On the other hand Babel has interesting characters that have a realistic representation of what it's like to have grown up in a cross-cultural context and how it can feel like you're betraying someone no matter what you do, which is not something I see in much media at all. She also starkly portrays and analyzes a trap that minorities can fall into where they are complicit in their own oppression.
Also, I appreciate Kuang's refreshing approach to having the bad people be bad people as opposed to misguided or misunderstood people with good intentions. Some kinds of bad-ness really shouldn't be excused, or perhaps have been explored to death already.
I think in _Babel_ (and _Katabasis_ as well), Kuang is a bit more prone than Tartt to showing off legit academic tidbits, which gives a nice scholarly glint (the illusion of high-brow? authenticity, dare I say?) to the environment, while not compromising the easy fantasy reading. More details than vibes, perhaps?
(When she gets details wrong, it does break the illusion. Like a small tangent on the etymology of the Greek word for truth in _Katabasis_.)
Oxford also simply has a certain aura for me, being from the US. All in all, I think Kuang's books are great "binge" or "airplane" reads with a smack of academic authenticity.
I saw _Possession_ mentioned elsewhere, which I think does academic vibes _and_ details very and IMO resides in a more refined literary category than either of the two other books. I should reread it!
A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months
~ https://ia801302.us.archive.org/20/items/ThePhilosophyOfDres...
Appello, non ad Caesarem, sed ad Caesaris uxorem
Taste, ah, varies.
There is also non-literary value of doing the culturally resonant thing while it's relevant. It was fun to watch game of thrones when everyone was watching it, it was fun to play elden ring when everyone was playing it, it's fun to read acotar when everyone is reading it. Not everything has to stand alone on its own merits, social participation is a value too.
I straight up dont give people recommendations if they mention liking a subset of authors who are known slop peddlers.
Wouldn't even stoop to recommend Baroness Orczy?
But taste does vary, no reason to push it if you dislike it. De gustibus et coloribus..
Speaking as a former academic, I don’t really agree with this — I think academia can make you believe wrongly that it’s a kind of “unalienated labor,” but actually the alienation runs deep, all the deeper when it’s invisible at first glance.
Yes, you don’t have to make something that is sold to customers or that fits in a JIRA ticket. But when you stop and think about it, you’re going to be doing research based on topics and paradigms that other people have largely defined (advisors, peers); you have to publish in journals that are often for profit and pay you zero; when you teach you usually don’t get paid all the tuition that your students are paying per course (the institution takes a big cut); you end up doing a lot of silly things to have a solid institutional position… TLDR, it has great moments of course, but it isn’t unalienated.
As an Oxbridge academic, I can confidently state that lots of things done by e.g. Isomorphic Labs, GSK AI, or Altos Labs are better than the stuff we do in the exact same subfield. Furthermore, they pay better, there is less drama, the workplace is much more professional and, above everything, they don't suffer from the power imbalance that has made academia so toxic.
The academia lacks consistency, but I wouldn't characterize it as toxic. Many individual labs and departments are toxic, but the academia as a whole isn't. The same freedom that lets individual PIs pursue their own directions in their own ways also lets many of them create toxic work environments. But curtailing the toxicity is difficult without sacrificing the freedom the academia depends on.
In many cases journals have retracted articles after evident image manipulation was discovered. University committees rarely take disciplinary action against fraudsters. In some prominent cases they have even issued statements of support. This is starting to change, albeit slowly. For example, Sweden now has a national integrity board that investigates those types of breaches, much more likely to be neutral as it is not closely linked to the investigated subjects.
Yes there are responsibilities but you’d be hard pressed to find a tenured professor who feels like they are really very onerous, especially considering how much they had to work their tail off in grad school, postdoc, and tenure track years with little to no ability to delegate any of that. Even as department chair, you will probably get assigned an admin assistant to manage that and you will pass that torch to a colleague before long.
Of course, the percentage of tenured winners varies a lot by fields. It's very low in the humanities, somewhat better in CS and math, etc.
Once you get tenure, if you ever do, you will indeed have a lot of freedom, but you will also have a lot of work to do. Sure you can pass grading and other jobs off to grad students and postdocs (which you were for the last decade...) but in many fields, the need to fundraise never ends. It's sort of like funding a new startup every year with a different set of grad students.
Most people don't want to sit alone in a closet and think deep thoughts (well, ok, mathematicians do...). But if you want to do something in the real world, you'll need funding, and that means writing a LOT of grant proposals.
There's also a good chunk of people who fail to advance past the assistant professor level, which is pre-tenure at US institutions (not sure about other countries). And it's up or out, so if you're an assistant professor and you don't get tenure within a certain number of years, you lose your job.
…and that’s for the fortunate disciplines, like CS, where there is actually an “industry” to go to. Let’s just say things look rather less pleasant in the humanities.
I have a lot of respect for academics, but the culture around the administration of higher learning is putrid.
Of course, operating under such ideological blinkers it is no wonder why so many leftist grad students toil for the promised land. Others merely do the same for believed good hours and prestiege with no such delusions.
The bigger omission is Byatt's Possession, predating The Secret History by a couple years and I think possibly being the type specimen of what is now called dark academia.
The Secret History is generally regarded as the prototype for the modern subgenre though.
> The Secret History is generally regarded as the prototype for the modern subgenre though.
Well, but that's why I mentioned possession. I know the secret history is considered the original dark academia, but possession predates it, is retrospectively just as firmly within this genre as it is understood now, and while not as famous is probably as influential on authors within it. It's a striking omission in an overview of the history of the genre.
Vita Nostra definitely fits the genre descriptively but I think it's more connected to a russian fantasy/slavic magical realism tradition that there isn't really a name for and that we only get a little bit of translated decades later. To me it shares a lot more with like mariam petrosyan and sergei lukyanenko than it does donna tartt.
Not a clean fit to Dark Academia, but a lesser known and worthy forerunner.
Also, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Stephen Fry, and many others in the 2000 TV adaption is good entertainment for anyone with a DA bent. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsPC8m4zo9g