Across the Empty Quarter by Wilfred Thesiger

Across the Empty Quarter
Wilfred Thesiger, 1959/2007, 96p

This very thin volume is actually an excerpt from Thesiger's Arabian Sands¹ (I believe), and it starts and ends in the middle of a much longer narrative. While this means that the first section directly refers to text and events not available, and the last section ends on a notable cliffhanger, I enjoyed the selection. Removed from the larger context, it was easy to submerge into the writing and the experience, even if the overall journey was unclear. It had the feel of reading a diary, with the daily conflicts, rations and mood audited serially.

I have read very little colonial explorer non-fiction, and this work is a fairly late example of this genre². Thesiger is relatively free of condescension and while he is enamoured with his surroundings, he doesn't wash them in a romantic light. When he sees brutality or foolishness, he is cautious to put it in contrast with the range of his experience in the area (the Arabian desert).

An interesting journey into culture and region now highly transformed³, and also into a type of tourism now long gone.

Notes:

1. Arabian Sands is still in print from Penguin. The Penguin Great Journey series was a selection of short works generally culled from other materials that represented interesting historical travel writing, including contributions from Mark Twain, Herodotus and Anton Chekhov among others. The series book design is lovely. Oddly, despite only being published in 2007, they all appear to be out of print now.
2. The travels discussed here were from 1945-1949, with the writing first published a decade later, though obviously heavily based on notes written in the field.
3. I have briefly visited nearby Dubai and Abu Dhabi, (which of course are coastal emirates and I would be a fool to confuse these with the desert nomads he writes about,) and the transformational pressures of the last half-century are obvious and at most times surreal.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

Babel-17
Samuel R. Delany, 1966, 173p.

Rydra Wong (space-captain/poet/linguist) adventures into space in the midst of a galactic war to track down the source of a new, compelling language. This is science fiction that explores linguistics, specifically the notion that language and perception are tightly coupled. What if languages were designed that allowed new ideas to be formed? What if you could design a language that wouldn't just enable certain thoughts, but would indeed require these thoughts? Would languages that didn't include notions of independent first and second person subjects make you anti-social? Modern linguists would likely dismiss this, but people who work with software developers are forced to consider the question more seriously.

Like a lot of hard science fiction from the 1960s, the science being explored has moved on. But the exploration remains interesting because there is depth to both the writing and the universe. The author's background in the humanities means that there are credible cultures and variations in species and location, credible challenges with languages.

On the downside, the background is a bit more rich than the author can sustain, and some of the business around the discorporate beings is frankly silly and offhand. Overall, fresh, interesting and worthwhile short novel that has aged surprisingly well for something that has had the science move on underneath it.

Notes:

1. The edition I have was published back-to-back with Empire Star, another short novel by Delany at the same time. My wife and I both read that story on our 2009 spring migratory bird trip in the back of our camper. My wife reviewed that novel at the time. The two works are quite different, both in style and in universe, but they do connect, in that Empire Star is mentioned as a story written by Rydra Wong in Babel-17.