Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
Winner of the Science Fiction Writers of America's 1966 Nebula Award
Nov 12, 2008
Babel-17 is an early novel by acclaimed novelist and lecturer Samuel R. Delany. First published in 1966, it won the second ever Nebula Award presented by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Out of print as a solo novel since 1999, it is only available as part of a double bill with its prequel, Empire Star (Vintage Books , ISBN 978-0375706691, 336pp.)
Rydra Wong, Poetess
For twenty years the Alliance has been at war with the Invaders. Both sides are human, although both have non-human allies. The Invaders have been mounting a blockade for two decades, and the war has taken on a seeming inevitability.
The Alliance is facing random acts of sabotage, all of them linked to transmissions of a mysterious code called Babel-17.
In desperation, the Alliance turns to poetess Rydra Wong, who at twenty-six has a readership that spans five galaxies. Rydra is a telepath with unparalleled linguistic abilities and a ship's captain's licence.
Babel-17
Rydra quickly realizes that Babel-17 is in fact a language rather than a code, and believes that she knows where the next act of sabotage will be committed. She recruits a crew, and they travel to the Armsedge Shipyards, though not before a mystery saboteur tries to destroy the ship.
At the shipyards she meets Baron Ver Dorco, but is unable to save him from assassination at the hands of one of his own weapons, a genetically engineered human. Fleeing the scene, her ship is saved by a band of space pirates whose leader Tarik is assisted by Butcher, a mysterious man who is unable to use personal pronouns.
Nebula Award, Best Novel
The year after Dune won the first ever Nebula Award, Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 tied for the second such award in 1966 with Daniel Keyes' now classic Flowers for Algernon. In sharing this theme with Robert Silverberg's 1971 Nebula winner A Time of Changes, it's one of the few SF novels to deal with language, and how language structure can define identity.
The section headers from Delany's then wife, the National Book Award winning poet Marilyn Hacker, bring a further new dimension to an enthralling and multi-dimensional work.
Babel-17 is not perfect. It's world-view is as romantic as one would expect from a twenty-three year old in the mid-1960s, and it relies heavily on the reader suspending disbelief, first of all that Rydra can be such a diverse polymath, and then that security services would be quite as pliant in the face of a threat -- given Delany's recurring motifs of movement between social strata, this may be wish-fulfilment..
But its imagery is lush, its use of language almost unparalleled even at this early stage of Delany's career.
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