Jerome Podwil’s 1966 cover art for Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

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Babel-17 (Samuel R. Delany) "Rydra Wong is a top linguist, acclaimed poet, and former military cryptologist. When the Alliance military come across a new code used by the enemy, which is beyond their ability to crack, they come to her for help. She informs them that it is not a mere code, but an actual language, and agrees to accept the challenge.

Quickly assembling a crew, Wong heads to the Alliance War Yards to study the raw data on this new language, which the military calls Babel-17. However, shortly after she arrives, an enemy attack forces her to flee in disarray, and she falls in with a privateer, who is, fortunately, on the Alliance side. Or mostly so.

On board the privateer's ship, she begins to learn more about Babel-17, and the surprising benefits and dangers it offers to someone who learns to speak it. The language literally twists the thought pattern of its speakers, making it easier to conceptualize certain ideas, but more difficult to translate your thoughts into anything others can understand."

Harrow the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) "Harrow the Ninth is, above all, really fucking confusing. Roughly every third chapter is actively gaslighting the reader about what happened in the last book. The main character is fucking struggling to maintain any sort of grip on reality all throughout the story, and more often than not, she fails miserably. This is due to several factors, including, but not limited to - sleep deprivation, latent schizophrenia, ruthless emotional manipulation from everyone around her, being full of a frankly alarming number of ghosts from several entirely unrelated sources, childhood parental and religious trauma, and a self-inflicted amateur lobotomy."

Vintage Paperback - Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany (1966/1980/1982)

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany (1966)

Set in a future world with space travel, body modification, ghosts, and an intergalactic war with beings known only as “the Invaders”. The Invaders are a specter in the book; they never appear on page, only the effects of their actions. The story is about Rydra Wong, a renowned poet. Her government, the Alliance, asks her to decode messages they’ve intercepted from sites of Invader sabotage. The messages are a code they’ve never heard before, a code they’ve named Babel-17.

When we meet Rydra, she begins with correcting the Alliance’s misconception: Babel-17 isn’t a code. It’s a language. And it’s unlike any language Rydra has learned before. She’s a poet: words are her playground. Babel-17 is the most efficient language she’s ever encountered, and she’s barely begun to scratch the surface of what it can do. She puts together a crew and goes to investigate.

There were lots of interesting ideas explored in this book, especially about language and how it affects how we think. There was a lot of jargon thrown at you. I wouldn’t mind reading it again someday. I enjoyed the story and world Delany built.

If you liked Arrival, I think you’ll like this one. It is a little dated; it’s almost 60 years old. But overall I was pleasantly surprised by it!

Babel-17 is such an amazing book. sometimes it’s hard to believe it was written in the 60’s, but that also shows that queer science fiction narratives and diversity were actually a thing back then!!! plus Rydra Wong is easily the most underrated female protagonist in sci-fi. i’ve read it (and loved it) before but always going to love this one. 11/10

Anyone else want to speak Babel-17? Or learn the Way of the Argosi? Fun Fact: They are the same thing, just from different perspectives. The Way of the Argosi is all about understanding the nature of everything in an effort to resolve it into what is best, whereas Babel-17 is all about describing everything in the most efficient, information-packed way possible. They both describe the exact nature of reality. The only difference is what one does with the information.

["Don't you see? Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist. And it's something the brain needs to have exist, otherwise you wouldn't have to beat your chest, or strike your fist on your palm. The brain wants it to exist. Let me teach it the word."]

TBR Pile: February 2024: A few for this next month!

The book [Babel-17] is often described as a dramatization of what specialists call 'linguistic relativity' and non-linguists as 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis': that language actively shapes perception and mental processes. The novel is certainly rich with fascinating disquistions on linguistics. Some of these are, shall we say, questionable: the notion, for instance, that French have no word for and /therefore no concept of/ 'warm' [95], which would surprise those Frenchmen I know; or the thesis that the Babel-17 language, lacking a word for 'I', must therefore 'preclude any self-critical process... cut out any awareness of the symbolic process at all' [188] – which seems to me a little like saying people who lack a word to describe the little crease running from the upper lip to the nose simply do not possess that part of the body. But the book's linguistics doesn't have to be right; it has to be thought-provoking and it has to be beautiful, and it is both those things.

Adam Roberts on Samuel Delaney's Babel 17.

I seek out queer books with the best of them of course (I know I’ve said I could read nothing but queer sci-fi for the rest of my life and it isn’t a joke) but nothing beats the purity of the joy and delight that comes from reading a book just because the sci-fi premise sounds neat and then discovering unexpectedly it is also queer

story of you life by ted chiang was very reminiscent of samuel delany's babel-17, both meditate on how language influences how we think, and how this extends into our perceptions of space and time, cause and effect. personally, i enjoyed delany's novel more because it explored how language can alter our perceptions of gender and politics. chiang left things far more ambiguous, which in this particular case wasn't quite as impactful.

alright later y’all, going to open my main save file on stardew and buy the community upgrades then keep grinding

June 11, 2023 - Day 357

I definitely need to read more by Samuel R. Delany after enjoying Babel 17 this much.