Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel) Paperback – February 27, 2013

I loved everything about this book. I finished it months and months ago, but it has stayed with me, which is one of the factors of all-time favorite books.It did what a small percentage has done, and that is make me genuinely giddy and excited to come home from work and dive into this book. Not just to see what happens next, but to revel in the beautiful words. It’s perfect on all fronts. The characters are so real, memorable, and lively; built in such a short amount of time. There are swaths of passages that you can lift out of the book that would fit with Dickens, Steinbeck, or many other novels from writers of great literature.The quality of the writing itself is amazing. One of my issues with so many modern books overall, not just fantasy, is how little effort goes into the writing or prose itself, it seems. Or if not a lack of effort, a conscious choice to make it so spare, which isn’t better, in my opinion. Senlin Ascends is as beautifully written as any other fantasy book I’ve read.I can’t stop thinking about certain sentences and passages. This has become an all-time favorite, and I’m beyond excited to continue the series. It really does feel like a classic.I’ll leave a few of my favorite quotes below (spoiler-free):“Why does our innovation never extend to our conscience?”“The door to ruin is heart-shaped and ringed with stone roses.”“Instinct is the fuel that fires the engine of civilization. Generations have labored to build and perfect the engine. Each of you, I hope, will spend your life working to preserve it. Because without it, we would be dangerous beasts.”“Senlin did not believe in that sort of love: sudden and selfish and insatiable. Love, as the poets so often painted it, was just bald lust wearing a pompous wig. He believed true love was more like an education: It was deep and subtle and never complete.”“We are not such a tidy, reasonable, and humane race. Our thoughts don’t stand in grammatical rows, our hearts don’t draw equations, our consciences don’t have the benefit of historians whispering the answers to us.”

Book reviews are largely an attempt by one person to tell lots of other people whether or not they should spend time and money on an endeavor. I say this to illustrate the warning that my review of Senlin Ascends will be full of praise and will attempt to persuade you to buy this book and savor it like you would a glass of barrel-aged scotch - a delicate flavor that must be experienced for oneself. Josiah Bancroft, in this reviewer’s opinion, has written the best fantasy novel published in the last ten years.Thomas Senlin is the school headmaster of a fishing village called Isaugh in the speculative land of Ur. Having recently wed his fiancee, Marya, he has decided to take his new wife on a honeymoon to the world’s largest and most spectacular destination: The Tower of Babel. In our own earthly mythologies, the Tower of Babel is a structure from antiquity built to reach the heavens, and thus God. In rage at the audacity of humans, God takes away humanity’s collective ability to understand one another, thus giving us the mythical explanation for why there are so many languages in the world. The Tower of Babel in Bancroft’s imagination might carry such metaphysical weight, but it is no myth to Thomas Senlin. It is a very solid, unimaginably huge structure that dominates the land- and mindscape of the world’s people.The concept of the Tower is simple and brilliant. The Tower is a magnet that draws all of humanity towards it, but it also serves as a world completely different from the one Thomas, and other tourists, know. This is made evident within the first chapter, as Thomas and Marya struggle through the mass of humanity surrounding the monolith and very quickly lose one another. Language is not the barrier that separates them because everyone speaks a common tongue. Thomas soon discovers that the machinations and politics of the Tower, a place he had studied exhaustively in his nifty and misleading guidebook, are the true wall between them.The theme of Senlin Ascends is one of searching for something (or someone) who is lost, which Thomas must do by entering the Tower and climbing it, as people tend to do in towers, floor by floor. The levels in The Tower of Babel are so large that they are dubbed ‘ringdoms,’ each having their own ruling structure and social mire to struggle through. Along the way, Thomas meets friends and foes, titles that become interchangeable on a whim, as well as a host of marvelous and pseudo-magical delights and horrors. As he searches for Marya, he finds in himself things he would never have dreamed of back in his schoolhouse in Isaugh. “It is easier to accept who you’ve become than to recollect who you were,” a loquacious man named Tarrou tells him at one point.In the hands of an amateur, the story of Senlin Ascends would be well worth a read because it pulls us along floor by floor through sheer curiosity. Senlin even says at one point that “the easiest way to make the world mysterious and terrifying to a man is to chase him through it.” Any setting can make for good plot, but Josiah Bancroft has a talent for prose to the point that every sentence in this novel feels meaningful. Go ahead, open a page and read a sentence and tell me that it isn’t both beautiful but also important. I’ll wait.When I mentioned that Senlin Ascends needs to be savored, in no way was I condoning an all-night binge - this book is not chips and pizza. This book is a 200 dollar main course at a restaurant that I can’t afford and am only speculating about. Thanks to generous souls like Josiah Bancroft, I can at least consume the literary equivalent of such a meal.Thomas’ ascension of the Tower brings him in contact with any number of rogues and villains, and a scarce but meaningful troupe of good guys - though like any “good” character, these adventurers are full of their own pathologies and skeleton-filled closets. “We shouldn’t have to go around congratulating each other for behaving with basic human dignity,” Thomas says to another character at one point, encapsulating in one sentence what the Tower does to the soul. Whether it’s the over-protective brother in the form of Adam, or Edith, a young woman making deals with devils in order to grasp the power that she is denied in her pre-Tower life, everyone is a globe of well-roundedness with only one or two mustache-twirling villains to provide character contrast. By the end of the book, Thomas himself is unrecognizable from the man who entered the Tower, transforming from a stuffy professor-type to a man who just might like a good adventure.Obviously, this book is not perfect. No book is, and the flaws in Senlin Ascends are not without their own weight. They could be enough to pull a lesser author down, but Bancroft rolls with his mistakes enough to make us look the other way while he performs his literary magic. There is no doubt that the plot at times seems to fold together too neatly, and that Senlin continually meets and re-meets characters that, in an environment so large, should not keep running into one another. Thomas Senlin also has an extraordinary ability to plan things that seem to go in his favor, despite having no experience in espionage or deceit before entering the Tower. This can be explained by the very nature of Babel, that it changes a person, but he is often a little too proficient to believe.In all, my complaints are as overshadowed by the book’s excellence as Thomas standing before the Tower. This book is simply too good to get caught up in nitty-gritty details. Josiah Bancroft has proven that self-publishing is as legitimate of a route as climbing the spire of the traditional publishing world, and his success story is a beautiful reminder that if we have the right idea and we believe in that idea, that we can traverse any obstacle, no matter the height. The Arm of the Sphinx, the second installment in The Books of Babel, is available for purchase as of this review with The Hod King hopefully coming later this year. Welcome Josiah Bancroft to the fantasy world, dear readers, because he is one to watch.

Senlin and his new wife, Marya, have decided to visit the fabled Tower of Babel for their honeymoon. The vast tower, miles wide and unfathomably tall, is divided into many different levels or "ringdoms", each level controlled by a different force and fulfilling a different function. Reaching the tower, Senlin loses his wife in the crowds and desperately tries to find her. This requires him to begin an ascent of the tower, searching for clues to her whereabouts and learning more about the powers that control it...and learning more about what he is capable of.Senlin Ascends is the first novel in a trilogy called The Books of Babel, followed by Arm of the Sphinx (out now) and The Hod King (working title, due next year). This is fantasy, but not quite as you may know it. It's a steampunk romance with airships and sky-pirates. It's a character-focused slice of the New Weird. It's a Biblical allegory (...maybe?). It's a science fiction novel set inside a Big Dumb Object created by peoples unknown for scientific purposes (...perhaps?). It's a black comedy of manners, a dashing adventure, and a devastating deconstruction of people, places and tropes. It's what you'd get if China Mieville and Christopher Priest collaborated on a novel and both brought their A-game, and it was then adapted for film by Studio Ghibli. It's quite possibly the most striking debut work of speculative fiction published in the last decade.Senlin Ascends is the story of a man who visits the Tower of Babel - which may or may not be "our" mythological tower - on honeymoon only to lose his wife. He ventures into the miles-wide, miles-tall tower in search of help, only to find most people indifferent to his plight and out to rob or enslave him. Initially he proceeds with optimism and reason, but as he suffers repeated setbacks he becomes more willing to manipulate and deceive people to achieve his ends. At key moments he realises the danger of what he is becoming and resolves to find his wife and escape before the tower batters him down from the man of integrity he used to be.In the course of this first novel, Senlin only ascends the lower four (of over forty) ringdoms of the tower. Each ringdom is an impressive feat of worldbuilding, complete with its own rulers, function and cast of characters. The Basement is a place of squalour and robbery. The Parlour is a bizarre place where guests have to take part in insane plays for the amusement of its rulers. The Baths is a vast spa resort where deadly politics play out and Senlin is blackmailed into becoming an art robber. New Babel is a collection of docks and markets where people toil in labour. Each location is painted in rich detail, each fulfilling a function that Senlin tries to grasp (and, late in the novel, manages to do so in an intriguing moment of revelation about the tower's purpose) and each being compelling enough for entire novels to be set there.What makes Senlin Ascends work so well is a combination of literary ambition - Bancroft's prose is evocative, exciting and occasionally beautiful - with a relentless pace. Chapters are short and punchy, Senlin's adventures rich and compelling, and Bancroft peppers the book with comic interludes, excerpts from quite ludicrously misleading tourist guides to the tower and, later on, Senlin's own journal about what is going on. A supporting cast of players is subtly put in place, ranging from the redoubtable painter Ogier to the fantastically violent warrior-woman Iren to Edith, a fellow lost traveller who inadvertently runs afoul of the tower's harsh and arbitrary justice system. There's also a genuinely unsettling and terrifying villain, of sorts, in the Red Hand, a literate and erudite enforcer with a tremendous capacity for violence. The supporting cast is small, but fantastically well-drawn.The novel builds over the course of its reasonable, focused length (350 pages) to an action-packed climax which sets the scene wonderfully for Arm of the Sphinx.In another universe, Senlin Ascends, which was originally published in 2013, would have already won the Campbell, Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke Award. In this one, however, the author chose to not only self-publish it, but self-edit it as well. He did exactly the stuff that you're not supposed to do as a self-published writer and has done with tremendous skill, restraint and self-awareness. To date self-publishing has given us some very fine light adventure novels from the likes of Michael J. Sullivan and a reasonably strong epic fantasy from Anthony Ryan, but now it has given us SFF's first genuinely evocative work of self-published literature (that has broken through to mainstream attention, anyway). It may mark a serious turning-point in the field.Senlin Ascends (*****) is available now in the UK and USA. The sequel, Arm of the Sphinx, is already available.

The story:Awkward and bookish schoolmaster Thomas Senlin surprises everyone by marrying the delightful and youthful Marya. But their planned honeymoon and holiday of a lifetime at the famed Tower of Babel, long a subject of study for Thomas, immediately goes awry when they lose each other in the swarming crowds at the base of the tower. Assuming she must already have entered, Thomas begins his own ascent. But with each ‘ringdom’ a confusing world unto itself, and Thomas’ trusty guidebook proving less than reliable, he will have to shed his former self and become the hero Marya needs, if he is to stand any chance of finding her or even escaping the tower with his life.My thoughts:This is the first book in the Books of Babel tetralogy. The story has all the hallmarks of an epic journey; but rather than the traditional journey across perilous lands, Thomas’ journey takes him upwards, gradually ascending the famed Tower of Babel, where the wondrous meets the treacherous. And while his physical journey is great, his journey from buttoned-up, mild-mannered schoolmaster to a man of action is immense.It takes Thomas a long time to come to terms with the disconnect between his expectations of the Tower, and its reality. And you can’t blame him, having dreamt of and studied the Tower from the security of his small town, for rejecting the evidence of his own eyes and experiences. But for every remarkable thing the Tower contains, there seems to be ten-times the number of tricksters, sadists and the hopelessly lost.Not everyone Thomas meets is an enemy however, with some showing friendship and loyalty to him even when their own lives are forfeit. This book includes some great characters, and I was particularly fond of bodyguard/enforcer Iren — hopefully we’ll learn more about her in the next book too.Overall, this was a unique and thrilling fantasy set in a world unlike any I’ve read before. The fourth and final book in the series was published in 2021, so readers can embark on this without worrying the story will take years to complete! I absolutely loved this book, and would highly recommend it to all fantasy fans.

I love books about towers where people enter the Tower with a quest to get to the top where there will be a wish-granting deity/treasure/whatever. Please see the LitRPG book Sufficiently Advanced Magic and the manhwa Tower of God for examples. I'm a real sucker for this trope, lord knows why, but for this reason I picked up Senlin Ascends.“Learning starts with failure.”The book tells the tale of Thomas Senlin, newly married to Marya. The pair go on their honeymoon to the infamous Tower of Babel where each floor is its own marvel, where within five minutes Senlin loses his wife. He enters into the tower to find her, but instead he only finds himself change from a quiet headmaster to a man of reluctant action as morality and the world he thought he knew blurs around him.This book is cool. Characters revolve in and out as Senlin travels. We spend fifty pages with someone here, another fifty with someone else. Senlin Ascends documents a tapestry of lives, interwoven and drawn apart. With each person, Senlin changes. The book drew me in (I turned down the pub to go read more, a rare occurrence!) and fascinated me.“I’m suspicious of people who are certain.”It only didn't reach five stars because some of characters really rubbed me the wrong way, particular how Marya is viewed: she was Senlin's student and she becomes lost because he's too embarrassed to shop for underwear with her. Women in Senlin Ascends are mostly viewed as whores (even if they aren't) and whilst there are several great female characters - Edith, Voleta, Iren - women are not treated well. Even the three good women are framed in terms of sexuality: Iren is too brutish to be considered sexual, Voleta is a beautiful young reluctant exotic dancer, and Edith represents some kind of temptation to Senlin's marriage. It's a bit exhausting.I loved the tale that Senlin Ascends weaves and the way that Senlin himself develops and changes over the book. I just wish that there was a bit more effort put into how all of the women are viewed. I have high hopes for the next book.

When I started the book, I had my doubts - the colourful vignettes were instantly charming, but I feared it would be essentially a plotless Pilgrim's Progress-type series of gloriously imaginative but ultimately unsatisfying pictures. Bancroft *does* deliver a delectable vignette, and his imagery is rich and textured; but he also gives us a rip-rollocking yarn and an ultimately satisfying character development to boot.The story's setting of the Tower of Babel works very well. Don't expect a carefully researched historical fantasy or a Biblical fable though. For Bancroft, the setting is largely a device that allows the story to progress through different and clearly demarcated realms (there's a definite sequential thing going on here, though less so in book 2). He uses this as licence for a rampant and unembarrassed anachronism; that's something that usually sets my teeth on edge, but here it doesn't come across as lazy but as an utterly believable whimsy. think of the movies of Karel Zeman, say, or Terry Gilliam, or even studio Ghibli, and you might be thinking along the right lines. It's also very fun!Flaws... Well, it uses a lot of steampunkery, which is a genre I've generally found a bit tiresome; the imagery works great here but is a bit tarnished by association (it might help, actually, if the anachronistically modern elements went more recent than C19th, but YMWV). A harsh critic might complain that the basic plot structures and character relationships are a bit familiar; again, this is likely going to be a matter of taste! Personally I'm a fan of good old storytelling archetypes, if used well, so this satisfies me. A similar thing goes for the language: Bancroft has a nice eloquent turn of phrase, but I can imagine some readers finding it a bit overblown at times.Overall a bloody good read (along with its sequel, which is even better). Can't wait for more.

Here is a thoroughly absorbing book best classified in the Steampunk sub-genre of fantasy. In fact, the first Steampunk story I've read.Senlin Ascends is set in a mythical version of The Tower of Babel with apparently Victorian era characters that mostly seem to be quasi-British. We have airships docking at the various "ringdoms" of the tower and many examples of steam powered machinery.Thomas Senlin is a studious Headmaster lacking somewhat in passion and spark who has an encyclopedic knowledge of everything around him based on what he has read from books. His real-world experience of most things appears absent. Newly married, he brings his young vivacious wife on a honeymoon journey to The Tower of Babel and promptly loses her in the crowded markets around its base as she sets off to find a "scandalous" dress to wear.Poor Mrs Senlin appears to have to work far too hard to get the kind of attention from her new husband that a bride would expect on her wedding night. She resorts to innuendo - "would the Tower [of Babel] be tall enough to fill the well beneath it" to try and encourage him. Senlin is not a man of action. If he wants to try and find his bride lost somewhere in the 60 levels of the Tower of Babel he will have to become one. Senlin and his wife appear to be poles apart and early in the story, I felt the urge to grab Senlin by the lapels, give him a shake, and yell at him to show some bravado.Josiah Bancroft is a talented story teller. Long before the end of the story, I realised that is exactly how I'm supposed to feel about Thomas Senlin, at first. But he is destined to ascend not just the tower, but his own claustrophobic limitations. At this point, I will mention that I think the book cover design is a work of genius. Go and take a hard look at it.Josiah does an incredible job during in the narrative of simultaneously doing many things - building a world of plotting villainous characters, showing the world of the tower seducing Senlin into abandoning the hopeless search for his wife, giving the impression of his wife moving ever further out of reach into a disastrous new life while Senlin is ever more desperate to find her. It's a little like one of those nightmares where you are trying to reach the door at the end of a corridor that seems to stretch further into the distance the more you strive to try to reach that door.As it says in the book description, Senlin must become a man of action and that propels the story on a new and more dangerous course.Senlin Ascends was one of those books where the stuff I have to do in my life got in the way of me reading it. It's going up there on the shelf next to my other all time favourite books.If you hold a flintlock pistol to my head and force me to find fault with this book there is just one thing I can come up with.Early on in the narrative and also during the climax, perhaps when Josiah is trying the most to impress the audience, he might have tried just a tad too hard. I felt there were occasionally a few too many metaphors per page. It's a subjective opinion that feels a bit like whispering to Michael Angelo that he may have overused that particularly vivid shade of blue he likes in his painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.Yep, Senlin Ascends is beautifully and almost poetically written and deserves to be recognized as a classic story in the Steampunk genre.So far I've successfully talked my mother, my wife and one of my friends into buying it. Don't miss out yourself now!I've moved straight on to reading the next book in this series - The Arm of the Sphinx