Babel-17 by Samuel Delaney

[polymorphikos]

Babel-17 by Samuel Delaney (1966).



***/*****



Considering the numerous accolades that this book came accompanied by, including having won the prestigious Nebula award, I’m not entirely certain what I was expecting, except that it was certainly something more.



Babel-17 is an interesting book. It has a few clever creative touches like making sailors bod-modders instead of having the tattooed and earinged, and it approaches most of the alien elements of the distant future with a matter-of-fact, understated approach that is commendable when one considers that Delaney might have simply rambled for pages and pages, instead of bringing this in under 200. But it lacks any real depth. The central idea of Babel-17 as a sabotage-linked super-language is not nearly clever or complex enough to work as the be-all and end-all of the story, and the story itself too limp and under-developed to work on its own merits. The character of Rydra Wong has some personality, but not enough to justify the absolute enchantment that she seems to cast over every person she meets. The twists and turns of the plot are few and unexciting, and the descriptions of space-ships convey very little atmosphere – indeed it is very hard to even picture them. This is possibly because Delaney was more focused on telling a fast-moving story motivated by characters and ideas, but none of it’s that exciting either emotionally or intellectually. There is also the fact that there is never a sense of real danger, and things float on by as though no harm could ever possibly come of it.



There is also the problem of the Invaders, who are never more than a faceless other – which is to say, one big McGuffin.



So over-all Babel-17 is a little slight, muddled and disparate. But these are all common failings of the literature of the time, so on to what does work.



The descriptions and scenes on Earth at the beginning are quite well done, with lots of strange creatures and settings, and there are many tantalising conceptual elements dropped from time to time throughout the book. Babel-17, and the various elements of the plot and characters that it grows to embrace, is quite a novel concept as a language that holds the fate of worlds in its hands. But it becomes confused by things that I cannot go into for spoiler reasons, save to say that Delaney should have quit while he was ahead or taken a different route when it came to Rydra’s talent and its history. The ideas that go into construction of Babel-17 also seem rather limited, and don’t seem to reveal much more than the appendix to 1984.

So it suffers from slip-shod delivery.

Ultimately, whilst I wouldn’t suggest not reading it, and would argue that is good to fair at minimum, this is yet another lengthy and confused epiphany in novel format that would have worked superbly at 10,000 words, but fragments and frays at 60.

[knivesout]

Thanks for the well thought-out and articulated review. I have not read this novel, but my experience of Delany's works is that, other than Dhalgren (and possibly later works - I've tried to read his books roughly in order of release and have reached as far as Dhalgren and now need to track back and locate Babel-17 and a couple of others), your words 'slight, muddled and disparate' describe his works pretty well. I'd suggest the muddle is more in execution than concept, but that's debatable.

BTW, if anyone here happens to be new to Delany, the ideal starting point, as far as I know, is Driftglass, a short-story collection.

[stellarexplorer]

Read it recently, with similar experience. Dated, duller than expected, not delivering by the standard expected of ... well, a standard.

I suspect that part of the acclaim granted the book in it's day was his presentation of the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that states that a language limits and constrains the thinking of its speaker, according to the patricular assumptions inherent in that language. This is far more controversial today, but was, I believe part of the tide in linguistics of which the diminished claim of 16 (or whatever number ) words for snow existed in Inuit language was a part.