A World That No Longer Exists
In The Burning God, the final volume of R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy, Rin gazes upon the glistening skyline of the New City, a space of gleaming architecture where each building represents a calculated slice of order. Yet there’s a decay buried deep within the urban sprawl. “Six months. Six months, and the Hesperians had transformed a riverside municipality into something like this,” Rin thinks. “How long would it take them to reconfigure the entire nation?”
This tension—the duality of the promise of ‘civilisation’ and the destructive history that underpins it—runs through both The Poppy War and Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, offering fierce critiques of colonialism that feel all too familiar in the age of neocolonial economics.
The Poppy War follows Rin, a war orphan who earns a place at Sinegard Academy, an elite military school in the fictional empire of Nikan. Described as “an imposing gray wall topped by a three-tiered pagoda”, Sinegard is grand. Yet even its grandeur is dwarfed by the arrival of the Hesperians, who bring changes akin to surgically implanting a piece of Hesperia into Nikan’s body…
This essay is an expert from my latest in Mekong Review.
Fiction has always been a tool for more than just entertainment. For some, fiction—particularly speculative fiction—becomes a weapon.
For Mekong Review's latest issue, I analysed R F. Kuang's writings, juxtaposed against the backdrop of neocolonialism to trace how the Poppy War Trilogy and Babel have become an archive for erased histories. In these works, we see the backend of power grooming and how colonial systems maintain till today—manifesting in new ways.