Babel-17

Babel-17 (5 Points)

Alright, there is a ton to unpack here. Firstly, I was completely blown away to learn that this book had been written in the 1960s, and went into the reading believing that it was a contemporary work from the writing alone! (Sure the beauty of the main character being described as "Oriental," children playing marbles, and the phrases like "coal scuttle" should have given it away, but I'm fairly bad at distinguishing these things.) Overall the book was a bit in an out for me and felt very much that I was trying to decipher the language of the novel just as much as the main protagonist was trying to learn about Babel-17. While I found the world-building and spectrum of alien characters to be incredibly fascinating, it was also all very terribly confusing. Which lead me to think that this book was published closer to our current time with its explorative and innovative writing techniques. It definitely didn't feel like a realistic science fiction novel, but I felt there were a lot of parallel elements of the book that related to "The Arrival" film which also shares a narrative focus on language and how it affects the human consciousness.

I also want to discuss the fact that the book was very forward when it came to sexuality and the visual presentation of appearances between those of Customs people and Transport people. From what I could gather, the two classes of people distinguished in the novel are people within Transport who are much more fluid in their presentation and sexual orientation, as well as being more comfortable with relationships that were considered highly unorthodox at the time. Customs seemed to be a people that relate more to the reserved Earth societies that stay within heteronormative and monogamous relationships. The Customs officer at the beginning of the book seemed to be very overwhelmed and nervous when it came to Transport establishments and activities, while the main protagonist seemed very open and at ease balancing between the worlds of Customs and Transport. The protagonist was also open to polyamorous relationships that are also found to be common within the navigators of space ships, and had previously been in a relationship with two men and admitted to being more inclined to have a relationship with a man and women in the future.

All of this is pretty mind-boggling and progressive coming from a book written in the 1960s and was also another aspect of what fed my earlier interpretation that this was a modern book. I enjoyed the openness, and how it addressed the inner-working os of societal norm every now and then or left these relationships unaddressed and just another aspect in the world-building that spoke for itself. While I wasn't sure how I felt about resurrecting the dead or recording the paths of human thoughts to be used in the future, I overall enjoyed the work for presenting me either early evidence of humanity leaving the binary and becoming more open to different types of relationships and communication.