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A review by danilanglie
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
3.75
It's so cool to read this and see so many sci-fi ideas that are developed in later books/stories I've also greatly enjoyed. I kept thinking of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, that idea of a computer language used as an infiltrating weapon...
This was a weird novel that kept resisting my expectations about how the plot would develop, but I was totally gripped all the way through. In terms of prose, it's written so beautifully, and really feels like a golden example of science fiction literature from the 60s/70s. It feels like it fits right in alongside one of my all-time favorite novels The Left Hand of Darkness in terms of style and the big ideas being explored.
There's always this strange and interesting thing when reading sci-fi written decades ago, where their imagined futures in some ways feel outdated due to the time of the writing. I love that this book explores polyamory as a healthy and viable option for some people, but also the book imagines that in this future, such relationships are very much marginalized and called "perverted," which we would of course hope would be less the case in the far future.
My favorite scene was maybe Rydra and the Butcher's conversation about the words "you" and "I" and how they are misapplied and then gradually understood, and the way that without such a concept of identity/personhood, so many other things become impossible to explain and comprehend. That really made me think!
This was a weird novel that kept resisting my expectations about how the plot would develop, but I was totally gripped all the way through. In terms of prose, it's written so beautifully, and really feels like a golden example of science fiction literature from the 60s/70s. It feels like it fits right in alongside one of my all-time favorite novels The Left Hand of Darkness in terms of style and the big ideas being explored.
There's always this strange and interesting thing when reading sci-fi written decades ago, where their imagined futures in some ways feel outdated due to the time of the writing. I love that this book explores polyamory as a healthy and viable option for some people, but also the book imagines that in this future, such relationships are very much marginalized and called "perverted," which we would of course hope would be less the case in the far future.
My favorite scene was maybe Rydra and the Butcher's conversation about the words "you" and "I" and how they are misapplied and then gradually understood, and the way that without such a concept of identity/personhood, so many other things become impossible to explain and comprehend. That really made me think!