R.F. Kuang’s fantasy novel “Katabasis” centers around Alice and Peter, two graduate students who study magic at Cambridge University. When their thesis advisor dies, they decide to go to hell to rescue him.
Kuang, a PhD student at Yale University, came to Boston recently for a Brookline Booksmith event at the Wilbur Theater. As she told Here & Now’s Emiko Tamagawa, her time at Yale ended up shaping “Katabasis.”
“When I started writing this book, [my] husband now, then boyfriend, we’d started our Ph.D.s at the same time. We were so excited, and then very quickly, he became very sick. And it was a nightmare. First semester, I was always driving back and forth between New Haven and Boston. I got really, really depressed, he was very, very ill,” Kuang said. “We have both climbed out of that period, but when I was playing around with this fun little journey to hell, I realized I had put my characters in hell because I had to write through what we had just gone through.”
6 questions with R.F. Kuang
We’re used to magic being like in the “Harry Potter” books, a wondrous gift. The study of magic that you have in the book is grim and difficult, full of hard study.
“I’m an academic, so I like to approach magic not as this neat, easy thing that you can instantly control, but rather as a plausibly real field of study that you can kind of figure out and do research at and experiment with and get better at, but nobody ever has all the right answers.
“In ‘Katabasis,’ I have this magic system that is built on logic paradoxes, so it takes a lot of dogged determinism and years of research, which might lead to nowhere. And they are Ph.D. students. I wanted to capture [that] kind of hopeless but dogged life of searching for the grain of sand that is a diamond in the rust.”
Academia is a world that you’ve spent a lot of time in. How much of you is in Alice?
“Quite a lot. I mean, I’m delusional. She’s delusional … I would probably go to hell for my adviser, but because I actually like her. I think with all of my main characters, they have these pieces of my heart, but I always try to keep that critical distance like a certain shield so that the character is obviously not me and not dealing with the same problems that I am.
“So I wouldn’t say that Alice’s particular problems and her experiences are identical to mine, but Alice feels betrayed by her own mind for a lot of the book. When I started the novel, I did too, and the reason why the prose is kind of jarred and chaotic and it’s crammed with references that feel like they’re about to spill over and just explode, that’s because that’s what living in her mind is like, and what living in my mind was like. So yeah, it was actually a very helpful thing to narrate the world as Alice saw it and as I was seeing it to kind of control that thought process and put it [on] paper so that it didn’t overwhelm me.”
We have to talk about Peter. He’s based on your husband, Bennett Eckert-Kuang?
“Yeah, guilty. I mean, there are important differences. Actually, this is really embarrassing. I’ve just been writing a version of the same character in all of my books. They’re like kind of gangly nerd men, who snap, and I would tie this to the primal scene of when I was in middle school and saw ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ and fell in love with Hiccup.
“And then I started dating the real-life version of Hiccup, and I realized I just love this person so much. I love his goofiness. I love his intellect. I love his way of looking at the world as like a chess problem, and I always write characters from a place of love. So when I was coming up with the other half of the Alice character, this, you know, their dynamic rivalry duo, I was like, ‘What are all the hottest things about a person?’ And I think one of the first lines that described Peter is he looked like he had worn a retainer in his childhood.”
You say to write all these characters from the point of love. But there is that thesis advisor, a man with this amazing academic reputation, but as the book goes on, you start to wonder, “You’re going to hell for this guy?” Is there something in him that you’ve come across in your many forays into academia?
“Yeah, I’m really interested in the myth of the male genius in academia, and I’m also really interested in the cult of the abusive teacher. And there are lots of them in academia, and I’m interested in why students choose to keep learning from them and choose to stay with them. And I wonder if anybody’s seen the Damien Chazelle film ‘Whiplash?’
“It’s about a drumming student played by Miles Teller and his just horrifically abusive music teacher, who is cruel and abusive on an emotional, physical, psychological level. And Miles Teller’s character keeps coming back to him, and I’m interested in that mentality because I have felt it too, the idea that actually this is what greatness demands and then the really corrupted logic of ‘Oh, it’s a compliment to me, it means I’m special that this person would choose me to abuse instead of everybody else.’
“So I am exploring Alice’s and Peter’s really fraught entanglement with their thesis advisor who they both hate on a visceral level, but also adore and would follow to hell and there’s a point at which they have an honest conversation about what they’ve both suffered at his hands and they laugh it off and they’re like, ‘yes, but we’re still going to go get him’ and I used the line that they felt like foot soldiers to a cause that they weren’t even sure they believe in, but it’s too late to turn back.”
Alice is Asian, but it’s very casually mentioned; it only comes up a few times in the book. I’ve read so many books where Asian-ness is central; in “Katabasis,” it was not, but it was there.
“Yeah, I did want to approach her background with a light touch and linger on the aspects of her that she felt were important. I’m actually really frustrated when people are like, ‘Wow, how brave and progressive of you to choose to write about a woman of color.’
“When I was writing the ‘Poppy War’ trilogy, I was like, I’ve never personally been white, so that would have been way harder for me to do, I think. And I get a lot of questions of the vein like, ‘why do you choose to center marginalized characters,’ but that seems like the wrong question because the defaults should not be, you can only write about a white male character and any choice otherwise is really experimental and pushing the bounds of craft.
“This is also related to why when I write characters with a certain identity, I try not to do it in this virtuous representational checkbox way because that’s not true to anybody’s lived experience. I just write nuanced characters whose backgrounds mean that they move through the world in ways that are different from their peers, and then those differences are interesting when they come into friction.”
When you finish a book, do you really leave it behind?
“I think so. I’m in a really different place in my life than I was when I started writing ‘Katabasis.’ I go to therapy now! And Bennett, my husband, is also doing a lot better.
“We’ve really come out the other end of that tunnel. It’s actually strange and painful to go back and reread parts of the book and realize like how dark things were for me at that time, and I think I just have a lot of gratitude that I get to look back at this with hindsight that we made it through that period.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Book excerpt: ‘Katabasis’
By R.F. Kuang
Excerpted from the book “Katabasis” by R.F. Kuang. Copyright © 2025 by R.F. Kuang. From Voyager, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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