The Babylonian Trilogy by Seb Doubinsky

The Babylonian Trilogy Reviews

• 
  Mark Van Aken Williams

  On the surface, Goodbye Babylon resembles a so-called hardboiled crime story, but lurking in the shadows is an alternate world. Doubinsky’s novel is more than just a well-written thriller. He ventures into the heavy, dark, and ugly parts of the characters souls, with a chiaroscuro effect that creates an atmosphere of mysterious, bone-chilling mood. And when you least expect it, we get to gaze directly into the light of knowledge. All of this happens at the fringes of fiction, executed with the skill of a poet. The novel unreels bit by bit, splicing universal truths with our gritty urban reality.
• 
  Rodney

  A spectacular and ambitious read that pulled me in like a wide-eyed child at each turn of the page. In three acts, The Babylonian Trilogy is transferred through various character perspectives, but also carried by colors, noises and scents. The “official” narrator only makes an appearance here and there for snippets of insight. There are gritty crime elements, poetic bits, and emblematic touches of science fiction. The highlight however, is the way the book is structured. The fragmented short pieces connect seamlessly. It is remarkable how clean and uncluttered it remains. There is beauty in the damaged soul of Babylon. You just have to be open enough to see it. No worries, your guide will make certain that you are.
• 
  J.S. Breukelaar

  The European title of Seb Doubinsky’s Goodbye Babylon is The Babylon Trilogy. In each of the three sections there is a poet, a killer, a needle, a goddess, a dream and noise. In each section there is the babble of Babel, as much song as story, as much dream as reality. A game of words where no one wins.
  
  Good-bye Babylon is one part noir fantasy, one part anarchist wet dream, with a good old fashioned slice of absurdism thrown in for laughs. In the first part, a soldier fights a war ‘somewhere in southeast China’ unknowing of an unscrupulous war correspondent heading his way. Meanwhile back in Babylon, city of ‘white noise’ and colorful silences, Waldo the dog makes a gruesome discovery and a faithless writer gets discovered. Truth, it seems, is just a shot away.
  
  In the second section, Yellow Bull, quietly tortured cop Georg Ratner (reminiscent of Don DeLillo's overlooked masterpiece, Running Dog) juggles a comatose wife and a covertly psychic mistress while finding that the elusive killer he seeks waits for him at the bottom of a nightmare. Truth, it seems, wears dark glasses.
  
  The final, possibly most subversive section ups the ante on the theme of terrorist-writers, where scribes support themselves by taking out contracts on enemies of the state. In one of the novel’s most blackly hilarious episodes, for instance, a poet-assassin targets his turn-coat mentor with, well, explosive consequences. The take-home message here? What the state giveth, it taketh away. In the world of Babylon, writers pay the ultimate price for art and hookers pay the ultimate price for love—or is it the other way around? Truth, it seems, is just a poem away.
  
  Doubinsky has a fine time exhuming and sporting with the spirits of DeLillo, Cervantes, Borges and Burroughs, yet it is one of the most original and compelling reads you will find under the category, uncategorizable. For all its baroque styling, surreal jump cuts, and jazzy cool, Doubinsky’s characters worm their way into your soul, especially the intrepid war correspondent Sheryl Boncoeur and the tough-guy cop Georg Ratner. Unlike so many of his post-everything fellow travelers, Doubinsky writes with a tongue in his cheek and a hand firmly on his heart—the language is unadorned yet (because Doubinsky is also a poet) lyrical.
  
  

  ‘There is no such thing as choice, Georg. There is no crossroad to wander to, no path to select, no card to draw. Only life prevails, with all its doors.’

  
  
  But it is Babylon that is Doubinsky’s greatest creation, the novel’s most memorable character. Only Babylon prevails, city of night and cardboard flames and industrial jazz. City of song and story, and war. Babylon is all cities, and all times, and guess what. You can never leave.
• 
  Bandit

  I’m a serious reader, but not a series reader. Not traditionally. But that being said, if I find one worth the time, the completist in me kicks in and wants to read all of them. So when I discovered the bizarre delight that is The City States series, I’ve determined them to be absolutely worth it. The determination was made solely based on the appeal of the latest books in the cycle, The Invisible and The Paperclip, though the fact that the author seems like a genuinely nice person appreciative of his fans certainly helped.
  Normally it would be difficult to impossible to get into a series began so out of order, but alas these novels are all created as standalones. There is a sequential order, but you can read out of it without too much disorientation.
  And so this is how it all begun, with this collection, comprising three novellas that introduce you to the strange world of the author’s imagination. Conceptually intriguing as always, but very different beasts, each one. Both from each other and from the later novels I’ve read.
  Specifically…the first novella is really out there, this is the author as his most abstract and experimental. For my linear narrative craving brain, it was interesting but not necessarily engaging. The second novella was much more in line with what was expected, featuring Detective Ratner in his first crime solving outing. Yey, said my brain, that’s more like it. And the third novella was somewhere in between, thematically and stylistically.
  But the overall effect is definitely fascinating and I love the way all these stories interlock together, directly or tangentially. I��m also a fan of the spareness of the narrative, I can barely streamline my reviews, so I really appreciate succinctness done right. And Doubinsky’s books got this really excellent dynamic to them, there is a singular sort of word economy, spare brushstrokes and all that but it manages to render the entire picture perfectly. They also speed by like bullet trains. Quickest reads for the page count, easily.
  It’s difficult to judge this as a series introduction having the prior knowledge of/experience with the books, but then again having read the more recent books it is fascinating to witness the author’s evolution. So far from the empirical evidence gathered, I’d say he certainly evolved stylistically into a more easily digestible less abstract sort of storyteller. Which works for me. Though who knows what the other books hold. And only one way to find out…Onward.
  
  This and more at
  https://advancetheplot.weebly.com/
• 
  Chris

  Cover artist, so maybe a little biased. But not much. This novel deserves EVERY positive word uttered about it.
  
  It's a book unlike any I've ever read before. The 3-part presentation; the way the characters live & interact within & across those 3 parts; the author's writing style- his voice. I honestly don't recall an author's voice drawing such attention to itself while reading any other book. Unique, yes, but also so confident & self-assured. And with good reason.
  
  I do hope that Seb - we've kept in touch since my work on the cover - realizes what an amazing world he's created, & populated with such broken & wonderful people/creatures.
  
  Read this book! I would have been thoroughly impressed by it even if I wasn't given the great pleasure of creating its cover art for PS Publishing. Assuming I was fortunate enough to stumble upon it without that incredible assignment. Lucky me. Possibly lucky you, if you pre-order this title from PS Publishing this minute. Right now. No, that can wait. This can't. Tick tock. Tap tap tap. Now, for piss sake!
  
  Chris Roberts
• 
  Benoit Lelièvre

  Tough not to crack, but definitely more mysterious than frustrating.
  
  The Babylonian Trilogy is more a series of transmissions from a mythical city than a conventional narrative. And these accomplish more than one purpose, ranging from satirizing post-war triumphalism to connecting the sacred with the profane and exploring outside the material world. The format is lean, but don't let it fool you, this novel is quite challenging.
• 
  Zachary Tanner

  I first encountered Seb Doubinsky’s city-states cycle in 2016, when the Dalkey Archive published the (author’s own) English translation of ‘Absinthe,’ which I purchased on a whim because I am a fan of French Literature, SF, and, primarily, the green elixir of Gehenna. I was a valet at the time and read the small volume standing at a podium in front of a New Orleans Hyatt, a very Doubinsky-esque occupation, if I may say so, it being no little secret that the multinational author has been employed in a number of Bukowskian factotums around the world in addition to the more typical academic positions expected of writers of such brainy fictions, not only from About the Author sections, but because the peons who work the odd jobs peripheral to the central conspiracies of these books are so clearly and believably drawn, those conspiracies around which the action of the novels exist, channeled, interpreted, and distorted by cops, newscasters, their lackey camerapeople, and the very collective hive-mind of the mass they inform, who oh-so-startlingly—that is the uninformed media-fed masses sandwiched between the abusive parents of nazism and neoliberalism—are the very villains by which mass destruction, genocide, and $$$WAR$$$ are enacted upon the masses outside the system, that is, wait a second: never have I encountered such a pithy take on the Terror-culture of the conservoprogressive western media-death machine than in this pithy little triptych novel worthy of such other European triptychs as Theroux’s ‘Three Wogs’ or Flaubert’s ‘Three Tales.’ Doubinsky’s little chapters—seldom are they longer than 2 pages—are a joy to read, to flip, and flip, and flip, and between the vignettes emerge interwoven omniscient plots and narratorial asides, which often come together in rich harmony while various other elements of the story are colliding of their own accord, that when read for long enough to forget one’s breathing amount to something worthy of the Grand French Novel Cycles the inter-publisher series emulates. This is a zeitgeist novel written in 2009 but no less potent in 2021. Reading this as the first of a chronological reading of the entire series, which, after ‘The Babylonian Trilogy,’ I greatly look forward to.
• 
  Arianna Dagnino

  I have been trying to pin down what I felt while reading The Babilonian Trilogy, which was very similar to the feeling I got when I read L’archipel d’une autre vie by Andreï Makine. It was like being on a raft going down one of those majestic Russian rivers. I just let myself be transported by the strong current of the words, knowing that sooner or later I would get to my destination, like in a sort of awakening. It all had to do with the rhythm of the sentences, and the poetic nature of the visions they inspired (like an abstract painting), even when the narration would lead into the most gruesome workings of human psyche and action. One can find and feel in Doubinsky’s way of writing echoes of two of his major literary influences: the stream of consciousness as opened by Joyce and followed by Kerouac (especially in novels such as Doctor Sax or Visions of Neal) and the French Surrealist poets (in particular, Breton, the young Aragon and Desnos).
• 
  Chris Kelso

  'Goodbye Babylon' is an ambitious Dickian odyssey that truly cements Seb Doubinsky as a unique voice in his genre...whatever genre that might be...
  
  I've been an avid fan of Doubinsky since 'The Song of Synth' first came out (I continue to have a strong love and admiration for all those lovely Black Coffee Press paperbacks that emerged at the turn of the millennium). Doubinsky's fiction is, honestly, like nothing else. It's poetic and stark at times, weaving and allegorical at others. The fact he does this without things ever getting messy is further testament to his ability as a writer. This contrast might be indicative of the duality present in his strange, complex character in real life - he also happens to be a French/American linguist/translator and poet who lives in Denmark for Jimmies-sake!
  
  Doubinsky takes all my favourite elements of 60's new wave science fiction and gives it a wholly modern spin - with prose that both sparkles in its intricacy and narrative dialogue that's punchy and memorable (an example of the duelling styles I mentioned earlier).
  
  'The Yellow Bull' is the second and, in my opinion, the most 'enjoyable' of the three acts. It serves as a buffer between the two more challenging and experimental sections (which I also loved), and, in an obvious way, it feels like Doubinsky is offering the reader a brief respite from all the crazy typesetting and non-linear narrative that book-end 'Goodbye Babylon'. This is SUCH a smart move because it enhances the experience of the novel completely. In 'The Yellow Bull' he takes us on an existentialist crime journey where Police Commissioner Ratner is tracking down a serial killer with little success. It's beautiful, written in a way that evokes noir masters Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. Doubinsky is a damn literary chameleon and it's a joy to watch him flex his narrative muscles.
  
  'Goodbye Babylon' should be the centrepiece to any philosophically-minded SF fans bookshelf. SIDE NOTE - please go out and buy the stunning trilogy published by PS, or the hardback 'Absinth & The Song of Synth' double novel, you won't regret it!,Add one beautiful and fawning intro from Mr Michael Moorcock and you've got another 50 reasons to pick up the entire triptych.
  
  I should say that this book actually does deserve all the superlatives that's been heaped upon it. One of my favourites from one of the greats.
  
  'Silence is white, too. When you close this book you will understand.'
• 
  Liviu

  
  This is just a plain weird but mesmeric book made out of three independent but interconnected novellas all taking places in a modern but "fantastic" city named Babylon which is a mixture of Paris and some US metropolis - at least this is how I "got"it, but the book is weird enough to have missed some subtle signals and I plan at least one reread.
  
  The Birth of Television According to Buddha is very episodic focusing on a bunch of characters and some dramatic happenings. At about 100 pages it packs the punch of a novel 3 times its size. This story mixes weirdness with the dramatic and it's just superb.
  
  Yellow Bull which is the longest piece of trilogy at about 140 pages is focused on a high ranking policeman Georg Ratner and his hunt for a serial killer which is helped by prophetic dreams and some piece of old fashioned deduction; but of equal interest is Georg's personal life, while a journalist with a flair for the dramatic turned show host in this instance provides the main link with the previous story. This story is more conventional and in the tradition of "absurd fantastic" though it is as enjoyable and superb as the first one.
  
  Gardens of Babylon is shorter and focuses on three characters, a "legal" assassin, a stripper and an underground writer. This story is the most conventional of all and while it uses the Babylon setting for minor weird details, it could be a regular "drugs, crime-lords and slums" story set in any modern city. For this reason I liked it somewhat less than the previous two, but the writing is still superb.
  
  Overall I enjoyed tremendously The Babylonian Trilogy and while it is definitely not for everyone, I highly, highly recommend it for connoisseurs of fine literature of the absurd, weird and fantastic.
  
  For me Mr. Doubinsky instantly became an author to follow based on this magnificent work.
• 
  David Bridges

  I go back a little with Seb Doubinsky’s work. I am always excited to read his work. I know the story is going to be extremely original in its approach whether it be the story itself or the writing. It is hard for me to pick a favorite of Doubinsky’s work though I started with the incredible White City and Omega Gray, which observations blew my mind to bits . Reading The Song of Synth was another brilliant experience and was when I realized Doubinsky is a gifted storyteller as well. The Babylonian Trilogy is a nice blend of great story telling and stripped down poetic prose that could easily have gone off the rails in less capable hands.
  
  I definitely think it is safe to call this a novel but traditional structure is not on the table. The book consists of three novella style narratives that all take place in Babylon with characters weaving their way through all three parts. The first story sort of sets the scene for Babylon by introducing you to multiple characters, some of which reoccur and some that are just odd, like Waldo a bizarrely sentient dog. While Babylon is a futuristic style parallel world, it still consists of humans, therefore, involves sex and war. Doubinsky’s writing is rich with satire and allegory that is prevalent in all his books. The second story, by far my favorite, is a more classical noir serial killer tale in the darker side of Babylon. The final story sort of brings it all together as it tells the story of some characters struggling to leave the struggle of Babylon.
  
  Again, the star of the show here is Doubinsky’s writing. There are not many writers who can pull off telling such a rich story with so few words. The balance struck between your imagination and the words given to you in the text move the story along in a smooth fashion. It is not easy to make comparisons to Doubinsky’s work. Strictly from a technical perspective someone like Brain Allen Carr or Stephen Graham Jones would be comparable but from a creative point of view I would say maybe Jeff Vandermeer. I try to make comparisons to give readers a landmark of what they maybe getting themselves into if they have never read an author before. Regardless I suggest you give The Babylonian Trilogy a shot.
• 
  Jordan N

  When I first found Seb Doubinsky it was the novel Absinth I read first. I had no idea it was part of a larger body of work taking place in an entirely different world. I had to go back and read The Babylonian Trilogy, and I'm glad I did.
  
  I would describe the book as archeology of the present. It reminds me of the absurdity of Waco, texas, violence, the danger of being perceived as a prophet, but also of the Michael Jordan movie SpaceJam, of growing up wanting to be like a cartoon and do what they can.
  
  The book asks questions like who are the psychos? Do we create them? What is the roll of ambition in the degradation of society? What makes people sadistic or just sad? Is anything an accident?
  
  I think the Babylonian Trilogy was written in compact chapters and short sublime sections before that style was in vogue. Twelve years ago this book was probably considered cutting edge and it still is! Colors and electricity and ancient temples mingle in a way reminescent of Pynchon and Dos Passos, but without the monotony of the long winded. The desire for fame, to be known, and the possible destruction of those that find it is accepted as a way of life now days, but the way Doubinsky depicts the journey is other worldly.
• 
  Thomas Joyce

  A whole new world. Okay, it isn't exactly a complete new world. It is mostly the same as our world. But there are some slight changes such as the existence of the City-States and new drugs and new wars. There are three separate books, but there are many things that connect two, or sometimes three, of the books. Each is written in its own unique way, but they all have Doubinsky's great flair with language. Looking forward to exploring this new world!
• 
  Jason Pettus

  (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
  
  Of all the ways that I discover the various books that I end up reviewing here, perhaps my favorite is when an author I already admire will recommend to me an author they admire; and that's not only because these authors and I tend to share the same tastes, but also because these authors tend to not want to ruin whatever good graces they have with me, so tend to only recommend writers who are legitimately quite great ones. Take for example New Weird veteran Robert Freeman Wexler, who I've reviewed twice now here in the past; he recently contacted me regarding another author recently signed to the same small press where he belongs, a writer similar in nature to him named Sebastien Doubinsky but based out of Europe instead of the US, and to see if it'd be all right for their mutual publisher to send along Doubinsky's latest book for possible review.
  
  And I'm glad he wrote, for Doubinsky's The Babylonian Trilogy turns out to be yet another great New Weird work, a trilogy of novellas that like Wexler's books are not quite science-fiction, not quite noir and not quite horror, but a strange and pleasing combination of them all, hence earning the all-inclusive "New Weird" moniker in the first place. The three long stories are all set in an alternate-Earth version of New York named "Babylon," although it's not until the third tale that we actually see any alternate-history-type stuff happen to justify the fictional setting; it's a large urban center that behaves almost exactly like we expect such places to, except with such fantastical elements as murder being legal there (as long as one has the correct licenses and expensive paperwork), the publishing industry being state-controlled, America still embroiled in Vietnam but with Vietnam now an official state within China, and other believable but not-quite-real touches. It is the New York of Raymond Chandler and other pulp writers, only filtered through the contemporary lens of tabloid television and rampant drug abuse, definitely an otherworldly environment but in about the least alienating way to non-genre readers as possible.
  
  What Doubinsky does within this environment, then, is present us with the intertwined stories of over a dozen different characters, each of the novellas standalone tales with their own themes and self-contained plot arcs, but with a series of developments that bleed over from one to the next; the first, for example, "The Birth of Television According to Buddha," is a Carver-like ensemble piece about the intersecting lives of a number of different, supposedly unrelated Babylon citizens (who of course turn out to be more related than they at first seem), while the second and third novellas ("Yellow Bull" and "The Gardens of Babylon") are much more stereotypical noir tales, albeit with running characters and storylines that pop up here and there throughout all three. In effect it gives the entire project as a whole the type of dreamlike, synchronicity-style causal connection that Doubinsky is obviously shooting for, a seemingly contradictory situation where we both feel that we are in that city ourselves and suspect that we're perhaps hallucinating the entire thing.
  
  Now, that said, there are some problems within The Babylonian Trilogy as well, and let me make it clear that this is not a book for everyone; with plotlines this fleeting, for example, it's easy to feel dissatisfied by the time one reaches the end, and with the tales themselves sure to be frustrating for those who don't naturally like at least a little unexplained weirdness to their genre fiction. Also, I have to confess that I'm not the biggest fan of the way this book was laid out, with the three novellas further chopped up into hundreds and hundreds of "mini-chapters" only a few paragraphs long apiece, each of them presented on a separate page and with their own chapter number or title; I know this is a big hot thing among a certain crowd of contemporary fiction lovers these days, but I tend to find such deliberate artificiality to do nothing but get in the way of actually getting lost in the story itself, and in general always prefer that the actual mechanics of the book-layout process cause as little undue attention to themselves as possible.
  
  But still, all in all I found The Babylonian Trilogy a highly entertaining and thought-provoking read, not the best that the New Weird community has to offer but certainly more than worth your time, a book definitely to pick up if you're already a fan of such bigger names as Jeff Vandermeer, China Mieville or Wexler himself. It comes highly recommended to genre fans, and is also not a bad title at all for non-fans to take a chance on.
  
  Out of 10: 8.6, or 9.1 for New Weird fans
• 
  Stephen Theaker

  The first part of this trilogy of novellas is The Birth of Television According to Buddha. Though not overtly science-fictional, it reminds me a bit of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan in tone and subject matter, and in its attempts to make sense of - or at least catalogue - a world that's utterly confusing. I loved the short chapters, which broke what could have been quite a difficult book up into nicely manageable pieces.
  
  It was interesting to read this on the Sony Reader (the publishers sent a review pdf), because it did show up one flaw of the device: if I wasn't paying attention when new characters were introduced (there are lots in this first part), I couldn't just flick my eyes back up the page to get my bearings. On the other hand, that means the Sony Reader will encourage me to read more carefully.
  
  I took a bit of a break before reading the second part, Yellow Bull. The problem with this part, about a detective assigned unenthusiastically to a serial killer case, despite how well written and engaging it was, was that I kept forgetting which book I was reading: was it Yellow Bull, or the Chabon book (I'm getting sick of hearing myself mention it) or The City in These Pages? But maybe that's a problem with me, not the book: I've only read a very few crime novels before. Someone who hasn't read any science fiction might see little difference between Heinlein and E.E. "Doc" Smith. The similarities stick out more than the differences.
  
  Next: the third part, The Gardens of Babylon. This was the first part with an overtly fantastical slant, in that among other things it's about the misadventures of a government-licensed assassin and an author guilty of illegal publication (though both have real world equivalents). After the straightforward, linear narrative of the second part, this is back to a fractured narrative from multiple viewpoints, but again it's in easy-to-digest bite-sized chunks.
  
  Overall, a well-written, exciting and thought-provoking book. It's a book I suspect I won't really understand until I read what other people have to say about it, but that wasn't a barrier to enjoying it, and the sense that it will repay further consideration is a good thing: a book that you know you've probably misunderstood is much better than one that leaves you thinking, glad I'm done with that!
• 
  Lori

  from publisher
• 
  Kris Saknussemm

  A wonderfully loopy science fiction influenced dream poem that brings to mind a mix of Braughtigan and Burroughs. Postmodern, post apocalyptic, wise, witty and fun to read.
• 
  Nathalie

  I loved, loved, loved The Babylonian Trilogy by Seb Doubinsky. After a few pages only, I found myself suck into this story and not being able to put it down. Not because I wanted to know what was going to happen next (although I did), but because I simply wanted more: more words, more images, more poetry, more broken and authentic characters. Doubinsky is particularly good at showing damaged characters in all their beauty. I feel he could be reciting the phone book and still manage to touch me and make me want to read more. I'm hooked.