The Poppy War

"The Poppy War is the first in a trilogy by R F Kuang, who I think is probably most known now for Babel . It’s a book about the colonial experience: she is ethnically Chinese — I believe she lived in China when she was a child and her family left to go to America. So she’s very interested, obviously, in the experience of recent Chinese history , which was not Britain’s finest hour. The Poppy War is about 19th and 20th century Chinese history, in a fantasy world. We’re imagining what it would be like if Chairman Mao was a teenage girl in a medieval fantasy setting. It begins very un-grimdark-ly, in this Harry Potterish magical school. Our hero Rin is taken off to this school, where she is ridiculed by most of the other people because she’s from the peasant class. She’s also got dark skin, so she is the victim of colourism and of classism. To no one’s surprise but her own, she discovers that she is in fact very, very gifted. So we begin with a non-western spin on Harry Potter and Hogwarts – now she’s working to save the country. It’s something like what Bakker’s doing in The Darkness That Comes Before , or what I’m doing in Empires of Dust : writing about power and military structures and the danger of militarism, and the complexity of the idea of saviours. She’s writing about the experience of someone who is trying, genuinely trying, to save her country and liberate it from colonialism. By the time you get to the end of the trilogy, there are armies which are being sponsored by foreign powers, who are coming into her country. She writes about the experience of China during the Second World War ; she writes horribly about the Nanjing Massacre, and about the violence that was inflicted on China in the 19th century by Europe, and then in the 20th century by Japan. But she’s also writing about the resistance to it, generating the need for extreme action. Her character Rin is not an Aragorn or Harry Potter-like ‘decent person’. She’s driven, she’s violent, she’s not a pleasant character. There’s an astonishing scene at the end of the third book, where she takes something which burns out her womb; and I’ve read several reviews of this where people say it is gratuitously disgusting, and just Kuang being horrible: why does she do that? But of course, on the Long March, Mao and his first wife abandoned several of their children, and they were never found. On the Long March children were left and abandoned, and died. Because as far as Mao and his wife and many of the other people on the March were concerned, what they were doing was so important that even one’s children had to be sacrificed. We see similar things in other resistance movements and extreme circumstances… It’s not done happily, and the scars will be there, but it’s necessary. So what Kuang is writing about is a leader who is not pleasant, and who is forced to do terrible things, but because terrible things are being done to their country. She writes about what happens to the people of China during the Rape of Nanjing; the response to that can only be extreme. You get these reviews along the lines of, “I started off reading this and I thought it was a bit of a clichéd magic school trope, and then Whoa ” – because actually, if you were Harry Potter and Voldemort was real, it would be “Whoa.” Yes. It’s interesting, a friend was talking about Babel , and he was saying, “Gosh, Kuang is amazing. She totally rewrites the history of Victorian Britain.” And I thought, she’s re-writing the history of Victorian Britain for you …"

"People have been recommending The Poppy War to me for years, and I finally picked it up last year. I’m so glad I did—it is a triumph. While it is strongly rooted in real-world history, it feels mythic not only because of its take on magic, where certain people have the shamanic power to channel the gods, but because it feels like you’re witnessing the birth of a character who will pass into legend. The protagonist, Fang Runin—or Rin—is a war orphan who comes from nothing (or thinks she does). When her adopted family threatens to marry her off to further their drug smuggling, she studies until she qualifies for Sinegard, the most prestigious military school in Nikan—an empire living on the knife-edge of peace, while the Mugen Federation lurks just beyond the sea, waiting to invade. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I’m a big fan of this book for many reasons, one of which is that Kuang is forthright about the violence and cost of war. While the book is a fantasy, she draws straight from the pages of history, confronting the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731 , among other horrors that should be more widely known. I also appreciate the fact that Rin actively seeks power, which she fosters throughout the book. In my experience, female characters are often judged more harshly for qualities like ambition and anger, so the fact that a chaotic, powerful god is acting through a young woman still feels revolutionary, even in an age where fantasy has far more room for women. Yes—there’s a time-honoured relationship between fantasy and history , to the point that we often see fantasy being called ‘historically inaccurate’ without a hint of irony. Using history as a cornerstone can make for strong world, or serve as a mirror for real-world truths, as in The Poppy War— I personally loved weaving details from the past into the The Priory of the Orange Tree— but unfortunately, history can also be used to try to strangle representation and progress in the genre. I wrote an essay on this subject to unpack my thoughts in detail, but as an example, you’ll sometimes get people claiming that, say, a queer relationship in a fantasy is ‘historically inaccurate’ and therefore makes the world unbelievable, which is absurd. I saw a man criticising The Witcher for including women who use swords. There are certain fantasy fans who have a misogynistic, whitewashed, straightwashed view of the past and want every new world to be filtered through that broken lens—forgetting, one: that fantasy isn’t history, and two: even if it were, their idea of history is simply wrong."