Ace Books first published Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany in the United States in 1966, when the writer was 24 years old. By my count he had already published six previous novels. (Dare I bore readers of this review with the obvious declaration that is standard of any retrospective assessment of Delany’s work; that he was a true SF prodigy?) Babel-17 was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1967 and tied with Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes for the Nebula Award that same year. By reputation, the book is considered one of the highlights in an impressive oeuvre. Nevertheless, while many elements of this particular book worked well for me, I found Babel-17 didn’t quite live up fully to its reputation, largely due to some conceptual and stylistic excesses, as well as a disappointing final act.Delany doesn’t provide much in the way of exposition in the book’s opening passages, but he does provide just enough detail to effectively evoke the future galactic society in which the book is set. The setup is relatively simple, but the plot hook is intriguing. An intergalactic realm known as the Alliance is under attack from another intergalactic realm called the Invaders. The Alliance has recently picked up a number of mysterious radio broadcasts in an apparently alien language concurrently with several sabotage attacks by the Invaders. Rydra Wong, a former code breaker and ship’s captain, turned famous poet, is enlisted by the Alliance to crack the alien language, which is known as Babel-17. In order to complete this mission she must gather a crew and travel to the site of Invader’s next attack in Alliance space.For an sf book nearing fifty years of age, much of Babel-17 still retains a modern feel; certainly more so than many books of a similar vintage. I would argue that this is because Delany’s interest is extrapolating cultural elements into the realm of the wilfully weird, rather than any foolhardy attempt at a prediction about the future. Delany weaves various strange subcultures into his galactic future setting; for example, there are the spacefarers who work in Transport for the Alliance, for whom outlandish and surreal body modifications achieved through cosmetic surgery are common and akin to contemporary tattoos. Likewise, Delany posits a society in which the consciousness of dead people becomes technological ghosts known as discorporates, and are used to perform sensory roles on ships that no corporates can perform without going insane. Delany certainly has a knack for creating gritty societies fully inhabiting a used-future setting.Whilst female representation is still too rare in contemporary sf novels (though arguably improved and hopefully still improving compared to the Sixties), I don’t think it’s debatable to say that in decades past worthy female characters were dismally under-represented in sf literature. This makes Wong a refreshing protagonist. What’s more, in a worthy display of diversity it’s clear she is Eastern in ethnicity (as depicted on the very first Ace Books cover, though successive editions have white-washed her) (though Delany does use the term ‘Oriental’, which dates the book somewhat). The novel is also ahead of its time in the representation of polyamorous and pansexual relationships as a normal part of society. The unique character of Wong is a central part of the book and she is a vehicle for Delany to explore his thematic concerns. Orphaned during an embargo related to an Invader attack, Wong was infected as a small child by a neuro-sciatic plague that left her in an autistic state; she emerged after a miraculous recovery with total verbal recall, learning seven Earth languages and five extra-terrestrial tongues by the time she was twelve. Using her incredible aptitude for languages and a hidden telepathic ability (a Sixties sf cliché I could have done without) to read the unexpressed thoughts of other people, Wong has become a famous poet and a cultural hero within the Alliance. I found the admiration for a poet in this future galactic society stretched credulity a tad, but certainly convenient for the major theme of the book.You see, Babel-17 is an sf novel about the concept of linguistic relativity; a principle that holds the structure of a language affects the ways in which its respective speakers conceptualize their world. To me, this is a fascinating premise on which to build an sf novel, rife with possibilities to explore the way worldview is influenced by cognitive processes related to language. Delany alternates between playful thought experiments and goofy fun, sometimes pushing the concept into the preposterous. For example, it’s hard to swallow that an individual who does not know a word for ‘I’ would have no sense of self, as Delany posits. Likewise, I suffered from bad Matrix flashbacks when, by forcing her cognitive processes to operate in a super concise and economical language, Wong is able to enter what is effectively bullet time in a vibro-gun fight against a group of Invaders. Like I say, you can read these passages as charming and ludicrous fun; though I got the sense Delany intended these ideas to be taken a little more seriously than I was able to.With a preference for tighter plotting and efficient storytelling, I was grateful that this book is slicker and more streamlined than many of today’s sf clodhoppers. However, contemporary readers should be forewarned that the book, as a work concerned with language, is deliberately overwritten in places, with imagery and metaphors that seem to have been ripped straight from some trippy, drug-fuelled poetry of the Sixties. In fact, there is a scene halfway through the book that I found symbolic of Delany’s prose style throughout the book: during an Invader attack a machine that serves food at a banquet goes haywire, continuously serving opulent and nauseating food until it is piled high and overflowing from the table. In small morsels, Delany’s rich and energetic prose style throughout the novel can be quite delicious, but, taken in large quantities, stylistically the novel leaves you with a distinct feeling of overindulgence.Despite my reservations about some of the zany carry-ons and stylistic idiosyncrasies, the delicious mystery of the plot carried me through the novel, with its central question: what is Babel-17? Perhaps the most unsatisfactory aspect of the novel, however, is the resolution. The ending is marred with long tracts of clunky expository dialogue, and the solution to the mystery of the alien language relies on contrivance and coincidence. It was impossible for me to close the final page of the novel without a slight feeling of deflation.Despite this, Babel-17 is a book that makes me interested in reading more Delany. Reading it in a contemporary context, the features that made the book so cutting-edge and groundbreaking in the Sixties are apparent, and the book has hardly dated at all in my appraisal. Some of the endearing goofiness is probably unintended and the style was occasionally a bit chewy for my liking, but if Delany had been able to stick the landing of his ingenious central conceit I would have been on the bandwagon with many others, proclaiming this a masterwork of sf. As it is, I can really only say this a good and fun book, marred by a flawed final act.
Babel-17 is one of the greatest classics in the history of literary SF, and I now know why. Delany is a veritable genius - what we gush about today in Mieville is but a more sophisticated, more complex offshoot of Delany's ingenious conceptions of making the abstract concrete.Language is what defines us, our thoughts, our perceptions. What separates our critical thinking processes is the perception of I as different from you, the awareness of an independent conscious existenceWhat happens when you are stripped of your language and embedded with another language replete with its own dominant ideology? Language, we know by now, is far from innocent. It is a political tool, a vehicle to convey a specific political ideology across a whole population. Language is an infection - those bred in a specific language are infected with its prejudices and conditionings. With its conceptions of right and wrong, friend and foe. Language is culture. Culture is politics. And politics is power. Alter the language, and you alter the consciousness of an individual - or even a group.Thematically, the novel addresses the question of how language determines our perception of our world, even before we consciously decide what our beliefs are. Language is the subconscious that invisibly and imperceptibly controls and instructs our seemingly conscious, rational mind.Babel-17 opens with the protagonist, the poet Rydra Wong being assigned a top military task of decoding the mysterious code Babel-17 that is found out to be the signal by which the Invaders, a collections of some planets far in the Galaxy are attacking and destroying the Alliance, another collection of planets. Taking a crew with her, she decides to board a spaceship that will take her at the place of the next intended attack, so she can decipher the radio-frequency language at the site of destruction.Wong discovers, with her knack for language, that Babel-17 is not a code, but an unknown analytical artificial language invented by the Invaders. But as she progresses in understanding the language, it begins to change her. From a supporter of the Alliance, she begins to become a traitor without realizing it, under the influence of the strange language - the language without the concept of I.It is astounding how Delany conjured up such a philosophical concept and pinned it down so concretely in the story, without making any of the explanations given above. To do that is a rare feat, to get the idea across without elaborating on it, simply through the story. Even with minimal world-building and dashes of clean, but sparkling humor throughout the work, the novel never loses focus, yet never, despite the complex theme, linger heavy upon the mind.Coming to the technical part of the writing process, the novel was the most interesting in the beginning and the end - the middle part slowed down, since there was more confusion as to what was going wrong with the ships hurled in and out of the Novae. Not that the interest seems to be flagging, but the sparkling curiosity seems to dim down in the middle.The humor was hilarious - James Bond as a mythological creature! References to Shakespeare and Baudelaire as ancient poets ;)The science part is less even - I assume a few thousand years later, radios will be so outdates as to be not understood by that generation, let alone be in use. True, it was written in the 60s, but it could have been more imaginative, for sure. But this is only the most minor fault - better to be ignored in a masterful work as this.For sure, we know now where Embassytown got its inspiration from - the latter is far more lucid, sophisticated, thematically complex and brilliantly conceived than Babel-17, but Babel-17 appeared half a century earlier, when Language and Politics were still a radical combination, a new thought.Babel-17 sure deserves the accolades it has received and stands as a landmark work in the history of sensible, literary SF.
Do You like book Babel-17 (1978)?
I don't get this book.Worse, I don't buy its setting. If it was comedy or possibly allegory, fine. But it seems to be Big Idea SF. Or is it? It's so preposterous and baroque (it's even got ghosts) that I'm not sure. I don't find it particularly funny anyway.Still worse, the ending is painfully bad. Exposition! The mysteries are revealed! Lots of books are like this but this time we get preached bad science and plain nonsense. The final clever trick theatratically revelead to the reader involves among other terrible plot devices... a mind moving form one part of the brain to the other by making new neural connections! And even if you grant its preposterous premises, some the exposition doesn't make sense anyway.Part of the problem with Babel-17 is how dated it's become. Some SF and/or fantasy written around the same time has aged pretty well so that's not a given.The cryptography in the first chapter must have been dated even when the book was written. In the 21st century, it's become simply laughable. Add to that the notion of a society so technologically advanced and energy-rich that it borders on the preposterous would suffer from famines and the first 15 pages or so already had me in a critical mood.The pervasiveness of 20th century culture in a story purporting to be set in humanity's far future was also an annoyance... so much so that I wondered if there was some kind of allegory to the sixties I was too thick to get.That said, there's much to like about Babel-17. It's often a pleasant and colorful read. I guess it could be a good read if you were willing to suspend your critical faculties.It's also an influential book so I guess it's worth reading for those interested in the history of SF, intertextuality and all that stuff.
—Outis
I have always believed that the language you speak determines the way you think. How else can it be, really? I am a trilingual person who has quite a few monolingual family members, and I can't even tell you how many times in frustrated fascination I have contemplated the peculiarities of languages, the plays on words that are often impossible to translate, the confusing idioms, and the frustrating lack of certain concepts in one language as compared to another. So many times I realized that merely voicing a concept in a different language changes your understanding of it, its connotation, and therefore the parts of its meaning. Something can be well-intentioned in one language and come off as condescending or rude or dismissive in another. Once you think about it - how much of the stereotype of Italians being passionate and loving, or the Germans being regimented and strict, or the French being seductive comes from the mere way their language sounds to the ears of the observer? Indeed, what you speak determines in part who you are. Because can you even conceive of something when there is no way to express it?"She taught him how to say I and you. They wandered through the graveyard in evening, and we hovered over them while they taught each other who they were."Ever since my teens, I have been fascinated by Samuel Delany's Babel-17, a sci-fi classic about an eponymous mysterious alien language that Rydra Wong, a poet far in the future in the middle of intergalactic war, is trying to decipher. This book has more than just linguistic appeal, however, - it details the futuristic society with genetic engineering, changed concepts of love, star ships, stellar battles, futuristic technology (of course, now riddled with unavoidable anachronisms, but fascinating nevertheless), discorporate members of the society - all this told through Delany's vivid haunting imagery, told in the language that shifts between crisp and poetic, fluidly transitioning between scenes and concepts, illustrated by modernistic and surreal poems at the beginning of each section.But even by my mid-teens I have read many books that belonged to the excellent science fiction tradition. What impressed me about this one, what set this particular book apart for the language-nerdy daughter of a literature teacher was exactly the portrayal of language in it, the mystery of the highly analytical Babel-17, the allure and the power the language has over people, their perception of the world, even their own selves. "Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases of the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid. If there's no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn't the proper form, you don't have the how even if you have the words."Rydra Wong, the protagonist of this short novel, is a poet revered at the either side of the war, known and loved by the white and blue collar people alike (or, in the language of this world, the Customs and the Transport). She is strong, fiercely intelligent, and competent - a remarkable thing for a sci-fi novel written in 1960s, a time dominated by strong sci-fi manly men who usually got rewarded with beautiful sci-fi cardboard-cutouts women. She excels at reading people, their innermost thoughts and desires - be that through muscle movements or telepathy. As she cracks open the mystery of Babel-17, she discovers more about her inner world as well as some other deep secrets - revealed through the sheer power of language. And the way Delany gives us the glimpse into her - her mind, her reasoning, her perceptions - is so vivid and sophisticated that its almost unsettling, and begs for the reread of certain sections before moving on."You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them."I figured out a big part of the conflict of the book rather early on, but it did not detract in the slightest from being fascinated and enthralled by it, and the fascination did not decrease at all during the reread. The ending is the only part that I have some qualms with - it felt a bit too rushed, too convenient, and lacking a bit compared to the wonder of the story leading up to the resolution. Thus, reluctantly, I have to take off a star.======================================================I loved this book when I first read it as a teenager, funnily enough, translated into a different language than it was written in. Loved it when I re-read it now, in its original language. A masterfully written and smart sci-fi book about the power of language - what's not to love? Wonderful "vintage" sci-fi, a classic that has aged well despite the unavoidable anachronisms. 4 well-deserved stars."Growing older I descended November.The asymptotic cycle of the yearplummets to now. In crystal reveriesI pass beneath a fixed white line of treeswhere dry leaves lie for footsteps to dismember.They crackle with a muted sound like fear.I ask cold air, "What is the word that frees?"The wind says, "Change,"and the white sun, "Remember."
—Nataliya
Samuel R. Delany was always one of the great wasted talents of sci-fi. In the very early Sixties, he was one of the first writers to bring a deliberately literary edge to sci-fi, to try to go beyond the hard-science, alien invasion, starship wars conventions of the genre. Delany's early books just turned genre tales inside out, and by the time he reached "The Einstein Intersection" and "Nova" at decade's end, he was writing beautiful, eerie, thought-provoking tales that let you feel part of new and very different worlds. Then, somewhere in the early '70s, Delany decided that he was now an Important Literary Voice and wrote bloated, pretentious, verbose, damn-near-unreadable things like "Dhalgren" and "Triton". Call it Harlan Ellison Disease or Norman Mailer Syndrome, Delany just ceased to be readable at all and became a sci-fi convention talking head and a 92nd St. Y Poetic Voice... (This was all at the same time that Roger Zelazny, another fine writer in the mid-60s, sold out to doing endless fantasy series hackwork) So--- let's pretend that Delany died in 1970, shall we? If we do that, "Babel-17" becomes a climactic work, a finely-woven, witty, oddly adventurous tale of languages and linguistics, of the semiotics of warfare and trade and politics, of poetry and intrigue. It can stand with "Einstein Intersection" and the earlier "Empire Star" as one of the key "new sci-fi" works of the era. Read it, delight in its poet-heroine, and pretend that Delany died before throwing his talent away.
—DoctorM
