Two of the Books I've Read Since June 18 (or Thereabouts)
last few weeks have just been more sci-fi. i think because if i'm going to read a "story," right now i'd at least like for it to be taking place in some other world, or time, and to have a sort of infrastructure built around it that's interesting to think about. i told a friend that i didn't feel like reading "about Johnny and His Dog Up in New Hampshire." friend told me "Johnny and His Dog" is a great book, and i shouldn't knock it. but he was being sarcastic. anyway here are two of the books i've read in the last few weeks (or one and a half books, really, since the second was a novella):
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
i got this for 3 reasons: 1) the name. it sounded cool. stuff about Babel is often interesting. 2) the cover looked cool. it didn't look like a lot of the other sci-fi crap that's out there ("out there" being on the shelves at local bookstores...i don't go for books with pictures of dudes with laser guns on spaceships). 3) having been attracted to the name and the cover, i saw that it won Nebula Award in 1966 and was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1967. books that win/are nominated for those awards are usually decent.
and it was decent. it was short. more interesting than the story itself was the ideas he used them to talk about (perfect example of why i like sci-fi). Language (hence, BABEL) was the background here. how languages, the words we use, affect, form, and either Limit or Enhance the ways we think, the cultures and traditions that our communities develop and live by, the concepts we can grasp, and maybe even speed/efficiency with which we can Act. that's some deep shit, right? i thought so. word i learned that i'd never known before: PLOSIVE. Plosives are Plosives are oral stops with a pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. in English these are letter-sounds like P, T, K and N. some languages don't have them. or don't have some of them. which makes it really hard for those people to speak English.
Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany -- this novella was attached to the end of Babel-17, so i read it. it was fun. it dealt with, i think, Time...or a sort-of never-ending timeloop in which events kept occurring only a little bit differently with each repetition. as if time were running on a Möbius Strip around the universe. samuel r. delany is a Lit Prof at Temple. he's got a nice beard, lots of books, and a somewhat interesting biography:
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
i got this for 3 reasons: 1) the name. it sounded cool. stuff about Babel is often interesting. 2) the cover looked cool. it didn't look like a lot of the other sci-fi crap that's out there ("out there" being on the shelves at local bookstores...i don't go for books with pictures of dudes with laser guns on spaceships). 3) having been attracted to the name and the cover, i saw that it won Nebula Award in 1966 and was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1967. books that win/are nominated for those awards are usually decent.
and it was decent. it was short. more interesting than the story itself was the ideas he used them to talk about (perfect example of why i like sci-fi). Language (hence, BABEL) was the background here. how languages, the words we use, affect, form, and either Limit or Enhance the ways we think, the cultures and traditions that our communities develop and live by, the concepts we can grasp, and maybe even speed/efficiency with which we can Act. that's some deep shit, right? i thought so. word i learned that i'd never known before: PLOSIVE. Plosives are Plosives are oral stops with a pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. in English these are letter-sounds like P, T, K and N. some languages don't have them. or don't have some of them. which makes it really hard for those people to speak English.
Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany -- this novella was attached to the end of Babel-17, so i read it. it was fun. it dealt with, i think, Time...or a sort-of never-ending timeloop in which events kept occurring only a little bit differently with each repetition. as if time were running on a Möbius Strip around the universe. samuel r. delany is a Lit Prof at Temple. he's got a nice beard, lots of books, and a somewhat interesting biography: