Reviews - Babel-17 | The StoryGraph

845 reviews for:

Babel-17

Samuel R. Delany

3.65 AVERAGE

ana_bane's review against another edition

4.0

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

kinetica's review against another edition

4.0

i really liked the linguistic elements and reflections on communication in here. there's queerness and outsider culture in a way that makes me wonder how his work was received when originally published.

far1s_'s review against another edition

4.5

A space opera lead by a linguistic poet! My only complaint after finishing this book is that it’s not long enough!

An imaginative piece of Sci fi that stretches the road regarding language and its perception. Delany exercises the importance of linguistics whilst still crafting an extremely fun story.

I love Ryda Wong, particularly her dynamic with butcher was really cool and much more compelling than I thought Delany could achieve in such short time.

It’s clear than Delany threw in concepts that are out of the ordinary to really spice up the story, for the length of this novel I wish they were explored abit more.

Written in 1966 and it still holds up today. A truly fun and compelling story for sci fi lovers

If you love sci please give this gem a chance, you won’t regret it!!

areaderofthings's review against another edition

4.25

adventurous challenging mysterious medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Writing this view months later, this book was good when I understood it but some bits did require a bit more thought.

athena21's review against another edition

3.0

The very beginning of this book very much compelled me. I'm a fan of the very specific genre of book 'person decodes alien code/language' and was really excited to read about Rydra Wong's process of translating Babel-17. However, that is pretty quickly just thrown to the backseat as we are introduced to Wong's inexplicable "knack" that means she can just kind of translate a language through vibes?! In the end, this novella felt less like it was a novella because Delany had a brilliant idea that was best expressed through this medium, with a tight focus and clear idea, and more like a book that just ended up too short. A lot of the ideas are very big but Delany only ever approaches them from a very shallow perspective. "What is to steer a ship you had to literally wrestle with space?" is only given the cursory answer "that would be cool as hell." A lot of the characters are also like this, as another reviewer pointed out, they're less characters or explorations of a culture and more just a tour through some stuff Delany thought would be cool in a sci-fi future. I don't know, I don't want to be way too critical because there are interesting ideas - at its heart, it's a book that takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to its logical extreme in a really fascinating way, writing about how a language could be a weapon. That's fascinating! But it doesn't change the fact that the pacing is way off, the world-building is weak, and the ending of the book is stupid as hell. Ok, the world-building isn't really weak and I loved loads of the ideas - discorporates and the weird approach to death that they create, triples and what they say about love in this universe, and so much more. It's just that everything is so damn quick that nothing is given the time it deserves. I'm not going to defend the ending at all though, it was so many levels of stupid and it just didn't make any sense. Like, for a book that was written in '66 it honestly didn't sound wildly dated, it's got a female main character that isn't god-awful, it's not wildly racist and even properly respects other cultures... it's just that none of that can save it from its own stupidity. So on balance, the best I can give it is 3 stars.