Babel-17 (S.F. MASTERWORKS): Samuel R. Delany

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General, although they know a hell of a lot about codes, they know nothing of the nature of language. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. But this book was still very good, and despite being incredibly dated in terms of future gadgets, succeeds well in producing a literate, intelligent, and memorable SF novel that mirrored the dramatic social changes happening at the time. Empire Star" is short story, less than a hundred pages, which apparently Delany originally wanted packaged with "Babel-17," but ended up getting published separately. Babel-17 is a standalone science fiction book from the 60’s, although I’m not sure I would have guessed it was from the 60’s if I’d read it without knowing that.

To be fair: it is a very good book, but the language gets too flowery in places and the excitement of the plot waxes and wanes a bit too much, alternating between dullness, psychedelia and high drama. A late-comer to the worlds of science fiction, John Folk-Williams circled around it, first by blogging (primarily through Storied Mind) about inner struggles and the mind’s way of distorting reality. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.Delany is clearly influenced by the advances happening in computer programming in his time: if we can literally shape the “minds” of our machines depending on the type of programming language we use, could we not shape the minds of people the same way?

The language portrayed at the center of Babel-17 contains interesting linguistic features including the absence of a pronoun or any other construction for "I".I hauled myself to the end of this one out of duty, dragged along by the feeling that I should finish such a well-regarded work.

so much so that I wondered if there was some kind of allegory to the sixties I was too thick to get.I think some of my favorite SF/Fantasy stories are the ones that give language a special place in the universe. Would gladly read of more linguistic ruminations, and learn all there is to know of the societal structures of this world, without the need for war or assassination plots. Something can be well-intentioned in one language and come off as condescending or rude or dismissive in another.

I have no idea where I am supposed to place them, and puzzling out how to read a book is not my idea of a good time.

In any case, I'm only willing to allot time to reading his shorter, earlier works (with Nova and Einstein Intersection on deck), and I really enjoyed Babel-17. When Rydra awakens she, her crew and their ship have been taken on board another vessel, an Alliance-friendly pirate ship, under a Captain Tarik. A, of course extremely evil, triumvirate of space opera, Hard Sci Fi with elements of cyberpunk, astrophysics, scientific theories,… and social sci-fi controls the output of the genre, leaving many of the too alternative concepts and narrative styles with less hope for large sales. I’m pretty sure that when a French person and an American person think about pizza, we’re thinking of the same thing apart from the toppings.