kept thinking of various conversations i've had recently. my last roommate and kai and i would have the "color conversation" about that one video that explains how colors are determined by language. We had this same conversation so many times (not in a boring way) that it got to the point where when someone would veer close to bringing up anything about colors we had to shut it down right away or we would stay up too late When Samuel R. Delany wrote Babel-17 in 1965, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was still new(ish) and popular, and the computer-driven Information Age era was dawning. Transhumanism was a popular idea in some circles. All of these aspects of the zeitgeist converge in this Nebula-winning book. 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. The character of Rydra Wong is well developed, she is complex and believable, though I do Asked about the idea for the film, which is credited to Arriaga and Gonzalez Inarritu, the former said, "It is credited to him because I had this story first placed only in two countries. He asked to have it in four and that’s why he has the ‘idea by’ credit." Asked also if the idea of setting “Babel’s” two other stories in Morocco and Japan was from Gonzalez Iñárritu, Arriaga answered "No, he said put it wherever you want,". [10] Casting [ edit ] Rather than being a straightforward sequence of two people falling in love, their romance also becomes a labyrinthine struggle through the concept of the self. Where does “I” end, and “you” begin? Does speaking another language change the way you think? Can one person ever truly know another? Refreshingly, Delany gives us a hero who can talk her way out of trouble, who succeeds through using her wit and her empathy rather than force or technology. She’s described by several people as beautiful, but this never becomes an issue—her admirers put her on a pedestal because they love her work. There are a variety of sexual flavors on display, but there’s never even a hint of coercion or assault. While Triples are referred to as deviants at one point, by the end of the book even straitlaced Officer Appleby is frequenting pilot wrestling matches. The gruff general from the book’s opening scene is willing to listen and collaborate with people from an array of fields, rather than toeing any military line.

I recently rediscovered this book hiding in a crate in my home library, waiting several years to be read. As with most of my experiences reading Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17 proved at various times frustrating, inscrutable, exceptional, and interesting. When a friend asked me if I had enjoyed it, I replied, “I respect it.” That’s perhaps the best way to sum up a lot of my feelings about Delany’s science fiction. Language Equals Thought: The novel is built wholly around this trope. The smallest (and least spoilish) example is a race of aliens whose language is based almost entirely around temperature gradients but have no word for "house" - because of this, they build incomprehensible starships that look like a mass of strung-together boiled eggs. And of course, the eponymous language enables extremely fast thinking and enhanced spatial awareness.

Hobbies

Rich, Jamie S. (11 February 2007). "Babel: DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video". DVD Talk. DVDTalk.com . Retrieved 15 February 2016. I already finished a book today and was going to leave it at that, but again kai was pestering me to read this as she had read it yesterday. I said i had to do other tasks, but she wanted this enough that she followed me around while i did laundry and whatnot and she read the whole thing out loud. She did an excellent performance with different voices and accents. My favorite character by far was Lump. Consider this extraordinary passage, with which I'll conclude, combining the philosophy of language with the most poignantly personal recollections, a passage worthy of the writer it names in turning ideas into dialogue and drama:

First is the replacement of the white man as ingenious, omni-competent space-captain with a woman of color. Second is the future as bohemia, a place of erupting micro-individualisms where stellar citizens find their fulfillment in biological transformations and sexual configurations that were still relegated, in the middle 20th century, to the vast "closet" of certain urban quarters. Finally, Delany represents language as absolutely determining thought and experience; the language you speak and write constrains what you can know, believe, and even perceive—like so much 20th-century thought, Babel-17 presents language as first philosophy. In "Letter to Q——," criticizing Toni Morrison for what he regards as her racism and homophobia and all-around crypto-fascist essentialism, Delany argues that she has betrayed the mission of the novel as a literary form, because the novel exists to tell us I can’t work out if this book should be 5 stars and in my favourites folder, or if it was just quite good.

O primeiro – em que ela é explicitamente apresentada – é “A história da sua vida”, de Ted Chiang. Esse conto se transformou no bom “A Chegada”, filme de Denis Villeneuve. Upon this latest reread, I feel very strongly that the linguistics aspects of the story relate in a crucial way to the gender and sexuality aspects, even if this is not apparent at first. Delany even presents the process of language change, albeit in a very short and condensed fashion, as Rydra finds herself teaching someone the pronouns I and you…but not discussing he or she. Rethinking the whole novel from this perspective is as breathtaking as the moment when Rydra Wong finally wraps her mind around Babel-17. It´s a bit sad, and ironic, as especially the leaving behind of genre conventions and trying out unique world building elements has once been one of the driving forces of Sci-Fi. It´s not as if there weren´t enough independent publishers, self publishers, and indie authors who do write all these works, but they come with the immense problem of missing large scale rating to ensure the readers that the work is no waste of time. I´m already investing quite an amount of time in activism and am not altruistic enough to risk bad reads too, sorry. My sister was talking about sommeliers two days ago and asking if they taste more and I was telling her that based off the wine classes I've been forced to take at work I am pretty postive the whole thing is not that they have more taste buds or taste "more" but that they have a shared vocabulary to describe tastes and therefore can identify more tastes