Babel-17

TL;DR – Five stars for ideas, but fewer because of writing that doesn't gel for me.

I want to love Delany's writing–I think he's an amazing person with wonderful ideas, and anybody who has written a banned book (Hogg, which I think I'll read next) and also semi-mainstream books must have a lot to offer. After being stymied by Dhalgren, I thought I'd take on an early novella. Babel-17 has fascinating elements (fast-food-style plastic surgery, sci-fi ghosts), an interesting protagonist(female! in 1966! a poet warrior), philosophy of language in action–all things that would make this a great read for me.

And yet, this feels clunky for me. Delany is often cited as being a “literary sci-fi writer”–perhaps THE literary sci-fi writer–but most of the plot feels ad hoc to me, and the exploration of the power of language on thinking feels heavy-handed. Lots of interesting science fiction elements are crammed into too few pages (this is the way I feel about many of Philip K Dick's books)–an embarrassment of riches, perhaps, but still makes it not as readable for me.

I'm going to keep trying, though, because I do get the sense that I may just not be understanding him enough, just don't ‘get' his writing on some level.

Nebula award winning Babel-17 is one of the “densest” books I've read in quite some time; the sheer amount of information and concepts that are packed layer-by-layer into such a small space made for slow going at times, but it was not so tough as to make it not enjoyable. The use of language as a central theme was intriguing, and was used quite effectively. The secondary tale, Empire Star, was not quite as “dense” but still it contained some mind-twisting parts which stopped it from being a quick read (although I did not regret any of the time spent).

A space opera based on a strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the principle that language influences thought. When learning the language, Babel-17, our protagonist first notices she starts to see new connections and similarities between unconnected concepts. Once fluent and able to think in Babel-17 her thought process speeds up and allows her to become a strategic mastermind. Yet there are also unwanted effects programmed into the core of the language.

The ideas are all there, but they are packaged into a rather fast-paced, character- and action-packed space opera that is too short to fully dive into all the linguistic and cognitive possibilities.

This was a truly remarkable novel to be published in 1966 by a 24-year-old writer (who was 22–23 when he wrote it). It has a style and imagination that wasn't characteristic of most sf of the mid-1960s, and it survives well into the 21st century.

True, if you read it as a book written now, it could seem rather strange and clunky, and there are anachronisms in it. But it's silly to read a book from 1966 as though it were written now; would you treat Jules Verne or H. G. Wells like that?

As with all fiction set in the future, the bizarre and colourful universe it describes is surely not going to be our future. It's an imaginary future, in which the Alliance battles the Invaders, and spaceships have discorporate crew members and pilots reshaped by cosmetisurgery. In this imaginary future, they record sound on tapes and find some use for punched cards, and that's OK, because it's not our future; think of it as the future of some other timeline.

Babel-17 is the name of a language, and this is a story about the effects of language on how we perceive and understand the world around us. What the young Delany had to say about language wasn't necessarily correct in all respects, but it stimulates thought about the subject.

I've been rereading this book since the 1970s, and I still enjoy it: it's quite a trip. I notice now that the story skates glibly over a number of implausibilities, especially at the end, where everything is wrapped up rather quickly. My advice is to sit back and enjoy the trip without worrying about such things.