Rating: 
Summary: empty emptiness empire
Review: imagine SLAVERY this razzle dazzle excess hubrisMIND pondering the termite hive COLORLESS BOND lo lo is a yo hoo BOREdoom imagine reading detail excruciating,cute but deadly ozze light years away from meaningfull, MARRONED ON THIS SHIP WREAK DREK OF SPECULATIVE hyper boil.Space pre adolescent portal SADO MASCO kiss em BOOTs spaceFAIRY wearingBroil,...maybe the STARis on board. what a blastED EMPIRE THIS IS.
Rating:
Summary: empty emptiness empire
Review: imagine SLAVERY this razzle dazzle excess hubrisMIND pondering the termite hive COLORLESS BOND lo lo is a yo hoo BOREdoom imagine reading detail excruciating,cute but deadly ozze light years away from meaningfull, MARRONED ON THIS SHIP WREAK DREK OF SPECULATIVE hyper boil.Space pre adolescent portal SADO MASCO kiss em BOOTs spaceFAIRY wearingBroil,...maybe the STARis on board. what a blastED EMPIRE THIS IS.
Rating: 
Summary: Multi-Plexed Jewels
Review: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Babel-17. And from the Word understanding flowed, and gave substance to the material world. A Symbol: a Name: Rydra Wong. Poet. Cryptologist. Starship Captain. Woman. Co-opted to decipher what Babel-17 is, what meaning it has, what connection there is between war-plant sabotage and the usage of Babel-17. Inside, around, and terminally intermixed with this nominal space opera is the quest to define the relationship between language, symbol, object, and thought process. A quest that flows around surgical body-form manipulation, the senses of the discorporate, succubi , the revival of the dead, love triples, starship pilot wrestling, a society and personality types split between Customs, Transport, and military. All told with Delany's inimitable sense of the English language, with the admirable support of excerpts of Marylyn Hacker's (Delany's then wife) poems. Delany has developed this theme of language as the controlling factor in a person's world map in several books, but this is the only one that I can think of by him or any other author where language is not only a weapon but the main driving force behind the plot. In making his point, he almost goes too far, giving powers of understanding to Babel-17 that stretch the boundaries of believability, although he makes the very relevant point that some concepts cannot (or only with great difficulty) be expressed in some languages, while in other languages the same concept can be expressed very precisely in just a few words. The characters of this book are far more normal than the typical set of Delany people, which is not to say that they are not extremely interesting, engaging, and well presented. And as part of the character set, we learn that Rydra was once part of a love triple, the other members of which, while just names in this book, play a major role in the follow-on novella, Empire Star. Having had your world view expanded by Babel-17, be ready to have it totally turned upside down, twisted into circles and hyperboloids by Empire Star, where a person's world view can be described as simplex, complex, or multi-plex. Here we find Comet Jo, a simplex person who observes an organiform star-ship crash and who is given a message to take to Empire Star by one of the ship's dying members, who looks exactly like himself. In the process of taking the message, we watch as Jo grows to complex, then multi-plex maturity as he meets San Severina, owner of seven Lll slaves (ownership of which causes the owner to experience continuous unbearable sadness), LUMP (a linguistic ubiquitous multi-plex computer), and learns about the battle to free the Lll slaves. But at just about the point where you think you have a standard, straight-forward story, curve-balls of time-travel, causality, and mirrored relationships come to the fore, and twist this story (and by its relation to Babel-17 that story also) into a pretzel of deep complexity that will leave you scratching your head while fully satisfying your emotional requirements. Within these two stories, Delany packs more original ideas than most authors would in ten novels, and does it with great style and panache. Written very early in his career, they fully deserved the Nebula Award and Hugo nominations they received, and read just as well today as when they were first published.
Rating: 
Summary: A gripping space adventure
Review: Samuel R. Delany won the Nebula award for this novel and it is easy to see why. He manages to write an engaging adventure while incorporating many fascinating science fiction ideas and creating engaging characters. His most interesting idea is his exploration of the use of language and it makes you think and view language in a new way. Along with this are exciting weapons, characters and drama which combine to provide exciting action scenes. A novel that has a bit for everyone, adventure, thought provoking ideas and absorbing characters.
Rating:
Summary: Read these when you're twelve
Review: That's when I did, and thought they were wonderful. When I reread them as an adult, I started to see flaws. Delany's prose
is almost poetic and often overshadows everything else in these
novels. Even those Babel-17 was the award-winner, I've always
thought Empire Star was the better of the two books. There are
a lot of good ideas in both--proto-cyberpunk, as it were (the same themes show up in his novel, Nova). But I think it's best to approach these books when you are in your early teens--12 or
13 are the best years, probably.
Rating: 
Summary: unknown places
Review: This being a book with two novels in one cover, so the review sould be about both of them.
Babel-17: Consider this-interstellar war is going on, we have a major problem that only one can solve, incidentally that one is the best poet in the whole universe and one of the best interstallar captains that can tranverse "universes" of different thoughts (racial segregation), so of course she is the only logical solution that fits the parameters we want. She then forms the space crew and they have a lot of fun in the galaxy. To spice things up some more-put a slitle incomprehensible linguistic bable (which makes even less sense if you're linguist) and we have Babel-17. Figure it on you're own do you want to read this or not
Empire Star: Well I didn't really grasp this one. As a novel it simply misses the intended function of novel, neither is fun, neither educates (just to keep in mind those two, most widely respected functions of a novel). But as a parable you could find some sunlight in it. Rather confusing actually and I'm not sure what to reccomend you about this book-read it and see for yourself. (Rating of two stars is for the sake of Babel-17, which got Nebula somehow, and I really do not know who (and in which condition he where) gave it to it)
Rating:
Summary: Muels¿ Multiplex Mentality
Review: This recent pairing of Samuel R. Delany's early classics is a wonderful piece of publication, as the two novellas together make yet a third window on the combined story. Babel 17, The longer of the two, is a narrative of mayhem, murder, mystery, madness, and metaphor. Though shorter (sort of), Empire Star gets in its LUMPs (Linguistic Ubiquitous Multiplex Computers) as well. Delany, anagramatically AKA Muels Aranlyde, writes sagely about the joy of linguistics (in a Whorf-ian sense), the anguish and sadness of slavery, the questing journey, non-standard sexual proclivities, and a whole new slant on death being no excuse to stop working. (Although both treks are aesthetically closer to Road Warrior than Star Wars, George Lucas does seem to have picked up a couple of ideas here, including the famous alien bar scene.) There is one disclaimer: The topologies of Delany's writing are not for everyone. I first discovered his works while I was in college, and found them opaque and self-absorbed. But I would have pored over them earlier, and much later have come to enjoy them all the more, in spite of the flaws. Intensely self-referential long before fractals, chaos theory, and literary necessity made the technique fashionable, this is the thinking person' science fiction at its finest.
Rating:
Summary: Worth reading over and over again
Review: This was my first real SCIence FIction novel, and it got me hooked. I have since found it (the first one was borrowed) and purchased for myself so I could read it again and again. The characters are so real, I could feel what they were going through.
Rating: 
Summary: Original but minimalistic
Review: Who better to write a sci-fi novel about alien linguistics but Samuel R. Delany. Everytime I read one of his books I am both irritated and awed at the same time. Irritated in that his prose is so minimalistic that it robs you of the story; in awe because he does manage to describe a lot with very few words. Babel-17 has many new and original idea (cyberpunk modifying of your bodie, discorporate souls for ship navigation, etc), but it a lot of it gets lost in the eloquent prose. I wish he would have taken a little more time and wrote a little more to flesh out the small world he created in Babel-17. This is definately not Delany's best work. If you want a great space romp that's very similar in style and setting as Babel-17, read Nova.
Rating:
Summary: Original but minimalistic
Review: Who better to write a sci-fi novel about alien linguistics but Samuel R. Delany. Everytime I read one of his books I am both irritated and awed at the same time. Irritated in that his prose is so minimalistic that it robs you of the story; in awe because he does manage to describe a lot with very few words. Babel-17 has many new and original idea (cyberpunk modifying of your bodie, discorporate souls for ship navigation, etc), but it a lot of it gets lost in the eloquent prose. I wish he would have taken a little more time and wrote a little more to flesh out the small world he created in Babel-17. This is definately not Delany's best work. If you want a great space romp that's very similar in style and setting as Babel-17, read Nova.
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