Josiah Bancroft
Josiah Bancroft is an American author whose journey to literary recognition is one of the more remarkable stories in recent science fiction and fantasy publishing. He spent over a decade writing and self-publishing his Books of Babel series before a chance encounter at a convention led Brandon Sanderson to champion his work, propelling it to mainstream publication with Orbit Books. Bancroft studied English literature and creative writing at Ohio State University and worked as a schoolteacher while quietly constructing one of the most elaborately imagined secondary worlds in modern fantasy.
The Books of Babel series, beginning with Senlin Ascends (2013, republished by Orbit in 2018), is built around the Tower of Babel reimagined as a vast, layered city in which each “Ringdom” operates by entirely different social, physical, and logical rules. The series follows Thomas Senlin, a mild-mannered schoolmaster who travels to the Tower on honeymoon only to lose his wife in the crowds and spend the subsequent volumes ascending through the Tower’s increasingly strange and dangerous levels in search of her. The series is a tour de force of invention, combining steampunk aesthetics with literary sensibility, Kafkaesque bureaucratic comedy, and genuine emotional depth. The Hexologists (2023), available on WritersReview, is Bancroft’s standalone novel, a charming mystery set in a richly rendered secondary world where a married couple of investigators — an hexologist and her husband — navigate a case involving royalty, magic, and municipal politics.
Bancroft’s prose style is one of his most distinctive qualities: ornate, witty, and pleasurably dense, it belongs to a tradition of elaborate fantasy world-building that prizes linguistic invention as much as narrative momentum. His sentences reward careful reading, and his dialogue sparkles with dry humour and period-appropriate flavour. The Books of Babel in particular has been compared to the work of Mervyn Peake and Gene Wolfe — authors whose commitment to literary craft within fantasy has always prioritised depth over accessibility, but who reward patient readers with experiences unavailable in more straightforward genre fiction.
The Hexologists demonstrates that Bancroft can operate successfully in a more compact, accessible register without sacrificing his characteristic wit and world-building ambition. The novel has been warmly received and has introduced his work to readers who might not have committed to a multi-volume series. Bancroft is an author whose career trajectory — from self-published obscurity to critical and commercial success — has become something of an inspiration within the writing community, and his work continues to demonstrate that there is a substantial readership hungry for fantasy that takes both its genre pleasures and its literary ambitions seriously.
