Well this is definitely weird. Railsea by China Mieville is essentially a modern-fantasy take on Moby Dick, with trains and giant moles instead of ships and giant whales. But that’s not all, this Earth exists in a world where aliens visited many years ago and now the world is polluted beyond repair, haunted by gargantuan beasts. The setting is very interesting, but I’m not super fond of all of the characters aside from Sirocco, which made Railsea very difficult to read for very long.
The idea of using language as a weapon is incredibly bizarre and I wouldn’t have thought a book would try to tackle the concept, but hey, Babel 17 does just that. Now, I have heard of the concept before but only in the video game Metal Gear V: The Phantom Pain where the story was, well, bad. The idea was that a disease of some sort was spread by an underground military group and this disease would respond to a certain language spoken by killing the host. Not a bad idea, but it wasn’t explored to its full potential. At least now I know where Metal Gear potentially got the idea. Babel-17 approaches the “weaponized language” concept in a different direction as it’s more of a boon to the user than a bane. Someone who learns the language Babel-17 has their brain rewired to think in the language, which is so precise that the user can think a mile-a-minute and describe intricate scenes in mere moments. Babel-17 tackles the concept of the self and whether we as people can ever truly un...
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