...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...
With the current state of the world right now, I feel that this is a better time than ever to show appreciation for the African American authors of the past and the present. As I looked through the reading list, I came across W.E.B. DuBois' name, along with his work The Comet . Though I had heard of DuBois from my high school history classes, I did not know any of his works. When I saw that The Comet was written in 1920, I wasn't expecting much out of the "sci-fi department". Normally when I think of what defined sci-fi back then, my mind tends to lean towards the film Metropolis . Robots, utopias, weird machines, anything futuristic. How could a single comet compare to that without feeling inferior? It all made sense after I finished reading. The sci-fi element was just the backdrop to the main theme of the story; the comet was the catalyst for the realization that racial discrimination is not only an absurd concept, but it unfortunately takes a serious tragedy for ...
Throughout my journey into The Night Circus , I had only one quote running through my head, and it wasn't even from the novel itself. It was from the first Star Wars prequel: The Phantom Menace, with the quote being Qui-Gon Jinn's, "There's always a bigger fish". At first, it seemed like my brain was just pulling up funny quotes for the hell of it, but the further I read on, the more I realized that it was referring to the amount of manipulation being done by the characters in the story. The story begins with Prospero and the man in the gray suit pulling Celia and Marco's strings, but after the circus is established as the venue, Celia and Marco begin to pull their own strings as well. Soon enough, the entire circus staff is under their control, as well as the exhibitions of the circus itself. Yet, despite manipulation having a negative connotation, there were some people in The Night Circus who used manipulation for good deeds. For example, Celia and Ma...
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