GoKawiilKatabasis
R. F. Kuang
Harper Voyager (2025)
Graduate studies can be hell — metaphorically. In Katabasis, it’s the literal truth.
Katabasis is Greek for a descent to the underworld — think Dante’s Inferno. But in R. F. Kuang’s hands, these works are not literature but travel guides. Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are PhD students at the University of Cambridge, UK, the top institution in their field of analytical magick. Their mentor, Jacob Grimes, has died in an explosion caused by an imperfectly drawn chalk pentagram, and Law, who blames herself for the mistake, travels to hell to restore him to the land of the living. This is not out of fondness — Grimes was a toxic, abusive adviser — but so that she can graduate. Murdoch joins her for reasons of his own.
Armed with chalk, food and fluency in logic, Law and Murdoch traverse the Eight Courts of Hell, and the amnestic River Lethe, in search of Grimes and a way home. Several of these infernal courts mirror university towns such as Cambridge, and all are steeped in the minutiae of academia — and absurdity. Souls of the dead haggle over prewritten papers, submit dissertations on sin and toil in an endless library to prepare an oral defence on the nebulous topic of ‘good’. If you are or have been a graduate student, give Katabasis a try — your scholarly journey will seem like Paradise by comparison. — Jeffrey M. Perkel
Solar
Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape (2010)
At the beginning of Solar — Ian McEwan’s comic novel on climate change — physicist Michael Beard is “stricken”. His (fifth) wife is having an affair, he hasn’t done any serious science in about 20 years and he is the unenthusiastic head of a government renewable-energy agency. Beard zips around the world to give after-dinner speeches and appear at conventions, but can’t shake the feeling that his Nobel-prizewinning theory, the Beard–Einstein conflation, was a fluke.
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