To Infinite and Beyond.

More science fiction.

Before I talk about Babel 17, I am going to talk about A Scanner Darkly which is one of the most bizarre movies I have ever seen. When we watched it in class, I knew I had to finish watching it. A week later, it arrived.

A Scanner Darkly is one of those movies that screws with your mind as much as the characters screw with one another's minds. You have to just roll with it. I think the major theme in the movie is not just paranoia but justified paranoia. You are always being watched, you are always being listened to. The world is a lot like the internet in which someday someone will find something you have done no matter how you try to hide it. Privacy is an invented concept in the modern world, everything is public domain whether you wish to believe it or not. It reminds me of how on deviantart, somebody will steal another person's piece of work, post it on an obscure site and still a hundred people note the artist saying they found it.

The most interesting thing perhaps is how the characters in the movie have no idea that the ring leader of them is actually an agent in disguise. Even worse, the actual government doesn't know that the guy they are looking for is actually their own agent. My favorite part, and most well done, is when they walk into the house and think that they are about to be raided. They go over the possibilities of what might happen, because the door was unlocked, and then they find out it was just the girlfriend. They almost shoot her. You would think with that level of paranoia one of them would have serious health problems beyond the drug issues.

But now onto Babel 17 even though it seems to have little connection to A Scanner Darkly.

It is not a long story but the theme of language and communication is a strong one. When the main character finds what they believe is a code, she realizes it is not a code but actually an alien language that can be used as a weapon. Eventually she is seen as a perhaps traitor and is rescued from danger. Language is often a theme in games as well as books. In many of the modules I have played in Neverwinter Nights, the puzzles consist of deciphering languages that turn to be these ancient powerful civilizations. Many times, like in Shadows of Undrentide, you end up in the wake of that civilization because of your discovery. That is much what happened in Babel 17.