Finished about 2 weeks ago, around end-Mar 2005.

The first book I’ve attacked in my quest for linguistics-based scifi. So far, most books seem to be fascinated by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which basically says that our languages dictate how we think. Babel-17 adopts a strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A poet/cryptographer figures out the structure of this supremely analytic language, Babel-17. When she thinks in this language, she has to think in a certain way. I didn’t really buy the premise, it seems to me that since she knows a bunch of other languages fluently (and Babel-17 is far from her native language!) that she would be able to borrow concepts from the others into Babel-17 and break out of the mould. But anyway, this book is certainly thought-provoking.

The book I read contained only “Babel-17” and not “Empire Star”, so I haven’t any idea about the latter.