Babel-17/Empire Star: Nebula Award Winner

Rydra Wong is a poet - the poet of her generation, though only in her twenties, with a readership spanning five galaxies. Her readership also spans two sides of an interstellar war. Because of her past skills at decryption and current skills in many human languages, her help is asked in decoding messages that precede devastating acts of sabotage against our side. Rydra discovers that codename Babel-17 is no mere cipher. It's a language instead, with its own words, grammar, and lethal internal logic. Rydra chases Bable-17 in a trail of sabotage across the star-streams, learning bits and pieces of the language as she goes. Every fact that sheds light on the language only darkens the real mystery: who speaks this language? And why? It's a slim book, but dense. Fast-paced adventure pulls the reader along, with plenty of worthwhile characters along the way. Delany's writing is so good that we really care about that mousy little bureaucrat who approves Rydra's star flight. We also get a genuinely sick chill from the head of the weapons lab - as well we should, from the hypocritical genteelness of a man so dedicated to death en masse. There's an extra in this book, like the flip side of an old Ace Double. That's Empire Star, a novella with many themes of personal becoming: slavery ending, an urchin rising from the gutter, and a princess seeking her birthright. The storytelling is highly nonlinear, a fact that explains much but becomes apparent only towards the end. I never found a satisfactory resolution within this story, though. Although Babel-17 is truly memorable, Empire Star is not. Babel-17 instantly became one of my favorites when I first read it. A new reading, years later, shows why. I never know whether an old favorite will live up to my memory of it, but this one certainly does. //wiredweird

After reading Dhalgren, this novel is just like summer beach reading. Not that it's easy, but for the most part the effort is worth it. One of the few SF books to deal with the relatively esoteric topic of language and how it defines us (which really seems to be a natural SF topic, being that they deal with aliens and stuff so much), something it sort of shares with Ian Watson's The Embedding. Delany however won a deserved Nebula for this book (actually he tied with Flowers for Algernon, also a fine book, but as different from this as can be), which probably wasn't at all what readers were expecting in 1966 when this was published. But who cares what the readers want, as long as it's good? And this is. As I mentioned before it's a mediation on how language defines us, both to ourselves and in relation to other people, all cloaked in a Space Opera type story. The Invaders (who are never really seen, weirdly enough, but I think they're human) are attacking the Alliance and are using a mysterious weapon called Babel-17. What is it? Nobody is really sure so the military recruits famous poet Rydra Wong to figure out what's going on. She has little idea either but has come closer than most people. What follows is layer upon layer of story as Ms Wong examines her own life as she tries to unravel the mystery of Babel-17, examining both the roots of language and doing her best not to get killed. Rydra is a rarity in SF, a three dimensional woman who stands on her own as a strong character who doesn't come across as an emotional maelstrom or an ice-cold witch. She's one of the most enjoyable and well-rounded characters to come down the pipeline in SF and there are very few characters since who can match up to her. Delany's story just a bit wacky toward the end and he makes up more than a few SF twists to explain the ending but the story holds together really well and it has brains and a soul underneath all the deep thinking. It's also very short, so all the people scared off by Dhalgren can come over here and see what the man can do in small doses. Then they can move on to the big stuff.

This recent pairing of Samuel R. Delany's early classics is a wonderful piece of publication, as the two novellas together make yet a third window on the combined story. Babel 17, The longer of the two, is a narrative of mayhem, murder, mystery, madness, and metaphor. Though shorter (sort of), Empire Star gets in its LUMPs (Linguistic Ubiquitous Multiplex Computers) as well. Delany, anagramatically AKA Muels Aranlyde, writes sagely about the joy of linguistics (in a Whorf-ian sense), the anguish and sadness of slavery, the questing journey, non-standard sexual proclivities, and a whole new slant on death being no excuse to stop working. (Although both treks are aesthetically closer to Road Warrior than Star Wars, George Lucas does seem to have picked up a couple of ideas here, including the famous alien bar scene.) There is one disclaimer: The topologies of Delany's writing are not for everyone. I first discovered his works while I was in college, and found them opaque and self-absorbed. But I would have pored over them earlier, and much later have come to enjoy them all the more, in spite of the flaws. Intensely self-referential long before fractals, chaos theory, and literary necessity made the technique fashionable, this is the thinking person' science fiction at its finest.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Babel-17. And from the Word understanding flowed, and gave substance to the material world. A Symbol: a Name: Rydra Wong. Poet. Cryptologist. Starship Captain. Woman. Co-opted to decipher what Babel-17 is, what meaning it has, what connection there is between war-plant sabotage and the usage of Babel-17. Inside, around, and terminally intermixed with this nominal space opera is the quest to define the relationship between language, symbol, object, and thought process. A quest that flows around surgical body-form manipulation, the senses of the discorporate, succubi , the revival of the dead, love triples, starship pilot wrestling, a society and personality types split between Customs, Transport, and military. All told with Delany's inimitable sense of the English language, with the admirable support of excerpts of Marylyn Hacker's (Delany's then wife) poems. Delany has developed this theme of language as the controlling factor in a person's world map in several books, but this is the only one that I can think of by him or any other author where language is not only a weapon but the main driving force behind the plot. In making his point, he almost goes too far, giving powers of understanding to Babel-17 that stretch the boundaries of believability, although he makes the very relevant point that some concepts cannot (or only with great difficulty) be expressed in some languages, while in other languages the same concept can be expressed very precisely in just a few words.The characters of this book are far more normal than the typical set of Delany people, which is not to say that they are not extremely interesting, engaging, and well presented. And as part of the character set, we learn that Rydra was once part of a love triple, the other members of which, while just names in this book, play a major role in the follow-on novella, Empire Star.Having had your world view expanded by Babel-17, be ready to have it totally turned upside down, twisted into circles and hyperboloids by Empire Star, where a person's world view can be described as simplex, complex, or multi-plex. Here we find Comet Jo, a simplex person who observes an organiform star-ship crash and who is given a message to take to Empire Star by one of the ship's dying members, who looks exactly like himself. In the process of taking the message, we watch as Jo grows to complex, then multi-plex maturity as he meets San Severina, owner of seven Lll slaves (ownership of which causes the owner to experience continuous unbearable sadness), LUMP (a linguistic ubiquitous multi-plex computer), and learns about the battle to free the Lll slaves. But at just about the point where you think you have a standard, straight-forward story, curve-balls of time-travel, causality, and mirrored relationships come to the fore, and twist this story (and by its relation to Babel-17 that story also) into a pretzel of deep complexity that will leave you scratching

Delaney explores the influence of language on thoughts en indentity. Would we be who we are when we had grown up, using a language with no word for me or I or, for that matter, you? Would we be able to think better or faster when we used another language for our thoughts? Is that a way to define intelligence? Can language be used to manipulate so sharply that it becoms a weapon?A must-read SF classic, not only because of the theme, but also because of the vivid new (1966!) universe he created, and the way he sees our future. Delaney avoids the trap of (some) older SF-writers: to focus on the theme instead of the plot. It's an excellent read. Babel-17 won the Nebula Award in 1966.