Babel-17 (S.F. MASTERWORKS): Samuel R. Delany

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I figured out a big part of the conflict of the book rather early on, but it did not detract in the slightest from being fascinated and enthralled by it, and the fascination did not decrease at all during the reread. The events of the story are quite unpredictable, but they always have a poetic flair and leave images and phrases etched in the mind's eye. This is always at its best when riffing off of the major thematic concerns of language and meaning, which are fortunately well-worked into the fabric of the novel, as the very speech patterns and off-handed body-language descriptions of have key plot-points to convey. this kind of space opera is so much more fun than the heavy realistic dune-type stuff that kinda took over the genre soonafter.

I’m pretty sure that when a French person and an American person think about pizza, we’re thinking of the same thing apart from the toppings.Explanatory dialogue can be given in a natural way, and a larger emotional idea is conveyed as well. Given this book's reputation I had been expecting something much more interesting than what was on offer.

Delaney’s 1966 Nebula Award winning novel and Hugo nominated book continues to excite and baffle SF fans more than 50 years later. She puts her hand on the bar, she leans back on the stool, hip moving in knitted blue, and with each movement, I am amazed, surprised, bewildered. If I asked them that, I know what they would have said: their blasted dictionary, or encyclopedia, or whatever it is. Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. Samuel Ray 'Chip' Delany, Jr was born in Harlem in 1942, and published his first novel at the age of just 20.I enjoy occasionally learning a bit about language differences, and especially how a language reflects or affects the culture that speaks it, but language isn’t something I have much aptitude for or a particularly strong interest in, so this was a bit much for me.