Hot Stuff (May Reading)

[ase]

My to-do list hasn't been stalled by any reluctance to put on real clothes. It has been stalled by 92 degrees of misery with 54% humidity. (In case you missed it, I loathe and abhor any temperature above 80 F when the humidity is above, oh, 20%. Who spent a few formative years in a desert? Hi!) Today may be a good day to learn what bribes my roommates will accept for taxi services.

In the meantime, May reading:

Babel-17 (Samuel Delany): The beautiful poet and genius linguist Rydra Wong is recruited to unravel the other side's code in an interstellar war. Leans on the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to explain how Babel-17 operates. It's also linked to computer languages: thinking in Babel-17 lets Wong analyze and react to situations quickly, but forces its own logical pathways on the thinker. Paired read with Snow Crash?

I was less than impressed by the unending adulation shown to Rydra Wong - can do no wrong, smarter and more beautiful and more understanding than anyone else ever - but wasn't too put off because it was a short novel, and was over before Wong could irritate me too much. Something also distracting was the extensive body modification, which was sort of socially class linked and may be standing in for tattooing, I don't know. I was just distracted because hey, minor surgery! Ow!

Someone lent me two graphic novels, The Tale of One Bad Rat and Fun Home. I tried and failed to read both. Rat nearly got hurled against a wall by spinal reflex for being unexpected Child Abuse Is Bad fiction; I got as far as the back cover copy for Fun Home and nixed it for proximity to Rat, as well as general indifference, before I ever cracked it open. Neither were the fantasy or SF tropes I was expecting.

If I finished anything else, it's been lost in the shuffle. May was nuts and fruitcake and a very short attention span.

Comments

[sraun]

I've read Babel-17 relatively recently, so I have an opinion on the body modification. A large part of it was a stand-in for tattooing, but there were also elements of 'we have computer jack-in technology that takes you out of body, and uses your whole body reactions to control things', and the body modification allowed both the practice of things that you might have to do with a ship that you couldn't otherwise, and the analysis of how good you might be doing that type of thing.

[ase.livejournal.com]

The in-text explanation is reactions and body control, but I still get stuck on the external context (USA, the mid '60s) and what Delaney going for some impressive body modification in that time says. "People are people", I guess.