Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
Mar. 3rd, 2019 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsBabel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
3/5. *Shows up fifty years later with Starbucks*
Hey, did you guys know that Delany is a kind of brilliant weirdo? Yeah, you probably did. This is a decadently weirdo short novel about a woman who is a famous poet, a code-breaker, and a ship captain (just go with it, I did) trying to teach herself an alien language. It's playing with an old hypothesis of linguistics – about language shaping and circumscribing thought – which has generally fallen out of favor, and it includes such delightful interludes as a conversation between two people where one of them has not grasped the shifting semantics of "you" and "I" so he refers to himself as "you" and his interlocutor as "I" throughout. Look, either you think that's delightful or you don't. Scenes like that one elevated this book for me, whereas otherwise it might have been an inventive but ultimately unengaging story.
You do have to read this a bit as historical document. I'm not just talking about the sexism, but also how our sense of style changes over time, such that Delany's efforts at shoehorning in splainy monologues looks deeply amateurish to the modern eye. And on a different topic, I wanted some in depth criticism looking at the suggestion this book makes that the main character was born autistic and was . . . re-molded? Into a neurotypical-ish person (except she totally isn't). I didn't know what to make of this, and couldn't find anything of real depth about it – if you know of anything, speak up.
3/5. *Shows up fifty years later with Starbucks*
Hey, did you guys know that Delany is a kind of brilliant weirdo? Yeah, you probably did. This is a decadently weirdo short novel about a woman who is a famous poet, a code-breaker, and a ship captain (just go with it, I did) trying to teach herself an alien language. It's playing with an old hypothesis of linguistics – about language shaping and circumscribing thought – which has generally fallen out of favor, and it includes such delightful interludes as a conversation between two people where one of them has not grasped the shifting semantics of "you" and "I" so he refers to himself as "you" and his interlocutor as "I" throughout. Look, either you think that's delightful or you don't. Scenes like that one elevated this book for me, whereas otherwise it might have been an inventive but ultimately unengaging story.
You do have to read this a bit as historical document. I'm not just talking about the sexism, but also how our sense of style changes over time, such that Delany's efforts at shoehorning in splainy monologues looks deeply amateurish to the modern eye. And on a different topic, I wanted some in depth criticism looking at the suggestion this book makes that the main character was born autistic and was . . . re-molded? Into a neurotypical-ish person (except she totally isn't). I didn't know what to make of this, and couldn't find anything of real depth about it – if you know of anything, speak up.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-03 11:30 pm (UTC)Reminds me of when my son was just starting to speak in sentences, and referred to himself as "you" for a fraught couple of weeks until he did the prism-glasses thing and figured out the linguistic convention. He'd been imitating us and, well, WE called him "you"...
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 09:40 am (UTC)In my defense, I had just been studying philosophy of language (and also, autistic). So I could have done worse.
Had I been further along in my Delany readying, I might have been small_maxa or santine instead.
But I do love the slapdash melodramatic gaudy space-opera-ness of Babel-17. And it was my first introduction to the concept of polyamory, and to the poetry of Marilyn Hacker.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 11:14 am (UTC)Yes, I thought of you and went "ah!"
That is a very good description of this book.