setting up your razor-wire shrine

[cimorene]

empire star. samuel r delany again. i am so fucking. dizzy. with the. rightness and paradox of it.

writers like this make literary criticism utterly superfluous and everything i read makes me fall more deeply in love. i'm so inspired i can't breathe. and i've got to do this japanese before i write. *grits teeth*

Comments

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

Empire Star! I loved Empire Star!

I wish that I could still read Babel-17 without suffering serious cognitive dissonance. Such a perfect space opera. And full of so many linguistic errors that he could have so easily avoided if he'd just done his research.

Later Delaney is kind of scattershot for me-- some, like Stars in my Pocket, I enjoy, and some, like Triton, just leaves me bored and vaguely weirded out. But early Delaney is wonderful.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

babel-17's my favorite book ever.

he knows more about linguistics than i do, anyway.

but i guess the errors don't matter much to me anyway because... you know. artistic licence. it does quite a good job of being about the nature of language.

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

The odd thing is, I'm perfectly willing to grant him artistic license for the story as a whole-- I mean, the crux of the book is a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which is, quite simply, complete rubbish, but that doesn't bother me any more than SF built around impossibilities of physics or biology does. But the mistakes he makes with a lot of the little details just throw me out of the story. I can believe in Rydra Wong when she's learning a language in days or being telepathic, but not when she's claiming that voicing isn't phonemic for dental fricatives in English. I really wish I wasn't thrown by such picky details, because in general I love the book.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

yes, sapir-whorf stuff--and that does bother me--okay, well, i absolutely despise it. but... i don't know why it didn't bother me. i suppose i'm lucky not to have noticed the other factual errors. my delight with the book was more about the love story.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

also, i love triton. impresses the hell out of me.