Title Senlin Ascends Author Josiah Bancroft Cover Art Ian Leino Publisher Orbit - 2018 First Printing CreateSpace - 2013
	Title Arm of the Sphinx Author Josiah Bancroft Cover Art Ian Leino Publisher Orbit - 2021 First Printing CreateSpace - 2015
	Title The Hod King Author Josiah Bancroft Cover Art Ian Leino Publisher Orbit - 2021 First Printing Orbit - 2019
	Title The Fall of Babel Author Josiah Bancroft Cover Art Ian Leino Publisher Orbit - 2021 First Printing Orbit - 2021
	Title Short Stories & Vignettes from the Babel-verse Author Josiah Bancroft Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing ---
	Title An Empyreal Retinue Author Josiah Bancroft Illustrator Todd Kidd Publisher Subterranean Press - 2023 First Printing Subterranean Press - 2023
	Category Steampunk Warnings None Main Characters Thomas Senlin, Marya, Adam, Voleta, Edith, Iren, Byron, the Sphinx, Marat Main Elements Steampunk Website ---

Senlin Ascends

Arm of the Sphinx

The Hod King

The Fall of Babel

An Empyreal Retinue

I read Senlin Ascends back in 2018. I had planned to continue the series right away, so I didn't write up a review at that time. But I didn't love the book enough to buy the other ones, they also tended to be on the more expensive side, thus I wanted to borrow them from the library. Years passed and finally, after waiting for the long queue of people reserving the books when they finally did get acquired, I was able to return to The Books of Babel.

After 6 years of course my memory was a little fuzzy about the first book, but as I put my mind to it, I discovered the book was memorable enough that I recalled Senlin and his wife arriving at the tower as tourists but finding out it was more of a Hotel California, you can never leave. And there are plenty of beasts to kill, some of them literal. Each floor of the tower it an entirely different realm where the rules are completely different. I saw the books described as Gulliver's Travels crossed with Disneyland, and that was pretty accurate.

Long story short, a prim and proper schoolteacher loses his wife and he finds himself have to mix with criminals, to become a criminal himself, even a pirate. To fight, and scheme, and wonder what kind of person he'll be by the time he finds his wife. Considering how he has changed through his experience, what will his wife be like if and when he finds her? And what exactly is the purpose of the Tower? As he crawls between the floors and reaches out to the strangest of characters, it becomes clear there is more to the Ttower than meets the eye.

Fantastical, bizarre, and sometimes cruel, no matter what else you end up thinking of these books, the location is a world unto itself, and one you won't forget and I am proof of that.

The second book has all the above, but now we can toss in pirates! And mechanical men with deer heads. And a guy that looks like a spoon. I'm loving it just for all the crazy things that appear around every corner. In the first book, you have Senlin stumbling around kind of blindly through the Tower setting the scene for us. In this one, he's on a pirate ship and he's trying to get back in...which may even be harder than getting out. In the process he's learning more about what is really going on inside, the political struggles, and maybe even, a little bit about why the Tower we built in the first place (and that maybe its not even a Tower at all!) and how great ideas become, well let's just say something else, when you let human nature runs it's course and petty squabbles take over grand ideals and one's aspiration to elevate humanity is turned into a quagmire of slavery and abuse.

In the third book Senlin goes from pirate to spy, trying to learn more about a pending hod uprising while still searching for his wife. This book is less about trying to wow the reader with strange and yet stranger aspects of the Tower, for what its worth most of the time is spent on a relatively normal ring, though the ship Edith and the others are on is full of suprises. But we dig a lot deeper into the workings of the Tower.

The fourth book was...long. There weren't as many amazing new discoveries to make about the tower, at this point we're not exploring anymore but trying to prevent Marat from using the Hod King to take over the tower. So there were a lot of chases, a lot of fights, a lot of near deaths (and actual deaths recovered from), but while that might make some readers happy, to really have things moving fast, I kind of missed the wonder and weirdness. And it was long, both protagonists and villains thwarted at every step, though I kind of liked Marat and his crew being thoroughly frustrated by a door, there are still some little twists here and there on the reader's expectations on what happens next. Though the secret of the Tower I kind of figured out, well, sorta, I didn't get it quite right but the underlying idea was the same. So...on the whole I enjoyed it, I just felt it took a little long to wrap up in the end and I had to kind of force myself to keep reading the last book. I am satisfied with the ending though, all but one question was wrapped up and answered, and the one that remained ignited that sense of wonder and mystery again, one could probably write a whole other book, but maybe one shouldn't, leaving the reader to imagine what comes next.

I'm currently debating whether to purchase the collection of short stories, its a bit pricey but I'm also a completionist...

I went for it and got An Empyreal Retinue which I didn't regret. When writing as big as series as this, with all the characters and world building involved, an author can't cover everything he might want to share about his creation. The short stories solve that problem, filling in the background of the various characters, allow some to share their point of view, or just explore the Tower further through stories that don't even intersect with the main plotline. I know some people don't see the point of that, but I love reading about secondary characters or just enhancing the overall world and its history. And of course, to give us a little hint of what happened after the end of the last book. None of these tales were necessary, but if you're a fan of the series, its fun to get little bits and pieces filled in. I'm just disappointed that "The Sinner's Dance" was not included in this collection, which leaves me with that tiny, near impossible to fill, gap in the series.