During an interstellar war one side develops a language, Babel-17, that can be used as a weapon. Learning it turns one into an unwilling traitor as it alters perception and thought. This is discovered by the starship captain Rydra Wong. She is recruited to discover how the enemy are infiltrating and sabotaging strategic sites.
This book is about language: there is a war going on and there seem to be radio messages that seem to attack certain humans and technology installations. Rydra Wong gets to investigate, and we follow her on a wild ride. Rydra is a poet and a starship captain and she needs to be good at both to untangle this problem.
I liked the alliterations throughout the book. I liked what I learned about language and plots and storytelling.
A confusing mix when it comes to tone, this story reads mostly as a pulpy space opera, except for those moments where it launches into complicated discussions of linguistics and grammar.
Rydra Wong is a poet with such a great knack for learning languages that it borders on telepathy (body language is a language too, after all), and she uses her talent to decode the messages of the Invaders who, as the name suggests, are at war with her society.
I'm not a linguist, but I believe that the scientific theories on which the premise of this book is based have been debunked , which didn't help my suspension of disbelief. Personally, I was much more interested in another idea Delany introduced: discorporate people. Basically, in the future we prove that ghosts do exist, we just haven't yet developed the technology needed to perceive them. Without technological intervention we simply …
A confusing mix when it comes to tone, this story reads mostly as a pulpy space opera, except for those moments where it launches into complicated discussions of linguistics and grammar.
Rydra Wong is a poet with such a great knack for learning languages that it borders on telepathy (body language is a language too, after all), and she uses her talent to decode the messages of the Invaders who, as the name suggests, are at war with her society.
I'm not a linguist, but I believe that the scientific theories on which the premise of this book is based have been debunked , which didn't help my suspension of disbelief. Personally, I was much more interested in another idea Delany introduced: discorporate people. Basically, in the future we prove that ghosts do exist, we just haven't yet developed the technology needed to perceive them. Without technological intervention we simply forget our interactions with the discorporate as soon as they happen, leaving us with nothing but the lingering feeling of being haunted.
His vision of a future in which the dead are integrated into society is fascinating, and I would have preferred a book that focused on that idea.
Very easy to see why this won the Nebula. Really good look at linguistics (not TOO hampered by Sapir-Whorf or limited understanding of computer languages), with inventive ideas and plot—only really hampered by the pat ending.
Although I’ve read it before, my appreciation has been amplified after reading Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman: perfect communication REQUIRES telepathy, and telepathy enables communication to be perfected. Interesting that so much in the 60s-70s really focuses on telepathy, but the novum gets dropped so abruptly in the 80s.
Some fiction centers around plot, and while Babel-17's plot is truly captivating, the thoughts and ideas intermingled with it are what kept me reading the book and affected my thought process. Which is precisely one of the important themes of the book: how much does the language affect who we are? Could we imagine a language that when spoken or thought would change the way one perceives the world? As if this alone wouldn't be exciting, Delany bases off his work on Plato's Dialogues - making firm connection to philosophy.
Two stars because... It's difficult to read older sci-fi. But I really did love this story. I just thought the delivery and style made for a kind of painful reading. The sci-fi concepts and the overall plot were really still awesome, even today.
Hadn't read any Delany in a while, because I found Dhalgren overwhelming. This was intelligent and creative and challenging without being too much- a good fun read. Suspect I'll go back and hit more of the Delany catalog soon.
