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I have a lot to say about #Babel, most if it not very good. Many of my main issues - the paper-thin characters, the pacing, the overwhelming didacticism of it - have been discussed at length by other reviewers, so today I want to bring forward the issues I've seen discussed less.

The book is critical of colonialism, to put it mildly. However, it is so ingrained into specifically Western colonial epistemology that it refuses to see through the things it sets up.

My main worldbuilding issue is that in Kuang's world, the West gets an advantage due to special magic/technology that requires two things to succeed - silver and professional translators, multilingual people who dream in several languages. Yet the 19th century still sees the predominance of the British empire. It is mentioned that the Qing government does not allow foreigners to learn Mandarin and has lots of silver, and it is mentioned that the Mughal Empire was multilingual (the silver is not specified).
In real history, the Qing government had enormous output in many languages of the Qing Empire. It created specific institutions for translation in the Forbidden City precisely for Qing imperial governance. Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, and Mandarin were the key languages, and most Qing imperial administrators were fluent in several. The Mughal Court was also inherently multilingual. All emperors were fluent in Farsi, Chagatai, Sanskrit, Arabic, etc. at different points in Mughal history. Both had silver. In other words, Kuang created a world in which the Qing and the Mughal empires would have been infinitely more powerful than the West/Britain and then she absolutely REFUSES to see that, erasing Qing and Mughal multilingualism and institutions of translation in the process. It also erases the reason why the Qing and the Mughals needed multilingual institutions for governance - it begins i and ends with mperialism. So not only are non-Western empires erased, but so are the countless people they subjugated. Anticolonial much.

My main epistemic issue is that the plot centres a Western anticolonial movement (Hermes society), stripping any agency from people who still live in non-Western countries. Our heroes see the Hermes society as the only way to combat colonialism. It doesn't occur to them (even the survivors at the end) to search for something different, for indigenous and non-Western societies and movements to join. I had hopes when the gang went to Canton, but that episode was over and done with in like 15 pages (out of 548). Similarly, although the characters feel unwelcome at Oxford, they completely buy into all of the Western epistemology and theory they are taught (not even Remy, educated in India in a Mughal family, actively questions that). There are whole libraries written about colonised people and their difficult relationships with coloniser epistemic systems (Kuang could have started with Fanon, whom she quotes, but I am not sure understands). At no point do we see the characters experience conflict about their own identities or the extent to which they are won over by the modes of thinking (eg, Western translation theory), which they are taught. The book could have explored other understandings of translation or silverworking, techniques from different places. But no, similarly to the translation itself, which is simply erased to make this world make sense, Kuang has no interest in trying to imagine what silverworking from other places would look like, or how it would be used for empowerment and resistance. Remember, the colonised, only Western educated kids working within Western frameworks can save you from imperialism.

Add to this blink and you miss it queerness (why put it there in the first place if this is how you're going to treat it), promptly followed by murder your gays. Add to this gratuitous killing of most characters of colour in the book. Add to this weird character pacing - most people we met are killed off rather early in the final confrontation, so the stakes at the end are mostly about characters we've literally just met and don't care about. Add to this the absolute lack of logic in the final 'strike', which is based on the idea that the government wouldn't straight up murder a couple of Babel translators - AFTER THEY MURDERED TWICE AS MANY IN COLD BLOOD a couple of chapters before. Add to this that all the characters are developed about as well as Twitter argument talking heads - seriously, we get the measly backstory for the Black female lead IN THE EPILOGUE. Add to this an utterly underwhelming discussion of use of force in resistance, which has been done and has been done so much better so many times in both fiction and non-fiction.