...but words can manipulate you and turn you into a traitor against your own starship crew. In all seriousness though, Babel-17 was a very strange read for me. Reading this novel right after The Martian was a huge change of pace. While in The Martian I felt that I had a clear picture of Mark Watney's surrounding environment and predicament, I felt like I was walking through a haze while reading Babel-17 . All the stuff about body modifications, and futuristic starships, and the whole concept of a "triple" not registering to me as a form of three-way relationship until I looked it up, it was very confusing. And yet throughout all the haze of world-building exposition, the one thing that stood out to me the most was the concept of using language and words as a weapon. At first I was surprised at Samuel R. Delany's choice to use a language as the main conflict of the novel. Normally when you think of space adventures, you would picture the main sourc...
I love the ocean. I love it so much that before I wanted to become an artist, I wanted to be a marine biologist. I wanted to explore the deep sea and discover all the weird and disgusting creatures that lived down there. I even got my scuba diving license at 11 years old- that's how committed I was. Of course, that plan didn't pan out the way I had anticipated when I was younger, but reading Gyo brought me back to that time where I was a wide-eyed girl with a serious passion for the sea. For many people, this work would absolutely deter them from ever taking another trip to the beach, in fear of some fish scuttling up to them on spindly limbs. But we know that won't happen, since the legs that the fish were using were machines that were made during WWII. Obviously, the Japanese made no such invention during the war in our world. But I think what makes this manga extra scary is how it plays into our innate fear of the unknown. According to ...
Oops. After reading a good chunk of Mona Lisa Overdrive and STILL not understanding the world and the people in it, I eventually relented and googled the book's plot, only to find that it was the LAST BOOK in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. No wonder I was so confused. Thankfully, I wasn't the only one confused, which was why I could fully relate to Kumiko Yanaka and her story in the novel. Kumiko was basically thrown into the story with zero knowledge of what was going on around her. Her father shipped her off to England while he dealt with some Yakuza business, leaving her all alone and alienated in her new surroundings. Fortunately, she meets Sally Shears (who I read was actually named Molly Millions from the first books... which I SHOULD'VE read...), who drags her around London to meet with people with weird names. Even in her chapters, Kumiko feels like an outsider looking in, with Sally feeling like more of a star, most likely because...
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