The Nebula Award nominees for 2022 were recently announced; Babel looked intriguing; my ranking algorithm pushed it high up on my queue. The magic system is interesting, but the system is arbitrary and clashes too much with physics so I would categorize the book as fantasy, not sci-fi. The linguistic roots & translation subtleties are fun but also clash with linguistic research (Adger, Chomsky, Pinker), so they were also disappointing. However the story and characters are fun and the writing is immersive. So I did enjoy the book. 4/5 Stars.
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