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Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
Mar. 3rd, 2019 06:17 pmBabel-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You do have to read this a bit as historical document.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.
