Babel by RF Kuang | thoughts ๐ญ
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Books like this aren't just stories, they're like alarm bells. Orwell, Atwood, Kuang... they all weave fiction that's really a mirror for what's already happening or what will happen if silence wins.
The scariest part is how relevant they stay. Animal Farm was about Stalinist Russia, but you can read it now and it's just as sharp about capitalism, corruption, or even modern politics. The Handmaid's Tale feels like a dystopian prophecy with how women's rights, trans and queer rights and human rights in general are constantly under attack by American and British governments. And Babel feels like it's saying: the empire never stopped, it just changed costumes; colonisation, capitalism, exploitation of culture, it's all the same cycle. History is doomed to repeat itself when people forget.
And it always falls to the very people who are marginalised, erased, or under attack to resist, to carve out space underground, to survive in spite of apathy. It's exhausting that the burden's on us because those with privilege look away until it's too late. These books kind of stand as records, too. Like warnings written into culture so the next wave, the next generation, can point and say, "we knew, we told you."