on the story (and assume the rather bleak outlook I described), it seems to need that theme or message badly but I just wasn’t sure what it was.

So . . . Hugo?

I think the lack of discernable theme, whether intentionally hidden or unintentionally left out is what lowered this story in my esteem. It had a wonderful premise and great execution of that premise, but (for me) did not deliver on the higher level which we typically associate with stories which are “award worthy”.

I can recommend this story to read, but not for the award . . .

What are y’all’s thoughts? DID this story have a theme which I just completely missed (this would not be the first nor last time)? Please let me know what you loved or didn’t love about the story in the comments as well as anything I’m missing here. Thanks so much for stopping by.

See you next time.