Books Like Babel

Why Each Pick

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

Kuang's own return to dark academia, this time at Cambridge. Graduate student Alice Law travels through Hell with her academic rival to bring back the soul of her dead advisor, and the underworld is built from logic puzzles and philosophy. It shares Babel's brainy magic and its anger at how institutions use people, but it is a satire of graduate school more than a novel about empire, and just as long at 541 pages.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The book that defined dark academia. A small circle of classics students at an elite Vermont college fall under the spell of their teacher and Greek ideals of beauty, until they cross a terrible line. Like Babel, it follows an outsider welcomed into a brilliant, closed world that costs more than he understands. There is no magic, and the crime is revealed on page one, so the tension comes from why rather than what.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

For magic that runs on language. On the island of Roke, young Ged learns at a school of wizardry where power comes from knowing the true names of things, an idea close to Babel's silver bars and the gap between words. Le Guin's book is far shorter, at 183 pages, and more fable than argument: Ged's enemy is a shadow his own pride released, not an empire.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

For a poor, gifted student fighting his way through a legendary university. Kvothe talks his way into a school of magic where his tuition, his rivals and his secrets all threaten to undo him, much as Robin's place at Babel is never secure. Rothfuss builds a rule-bound magic system with the same love of detail, but the story is a personal adventure rather than a political one, and the trilogy is unfinished.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

For a scholar's obsessive notes on an impossible world. Piranesi records the tides and statues of an endless house in careful journals, until messages suggest someone has been keeping the truth from him. It shares Babel's love of learning and its slow discovery that knowledge is being used against the person who gathers it. It is short, strange and gentle, at 272 pages, with none of Babel's violence.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

For a brilliant scholar whose work powerful people want to own. Physicist Shevek leaves his anarchist moon for a wealthy, unequal planet to share his theory, and has to ask who will profit from it. Like Babel, it is a novel of ideas about scholarship, power and freedom. Le Guin writes science fiction rather than fantasy, and the conflict is philosophical, told across two timelines, rather than revolutionary.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

For the other side of the empire Babel's translators serve. In pre-colonial Nigeria, the proud warrior Okonkwo watches his Igbo village change as European missionaries and colonial rule arrive. Babel argues about colonialism from inside Oxford; Achebe shows it from the village it reaches. It is a short classic at 209 pages with no fantasy at all, and it hits as hard as Babel's final act.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

For readers who liked the secret society and its thefts. Locke Lamora and his gang of con artists rob the nobility of a Venice-like city while hiding in plain sight, a double life Robin would recognize. It shares Babel's sense of a hidden world under a grand city, but it is a fast, funny heist fantasy with no lectures, though the violence gets brutal later on.