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

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A security dossier had been handed him that morning, but he had passed it to his aide and merely noted, later, that it had been marked "approved. Linguist and renowned poet Rydra Wong is brought in to decipher the code, which she names Babel-17, and she gathers a crew and a ship to travel to where she believes the next attack will be. With Empire Star I can see more clearly the rollicking, adventurous, humorous sides of Delany's writing. However, there're parts I'll never understand: namely how such a thing could be composed in under two weeks, the same month that Delany finished writing a work as different as Babel-17. In the end I am guessing that I will give this 4 stars and say it was a really enjoyable SF book, nothing more, nothing pretentious, nothing deep, just a good book.

With a strong and interesting heroine and its focus on linguistics, I was quickly drawn into Samuel Delany's Babel-17.Humanity, which has spread throughout the universe, is involved in a war with the Invaders, who have been covertly assassinating officials and sabotaging spaceships. I recently rediscovered this book hiding in a crate in my home library, waiting several years to be read. In the first, letters, or symbols that stand for letters, are shuffled and juggled according to a pattern. In a far future when man alongside a few other races is spread all over the universe, a universe where a number of these races, include the humans have been at war for decades.

The weaponized language is the eponymous Babel-17 which is being used to sabotage the war efforts of The Alliance, the side of the war the story is narrated from; whether this is the "right" side is not really dwelled upon in the book. Humanity appears to have split in two- the Alliance, who are Earth based and the Invaders who are pretty minimally described, but appear to control one or more other galaxies outside the Milky Way.Possibly because I am so far removed from the time (and less familiar with psychotropics than many of the era lol) and possibly because of the subject matter. It's also an influential book so I guess it's worth reading for those interested in the history of SF, intertextuality and all that stuff. After several attacks have been made by the invaders who speak Babel-17, she soon realizes the potential of the language to change one's thought process and provide speakers with certain powers, and she is recruited by her government to discover how the enemy is infiltrating and sabotaging strategic sites. General, although they know a hell of a lot about codes, they know nothing of the nature of language. She puts her hand on the bar, she leans back on the stool, hip moving in knitted blue, and with each movement, I am amazed, surprised, bewildered.

Things get more interesting from there as Rydra deepens her knowledge of Babel-17 as well as her relationship with one of Tarik’s crew, named Butcher. If you bounce hard off stories with no, well, story, just relax, this one's short, rather witty, and unlike anything I've read before. Delany was deeply interested in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that maintained one’s language determined the categories of thought. Given the short length of the book the other characters are at least adequately developed, but again I did not feel any emotional investment in them. A, of course extremely evil, triumvirate of space opera, Hard Sci Fi with elements of cyberpunk, astrophysics, scientific theories,… and social sci-fi controls the output of the genre, leaving many of the too alternative concepts and narrative styles with less hope for large sales.For the first time, Babel-17 is published as the author intended with the short novel Empire Star , the tale of Comet Jo, a simple-minded teen thrust into a complex galaxy when he's entrusted to carry a vital message to a distant world. The dialogue concerning a language without the concept of I and Me is one of the highlights of the book. It's the name for a rather involved set of deterministic moral evaluations taken through a relativistic view of the dynamic moment. She is strong, fiercely intelligent, and competent - a remarkable thing for a sci-fi novel written in 1960s, a time dominated by strong sci-fi manly men who usually got rewarded with beautiful sci-fi cardboard-cutouts women. The invaders have somehow been mounting damaging sabotage attacks deep into Alliance territory, with only strange, coded radio messages giving any clue to how they are being carried out.