Rydra Wong, an ex-military cryptographer, a poet, and a linguist, has been approached by the military once again to help decipher the Babel-17 code used by the alien invaders in their many attacks. Rydra realizes that Babel-17 is not a code, but a language. After obtaining some of the original recor...
This is an excellent science fiction novel - the future world that Delany imagines is extremely vivid, creative, even realistic. And devoid of any kind of patronizing chauvinism, which is always refreshing. Even after almost half a century, it's hardly dated much... well, except for some of the ling...
When you revisit something after a long interval, you never know what you're going to get. A few days ago, I read The Story of the Amulet, the third volume in the E. Nesbit trilogy that starts with Five Children and It. I had been meaning to check this out since I was about 7, but somehow never loca...
Samuel R. Delany was on a short list of famous sf authors I have never read, the list includes Cordwainer Smith, Henry Kuttner, C. J. Cherryh, Stephen Baxter and Neal Asher. I will try to get to all of them next year, any recommendations concerning these authors would be welcome.Babel-17 is a very s...
I have always believed that the language you speak determines the way you think. How else can it be, really? I am a trilingual person who has quite a few monolingual family members, and I can't even tell you how many times in frustrated fascination I have contemplated the peculiarities of languages,...
I think I liked the ideas a lot more than the prose or the plot. There is a lot of really great stuff in here, gene altered starship pilots who look like griffins or tigers or dragons, assassins and spies being built in a lab, a capable and interesting heroine building a starship crew and taking th...
Vintage science fiction, which means the plot is more idea driven than character driven. Which I don't mind, in small doses. The idea of this book, language as tool to program the mind, is interesting. Reminded me a bit of Snow Crash. I would be curious to see what authors like Catherine Asaro or D...
Sometimes scifi of this vintage can really suck, and I can't grok it at all. (See what I did there? Anyone? Okay, it's kind of lame.) Sometimes the upheavals of the late 60s in terms of race, gender and the like get glossed in scifi in lieu of a future dominated by Joe Blaster righting the imperial...
"This book was formative for me. I read it in elementary school, and the powerful message it conveyed about how the language you know shapes the way you are able to think affects me to this day. It's science fiction, won a Nebula Award, reads more like poetry than prose at various points, and isn't ...
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