If watching Robin, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty learn how silverwork lets the British extract power from colonized languages—and then turning that knowledge against the empire—hooked you, you'll be riveted by The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Baru infiltrates the very bureaucracy that subjugated her home, mastering currency, policy, and coded speech much like Robin masters translation. The same cold calculus you saw in the Canton mission and the Hermes Society’s plots drives Baru’s schemes, culminating in betrayals and hard choices that echo Babel’s final, devastating stand.

If you loved the Fellowship’s lectures, late-night translations in the tower, and the way Robin’s cohort oscillates between loyalty and rivalry, The Atlas Six delivers that same charged campus intimacy. Six prodigies enter a secretive institute where knowledge is power and scarcity breeds manipulation—think Professor Lovell’s exacting demands and Babel’s patronage politics, but with a clandestine library, dueling theories of magic, and alliances as precarious as Robin and Letty’s.

If Babel’s dense lectures, etymological asides, and footnote-rich worldbuilding made you feel like you were paging through a living archive, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell will scratch that same itch. Clarke’s narrative is laced with whimsical, revealing footnotes and academic digressions—much like Babel’s marginalia about silverwork pairings—while following magicians whose studies become entangled with national power, echoing Robin’s realization that scholarship isn’t neutral.

If Robin’s struggle over whether to use silverwork—the way he weaponizes translation on the bridge, and ultimately chooses a cataclysmic act at Babel—moved you, The Fifth Season wrestles with similar ethical fault lines. Orogenes can reshape the world, but only under brutal systems of control; like Robin and Griffin debating the Hermes Society’s tactics, Jemisin’s characters must decide what they’re willing to break to make anything new. It’s morally searing, intimate, and uncompromising.

If the Oxford translators’ chess game with Parliament—the wheedling dons, colonial administrators, and the Canton fallout—kept you turning pages, A Memory Called Empire offers equally deft intrigue. Ambassador Mahit navigates an imperial capital where poetry, rhetoric, and coded phrasing carry real power, much like Babel’s silverwork pairings turn meaning into force. The book blends court politics with the peril of assimilation in ways that mirror Robin’s fight to define himself against the empire he serves.