Diego asked you all to post something on a Science Fiction book that was important for or had some sort of relationship with your field of study. As someone who works in the field of Applied Linguistics I guess the futuristic novels I've read which have had the biggest link to this discipline have been A Clockwork Orange and 1984 both of which I read as a teenager (or pre-teen in the case of 1984) but neither of which are classed as pure Science Fiction.
I love the start to 1984:
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansion, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him."
It was glaringly obvious to me that this was futuristic from the first sentence. When I first read this at age 11 or 12 in early 1970's Britain no clock struck thirteen, and, to my knowledge they still don't.
Later down the first page we are introduced to the
Telescreen then on and beyond to other examples of N
ewsspeak such as
blackwhite,
goodsex,
sexcrime and
thoughtcrime to name but a few (a more exhaustive list can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Newspeak_words).
The first edition of A Clockwork Orange that I read had a Glossary of Nadsat Language that Anthony Burgess had created for the story (
http://soomka.com/nadsat.html) - I love the feel of some the words, - droog, horrorshow, nazz, shilarny and yarbles. Unfortunately, the glossary is no longer included in reprints which, to my mind, is a crying shame. What the publishers are thinking is anybody's guess:
