Babel-17 (S.F. MASTERWORKS): Samuel R. Delany

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so much so that I wondered if there was some kind of allegory to the sixties I was too thick to get. There were a lot of interesting things here, and I think somebody who is more interested in language than I am and/or appreciates experiments with writing styles more than I do would probably like this more than I did. Rydra has to learn this the hard way when her own ship experiences malfunctions on take-off, leaving them adrift until they manage to get back on course for their destination: the center of weapons production for the Alliance. I think some of my favorite SF/Fantasy stories are the ones that give language a special place in the universe. The Navigator is a set of three people acting in unison, one of whom has to be raised from the dead and only speaks Swahili.

There are some interesting ideas in the narrative around language and the way that the structure of language profoundly influence the way we see and interact with the world but I found myself constantly distracted by elements of the story and its execution that didn’t gel for me.

The problem with Babel-17, which is at first thought by the military to be only a complex code, is that this language can turn people into traitors and weapons. Far from my favourite Delany novel, Babel-17 does confirm, I think, that I prefer his science fiction to his fantasy outings. After several attacks have been made by the invaders who speak Babel-17, she soon realizes the potential of the language to change one's thought process and provide speakers with certain powers, and she is recruited by her government to discover how the enemy is infiltrating and sabotaging strategic sites. I usually don’t mind the way that older SF (this was published in ’66) is often full of temporal markers that give away the era in which it was written. While linguistic relativity and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis remain somewhat controversial, depending on how you define them, their staying power is evident because we are just obsessed with language.

If you bounce hard off stories with no, well, story, just relax, this one's short, rather witty, and unlike anything I've read before. This ‘personality’ has the general desire to destroy the Alliance at any cost, and at the same time remain hidden from the rest of the consciousness until it’s strong enough to take over. She turned to him (as the figure in the mirror behind the counter caught sight of him and turned away), stood up from the stool, smiled. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, and his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. 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.This is the story of her and her crew as they travel through the galaxy investigating the sabotage and coming to an understanding about the saboteurs language that may help them solve the problem affecting the whole of humanity and its allies. While I found the ideas and concepts very interesting and thought provoking I also found the pacing to be a little uneven, a couple of chapters simply dragged, in a short novel like this I expected a tighter narrative.

My main complaint is that the novel is too short and that many of the critical scenes, especially late in the story, disappear into the blank spaces between chapters. This readerly space-travelling pod-confinement inside Delany’s head was a result of the novel itself being a big mental puzzle, or rather the embodiment of an intellectual problem (on deep issues of language and its relation to reality and identity) posed by then solved by Delany. The language portrayed at the center of Babel-17 contains interesting linguistic features including the absence of a pronoun or any other construction for "I".Delany is clearly influenced by the advances happening in computer programming in his time: if we can literally shape the “minds” of our machines depending on the type of programming language we use, could we not shape the minds of people the same way?

There’s adventure and space battles and futuristic technologies with a brilliant female lead character but the book is mostly about language and communication. 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. Given this book's reputation I had been expecting something much more interesting than what was on offer.Delany plays around with the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis, but it's so poorly interpreted to be almost unintelligible. Her love of languages and her fascination with this particularly unique language leads her to get directly involved in seeking it out and learning more about it, and the rest of the story spurs off from there.