A Dark, Broiling Storm Seething With Phoenix Fire: RF Kuang’s ‘The Poppy War’
“War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”
My RF Kuang obsession began last November at the Foyles SFX book con when she fended off the absolute pinnacle trashfire line of comment-not-questioning I’ve ever witnessed at a book event. The panel was on Tolkienesque fantasy, and instead of using the professor as a springboard for a rich discussion of modern SFF, the moderator kept bringing it back to LOTR. And lo and behold, the first fossil who leapt up when the floor opened to the audience took the opportunity to spew a toxic tirade of vitriol at RFK for disrespecting the forefather of the genre. Also, aside from the fact any critique of Tolkien’s contemporary context and narrative limitations especially with regards to race and gender is unequivocally valid, RFK had literally just cited LOTR as the perfect blueprint of a trilogy narrative.
When the mic was finally wrested from the claws of that swamp creature, it went directly into those of yet another prehistoric troll, who proceeded to wax not-so-lyrical on the tragic omission of white people in TPW, how unfair it is, and how – wait for it – historically inaccurate it is…
Not only did RFK utterly shut both of these hobgoblins and foul fiends down with scintillatingly ice-cool composure that would rival the supersonic storms of Neptune, she went on to give one of the most impassioned orations I’ve seen yet on empowerment and reclamation and how “women of colour are the future of fantasy”.
I desperately hope those dumpster inferno exchanges didn’t tarnish the event for her, but there was a small consolation in the fact she sold out every copy of The Poppy War in the store. And when I went up at the end to get two copies signed she said I looked like VE Schwab. So, basically, I would follow her into Mordor.
After that introduction I knew I was going to DEVOUR this book so was saving it for an unbroken stretch of silence and serenity when I could go full-immersion mode. Just such an opportunity arose last month when I vanished far into the mist-drenched north on a family holiday to a remote peninsula caught between loch, sea, and mountain where the Highlands fragment into the Western Isles.
Reader, it is symphonic. I only bestow that adjective on the most soul-stirringly sensational of subjects, and The Poppy War is in the highest echelons of symphonies wrought in book form.
This is, quite simply, epic fantasy at its very VERY best, while at the same time being gloriously refreshing in that it is not a derivative pseudo-European setting glued to the same old Hero With A Thousand Faces blueprint lock, stock, and barrel. It’s woven with raw immediacy and glorious grimdarkness, not to mention a beautifully crafted web of relationships. It’s not whimsical, it is not meandering, it is not weighed with exposition or archaism. This is a book of war and all its attendant darkness.
The title itself refers to opium, while the book draws much of its inspiration from the Second Sino-Japanese War and the likes of the Nanjing Massacre in a setting akin to the 11th-13th-century Song Dynasty.
It kicks off with downtrodden orphan Rin working herself to the brink of insanity in her impoverished village within the southern heartland of Rooster Province to earn a place at the infamous military academy of Sinegard, not through blood status or prophecy or magic but sheer hard work studying for the Empire-wide Keju test. Hardly anyone can believe Rin didn’t cheat given her origins, her guardians already in the midst of plotting to marry her off to the highest bidder, nevertheless she gets to enrol in this place she’s only ever dreamed of before.
But life only gets harder from there, exacerbated exponentially when she discovers her lethal magical powers and the existence of the gods. While she learns to control her abilities, a third Poppy War also brews with the Empire’s ancient enemy across the narrow sea.
As RFK described it in her (predictably epic and inspirational) 88 Cups of Tea interview with the incomparable Yin Chang, The Poppy War is Avatar: The Last Airbender if the main character was Azula and everyone was on acid. And you should read it right now.
“She had not just altered the fabric of the universe, had not simply rewritten the script. She had torn it, ripped a great gaping hole in the cloth of reality, and set fire to it with the ravenous rage of an uncontrollable god.”
