ISBN: 9780575094208
Date read: 02/04/2021
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
Support your local bookshop by going to Bookshop.org to buy your copy (instead of THAT online shopping website…)
In a far-off future, humanity has spread out across the stars. Aliens and even ghosts are now commonplace and humanity itself, thanks to the popularity and proliferation of ‘cosmeti-surgery,’ has made itself unrecognisable. Galactic civilization is currently embroiled in what is referred to as ‘an invasion,’ a conflict that has apparently lasted a number of years. Humanity has begun to detect messages of unknown origin in a strange language they can’t understand that has been dubbed ‘Babel-17.’ Wherever this language is heard, disaster seems to follow, and not just random events, but co-ordinated damage to military targets.
In an effort to decode and translate Babel-17, the military brings in galactically renowned poet and linguist Rydra Wong, who believes that language is the key to forming one’s thoughts, perception and ultimately their reality. As her mission to translate and understand Babel-17 deepens, she will find her own reality, perception and even identity beginning to twist and collapse into something alien and sinister.
Samuel R. Delany has been referred to as a prodigy, having published his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962) when he was 20. He was 23 when he wrote Babel-17 (1966). He is also somewhat of a lesser-heard voice in the world of sci-fi literature, being both black and gay. Delany has also written seven books of literary criticism focusing on issues in science fiction, comparative literature, queer theory and black studies.
Due to it’s author’s academic background, the novel definitely functions in a different mode than a lot of other sci-fi of its time. On top of being a novelist, Delany is also a poet, and this comes through, not just in each of the book’s chapter epigraphs which feature poems by Delany’s then-wife Marilyn Hacker (whom Rydra Wong is actually based on), but also in every sentence he writes. Some could argue that this qualifies as overwriting. However, like in his even more challenging work, the experimental, modernist epic Dhalgren (1975), the style of the writing feeds into the inner workings of the novel itself. The flowery language feels right at home within its space opera setting, but at odds with the novel’s obsession with the technical workings of what language specialists call ‘linguistic relativity.’
Adam Roberts writes in his introduction to the book, ‘Novels, Delany is saying, are not made out of ideas, or characters, or stories: novels are made out of words. And in a novel precisely about language, like this one, it’s appropriate to foreground the working of language.’[1] He also highlights how the novel’s main concern, specifically Rydra Wong’s belief in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the aforementioned linguistic relativity in relation to a person’s reality), is often questionable. For example, the thesis that because the language Babel-17 has no word for ‘I,’ it must ‘preclude any self-critical process…cut out any awareness of the symbolic process at all.’[2] It’s like saying that if a language doesn’t have a word for, or to describe, a body part, then any speakers of that language will actually lack that body part physically.
If, however, we ignore this real-world application of this idea, and just relax and go with the novel’s own internal logic, then Babel-17 can show us some fascinating discussion and speculation regarding language and linguistics. An example of this in the book features and alien race called the Ҫiribians who, while having the means and technology for space-travel, have no word for ‘house’, ‘home’ or ‘dwelling.’ The closest thing to ‘house’ in ҫiribian is a long periphrasis, which Delany takes the time to write out at nearly an entire page. It is also stated that one ҫiribian can ‘slither through [a power plant] and then go describe it to another Ҫiribian who never saw it before so that the second can build an exact duplicate, even to the color the walls are painted…in nine words. Nine very small words, too.’[3]
The book also functions, at least in my opinion, as an early precursor to what became the cyberpunk genre in sci-fi. Babel-17 features aliens both of the extra-terrestrial kind, but also in the form of those who have physically changed their bodies beyond recognition. An example of this is the spaceship’s pilot, Brass, who has had body modifications to turn himself into a lion, and as a result of this, and once again showcasing the novel’s focus on linguistics, Brass can no longer say the letter P:
‘The mouth, distended through cosmeti-surgically implanted fangs, could not deal with a plosive labial unless it was voiced.’[4]
One of my favourite scenes in the novel is when customs officer Danil D. Appleby is taken into the bars and clubs in the seedier areas of the city, populated by the infamous Transportation Folk, with the aim to recruiting personnel for Rydra Wong’s spaceship crew. He accompanies her on this mission at the novel’s opening, and when we encounter him again at the end, seeing that he has been changed by the eye-opening experience, which I read as an affectionate celebration of queer culture:
‘I saw a bunch of the weirdest, oddest people I had ever met in my life, who thought different, and even made love different. And they made me laugh, and get angry, and be happy, and be sad, and excited, and even fall in love a little myself…And they didn’t seem to be so weird anymore.’[5]
I really enjoyed Babel-17, both as a sci-fi adventure story and as an example of what the genre can do when it is used as a vehicle to communicate more literary concepts. Any readers who have studied languages will enjoy picking up on some of the more academic elements of the book, however this will likely alienate any readers that are hoping to enjoy a more conventional, escapist sci-fi romp.
[1] Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17, 1966 (Gollancz; Great Britain), p.x
[2] Ibid, p. 188
[3] Ibid, pp. 132-133
[4] Ibid, p.33
[5] Ibid, p.169