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

Product Information

Perhaps the most famous of these novels, the one most clearly united around a central idea, is 1966's Babel-17. The novel is set in a future marked by interstellar war between the Alliance and the Invaders. Its heroine is the brilliant young celebrity poet, linguist, and starship captain Rydra Wong, herself traumatized and orphaned by the war. Asked by an Alliance general to translate intercepted Invader transmissions in a strange code called Babel-17, Rydra assembles a team and sets off for space. Manchurian Agent: One saboteur turns out to have been programmed by Babel-17 itself, which is crafted to make people hate the Alliance. There was an odd static quality to Babel-17, even despite all the space travel and fighting. This static quality stemmed from the fact that while reading this book I felt like a space traveller inside Delany’s head (space travel probably does have an odd static quality – confined in a pod, few if any reference points whizzing by). 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. In this way Babel-17 is like a high-brow thesis in the language of science fiction. This novel, more than most, benefits greatly from the reader being able to hold the whole novel in its entirety in one’s head as an object to be contemplated once completed. Then one can see more clearly the knotted up thorny quality of the problem (which is the bulk of the book after all) as opposed to just the unloosening freedom of the solution at the end. I already finished a book today and was going to leave it at that, but again kai was pestering me to read this as she had read it yesterday. I said i had to do other tasks, but she wanted this enough that she followed me around while i did laundry and whatnot and she read the whole thing out loud. She did an excellent performance with different voices and accents. My favorite character by far was Lump.

This article needs an improved plot summary. Please help improve the plot summary. ( May 2023) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Pringle, David (1990). The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction. London: Grafton Books Ltd. p.407. ISBN 0-246-13635-9. Recursive Canon: The book has an amusingly twisted example. Rydra Wong and her shipmate Ron start talking about "'Empire Star' and other Comet Jo stories", written by Muels Aranlyde, and Wong explains that Comet Jo is a real person who she knows, but that the stories are only loosely based on reality. Empire Star is actually a novella by Delany, and its protagonist is named Comet Jo. So you're left to wonder if Delany's novella is fact or fiction from the perspective of Babel-17's characters.

Hobbies

One of the central connections between all of the main characters is the rifle. Over the course of the movie, the viewer finds out that Yasujiro Wataya visits Morocco for a hunting trip and gives the rifle as a gift to his guide, Hassan Ibrahim, who then sells it to Abdullah from where it gets passed on to his sons. Susan Jones, in turn, is shot with that very same rifle which also has a tragic impact on Amelia Hernández' life. It is observable that "all characters are affected by the connections created between them – connections that influence both their individual trajectories as characters and the overall structure of the plot". [7] Language Equals Thought: The novel is built wholly around this trope. The smallest (and least spoilish) example is a race of aliens whose language is based almost entirely around temperature gradients but have no word for "house" - because of this, they build incomprehensible starships that look like a mass of strung-together boiled eggs. And of course, the eponymous language enables extremely fast thinking and enhanced spatial awareness.

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. My sister was talking about sommeliers two days ago and asking if they taste more and I was telling her that based off the wine classes I've been forced to take at work I am pretty postive the whole thing is not that they have more taste buds or taste "more" but that they have a shared vocabulary to describe tastes and therefore can identify more tastes I’m a fan of classic SF, and I expected to like Babel-17. Sadly, I feel this novel hasn’t aged well. Bio-Augmentation: exotic, alien-looking "cosmetisurgery" is popular with spacecraft crews. Tails and feathers are common, but variety is the key, and some of the changes are quite disturbing. Those who aren't part of the Transport culture find it very distasteful.

First is the replacement of the white man as ingenious, omni-competent space-captain with a woman of color. Second is the future as bohemia, a place of erupting micro-individualisms where stellar citizens find their fulfillment in biological transformations and sexual configurations that were still relegated, in the middle 20th century, to the vast "closet" of certain urban quarters. Finally, Delany represents language as absolutely determining thought and experience; the language you speak and write constrains what you can know, believe, and even perceive—like so much 20th-century thought, Babel-17 presents language as first philosophy. Delany describes himself as having been "a die-hard believer in the Sapir-Whorf", which was in the air at the time, without his ever having heard the term; eventually, once he read about it, he decided that "it was just incorrect", because "it fails to take into account the whole economy of discourse, which is a linguistic level that accomplishes lots of the soft-edge conceptual contouring around ideas, whether we have available a one- or two-word name for it or only a set of informal many-word descriptions that are not completely fixed", which motivated his later works considering language: "The realization of the flaws in the Sapir-Whorf, in that they caused me to begin considering the more complex linguistic mechanisms of discourse, you might say gave me my lifetime project." [6] Other media [ edit ] On her travels she begins to suspect that Babel-17 is less a code than a unique language, a language that could be an extraordinarily powerful and profound threat to the Alliance. And that's why you can't go around killing people. At least you better do a hell of a lot of thinking before you do."

He looked at her closely. “I don’t really think you’re going to kill me. You know that. It’s something else. Why don’t I tell you something else that frightened me. Maybe you can see some pattern you will understand then. The brain is not stupid.” Because starships need to be staffed by polyamorous trios and by the consciousnesses of the deceased (or, in the book's lingo, "discorporate"), Rydra must recruit her crew from the demimonde inhabited by those in "Transport," i.e., space travelers, a kind of science-fictional bohemia looked down on in the novel's world by the squares and normies who work in "Customs." In the novel's first quarter, Delany is clearly more interested in exploring this futuristic East Village—and dramatizing a Customs Officer, a stodgy straight white male, lose his resistance to its polymorphous blandishments—than he is in the plot's supposedly central star wars. The overall effect is more Thunderbirds than bright, technological future, hell, a ‘heat-ray’ makes an appearance at one point, and an evil character in a protagonist’s past is un-ironically named ‘Mr. Big’.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. The character of Rydra Wong is well developed, she is complex and believable, though I do