Bable-17

At first when I started reading Bable-17 I was a little skeptical. I was thinking oh great another book where they are going to spend the whole time on a spaceship just drifting through space, but I was pleasantly surprised. Samuel R. Delany brought so much more to the plate than just flying through space.
The first aspect that really sparked my interest were the creatures in the bar. Or, well, humans with cosmetisurgery. I have thought about this concept before so I was thrilled that it was brought up. People have gone beyond just getting simple tattoos, they now are getting horns or tails, or anything else they can imagine being added on to their bodies. I always figured it was a just a matter of time untill this began happening in the real world, and im still waiting. Ill be first in line to get my tail attached....ok maybe not. But the concept seems very plausible and I am glad he decided to include it.
Yet the best part of the book was all of the indepth discussion and theories on language. The theory about language revealing so much about a culture was very interesting. I think it makes perfect sense. They way a group of people speaks dictates the way they think, and if you can learn how a cultures language works, you are indirectly learning how a culture thinks. Such as when Rydra mentioned how some cultures have multiple ways to describe snow where as other cultures may only have one. The more words they have for a certain thing the more important it is in a culture. The whole concept could be taken to many extremes and applied to a variety of things.
Also the other intriguing thing was Rydras ability to "read" people. Sometimes I feel the same way, being able to read what a person is thinking based on their body language and facial expressions. I think that the concept of reading people is very probable. Some people are deffinately better at reading people than others, and the concept that she would have mastered it so well as to form exact sentances seems possible. It is a skill that would be very useful to learn and I am going to start trying to observe and watch people more closely now to try and catch what they are really trying to say, see if I can do it.