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R.F. Kuang, Katabasis Robert Lanza and Nancy Kress, Observer Jo Walton, Everybody’s Perfect Adam Oyebanji, Esperance Mira Grant, Overgrowth Freya Marske, Cinder House Along with a lot of other people, I really enjoyed Babel (Harper Voyager, 2022) by R.F. Kuang. I haven’t really liked Kuang’s other novels (a minority position), so I approached her new novel, Katabasis (Harper Voyager, August 2025), with some wariness. As it turns out, the novel is an engaging page-turner that is also occasionally bleakly hilarious. A katabasis is a common trope in literature, especially in epics. Literally it means “going/traveling down,” and it refers to