Babel-17

Babel-17 failed to connect with me. I felt this classic is way past it sell by date. Since it's mainly a book about ideas, the ideas must remain fresh and crisp for a 21st century reader to enjoy it. Sadly, this isn't the case. The most focussed on ideas in the book are about the nature of language. Even when reading it in 1966, I doubt that someone with a fairly basic knowledge of language philosophy could have enjoyed this. It's not so much the matter that the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been discredited to some degree, but it's simply just the general sloppiness of the ideas and little tidbits about language Babel-17 tries to force feed you. I'll briefly illustrate that with 2 examples... (...)

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