"I read this book for a book club I'm in, and it surprised me that I hadn't heard about it before. I bought the book and I read it and I wanted to like it. There had been a lot of hype when it came out in 1986 and won the World Fantasy Award of 1988. I like fantasy. I write fantasy. But I don't think this book is actually real fantasy. I don't think it's science fiction either. I think it is a failed attempt to write a story where a human being finds redemption through an unusual method.

I feel in a way as if I should not review this book, because so many people have given it such high ratings that a negative comment will make me seem inconoclastic and picky or, worse, small-minded since it comes from a fantasy writer. I don't think I'm any of those things. I want to be surprised in fantasy, that's all. I would like to be surprised in every book I read, excited by a beautiful turn of phrase, startled by a concept, taken to a new place in my own mind. And Replay didn't do that for me.

There are three things wrong with Replay, in my opinion.
(a) the character
(b) the plot
(c) the writing.

The character never excited me by any growing maturity. He was ordinary, dull, selfish, and he just knew too much and not enough. For instance, after 23 years of life, he wakes up as a teenager remembering bits and pieces of his old life, and he 100% remembers what horse won the Kentucky Derby that year. I could have accepted that, if the character had shown a major interest in horse racing all the way through the book. But no. He never even notices a horse anywhere else, except that each time he wakes up he needs some cash so he bets on that same horse. Did I believe that? No. Did it surprise me not to believe it? No. Why not? Because the writing is pedestrian, and I do not expect surprises from pedestrian writing. I will merely say that each time this character "replays" his 23 years (no spoilers on this since you find out about replaying on page one) he remembers the important things that any normal person would remember from his life before dying. The memory of his old replays could help him change: could make him see the need to grow, to become something better than he has been before. But he never uses what he knows about world events for the good of others, only for his own self-destructive "good". He always falls into the same trap, even when he decides to go and live off the land (a decision we're not privy to, and therefore find totally out of character for this sexually charged man).

The trap? It's selfishness.

What we know about this man can be expressed in one sentence. He has to have what he wants. What he wants is usually sex. Clarification? Okay, he has to have sex with perfect women. Clarify still more? Okay, if they are only perfect on the outside, he tires of them and goes on to choose exactly the same kind of woman he had before.

Eventually, and this may be a spoiler, though I do think it is predictable (but if you haven't read the book maybe you shouldn't read from here: he finds a woman who is a replayer too. Together they make the world a much worse place. They don't intend to, but anyone with half a brain could see that their actions together were bound to result in terrible things. Spoiler ends here.

And at the end of the book, has it changed him? Page 309 of 310: and I quote: "Christ, how he yearned to hear a song, any song, that he had never heard before!"

Think about this. A man has lived a lifespan consisting of his first childhood and - let's say - ten replays. Let's say that gives him 240 years of human existence. There is no way that in 240 years he could ever manage to listen to every single song ever sung or written, even at a full 24 hours a day. Even if he changed his preferences from, say, the Beach Boys to blues and rock and roll or even to medieval chants, there is a whole world of blues and rock and roll and medieval chants out there. That's what I think is wrong with this guy. He never changes his preferences. He keeps re-doing what he always did, which is to find stuff for himself, and it's always the same kind of stuff for himself. He's unable to choose the right stuff to make him happy, because he doesn't realize that he has to use that stuff to make other people happy too. Only once does he try to use his foreknowledge unselfishly: regarding the assassination of President Kennedy. Otherwise, he doesn't really care about the world and its issues; he doesn't let himself worry about changing the future. The whole book - with one major exception - is about how he wants stuff for himself. Only by divine intervention (why, please?) does this change. And even after he's given what he wants, the chance at a whole, full life without repetition, he whines about his past (all those songs, all the same).

Redemption has to do with choices, with people choosing to change. I won't say that the hero of this book never chooses to change anything at all, but basically, he never chooses to change himself. Things happen to him. He lets them. He lives from one thing to the next. He never says, "Enough of this. I'm going to figure out why it's always me who is replaying." He never even changes his attitude toward it. It's always a torment. It's never possible for him to see it as a gift. Had he done this, the book would perhaps have lived up to the movie Groundhog Day, which despite its fluffy name, is a movie worth watching at least once a year for the rest of your life.

The plot? I say it doesn't work. Why? Because a plot asks why and why not. Does the hero ever do anything to try to find out why he has to replay this section of his life? I'm going to say something that I imagine most thinking people will expect, having read this far, but if not, this next part could be thought of as a spoiler. Here it is: The hero meets another replayer. A woman, natch. Together they start looking for others. They find one. It's the only truly great bit of writing in the book. I loved it. It gave us an explanation for the replayers. It even almost made sense, despite the fact that many readers won't be familiar with the concept as yoga understands it and as it is explained using the Bhagavad Gita by the one person who understands. But since most people who don't understand the yogic concepts have read Shakespeare (I'll paraphrase the next part): "All the world's a stage, and we but men and women acting on it... taking our exits and our entrances...." This reasoning, provided by someone who even tells our two replayers how and why the world is a stage for a certain group of people watching the replayers in the bloody stage of history they live in, a stage they make even worse, is an exciting concept! I so hoped it wouldn't turn out to be a cop-out. But, sadly, it did. The thought never runs through our replayers' minds again... The explanation was just insane. But I hung onto it. I hoped. I saw that there was an epilog. I didn't dare read it ahead of time in case I was wrong... I got to it at last. And no. The whole explanation had been presented and thrown away. End of spoiler.

So, to me it is a total mystery why this book won the world fantasy award. It is mediocre writing that forces you to live with a guy you really don't much like for all those pages, and there is never an explanation for the plot hook, and the hero is a sad, flawed character who never takes his own life by the horns and makes himself strong.
"

"I had very high expectations for this 1988 World Fantasy award winner. The main character, 43-year-old Jeff Winston has a heart attack and dies, only to wake up in his college dorm room 25 years earlier with his current memories intact. He "replays" his life several times throughout the book trying to correct the mistakes of his "previous" lives. After the second "replay", I got tired of reading about Winston's miserable life and sexual escapades and wished he would just die and stay that way. There is a message in the story -- life is short, so live it to the fullest. The preachy tone of the story and the characters' constant self-indulgence left a bad taste in my mouth.

If you liked The Time Traveler's Wife, you will probably enjoy this. I didn't."

"The Italian word for disappointment is delusione, from the Latin de-ludus, literally “to make fun of�. Its closest cognate in the English language is delusion, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as “an idiosyncratic belief or impression maintained despite being contradicted by reality�.

R. F. Kuang has me stuck in a never-ending cycle of delusion and disappointment. I keep convincing myself that I’m going to love her next book, and she makes fun of me by delivering something that doesn’t remotely match my expectations. Then she publishes a new book, and the cycle repeats.

Babel, in particular, seemed like the kind of novel I’ve been wanting to read for years. As a former translator, I was excited to learn more about its language-based magic system. As a reader, I’ve grown increasingly tired with the romanticization of academia and the classism inherent in the dark academia genre. And as someone whose family was deeply affected by European imperialism, I am keenly interested in fiction that discusses this topic.

The premise, then, was stellar; the execution, not so much.

My first issue was worldbuilding. To create an organic fantasy world, an author should either pick their setting based on how they want magic to work, or pick their magic system based on what makes sense for the setting. Instead, Kuang picked her setting (Victorian England) and her magic system (words translated on silver bars) based on the themes she wanted to tackle, with no apparent consideration for the actual compatibility of the two in real life. The result is a world that looks and works exactly like the real British Empire, even though its magic has nothing to do with the technology the British used.

This leads to a number of absurd conclusions that are ultimately detrimental to the book’s message. Historically, the reason Britain invented and developed the technology that led to the Industrial Revolution was that this technology required huge investments, made possible by the exploitation of the colonies. But translating words and engraving them on silver bars doesn’t require any sort of advanced technology.

Besides the cost of silver, which we’re told is abundant in the colonies, there are no reasons why any advanced civilization couldn’t develop their own institute of translation. The idea that translation alone is responsible for the technological superiority of the British Empire is ludicrous. Frankly, the only reason someone would come up with that idea is that they idolize translation to a point where they think it could actually be the single most important form of knowledge in human history.
Which, considering that Kuang is herself a translator, doesn’t seem like a far-fetched idea.

This single-minded obsession with the novel’s themes is also reflected in its characters. All of them are written not as multi-faceted humans, but as spokespeople for a certain perspective the author wants to portray. Robin is a British-Chinese man torn between his two identities; Rami is an anti-colonial activist who hates the Empire; Lettie is a privileged white woman; every British man is a cruel, evil imperialist devoid of humanity.

These are not people. They’re allegories.
And listen, I can appreciate a good allegory. But these characters aren’t even deep or original stand-ins for the concepts they’re meant to represent. All their political discussions seem to have been taken straight out of Twitter. If you’re on social media and even tangentially interested in postcolonial discourse, I guarantee you’ve heard it all before. Throughout the book I kept wondering, what is it that Kuang is trying to say with these didactic, on-the-nose explanations? That the British Empire was racist? That colonialism is bad? That workers were exploited during the Industrial Revolution? But you don’t need to convince your 21st century readers of this. And those who may still need convincing (bigots) will certainly not be swayed by a book that depicts all English people as evil, chauvinistic imperialists.

It doesn’t help that Babel has absolutely no trust in its audience’s ability to pick up subtext or understand its themes on their own. Instead, the author constantly interjects the narration with footnotes that are meant to clarify what is already obvious to anyone with minimal reading comprehension skills. These notes tell us that the racist things racist characters say are, in fact, racist; that Britain’s wealth comes from it being an exploitative colonial empire; that astrology doesn’t actually work; and other things that no human being with a functioning brain would possibly need explaining. These notes are also extradiegetic, meaning that they’re external to the narration: it’s not a fictional character writing them, but the author herself, who is directly addressing her modern readers. This felt very condescending and took me out of the story, causing me to wonder who Kuang thinks she’s writing for, if she envisions her ideal reader as someone who needs to have everything over-explained to them.

Until it dawned on me that so much of this book wasn’t written for me, or any other human reader. It was written for Twitter—specifically, an imaginary Twitter user who only exists in Kuang’s head, and whose entire existence revolves around levelling petty, bad faith criticism at her writing. This user gets really riled up about her making up a new building to house the Oxford Institute of Translation, in her fantasy novel about a made up Oxford Institute of Translation. They complain about her obviously racist villains not being condemned enough by the narrative. They get upset about a revolutionary character killing an innocent girl, in a book that is literally titled The Necessity of Violence.

Problem is, you can’t write a book for someone like that. First of all, because this person is not real: they’re a mental image conjured by the author’s own anxieties and insecurities. Secondly, because no good art has even come out of a need to pre-emptively defend oneself from baseless accusations. And thirdly, because despite Kuang’s best efforts, it’s impossible to make criticism-proof art.

I understand that it can be difficult to shut down the bad faith reader inside your head. Still, authors need to stop writing to convince an imaginary person that they’re morally righteous, and start treating their readers like intelligent adults who can figure things out on their own.

Because there is a good story buried in here. If you take away the repetitive, superfluous explanations that bog down the narrative; if you add some complexity and nuance to the characters� personality; if you give the audience a chance to think for themselves instead of lecturing them; you get an interesting novel that attempts to deconstruct the dark academia genre through the lens of language and translation. And this potential is particularly evident in the last 10% of the book, which ended up adding a star to my final rating. The last few chapters are truly powerful and emotionally resonant, imbued with a raw sincerity the rest of the novel lacks. I just wish it didn’t take me so long to get there."