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

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Humanity has encountered other races from other galaxies, some of whom are part of an Alliance with them and others who are enemies referred to as Invaders. It is briefly mentioned in "Babel-17" as a series of books the characters are familiar with, making it part of that interesting genre of fictional works within fictional works.

I will try to get to all of them next year, any recommendations concerning these authors would be welcome. Sometimes I read an author who is operating on a different level to me, and this definitely felt like one of those times. He has such a varied output, with his earlier books (Empire Star, Babel-17, Triton) hewing to more typical SF tropes but introducing much more sophisticated themes than Golden Age SF, and later getting into much more literary and challenging territory (at which point readers think his work is brilliant or unreadable) with books like Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Far from my favourite Delany novel, Babel-17 does confirm, I think, that I prefer his science fiction to his fantasy outings. He has the conscious minds of dead people serving as ship’s crew, decades before the transhumanists regularly began writing about upload civilizations.

They've starved during the embargoes, broken windows, looted, run screaming before firehoses, torn flesh from a corpse's arm with decalcified teeth. The only clues humanity has to go on are strange alien messages that have been intercepted in space.

To counter this, Rydra translates each message to another language, Basque, one that she can capture and remember. But even by my mid-teens I have read many books that belonged to the excellent science fiction tradition. As she cracks open the mystery of Babel-17, she discovers more about her inner world as well as some other deep secrets - revealed through the sheer power of language. so much so that I wondered if there was some kind of allegory to the sixties I was too thick to get. 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.I am a trilingual person who has quite a few monolingual family members, and I can't even tell you how many times in frustrated fascination I have contemplated the peculiarities of languages, the plays on words that are often impossible to translate, the confusing idioms, and the frustrating lack of certain concepts in one language as compared to another. Though a short book, it took me a week to read because, as always, Delany’s science fiction exemplifies the way in which this genre can be used to explore complex ideas. Perhaps more importantly for Delany’s themes, Rydra meets an enigmatic man whose incomprehension of I and you provides that final piece to her Babel-17 puzzle.