katabasis, r.f. kuang, and modern dark academia (a spoiler-free vlog & review)

Yellowface author Rebecca F Kuang on Trump’s America: ‘I live in terror!’

In her latest novel, Katabasis, the author has woven her life into fantasy fiction. Prepare for a tale of underworld adventures, academic rivalry and Crohn’s disease

https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/rebecca-f-kuang-interview-author-katabasis-yellowface-3ddkssbgh

https://archive.ph/ElMpT



Rebecca F Kuang is not the first postgraduate student to conclude: “Ha ha, academia is hell!” But she is surely the first to write a 560-page fantasy epic on the theme, depicting warring PhD students descending into Hell and taking their campus politics with them. Her new book, Katabasis, which means a journey to the underworld, might best be described as Dante’s Inferno crossed with a David Lodge novel. She started writing it for light relief while studying for a doctoral degree in east Asian languages and literatures at Yale University and, meanwhile, becoming obsessed with the British campus novels of the 1980s and “what the Thatcher years did to academia”. This is not perhaps what you would expect for a fantasy author born in 1996 in Guangzhou, China, brought up in Dallas, Texas, and with a love of Gossip Girl, but Kuang is anything but typical.

Still only 29, she writes cerebral books that are hugely successful. She published the first part of her opium wars trilogy, Poppy War, when she was just 19. Babel (2022), her Oxford-set fantasy that explored how translation and language are used as tools of imperial power, has sold more than ten million copies worldwide. She followed it with the bestselling satire Yellowface (2023), about a white author who takes the manuscript of a dead Asian-American friend and passes it off as her own. There’s something almost effortless about the way Kuang seems able to tap into the commercial/critical sweet spot.

She is huge on BookTok, her novels combining the breathless, righteous tone of television teenage dramas with surprising amounts of violence and astute genre reference points, like “grimdark fantasy” and “dark academia”, to name but two. Yet her primary ambition has always been to be a university professor and her novels are full of history, mythology and philosophy, often having the feeling of a fantastical thought experiment. “I think this often happens to me,” Kuang says on a Zoom call from Edinburgh, where she is visiting friends. “I find a bright and shiny idea that’s just kind of abstractly interesting to me.”

In the case of Katabasis she imagined the Courts of Hell from Chinese mythology and the punishments meted out to sinners. “But then I started thinking more deeply about why one would want to go to Hell in the first place,” she says. “I realised that this is not just a book about logic paradoxes, it’s a book about depression, suicide and chronic illness.” The book follows Alice, a PhD student of “analytical magick” at the University of Cambridge, who is convinced she has killed her egomaniacal adviser. Professor Jacob Grimes exploits the interest of female students and colleagues who are in awe of his “knife-like intelligence”.

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