This is a review of Katabasis, R.F. Kuang's new book. I wonder if there are any fans of Kuang here who can convince me to give her another go; I did not much like Babel, and only got 20% of the way into it. (This despite being a recovering humanities scholar who still wears dark-academiaish tweed skirts to her programming job.) From what I remember, the characters were a bit flat, the plot didn't draw me in, and the writing style was a little formulaic. I can't help compare with Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which I absolutely adored.
Babel is a story structured like a certain YA wizard series with very clear antagonists that are not remotely good people with very little in terms of shades of gray. Kuang has very clear themes and ideas that she wants to convey, and she leaves little to the imagination in terms of plot arcs and motivations and morality.
On the other hand Babel has interesting characters that have a realistic representation of what it's like to have grown up in a cross-cultural context and how it can feel like you're betraying someone no matter what you do, which is not something I see in much media at all. She also starkly portrays and analyzes a trap that minorities can fall into where they are complicit in their own oppression.
Also, I appreciate Kuang's refreshing approach to having the bad people be bad people as opposed to misguided or misunderstood people with good intentions. Some kinds of bad-ness really shouldn't be excused, or perhaps have been explored to death already.
I think in _Babel_ (and _Katabasis_ as well), Kuang is a bit more prone than Tartt to showing off legit academic tidbits, which gives a nice scholarly glint (the illusion of high-brow? authenticity, dare I say?) to the environment, while not compromising the easy fantasy reading. More details than vibes, perhaps?
(When she gets details wrong, it does break the illusion. Like a small tangent on the etymology of the Greek word for truth in _Katabasis_.)
Oxford also simply has a certain aura for me, being from the US. All in all, I think Kuang's books are great "binge" or "airplane" reads with a smack of academic authenticity.
I saw _Possession_ mentioned elsewhere, which I think does academic vibes _and_ details very and IMO resides in a more refined literary category than either of the two other books. I should reread it!
These are the common complaints about all of kuang's books and I think even the people who like her work generally acknowledge they are well-founded. Her stuff clearly resonates with people despite those weaknesses, but if they don't for you then why push. There are a lot of books.
Yeah, Babel had an interesting premise that didn't ultimately coalesce into a good book. I stuck with it, but only because I'm a compulsive book finisher.
My experience has been that a large majority of books that get hyped on social media and make the rounds as a hot book-club sort of read… are terrible. Whatever process causes a book to reach that point appears to have no connection to how good it is.
This has been a thing for my whole life, though probably made worse by social media. But I remember as a teenager a mentor telling me to be skeptical of "books that are read a lot by people who don't read a lot." But not to dismiss them entirely. There have been some good books on oprah's list or whatever and I'm sure there are some good ones coming across tiktok too.
There is also non-literary value of doing the culturally resonant thing while it's relevant. It was fun to watch game of thrones when everyone was watching it, it was fun to play elden ring when everyone was playing it, it's fun to read acotar when everyone is reading it. Not everything has to stand alone on its own merits, social participation is a value too.
It's like this with everything. Hyped movies are trash, hyped music is trash. I made fun of hipsters in the early 2010s but at this point the mainstream is such a cesspool you have to really hunt to find good, authentic art.
Yep. Scifi and Fantasy reads that break out mainstream these days seem to be universally below average. More and more consumers are demanding less which weirds me out. They want sexless, romanceless, conflict free drivel that just regurgitates feel good memes without any introspection or complex thought.
I straight up dont give people recommendations if they mention liking a subset of authors who are known slop peddlers.
“If the devotion scholars feel toward their work is intense and sometimes irrational, it’s because this is one of the last spaces of unalienated labor”
Speaking as a former academic, I don’t really agree with this — I think academia can make you believe wrongly that it’s a kind of “unalienated labor,” but actually the alienation runs deep, all the deeper when it’s invisible at first glance.
Yes, you don’t have to make something that is sold to customers or that fits in a JIRA ticket. But when you stop and think about it, you’re going to be doing research based on topics and paradigms that other people have largely defined (advisors, peers); you have to publish in journals that are often for profit and pay you zero; when you teach you usually don’t get paid all the tuition that your students are paying per course (the institution takes a big cut); you end up doing a lot of silly things to have a solid institutional position… TLDR, it has great moments of course, but it isn’t unalienated.
Besides, in many fields, lots of interesting research is now being done at industrial labs. So there's no reason to cope with the abuse the article describes so well, e.g. "[...] a celebrity scholar who enjoys seeing his advisees suffer, plays them against each other, and likes to remind them that without him, their careers are nothing".
As an Oxbridge academic, I can confidently state that lots of things done by e.g. Isomorphic Labs, GSK AI, or Altos Labs are better than the stuff we do in the exact same subfield. Furthermore, they pay better, there is less drama, the workplace is much more professional and, above everything, they don't suffer from the power imbalance that has made academia so toxic.
"In the exact same subfield" is the key point. The academia is small. If a topic has enough direct monetary value to justify substantial spending in it, the industry will usually do better work. Academic research works better in topics that don't have such monetary value, at least not yet.
The academia lacks consistency, but I wouldn't characterize it as toxic. Many individual labs and departments are toxic, but the academia as a whole isn't. The same freedom that lets individual PIs pursue their own directions in their own ways also lets many of them create toxic work environments. But curtailing the toxicity is difficult without sacrificing the freedom the academia depends on.
I don't agree curtailing toxicity would sacrifice freedom. The toxicity I was referring to translates into power abuse, bullying, data fabrication, and all the different kinds of misconduct that emerge in systems where there is no control, no filtering, and no skin in the game. Actually, I think freedom and creativity would flourish if academic misconduct was pursued more actively. I have worked at a few top departments, and academic misconduct led to extremely low efficiency and resource waste. Everyone was either fighting or demotivated. Huge multi-million projects didn't get anywhere. Some minimal guardrails are needed.
If you are a PhD student or a postdoc, you are probably working in a PI's lab and often funded from their grants. It's also common that nobody else at the university understands the project well enough to replace the PI as your supervisor. That creates incentives to avoid reporting abuse and to tolerate unhealthy levels of toxicity, as the likely alternatives are switching to a new lab (and delaying your career) or leaving the academia.
True, there are incentives to avoid reporting abuse. I think in cases where abuse is reported, universities tend to support abusers because they are the ones who bring in grant money. Furthermore, internal control systems are not independent, and they tend to be linked to senior faculty members, who are the ones usually breaching the academic code of conduct.
In many cases journals have retracted articles after evident image manipulation was discovered. University committees rarely take disciplinary action against fraudsters. In some prominent cases they have even issued statements of support. This is starting to change, albeit slowly. For example, Sweden now has a national integrity board that investigates those types of breaches, much more likely to be neutral as it is not closely linked to the investigated subjects.
You still have more freedom than most any job in the United States at that compensation level. Yes you have to get a grant approved, but you can literally pivot to all sorts of topics within your domain if you just make a reasonable enough proposal. You can craft a class to your own liking and teach whatever you come up with. And if you have tenure you are basically set for life and don’t have to worry about the macroeconomy. You can die in office still engaging in interesting intellectual pursuits. Ageism actually goes in your favor in academia where wisdom is celebrated unlike private sector where you look like a cost center with your paygrade and liable to retire and screw up your team at any moment.
Yes there are responsibilities but you’d be hard pressed to find a tenured professor who feels like they are really very onerous, especially considering how much they had to work their tail off in grad school, postdoc, and tenure track years with little to no ability to delegate any of that. Even as department chair, you will probably get assigned an admin assistant to manage that and you will pass that torch to a colleague before long.
It's important to understand that only a small percentage of academics will ever get tenure. The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry. That job will pay less than the equivalent job for someone who never took the PhD track.
Of course, the percentage of tenured winners varies a lot by fields. It's very low in the humanities, somewhat better in CS and math, etc.
Once you get tenure, if you ever do, you will indeed have a lot of freedom, but you will also have a lot of work to do. Sure you can pass grading and other jobs off to grad students and postdocs (which you were for the last decade...) but in many fields, the need to fundraise never ends. It's sort of like funding a new startup every year with a different set of grad students.
Most people don't want to sit alone in a closet and think deep thoughts (well, ok, mathematicians do...). But if you want to do something in the real world, you'll need funding, and that means writing a LOT of grant proposals.
> It's important to understand that only a small percentage of academics will ever get tenure. The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry.
There's also a good chunk of people who fail to advance past the assistant professor level, which is pre-tenure at US institutions (not sure about other countries). And it's up or out, so if you're an assistant professor and you don't get tenure within a certain number of years, you lose your job.
> The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry.
…and that’s for the fortunate disciplines, like CS, where there is actually an “industry” to go to. Let’s just say things look rather less pleasant in the humanities.
My grandfather was tenured, published voraciously up until he retired at 73, and was sorely disappointed when I chose not to follow in his footsteps and go into academia. Why? Primarily because I had to hear him gripe about how poorly the school administration treated him and his colleagues, culminating in him having to sue the university several times for the same reasons (and him winning every time in arbitration- he basically tripled his retirement savings).
I have a lot of respect for academics, but the culture around the administration of higher learning is putrid.
Unalienated labor doesn't exist. It is one of many fairy tales leftists like to tell themselves, like the idea of an objective fair universal price. The tale promises that work wouldn't be laborious and draining if it wasn't for those damn capitalists they would all labor happily in some kind of utopia. It would be comical except people actually believe it. Notice their ears remain firmly plugged to testimonies of life as a worker under communism which would tell them their framework is fatally flawed.
Of course, operating under such ideological blinkers it is no wonder why so many leftist grad students toil for the promised land. Others merely do the same for believed good hours and prestiege with no such delusions.
I don't think it fits in the genre particularly? Been a while since I read it though.
The bigger omission is Byatt's Possession, predating The Secret History by a couple years and I think possibly being the type specimen of what is now called dark academia.
The list doesn't have to be exhaustive. It also misses the vita nostra series, which is interesting as an example of the same subgenre occurring outside the anglosphere.
The Secret History is generally regarded as the prototype for the modern subgenre though.
No of course it isn't exhaustive I wouldn't want or expect that from this kind of article.
> The Secret History is generally regarded as the prototype for the modern subgenre though.
Well, but that's why I mentioned possession. I know the secret history is considered the original dark academia, but possession predates it, is retrospectively just as firmly within this genre as it is understood now, and while not as famous is probably as influential on authors within it. It's a striking omission in an overview of the history of the genre.
Vita Nostra definitely fits the genre descriptively but I think it's more connected to a russian fantasy/slavic magical realism tradition that there isn't really a name for and that we only get a little bit of translated decades later. To me it shares a lot more with like mariam petrosyan and sergei lukyanenko than it does donna tartt.
Tangentially - it's an absurdist character rich fantasy bound by a 70 generations old castle (or university? Well, no, but shade is thrown).
Not a clean fit to Dark Academia, but a lesser known and worthy forerunner.
Also, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Stephen Fry, and many others in the 2000 TV adaption is good entertainment for anyone with a DA bent. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsPC8m4zo9g
Oh that’s interesting - I’d never thought of Possession as being dark academia. But you’re right, it is. It’s certainly one of my favorite novels, on another level than The Secret History which I also enjoyed. Every time I re-read it I am impressed all over again by how it’s woven together and, not least, how Byatt managed to write all the poems herself.
This is a review of Katabasis, R.F. Kuang's new book. I wonder if there are any fans of Kuang here who can convince me to give her another go; I did not much like Babel, and only got 20% of the way into it. (This despite being a recovering humanities scholar who still wears dark-academiaish tweed skirts to her programming job.) From what I remember, the characters were a bit flat, the plot didn't draw me in, and the writing style was a little formulaic. I can't help compare with Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which I absolutely adored.
Babel is a story structured like a certain YA wizard series with very clear antagonists that are not remotely good people with very little in terms of shades of gray. Kuang has very clear themes and ideas that she wants to convey, and she leaves little to the imagination in terms of plot arcs and motivations and morality.
On the other hand Babel has interesting characters that have a realistic representation of what it's like to have grown up in a cross-cultural context and how it can feel like you're betraying someone no matter what you do, which is not something I see in much media at all. She also starkly portrays and analyzes a trap that minorities can fall into where they are complicit in their own oppression.
Also, I appreciate Kuang's refreshing approach to having the bad people be bad people as opposed to misguided or misunderstood people with good intentions. Some kinds of bad-ness really shouldn't be excused, or perhaps have been explored to death already.
I quite like _The Secret History_ too.
I think in _Babel_ (and _Katabasis_ as well), Kuang is a bit more prone than Tartt to showing off legit academic tidbits, which gives a nice scholarly glint (the illusion of high-brow? authenticity, dare I say?) to the environment, while not compromising the easy fantasy reading. More details than vibes, perhaps?
(When she gets details wrong, it does break the illusion. Like a small tangent on the etymology of the Greek word for truth in _Katabasis_.)
Oxford also simply has a certain aura for me, being from the US. All in all, I think Kuang's books are great "binge" or "airplane" reads with a smack of academic authenticity.
I saw _Possession_ mentioned elsewhere, which I think does academic vibes _and_ details very and IMO resides in a more refined literary category than either of the two other books. I should reread it!
I read The Secret History at an impressionable age and arrived at university grossly misinformed. I love it anyway.
These are the common complaints about all of kuang's books and I think even the people who like her work generally acknowledge they are well-founded. Her stuff clearly resonates with people despite those weaknesses, but if they don't for you then why push. There are a lot of books.
> dark-academiaish tweed skirts
A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months
~ https://ia801302.us.archive.org/20/items/ThePhilosophyOfDres...
Appello, non ad Caesarem, sed ad Caesaris uxorem
Yeah, Babel had an interesting premise that didn't ultimately coalesce into a good book. I stuck with it, but only because I'm a compulsive book finisher.
My experience has been that a large majority of books that get hyped on social media and make the rounds as a hot book-club sort of read… are terrible. Whatever process causes a book to reach that point appears to have no connection to how good it is.
Taste, ah, varies.
This has been a thing for my whole life, though probably made worse by social media. But I remember as a teenager a mentor telling me to be skeptical of "books that are read a lot by people who don't read a lot." But not to dismiss them entirely. There have been some good books on oprah's list or whatever and I'm sure there are some good ones coming across tiktok too.
There is also non-literary value of doing the culturally resonant thing while it's relevant. It was fun to watch game of thrones when everyone was watching it, it was fun to play elden ring when everyone was playing it, it's fun to read acotar when everyone is reading it. Not everything has to stand alone on its own merits, social participation is a value too.
It's like this with everything. Hyped movies are trash, hyped music is trash. I made fun of hipsters in the early 2010s but at this point the mainstream is such a cesspool you have to really hunt to find good, authentic art.
Yep. Scifi and Fantasy reads that break out mainstream these days seem to be universally below average. More and more consumers are demanding less which weirds me out. They want sexless, romanceless, conflict free drivel that just regurgitates feel good memes without any introspection or complex thought.
I straight up dont give people recommendations if they mention liking a subset of authors who are known slop peddlers.
You've got nothing for lovers of Georgette Heyer or Agatha Christie then?
Wouldn't even stoop to recommend Baroness Orczy?
I read babel this year. Not the most memorable book, but an easy one to finish regardless. Nothing so off-putting they I couldn’t finish it.
But taste does vary, no reason to push it if you dislike it. De gustibus et coloribus..
Babel read like YA to me.
Did you like the rest of Donna Tartt's work as much as Secret History?
“If the devotion scholars feel toward their work is intense and sometimes irrational, it’s because this is one of the last spaces of unalienated labor”
Speaking as a former academic, I don’t really agree with this — I think academia can make you believe wrongly that it’s a kind of “unalienated labor,” but actually the alienation runs deep, all the deeper when it’s invisible at first glance.
Yes, you don’t have to make something that is sold to customers or that fits in a JIRA ticket. But when you stop and think about it, you’re going to be doing research based on topics and paradigms that other people have largely defined (advisors, peers); you have to publish in journals that are often for profit and pay you zero; when you teach you usually don’t get paid all the tuition that your students are paying per course (the institution takes a big cut); you end up doing a lot of silly things to have a solid institutional position… TLDR, it has great moments of course, but it isn’t unalienated.
Besides, in many fields, lots of interesting research is now being done at industrial labs. So there's no reason to cope with the abuse the article describes so well, e.g. "[...] a celebrity scholar who enjoys seeing his advisees suffer, plays them against each other, and likes to remind them that without him, their careers are nothing".
As an Oxbridge academic, I can confidently state that lots of things done by e.g. Isomorphic Labs, GSK AI, or Altos Labs are better than the stuff we do in the exact same subfield. Furthermore, they pay better, there is less drama, the workplace is much more professional and, above everything, they don't suffer from the power imbalance that has made academia so toxic.
"In the exact same subfield" is the key point. The academia is small. If a topic has enough direct monetary value to justify substantial spending in it, the industry will usually do better work. Academic research works better in topics that don't have such monetary value, at least not yet.
The academia lacks consistency, but I wouldn't characterize it as toxic. Many individual labs and departments are toxic, but the academia as a whole isn't. The same freedom that lets individual PIs pursue their own directions in their own ways also lets many of them create toxic work environments. But curtailing the toxicity is difficult without sacrificing the freedom the academia depends on.
I don't agree curtailing toxicity would sacrifice freedom. The toxicity I was referring to translates into power abuse, bullying, data fabrication, and all the different kinds of misconduct that emerge in systems where there is no control, no filtering, and no skin in the game. Actually, I think freedom and creativity would flourish if academic misconduct was pursued more actively. I have worked at a few top departments, and academic misconduct led to extremely low efficiency and resource waste. Everyone was either fighting or demotivated. Huge multi-million projects didn't get anywhere. Some minimal guardrails are needed.
If you are a PhD student or a postdoc, you are probably working in a PI's lab and often funded from their grants. It's also common that nobody else at the university understands the project well enough to replace the PI as your supervisor. That creates incentives to avoid reporting abuse and to tolerate unhealthy levels of toxicity, as the likely alternatives are switching to a new lab (and delaying your career) or leaving the academia.
True, there are incentives to avoid reporting abuse. I think in cases where abuse is reported, universities tend to support abusers because they are the ones who bring in grant money. Furthermore, internal control systems are not independent, and they tend to be linked to senior faculty members, who are the ones usually breaching the academic code of conduct.
In many cases journals have retracted articles after evident image manipulation was discovered. University committees rarely take disciplinary action against fraudsters. In some prominent cases they have even issued statements of support. This is starting to change, albeit slowly. For example, Sweden now has a national integrity board that investigates those types of breaches, much more likely to be neutral as it is not closely linked to the investigated subjects.
You still have more freedom than most any job in the United States at that compensation level. Yes you have to get a grant approved, but you can literally pivot to all sorts of topics within your domain if you just make a reasonable enough proposal. You can craft a class to your own liking and teach whatever you come up with. And if you have tenure you are basically set for life and don’t have to worry about the macroeconomy. You can die in office still engaging in interesting intellectual pursuits. Ageism actually goes in your favor in academia where wisdom is celebrated unlike private sector where you look like a cost center with your paygrade and liable to retire and screw up your team at any moment.
Yes there are responsibilities but you’d be hard pressed to find a tenured professor who feels like they are really very onerous, especially considering how much they had to work their tail off in grad school, postdoc, and tenure track years with little to no ability to delegate any of that. Even as department chair, you will probably get assigned an admin assistant to manage that and you will pass that torch to a colleague before long.
It's important to understand that only a small percentage of academics will ever get tenure. The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry. That job will pay less than the equivalent job for someone who never took the PhD track.
Of course, the percentage of tenured winners varies a lot by fields. It's very low in the humanities, somewhat better in CS and math, etc.
Once you get tenure, if you ever do, you will indeed have a lot of freedom, but you will also have a lot of work to do. Sure you can pass grading and other jobs off to grad students and postdocs (which you were for the last decade...) but in many fields, the need to fundraise never ends. It's sort of like funding a new startup every year with a different set of grad students.
Most people don't want to sit alone in a closet and think deep thoughts (well, ok, mathematicians do...). But if you want to do something in the real world, you'll need funding, and that means writing a LOT of grant proposals.
> It's important to understand that only a small percentage of academics will ever get tenure. The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry.
There's also a good chunk of people who fail to advance past the assistant professor level, which is pre-tenure at US institutions (not sure about other countries). And it's up or out, so if you're an assistant professor and you don't get tenure within a certain number of years, you lose your job.
> The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry.
…and that’s for the fortunate disciplines, like CS, where there is actually an “industry” to go to. Let’s just say things look rather less pleasant in the humanities.
My grandfather was tenured, published voraciously up until he retired at 73, and was sorely disappointed when I chose not to follow in his footsteps and go into academia. Why? Primarily because I had to hear him gripe about how poorly the school administration treated him and his colleagues, culminating in him having to sue the university several times for the same reasons (and him winning every time in arbitration- he basically tripled his retirement savings).
I have a lot of respect for academics, but the culture around the administration of higher learning is putrid.
Unalienated labor doesn't exist. It is one of many fairy tales leftists like to tell themselves, like the idea of an objective fair universal price. The tale promises that work wouldn't be laborious and draining if it wasn't for those damn capitalists they would all labor happily in some kind of utopia. It would be comical except people actually believe it. Notice their ears remain firmly plugged to testimonies of life as a worker under communism which would tell them their framework is fatally flawed.
Of course, operating under such ideological blinkers it is no wonder why so many leftist grad students toil for the promised land. Others merely do the same for believed good hours and prestiege with no such delusions.
No mention of Gormenghast? Bumbaclart…
I don't think it fits in the genre particularly? Been a while since I read it though.
The bigger omission is Byatt's Possession, predating The Secret History by a couple years and I think possibly being the type specimen of what is now called dark academia.
The list doesn't have to be exhaustive. It also misses the vita nostra series, which is interesting as an example of the same subgenre occurring outside the anglosphere.
The Secret History is generally regarded as the prototype for the modern subgenre though.
No of course it isn't exhaustive I wouldn't want or expect that from this kind of article.
> The Secret History is generally regarded as the prototype for the modern subgenre though.
Well, but that's why I mentioned possession. I know the secret history is considered the original dark academia, but possession predates it, is retrospectively just as firmly within this genre as it is understood now, and while not as famous is probably as influential on authors within it. It's a striking omission in an overview of the history of the genre.
Vita Nostra definitely fits the genre descriptively but I think it's more connected to a russian fantasy/slavic magical realism tradition that there isn't really a name for and that we only get a little bit of translated decades later. To me it shares a lot more with like mariam petrosyan and sergei lukyanenko than it does donna tartt.
Tangentially - it's an absurdist character rich fantasy bound by a 70 generations old castle (or university? Well, no, but shade is thrown).
Not a clean fit to Dark Academia, but a lesser known and worthy forerunner.
Also, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Stephen Fry, and many others in the 2000 TV adaption is good entertainment for anyone with a DA bent. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsPC8m4zo9g
Oh that’s interesting - I’d never thought of Possession as being dark academia. But you’re right, it is. It’s certainly one of my favorite novels, on another level than The Secret History which I also enjoyed. Every time I re-read it I am impressed all over again by how it’s woven together and, not least, how Byatt managed to write all the poems herself.
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