By Brandon Hill
Special to InReview

Finding a tale that paints a compellingly vivid world while presenting a cast that is individually compelling and interesting in a way that truly sparks my emotions is something I rarely come by. In fact, only once before have I encountered a book that rivals Josiah Bancroft’s Senlin Ascends, a story of the tribulations of a man whom misfortune and betrayal forces him to shed his naivete and passive nature to defy the maze of human treachery and deception that has separated him from his beloved wife. 

The first in Bancroft’s Tower of Babel series, Senlin Ascends brings to mind the excellence of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which catalogues a less focused, but similarly surrealistic odyssey of a lowly torturer in an Earth of over a million years in the future, from outcast to king. In Bancroft’s work, the eponymous Tower of Babel whom Thomas Senlin and his new wife, Marya, visit for their honeymoon, soon separates the two in the dizzying crowds of its outer marketplace, forcing the socially naïve schoolteacher from an unremarkable town into an odyssey of tribulation in the “ringdoms” of the enigmatic and incomprehensibly massive Tower’s multiple floors, in his quest to be reunited with the woman he loves at any cost. 

The tower itself is presented as an alluring port of call and vacation spot in this turn-of-the-20^th Century-like world.  It is beyond vast, containing miniature “worlds” on each floor, each with its own style, culture, leadership and eccentricities, from the endless beer fountains of the Basement to the never-ending play of the Parlor, the seductive decadence of the Baths, and the steampunk-esque metropolis of New Babel.  But there is also a sinister side to this architectural marvel, as Senlin discovers in his arduous journey. 

Possessing a dwindling supply of money and an increasingly useless guidebook, Senlin’s encounters with a broad cast of individuals who feign friendship but offer only treachery and betrayal — or whose trust of the nebbish protagonist costs them nearly everything — leaves him with a dearth of true allies in a world where altruism and charity are merely words used to entrap the gullible. Senlin must learn to grow into someone with the wisdom and craftiness to survive the ringdoms’ Byzantine politics and withstand its residents’ attempts to crush his faith in humanity. In the course of the story, the situation becomes ever direr, especially after the reader is given a glimpse of the fate of his wife.    

Selnlin Ascends is a tale that has left me utterly speechless with the caliber of its writing and descriptions, with a dizzying array of characters with their own unique (and often depressing) stories of what they lost to the tower, along with the strange environs of the tower floors themselves. Many characters who appear to exit the proverbial stage in unfortunate circumstances turn up later through the most unexpected means, but often greatly changed themselves — and usually not for the better. The changes that Senlin undergoes to survive people and situations that seem hellbent on breaking him presents the reader with one of the most complex and endearing characters ever in a series that straddles the line between fantasy and sci-fi in a world whose locales share the same names as many places in ancient Biblical history, such as Ur, Babel, and Ararat. 

Senlin Ascends truly does remind me of Wolfe’s aforementioned classic work in the almost-surreal milieu of the tower’s worlds as a backdrop to a harrowing quest and ends in a way that shows in no uncertain terms that this is only the beginning of Senlin’s odyssey. Will he at long last find his wife, or will he succumb to the forces in the tower that threaten to cause the gentle teacher to give into despair and transform him into just another treacherous wretch that this titanic monument produces out of the visitors that it swallows up on a daily basis? I will certainly need to keep reading to find out, and I highly recommend other readers to pick up this bizarre adventure, especially if they crave something that is truly unique.

“Senlin Ascends” gets a 9/10 and I highly recommend it.

Brandon Hill is the author of the Wild Space Saga and War of Millennium Night books. He is a native of Louisiana and an avid and frequent reader of science fiction and fantasy. Having had dreams of authorship since childhood, he began writing in the eleventh grade, and has since then, released nine books, both self-published and released through various publishers. He sketches perhaps even more prolifically than he writes, and derives inspiration from his illustrations of fantastic worlds and characters. He hopes to continue sharing his ideas, characters, and stories with others for years to come. Click here for more of his book reviews, click here to go to his Amazon author page and click here and here to go to his Deviantart portfolios.