Babel-17

I recently picked up Babel-17 at the recommendation of my A.I. professor and found it short, weird, but all-together interesting. Babel-17 is a Nebula Award winning novel by Samuel R. Delany, and its plot is driven by a very strict interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which states that speakers of different languages think and behave differently. Essentially, in this book, language controls not only your thoughts and your behavior, but also your physical and mental abilities.

The book started off rather normally, but in the second chapter you are thrust into a bizarre world of cosmetic surgery and the discorporate. After the initial shock I warmed up to the characters and enjoyed the story. There are several interesting portions of the book (I'll quote a few favorites below) where the author either examines language in the minds of the characters or shows the perception of characters through their language. While the interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis used in this book is no longer scientifically valid, it is a fun, small novel that takes a known scientific concept and uses it to an extreme to create a small, thought-provoking novel for those willing to suspend disbelief and truly dive into the strange future that Delany envisioned.

Rating: 8/10

Cool Quotes (BEWARE SPOILERS - highlight to read):

"Words are names for things. In Plato's time things were names for ideas--what better description of the Platonic Ideal? But were words names for things, or was that just a bit of semantic confusion? Words were symbols for whole categories of things, where a name was put to a single object..."

"But the Greeks were poets three thousand years ago and you are a poet now. You snatch words together over such distance and their wakes blind me. Your thoughts are all fire, over shapes I cannot catch. They sound like music too deep, that shakes me...The 'I' in me is not strong enough to hold them..."