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This is a book that's not shy about the morals you're supposed to take away from it. But there is one moral that is coming through very strongly to me that I am not sure Kuang intended. And seeing how the world of Babel collapses when Robin and Victoire shut down the tower, it's really got me thinking "Man, it sure was a mistake to make critical infrastructure decisions that rely on the continued functioning of this small academic institute. And it's really irresponsible of Babel to have so little in the way of contingency planning. There's like 3 or 4 people in the world who can maintain the chinese match pair silver bars? wtf?" For context, I'm reading this right as Unity is exploiting its monopoly position to hike prices. (But see also the leftpad saga, any number of other examples in software).

So, Babel is a book that tells us that racism is bad, colonialism is bad. But also that relying on unaccountable, opaque, outside entities for vital infrastructure is precarious at best.

I am quite enjoying this, but there have been a few things that just kind of took me out of it. Like, Ellie's desk hasn't been touched since she died, but she was exploded? So did they tidy up after her and put it back how it was? Or she wasn't at her desk when she was killed? I don't know, it could have been clearer.

Ramy and Victoire being mad at Robin for not telling them about Hermes makes no sense. They were in a secret society, and if they understood how it works, it was RIGHT AND GOOD that they don't talk to ANYONE about it. That's how it works. The way in which Robin "betrays" Hermes isn't nearly bad enough to warrant their disapproval either. That whole part felt kind of more like Kuang needed there to be some sort of tension between the characters, rather than it really making sense as a reason for them to fall out.

I love the idea of magic being the meaning lost through translation, but the specific examples kind of don't make sense often. Like Capitale <-> Chattel making slaves docile. Isn't the root just the word for "head"? Caput or something? Where is the suggestion of docility lost? In fact, I looked it up, and "caput" also means "head" as in "leader", so I guess some sense of vigour and action has been lost moving from caput to chattel, but that's not how it was explained in the book. I think there they talked about "capital" as in money, but that seems neither here nor there. I don't know, maybe it got mangled in editing?

Keeping the whole cohort together to send on the trip before their fourth year felt really plot-device-y. Like, it makes no sense to send Victoire, Ramy and Letty to Canton. They're be much better used sent to other parts of the empire.

These are nitpicks, not really big plot holes.

I thought it was a pretty brave choice, narratively speaking, to set the whole book up as a search for Slado, and then just completely drop that thread and spend a big chunk of the end of the book exploring the demons and their unexpected sophistication. I think it worked and I didn't think about it much at the time, but in retrospect, that's a move that could have come off as just completely losing the plot thread.

The hints of some kind of lost technology from the first two books (routine bioform clearance etc) is a kind of intriguing, but that plays less of a role in this book. I like that slow burn multi-book storytelling, but I was kind of hoping that that thread of the series would be explored more. This is presumably something that will come back into focus in the later books. Again, it feels like a brave move to more or less drop progressing that strand of the story for a whole novel. I think it worked, because the mystery of the demons is a pretty strong story itself.