Babel-17

Babel-17, like it's wordplay of a title suggests, focuses heavily on the theme of language, and how it exists as such a vital and complicated facet of society, functioning both verbally and nonverbally to communicate the most complex and nuanced of signals and messages with very slight changes, even through body posture or slight tone of voice. As it is fitting of such a theme, the protagonist is a linguist and writer, and the novel begins and kicks off with her attempting to learn and decipher the language known as Babel-17, an intricate and complicated language that requires intense study to try and decode, and which seems to have some sort of real psychological or supernatural effect on the people who do come to understand it. It doesn't take long for the protagonist to decipher the language, and she soon finds herself with superhuman abilities of the mind, beginning with her being able to read the thoughts of others, and even manipulate time. As the novel progresses Its revealed that the language itself can come to almost control the mind of those who understand it, slowly taking control and making people do awful things they wouldn't normally commit, slowly controlling them, and separating them from the real world. I thought this was a really interesting concept, even though a solid allegory or message, if there is one, seemed to elude me. I kind of interpreted it as the idea of coming to go beyond human understanding, or to at least reach a new level of knowledge, and the sort of danger that could come with it, as well as the inevitable need for power that could come with it.

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