R.F. Kuang Sends Her Academics Into Literal Hell

Goodreads: Can you talk a little bit about the initial genesis of the novel? When did you first start thinking about the story in Katabasis?

R.F. Kuang: I started writing Katabasis a few years into grad school. I had initially sold Babel and Katabasis as part of a two-book deal, actually. After The Poppy War trilogy wrapped up, the deal was for these two fantasy novels, and in my head they form a kind of dark academia duology.

With Babel, I was interested in this big-picture, socio-historical critique of the university. The story spans decades and continents, has a very large cast, and is really thinking about the structural genesis and position of the university. Katabasis is a deep dive into the interpersonal psychology of just three characters. So it's doing a critique of the university from within, a very granular account of really just three people: Alice, Peter, and Grimes.

It was an opportunity to shift gears from that big-picture historical stuff—which I really love—to this more intense interpersonal register. I like to think of Katabasis and Babel as two halves of a whole. They're both thinking about what happens to us in the university. We have this goal of producing knowledge, sharing knowledge, learning, teaching, researching.… These are such wonderful ideals, so why is it so hard to actually do any of that at a university?

GR: You get into a lot of heavy-duty concepts in both those books, drawing from mythology, philosophy, language, history—even a little advanced mathematics. How do you calibrate the level at which you dig into these ideas and still deliver a story that will work as commercial fiction?

R.F.K.: I actually don't struggle with this a lot. I think it's because, in the social environments I'm in, people are always explaining things at a generalist level—at the level where a layperson could understand. You know, in grad student circles, everybody has a different subfield. I'm constantly asking people—oh, what is it that you do? And can you tell me in terms that I could understand? And I'm also constantly thinking about this myself, explaining the relevance of my research to people who haven't spent hours with it.

Something else that helps for Katabasis is that these really aren't my fields. This is the first novel I've written in which I'm kind of the layperson. It's my husband who does philosophy and logic.

In fact, as I was researching this book, we threw a paradox party. There are quite a lot of logicians in his department, and we told everybody to come with a handout of a paradox—a logic paradox that you think is really interesting. We have a whiteboard in the living room, so they would come and draw the paradox and explain it to everybody. And I would take notes and think, Oh, good! Like, I can see the fantastical relevance of this for my story.

GR: You've said before that you often like to follow established structures when you're putting together a book. With Babel, it was in part a Victorian pastiche in regard to the rhythm and the pacing and the prose. What did you have in mind with Katabasis?

R.F.K.: Well, it has one of the oldest storytelling structures of all time, and in fact it's named after that structure. The term katabasis is the hero's descent to the underworld. So at a very basic level, it's a matter of having a character reach the lowest of their lows, where they've lost everything. They've lost the relationships that are important to them, the goal that they were fighting toward, and any conception of themselves. And it's only when you get down there that you can start to rebuild yourself and see if you can crawl out of it.

GR: And you can't get much lower than hell.

R.F.K.: Right, both Alice and Peter, they’re totally deluded. They have these narratives about themselves that are insane—like literally insane—and it’s because of this pressure cooker environment of the university. They've lost sight of anything else. It takes physically going to hell and then reaching that emotional and psychological katabasis for them to start rebuilding their priorities; to look at the world with clearer eyes. Pacing or chapter structure aside, it has this really basic structure of a descent and then a climb.

GR: The story of a descent into the underworld is familiar from classic Greek mythology, with Persephone and Hades. But is it also something we find in other world traditions?

R.F.K.: Well, the interesting thing about the katabasis arc is that it's not even limited to being literally about the underworld or hell. People have written about katabasis in terms of trauma, of addiction—people struggling with drugs and alcohol. The Holocaust has been written about as a kind of katabasis.

I’m also fascinated with a lot of abolitionist literature, or literature on restorative justice. The idea that [on the societal level] you have to have to die in some sense to change who you are. You acknowledge what you did, you then have to fashion a completely new identity out of that and a new story. And it's really, really hard to do.

GR: Switching gears a bit, one of the challenges with fantasy worldbuilding is crafting a magic system that makes sense internally, within the world of the story. In Babel, you created a system that worked off of the energy between languages, the magic of translation. Can you tell us a little about the magic system in Katabasis?

R.F.K.: As you remember from Babel, one thing I like to do with my magic systems is make them a field of inquiry. It's something that you have to research and work at. It's not this innate ability. It's accessible to everybody, but it takes a lot of hard work and years and years of study. Babel maps onto the real discipline that is linguistics, and Katabasis maps onto the real discipline that is logic.

The really fun thing about logic paradoxes is that they disrupt everything in the field of rational decision-making. The ground has just dropped out from under your feet, but every step before seemed rational and obvious and logical. How did we get here? And it's that gap of disbelief—that instability—that’s the fun friction that I'm working with.

Partly through the book, I explain that there is a paradoxical magic system, the Intuitionists, who believe that it actually doesn't matter how sophisticated your paradox is. What matters is that you're able to trick yourself into believing it. And the longer you believe it, the longer the spell has charge.

GR: You’ve also folded in interesting details about ritual magic, including old standbys like ancient manuscripts and pentagrams and chalk circles. Was that fun to research? Did you have to go into any forbidden rooms at the Cambridge library?

R.F.K.: Well, it’s a lot easier now that everything has been digitized. I had a ton of fun with this essay, I think it was from the 19th century, called On a Piece of Chalk. And it talks about how chalk is made up of limestone deposits, which are the skeletons of tiny marine creatures that have been dead for millions of years.

In Katabasis, I had already come up with the idea that chalk is the physical substance that you need to manifest your paradoxes. I use this phrase—the living dead energy of chalk. And it turns out that these 19th-century naturalists were fascinated by the same thing. I was so happy. It felt like everything clicked into place because I had found this old document. I was like, this means that I'm on to something. I'm not making this up. It was out there already.

GR: For the book’s vision of hell, you pull from various world traditions. You’ve got ancient Greek legends and the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno, and also elements of Indian and Chinese traditions. But ultimately the hell in your story is a dark reflection of the characters’ world. It’s graduate student hell, essentially—lots of deadlines and uneasy politics and dissertation committees.

R.F.K.: Right, I think it really has to be this way. If hell is the worst place you can imagine, then it has to be different for everybody. When I first started reading about these concepts of hell, I noticed that, in a lot of ancient religions, the image of the underworld was just a mirror image of life. They were eating the same food, and the courts resembled their own bureaucracies. All the transportation looks the same.

You might think of this as a failure of imagination. Because, you know, how convenient that hell would be arrested at exactly the same levels of technology and culture as the time in which you die. But there's a much simpler explanation for this, which is just that in order for the punishments to make sense—in order for moral lessons to be imparted—they have to be in the same moral universe that the subject is familiar with. So, hell ends up being a mirror image of the setting in which you had to make all your crucial choices in life.

GR: Reading Katabasis, I kept thinking about speculative fiction as a genre and how, because of the fantasy premise, you were able to get to certain ideas and themes that would be hard to get to otherwise. What is it about the genre or the mode of fantasy that appeals to you as a writer?

R.F.K.: Well, I think I started writing fantasy because that's what I was reading. I really was still a kid when I was writing The Poppy War trilogy. I was in college, and those are just the kind of books I liked. And it wasn't just fantasy novels. It was also manga and anime and wuxia TV shows.

One way I've tried to articulate it is when I was a kid, I really wanted to escape. I had a lovely childhood, I had a really safe and wonderful home life, so it wasn't like I was trying to run away from anything. But I just thought the world was so uninteresting. I wanted to escape into realms where there was magic.

I think as I've gotten older, I’ve become more intensely curious about the things that are in this world. I used to be so impatient in art galleries, right? Or botanical gardens. And now I'm at that age where I could carefully inspect the flowers of, like, 16 varieties of tulips for an hour—which I recently did at the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh.

So, I think actually it's not a move away from the excitement of fantasy, but an expansion of my own imagination and capacity for curiosity. It’s discovering the magic in the mundane details of the world around me.

GR: Speaking of curiosity, what are some of the books that are on your nightstand these days?

RFF: Oh, I’ve been on a really good reading streak. I've loved everything I've recently finished. I just read The Overstory by Richard Powers. One of my close friends read one of his newer novels, and I couldn't get that at the library, so I got The Overstory instead. This goes back to the theme of being fascinated by mundane things: I'm paying closer attention to trees now. 

I also just finished 10:04 by Ben Lerner. I've read all his other novels. He's a favorite of mine. 10:04 makes me never want to move to Brooklyn. And because of this recent trip to Pittsburgh, I wanted to learn about the steel barons, so I'm reading a biography of Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw. Just to know a little bit more about this man whose name is stamped all over America.

Oh, and I just reread Brian Jacques’ Redwall because I'll be doing a podcast about it soon. That's one of the fantastical childhood series that I was really, really into. It's about mice in a medieval abbey fighting evil rats. Great stuff.