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

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What's happening at the Toronto Film Fest?". USA Today. 17 September 2006 . Retrieved 25 October 2015. DVD / Home Video Rentals, Feb. 19-25, 2007". Box Office Mojo. February 2007. Archived from the original on 11 March 2007 . Retrieved 25 October 2015. I think some of my favorite SF/Fantasy stories are the ones that give language a special place in the universe. Bene Gesserit witches commanding people with "the Voice." Wizards in the world of Earthsea practicing magic by knowing something's "true name." Add to that list "Babel-17," a language so analytically precise it can give you telepathic-like abilities. At the heart of this fictional language is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which (in my crude layman's simplification) is the idea that your language shapes who you are and how you see not only the world, but yourself. This intriguing idea immediately brought to mind the movie "Arrival" from last year, which was based on a SF story with similar themes. Others have noted the same, and view "Babel-17" as a kind of literary seed for such material.

The film extras portraying migrants in the Mexico shooting were real immigrants hired by the production company. [ citation needed] Funding [ edit ] Far more pernicious in political practice is this novel's thesis on language. The idea that language is absolutely constitutive of consciousness, after being vulgarized and garbled, becomes today's argument that language is literally a vector of violence, that words have power to obliterate identity, to deal irrecoverable psychic wounds. But if this is true, then the basis of democratic, liberal society falls away, because the point of such a society is to sublimate literal violence into discourse and dispute, to use language as a field wherein extra-linguistic reality may be recognized, interpreted, and only then imaginatively transformed. If words are weapons, then all we have are weapons. The social becomes a scramble of all against all, a zero-sum contest to control reality, which language has the putatively absolute power to do. Far from bringing peace, the claim that language speaks us rather than the reverse promises only war. Pensar em Babel-17 era como ver de repente todo o trajeto dentro da água até o fundo de um poço que, um momento atrás, você acreditava ter apenas alguns metros de profundidade. Ela cambaleou, tonta”.

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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: Rafferty, Terrence (19 October 2006). "Dueling auteurs: Whose movie is it?". International Herald-Tribune. Archived from the original on 16 November 2006 . Retrieved 16 November 2006.

Poulaki, Maria (2014). "Network films and complex causality". Screen. 55 (3): 394. doi: 10.1093/screen/hju020. This is the story of her and her crew as they travel through the galaxy investigating the sabotage and coming to an understanding about the saboteurs language that may help them solve the problem affecting the whole of humanity and its allies. She assembles a motley crew of cosmetic/surgically altered humans and a number re-animated dead people for her star ship, and a rip roaring adventure ensues. One Çiribian can slither through that plant and then go describe it to another Çiribian who never saw it before so that the second can build an exact duplicate, even to the color the walls are painted—and this actually happened, because they thought we’d done something ingenious with one of the circuits and wanted to try it themselves—where each piece is located, how big it is, in short completely describe the whole business, in nine words. Nine very small words, too.” So here I am 24 hours later, and I'm still undecided. It was a really interesting book. Some people have delved deeply into the linguistic nuances of this book and I have to admire both their knowledge and insight, to me though it was just a well written book, with the interesting linguistic focus.But eventually Rydra's ship, the aptly-named Rimbaud, is captured due to a mysterious traitor onboard. Our heroes end up on another spacecraft at an aristocratic dinner party eventually broken up—in a passage of delicious decadence—by terrorist sabotage. Better than quoting the text alone, I will quote Ted Gioia's amusing commentary on it: A materialist, Delany rejects evil and good and the soul as metaphysical entities, whereas the Catholic gnostic Morrison certainly does not, nor do many great novelists who fall afoul of Delany's basically Marxist commitments, from Dostoevsky to Coetzee. (By the way: 1997, the year Delany wrote his criticism of The Bluest Eye, was also the year Morrison published her late, underrated masterpiece, Paradise: in this novel, she seems to take Delany's side against her own younger self and to recant the implicit ethno-nationalism and inverted colorism of her early fiction.) Babel - Awards". Movies & TV Dept. The New York Times. 2015. Archived from the original on 18 February 2015 . Retrieved 25 October 2015. I just made it up. But what it stands for is quite real, and well worth an article. I don't think they could even comprehend it. But from now on, I shall refer to it as Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavdqx, and there are two of us who know the word now--so it's valid." 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.

Fun discussion of language with a bit too much going on without investing in character. Love the linguistics, the protagonist, and the style. Interesting discussion of linguistic relativism, cultural relativism, and the odder parts of our social realm. Brain Uploading: Spacecraft crew (and presumably others) who die are often able to go on serving as crew after death if they are able to have their brains uploaded. They are called "the deceased" and can only interact via computer interfaces, but can still be valued crew members. But it isn’t the kind of science fiction that’s all about the ideas either. There are exciting adventures and wonderful characters and fascinating worldbuilding and testing scientific ideas to destruction, which as a set of things is pretty much a definition of science fiction. But it’s a very unusual book. Just people who can find pleasure with unconventional works and don´t care about writing and genre conventions will be happy with this work, as the effort to read this relatively short book shouldn´t be underestimated, but the impacts it had on Sci-Fi is amazing:retrospective review by Jo Walton: "Babel 17 was published in 1966, the year in which I learned to talk." All in all, I thought it was an interesting (if implausible) concept, executed well. Computers were new, and programming them was cool. People started talking about brains as if they were computers; starting in the early 1960s, Noam Chomsky popularized his theory of syntax and universal grammar, where people were born with the facility for language programmed into their brains and all we had to do was be exposed to it and all the right switches would then be set for whatever language our parents spoke to us. And of course, Sapir-Whorf was trendy. Put all three of these things together, and you get Babel-17.