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

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I’m sorry I can’t say more, but Delany is one of those authors who obsessively deals with the same brainy themes in book after book, so it helps to read a few to really grasp what he’s up to, and as this is only my first (completed), please tune in for more once I read more. If I asked them that, I know what they would have said: their blasted dictionary, or encyclopedia, or whatever it is.

She puts her hand on the bar, she leans back on the stool, hip moving in knitted blue, and with each movement, I am amazed, surprised, bewildered. A very precise language can be more informative and more concise than one where words have more than one meaning or aren’t exact.

As her understanding of the language increases, she is able to predict where the next attack will be and gathers a team to go to the predicted location of the attack. Her love of languages and her fascination with this particularly unique language leads her to get directly involved in seeking it out and learning more about it, and the rest of the story spurs off from there. Na Ficção Científica, a hipótese (também conhecida como relativismo lingu� After teaching The Butcher the word "I," Rydra, The Butcher, and her crew leave the ship during a battle. With its many intriguing and mind-stretching scenes, Babel-17 holds up well after almost 60 years, despite the fact that Sapir-Whorf has fallen by the wayside.

The weaponized language is the eponymous Babel-17 which is being used to sabotage the war efforts of The Alliance, the side of the war the story is narrated from; whether this is the "right" side is not really dwelled upon in the book. i am collecting these books, but am very picky about it being this particular edition - i want all the covers to match.Sometimes I read an author who is operating on a different level to me, and this definitely felt like one of those times. For the first time, Babel-17 is published as the author intended with the short novel Empire Star , the tale of Comet Jo, a simple-minded teen thrust into a complex galaxy when he's entrusted to carry a vital message to a distant world. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since.

The concept is based on the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" which (if I understand it correctly) posits that ideas can not be thought of without words to facilitate them. The heroine finds her perceptions (and even her physical abilities) altered once she has learned Babel-17. He's a simplex person from a simplex world and the journey charts his progress into a multiplex character. All the misunderstandings that tie the world up and keep people apart were quivering before me at once, waiting for me to untangle them, explain them, and I couldn’t.

Personal Summary: A good book for its time with some novel ideas, but I do not feel enriched or up-lifted after reading it. He has won the Hugo Award twice and the Nebula Award four times, including consecutive wins for Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection .

For everyone with a background or profound knowledge in anything with linguistic, language, and all the similar fields, it might be the ultimate revelation, something to read again and again to dive deeper and enjoy while the puzzles unfold. The purity of the philosophic conceptions is arguably a little bogged down in places by absurd and marginally necessary sci-fi adventure conceits, but even these are a good playground/structure for the ideas (except in a few places where purely plot-driven concerns actually seem to dilute the ideas a bit). The invaders have somehow been mounting damaging sabotage attacks deep into Alliance territory, with only strange, coded radio messages giving any clue to how they are being carried out. 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. I know that sounds like something invented just to give conservatives a conniption fit, but the overall effect is an odd beauty, a celebration of the strange and weird that reminds you of how much of what we think is strange and weird is rooted in mere familiarity.

I saw a bunch of the weirdest, oddest people I had ever met in my life, who thought different, and acted different, and even made love different. The General looked from the silhouetted loading-towers that jutted behind the rickety monorail to the grimy buildings. I recently rediscovered this book hiding in a crate in my home library, waiting several years to be read. It was easier, being a general, to ask about the "animal man" than about the woman who had sat in the middle of the sidewalk during the last embargo holding her skeletal baby by one leg, or the three scrawny teenage girls who had attacked him on the street with razors (--she had hissed through brown teeth, the bar of metal glistening toward his chest, "Come here, Beefsteak!