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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
I liked Empire Star more than Babel-17, though I did enjoy both. Babel-17 has a great setup: an interesting and involving plot, half-science fiction and half-mystery, and a focus on linguistics that's both unusual and appealing. (Delany's take on linguistics is also, technically speaking, wrong, but if you're comfortable letting the Rule of Awesome gloss over the scientific inaccuracies for you, then you should be golden.) I loved several of the characters, and the setting is flawlessly and excitingly drawn.
The book felt too short, though; Delany abandons his universe just as soon as he's resolved the mystery plot, with only a brief nod towards tying up the dangling threads of the intergalactic conflict running through the story. Actually, some of the characters and sub-plots felt abandoned even before the resolution. It could've been a mindblowing book if it were only a few hundred pages longer; as it is, it's still very much worth reading.
Empire Star, by contrast, is only a novella but feels like a complete story. A very nice exploration of provincialism in a multicultural universe and of the complex nature of space and time.
The book felt too short, though; Delany abandons his universe just as soon as he's resolved the mystery plot, with only a brief nod towards tying up the dangling threads of the intergalactic conflict running through the story. Actually, some of the characters and sub-plots felt abandoned even before the resolution. It could've been a mindblowing book if it were only a few hundred pages longer; as it is, it's still very much worth reading.
Empire Star, by contrast, is only a novella but feels like a complete story. A very nice exploration of provincialism in a multicultural universe and of the complex nature of space and time.
This is a really a 3.5 for me but I am comfortable bumping it up to 4. I enjoyed the language aspect of Babel-17 though I found it hard to follow parts of it. I found it funny that in all this technology, they were still using "tapes" to record things, ha! (it was written in the late 60's). The last 10 or so pages of Empire Star had me riveted though. Overall, a fun read, and I'm glad I got it.
Fun reads that play with SF adventure stories and have a neat relationship with each other. In the Babel universe all the characters reference Empire Star as it's the Harry Potter of the future.