I saw a bunch of the weirdest, oddest people I had ever met in my life, who thought different, and acted different, and even made love different. Today it might be hard to difficult to publish a work like this that is so specific and primarily plot and idea driven that just a small minority, even of the readers with interest in Sci-Fi, might find it satisfying. In any case, I'm only willing to allot time to reading his shorter, earlier works (with Nova and Einstein Intersection on deck), and I really enjoyed Babel-17. He has won the Hugo Award twice and the Nebula Award four times, including consecutive wins for Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection . Delany casts an Asian woman as the captain of a spacecraft at a time NBC was telling Gene Roddenberry that he couldn’t have a woman serving as first officer of the Enterprise because audiences wouldn’t accept it.

Delany presents a very dense setting and manages it to build a complete world view within 160 pages! The b-side is a novella referenced within the main narative, which Delaney apparently wrote in 10 days to fund a trip to Europe, a fast, witty fable about a boy chosen to deliver a message he does not know. O mundo ficcional criado por ele é tremendamente vivo, repleto de coisas que têm um jeito cyberpunk que estava muito adiante do ambiente em que ele vivia. A security dossier had been handed him that morning, but he had passed it to his aide and merely noted, later, that it had been marked "approved.Perhaps more importantly for Delany’s themes, Rydra meets an enigmatic man whose incomprehension of I and you provides that final piece to her Babel-17 puzzle. Rydra has to learn this the hard way when her own ship experiences malfunctions on take-off, leaving them adrift until they manage to get back on course for their destination: the center of weapons production for the Alliance. I can’t work out if this book should be 5 stars and in my favourites folder, or if it was just quite good. And it’s something the brain needs to have exist, otherwise you wouldn’t have to beat your chest, or strike your fist on your palm. Characters refer to darkness as being like ‘the inside of a coal scuttle’ (a reference that was surely dated by the 60s, let alone in the distant future).

If you're a language nerd or can get lost in cool ideas, just relax, this one's short, rather witty, and unlike anything else I've ever read before. I kind of wish Delany had explored or explained this more; motifs of embodiment have long been something that fascinates me in science fiction. When last I heard, they were already up to the B's, but I'm sure they don't have a thing on Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavdqx. It’s not at all a scientific science fiction book, but I enjoyed reading about how spaceship crews were formed and operated, as well as the various details about how this fictional future society itself operated. The General looked from the silhouetted loading-towers that jutted behind the rickety monorail to the grimy buildings.

This book has more than just linguistic appeal, however, - it details the futuristic society with genetic engineering, changed concepts of love, star ships, stellar battles, futuristic technology (of course, now riddled with unavoidable anachronisms, but fascinating nevertheless), discorporate members of the society - all this told through Delany's vivid haunting imagery, told in the language that shifts between crisp and poetic, fluidly transitioning between scenes and concepts, illustrated by modernistic and surreal poems at the beginning of each section. This ‘personality’ has the general desire to destroy the Alliance at any cost, and at the same time remain hidden from the rest of the consciousness until it’s strong enough to take over. After several attacks have been made by the invaders who speak Babel-17, she soon realizes the potential of the language to change one's thought process and provide speakers with certain powers, and she is recruited by her government to discover how the enemy is infiltrating and sabotaging strategic sites. It´s difficult to understand just pieces of this amazing work, as it´s complexity is so interwoven with special innuendos and the author doesn´t care about genre or even writing conventions, making my poor brain hurt.

Not quite up to Dhalgren, of course, but much better than Nova, which looks almost ordinary when viewed between these two others. Poet and linguist Rydra Wong (one of the better SF protagonists and high in the running for best name) is on the trail of assassins and saboteurs and has come across some clues about the language and our space adventure is off. Their dialogue helps to unlock certain secrets about Butcher’s past and completes Rydra’s understanding of the weaponized Babel-17. Linguist and renowned poet Rydra Wong is brought in to decipher the code, which she names Babel-17, and she gathers a crew and a ship to travel to where she believes the next attack will be.Delany hoped to have Babel-17 originally published as a single volume with the novella Empire Star, but this did not happen until a 2001 reprint. She excels at reading people, their innermost thoughts and desires - be that through muscle movements or telepathy.

But I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to take a surreal, entertaining, enlightening, provocative journey into a wildly imagined future. Her love of languages and her fascination with this particularly unique language leads her to get directly involved in seeking it out and learning more about it, and the rest of the story spurs off from there.While I found the ideas and concepts very interesting and thought provoking I also found the pacing to be a little uneven, a couple of chapters simply dragged, in a short novel like this I expected a tighter narrative.