Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

This might be the most I have enjoyed a Delany yet…

…So fired up was I about halfway through Babel-17 (1966) that I ordered myself an additional Delany, keen and hungry and excited…

I did do this novel the disservice of largely reading it in short bursts while awake late with my small baby, but unlike the pacy thriller Gorky Park, this very much held up to fits and bursts and half awake engagement… (For the first half, then it did get a little more complex and demand daytime attention…)

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Babel-17 is set in the future in a space colony that is at war with another space colony. (Both human.)

Aliens exist, and some are allied with one side of one human colony and some are allied with the other, but the aliens don’t really spend much time as part of the plot. Because Delaney does here what he does excellently in his other earlier novels and evokes quickly and briefly exceedingly complicated settings and scenarios, often appearing fleetingly as background detail not to be dwelled upon.

The protagonist here is again a poet (like in Delany’s earlier texts The Jewels Of Aptor and the third book in The Fall of the Towers), but this time the poet is an exceedingly successful one, her books bestsellers across the Galaxy, on both sides of the intergalactic war.

As well as being a phenomenal poet, this woman is also a deeply, deeply, gifted linguist and code-breaker, and the novel opens with her being hired by the military to decode a series of messages that have been appearing on radio signals around the sites of significant and unexpected military interventions by the other side in the war.

These coded messages have been named “Babel 17”, and the gifted protagonist quickly realizes that rather than being a coded form of an obscure language, Babel 17 is a language in itself. She begins translating the messages found and recorded at the site of the most recent attack, and figures out where the next one is likely to occur. She heads off to that place in space (after finding herself a crew and a spaceship) and en route she translates and learns more of the language.

As the narrative goes on, the spaceship crew visits a futuristic weapons facility (they’re basically making the terminators from out of Terminator) and then there is a massive attack, then they head off into space and are subject to a targeted attack (perpetrated by someone onboard the ship!) soon after the poet-linguist works out where the next attack will be, then as they are drifting powerless in space they are reeled in by a giant space pirate ship, which is broadly tolerated by the military who control that area as they only attack the other side (though will sweep in and collect spoils from both sides by allowing dogfights to reach their conclusions without any intervention if their allies aren’t winning).

The crew is warmly welcomed among the pirates – initially because the captain loves entertainment and wants to host a poetry reading but it soon becomes apparent that the poet and her crew are genuine on-board assets. One particular pirate, an ex convict with amnesia who is unable to use the word “I” (or other first person pronouns) in his speech fascinates the poet and the two of them bond one-on-one.

The ship has a big fight with some ruffians from the other side of the galactic war but are saved from total annihilation by provoking the enemy into attacking a passing neutral alien ship with massively destructive heat rays, who subsequently decimates the villains.

The big pirate ship is very damaged, so the poet and her crew (plus her new friend who doesn’t know the word “I”) head off in a smaller one to where the next major Babel-17 linked attack is expected… But soon they are in the most secure prison that colony has with the poet and the other guy now with brand new amnesia and held as the likely perpetrators of another attack…

They have been, it seems, both infected by Babel-17, a language so powerful and so analytical that anyone who learns to speak it can hypnotise themselves into pre-programmed acts of destruction without ever knowing they’re doing it…

A few words in Babel-17 can do what it takes entire books to do in English, and always its speakers are serving the enemy and hiding their own actions from themselves…

Anyway, there’s a bit of deprogramming and realising that the poet can use her mad linguistic skills to essentially flip the polarity of Babel-17 and continue to benefit from its great analytics without being self-programming societal sabotage and kinda a happy ending.

It’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s intriguing, but it does very much function on the not-quite-accurate claim that all human intellectual and emotional understanding is totally reliant on the language an individual speaks…

The novel posits that anyone who doesn’t know the name of a thing cannot understand the thing… That anyone who has more descriptive words for a thing can understand things rapidly quicker than someone who can’t. (I mean there’s some sense in that, e.g. a narrative or a poem with stronger description clarifies itself more quickly that one with “bad” writing, but I don’t think extrapolating this to the point where the knowledge from e.g. a medical degree (or a masters degree in creative writing from the University of London!) could be imbibed by one perfectly written paragraph, which the novel basically does…)

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Characterisation is rich, world building is deep and thorough. (I haven’t even mentioned above how all spaceships have some crew who are disembodied souls of the dead, how death has become both what it now is but also an optional caesura that can be taken at will indefinitely until external situations change (or the storage facility powerbanks fail).)

So, there are space ghosts and space zombies, as well as space clones and space super monsters and space poets learning new languages that effectively make telepathy possible.

There are ideas and literary slash narrative devices I don’t have the Babel-17 skills to describe.

Complex characters who appear for one scene, implied organisations of depth that are mentioned in passing…

…It is 200 pages but feels like the background work of setting and alternative futures could support many times that…

This is a novel as good as and as fun as Driftglass, and though it isn’t as serious and literarily significant as Delany’s following book, The Einstein Intersection, it’s certainly a more “mature” and thus rewarding read than The Fall of the Towers.

I have two books left to read of Delany’s 1960s fiction and I’m looking forward to them both, though maybe, as it’s September now and my “hashtag Summer of Sam[uel R. Delany]” is technically over, I might give myself something more “real world” for a month or two. Or not!? Who knows??? I’m kooky!?!?!

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Similar, tonally, to the Denis Villeneuve film Arrival and the China Mieville novel Embassytown (both of which are much later works). If that’s a helpful note.