Babel-17
by Samuel R. Delany
On This Page
Description
Babel-17, winner of the Nebula Award for best novel of the year, is a fascinating tale of a famous poet bent on deciphering a secret language that is the key to the enemy's deadly force, a task that requires she travel with a splendidly improbable crew to the site of the next attack.Tags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
kevinashley Both these books take the relationship between language and thought as central themes. They explore it in different ways but with a similar thoroughness; both really explore just how 'other' alien can be.
40
LamontCranston Space Opera, updated. Strange mystery, assemble a crew of lively characters, go explore it. Sound familiar?
11
LamontCranston The same ephemeral beat prose.
And of course Space Opera, updated. Strange mystery, assemble a crew of lively characters, go explore it.
LamontCranston Space Opera, updated.
Strange mystery, assemble a crew of lively characters, go explore it. Sound familiar?
12
Member Reviews
This is science fiction where the most relevant science is linguistics! I’m not a linguist, but I’ve always found the field really interesting, so I loved that. The Earth is under attack by aliens of a kind we’ve never encountered before, and we’ve hacked their transmissions coordinating the attacks, but the only way to make use of this information is to find someone who can translate their langauge.
And that’s where Rydra Wong, world famous poet and linguist and code-breaker, comes in. Our protagonist is the only person with a hope in hell of teaching herself to comprehend the incredibly complex alien langauge, and therby saving humanity. She’s explicitly, canonically a bisexual, polyamorous, autistic woman of colour, and show more she’s a starship captain adored by her crew, and she has telepathic powers, and she’s brave and kind and beautiful and full of human fears and doubts. Which is all really cool - what a great power fantasy! - but even more so when you remember that she was written by a male author in 1966. I know people didn’t just abruptly start wanting to read and write about awesome diverse characters with the advent of tumblr, but it’s still so surprising and delightful to actually see it in a book from almost fifty years ago. show less
And that’s where Rydra Wong, world famous poet and linguist and code-breaker, comes in. Our protagonist is the only person with a hope in hell of teaching herself to comprehend the incredibly complex alien langauge, and therby saving humanity. She’s explicitly, canonically a bisexual, polyamorous, autistic woman of colour, and show more she’s a starship captain adored by her crew, and she has telepathic powers, and she’s brave and kind and beautiful and full of human fears and doubts. Which is all really cool - what a great power fantasy! - but even more so when you remember that she was written by a male author in 1966. I know people didn’t just abruptly start wanting to read and write about awesome diverse characters with the advent of tumblr, but it’s still so surprising and delightful to actually see it in a book from almost fifty years ago. show less
A science fiction classic from 1966, and one that is, sadly, still somewhat ahead of the times. Not in terms of the technology (there are still phone booths!), nor the linguistic theory (Sapir-Whorf linguistic determinism having since fallen by the wayside), but in terms of its social and sexual diversity. Delany paints a world lush with strange and interesting details that aren’t directly required for the story—body modification, polyamory, ethnic diversity, many of which are still considered outlandish by some people today. Rydra Wong, poet and linguist extraordinaire, is the character who pulls all the disparate elements together, even as she builds bridges among people of different classes, ideologies, and show more languages.
Communication is a key theme. An intergalactic war is going on between the Alliance and the Invaders. Key Alliance military targets are being sabotaged, and when they are, a strange transmissions are detected that the military believes to be a code but that Rydra recognizes as a language. How Rydra goes about translating that language is the core of the plot, but there are many fascinating side trips. Rydra’s recruiting her spaceship crew to take her to the scene of what she’s determined will be the next target of sabotage takes up a good part of the early chapters, and this is where Delany flaunts the sociocultural details that color his universe: from the stiff, bureacratic Customs officer who is introduced to the wrong side of town, to the bars and wrestling rings where potential pilots with exotic body modifications fight, to the Morgue where a dead navigator is brought back to be the third member of the required polyamorous triple of navigators; these chapters were my favorite part of the book.
I haven’t read enough Delany, and I’m inspired to take on Dhalgren at long last. show less
Communication is a key theme. An intergalactic war is going on between the Alliance and the Invaders. Key Alliance military targets are being sabotaged, and when they are, a strange transmissions are detected that the military believes to be a code but that Rydra recognizes as a language. How Rydra goes about translating that language is the core of the plot, but there are many fascinating side trips. Rydra’s recruiting her spaceship crew to take her to the scene of what she’s determined will be the next target of sabotage takes up a good part of the early chapters, and this is where Delany flaunts the sociocultural details that color his universe: from the stiff, bureacratic Customs officer who is introduced to the wrong side of town, to the bars and wrestling rings where potential pilots with exotic body modifications fight, to the Morgue where a dead navigator is brought back to be the third member of the required polyamorous triple of navigators; these chapters were my favorite part of the book.
I haven’t read enough Delany, and I’m inspired to take on Dhalgren at long last. show less
Rydra Wong, an ex-military cryptographer, a poet, and a linguist, has been approached by the military once again to help decipher the Babel-17 code used by the alien invaders in their many attacks. Rydra realizes that Babel-17 is not a code, but a language. After obtaining some of the original recordings, she has an intuitive guess as to where the next attack will occur. With the military’s blessing, she dusts off her captain’s wings and assembles a very colorful crew to head out to meet the threat and hopefully get to the root of the Babel-17 attacks.
I read the paperback version of this book some years ago as part of Little Red Reviewer’s yearly Vintage Science Fiction event. It was great then and I enjoyed it even more the show more second time through. There is a lot going on in this little book that was first published in the 1960s. First, our main hero is Rydra, a woman. Second, the cast of characters are quite varied – several have body modifications such as tattoos, spurs, enhanced bones, etc. Third, one of the core themes of the book is that language can influence thought patterns and behaviors of the speaker. I once studied a variety of languages, so I really enjoyed this aspect to the story.
Rydra is first introduced as a beautiful poet and, back in my first reading years ago, I thought this would be like so many beautiful damsel in distress SF stories that came out of the 1960s. Pretty quickly, we come to realize that Rydra is so much more that a poetic pretty face. For much of the book, she’s the one calling the shots and keeping her crew safe. I also liked her backstory that we learn mostly through her psychiatrist turned mentor and confidant. Rydra wasn’t always good at expressing herself.
Brass was my second favorite character. I picture him as a big lion that can leap about on all fours or walk on two legs, depending on what he wants to do. He’s a friendly brawler. He recently lost a loved one. It’s takes three to fly a ship and those three have to be in sync with each other and quite often the three are a loving triple. Rydra finds Brass and his partner a third at the morgue. Yep. There are dead flying zombies in this book, though the word ‘zombie’ is never used. In fact, Rydra’s search for a crew was quite amusing. She needs a port authority to approve the psych indices of her crew, so she hauls his reluctant butt around the port bars so he can approve on the spot and they can get in the air. He learns quite a bit that night and goes from looking down on such people to admiring several and continuing to visit the bars and watch the fights.
There’s this whole espionage feel to the quest. Babel-17 is an insidious language and slippery to describe, let alone translate. Rydra intuitively knows some of this but as she pieces more and more of it together, and as ‘accidents’ stat happening with her ship, she becomes more aware of just how important Babel-17 is to the attackers. Later in the story, we meet an escaped convict, the Butcher, and he becomes an important part of the story. Without spoiling anything, I just want to include that little snippet here to point out that the book has this continuing way of making the reader look at the second layer to each character. Rydra is more than a poet. Brass is more than a wrestler. The Butcher is more than a convict. These fascinating characters make for an excellent story.
Towards the end, the story leaves the comfort space of science fiction and gets a little fantasy genre on us. The first time I read this story, I didn’t understand all of what happened here but I understood enough to feel the story had a solid ending. The second time through, I get it a bit more but there’s still a few cloudy areas. I say this is probably the only weak spot to the story, but if you were to ask me after a third reading, I might disagree with myself. At any rate, the story does have a clear and solid ending that makes sense, even if the minute specifics of how we got there are a little muddled. It’s definitely a worthy read.
I received a copy of this audiobook at no cost from the publisher (via Audiobook Jukebox) in exchange for an honest review.
The Narration: Stefan Rudnicki did a great job with this book. Some parts of it are a bit tricky to vocalize; for instance, the character Brass can’t shape the letter P, so Rudnicki had to leave any Ps out of Brass’s ‘accent’. He did this smoothly and I can only imagine that he had to practice a bit. He brought each character to life and managed all the accents described in the book, including the foreign (made up?) languages. show less
I read the paperback version of this book some years ago as part of Little Red Reviewer’s yearly Vintage Science Fiction event. It was great then and I enjoyed it even more the show more second time through. There is a lot going on in this little book that was first published in the 1960s. First, our main hero is Rydra, a woman. Second, the cast of characters are quite varied – several have body modifications such as tattoos, spurs, enhanced bones, etc. Third, one of the core themes of the book is that language can influence thought patterns and behaviors of the speaker. I once studied a variety of languages, so I really enjoyed this aspect to the story.
Rydra is first introduced as a beautiful poet and, back in my first reading years ago, I thought this would be like so many beautiful damsel in distress SF stories that came out of the 1960s. Pretty quickly, we come to realize that Rydra is so much more that a poetic pretty face. For much of the book, she’s the one calling the shots and keeping her crew safe. I also liked her backstory that we learn mostly through her psychiatrist turned mentor and confidant. Rydra wasn’t always good at expressing herself.
Brass was my second favorite character. I picture him as a big lion that can leap about on all fours or walk on two legs, depending on what he wants to do. He’s a friendly brawler. He recently lost a loved one. It’s takes three to fly a ship and those three have to be in sync with each other and quite often the three are a loving triple. Rydra finds Brass and his partner a third at the morgue. Yep. There are dead flying zombies in this book, though the word ‘zombie’ is never used. In fact, Rydra’s search for a crew was quite amusing. She needs a port authority to approve the psych indices of her crew, so she hauls his reluctant butt around the port bars so he can approve on the spot and they can get in the air. He learns quite a bit that night and goes from looking down on such people to admiring several and continuing to visit the bars and watch the fights.
There’s this whole espionage feel to the quest. Babel-17 is an insidious language and slippery to describe, let alone translate. Rydra intuitively knows some of this but as she pieces more and more of it together, and as ‘accidents’ stat happening with her ship, she becomes more aware of just how important Babel-17 is to the attackers. Later in the story, we meet an escaped convict, the Butcher, and he becomes an important part of the story. Without spoiling anything, I just want to include that little snippet here to point out that the book has this continuing way of making the reader look at the second layer to each character. Rydra is more than a poet. Brass is more than a wrestler. The Butcher is more than a convict. These fascinating characters make for an excellent story.
Towards the end, the story leaves the comfort space of science fiction and gets a little fantasy genre on us. The first time I read this story, I didn’t understand all of what happened here but I understood enough to feel the story had a solid ending. The second time through, I get it a bit more but there’s still a few cloudy areas. I say this is probably the only weak spot to the story, but if you were to ask me after a third reading, I might disagree with myself. At any rate, the story does have a clear and solid ending that makes sense, even if the minute specifics of how we got there are a little muddled. It’s definitely a worthy read.
I received a copy of this audiobook at no cost from the publisher (via Audiobook Jukebox) in exchange for an honest review.
The Narration: Stefan Rudnicki did a great job with this book. Some parts of it are a bit tricky to vocalize; for instance, the character Brass can’t shape the letter P, so Rudnicki had to leave any Ps out of Brass’s ‘accent’. He did this smoothly and I can only imagine that he had to practice a bit. He brought each character to life and managed all the accents described in the book, including the foreign (made up?) languages. show less
Babel-17 is basically strong Sapir-Whorf, the novel. A series of attacks on Alliance military bases are preceded by strangely coded messages, and when polymath poet, linguist, and space captain Rydra Wong discovers that the Babel-17 messages are a language not a code, and one of incredible precision and expressive power, it's up to her to find the source and start a dialog.
Delany is a master of eyeball kicks of language, of strong self-indentity and beautiful decadence. Wong puts together a fascinating space crew of misfits, including a massive clawed pilot-wrestler, a live trinary navigation group and dead trinary sensor group, and a platoon of kids to turn the knobs. She visits a noble who dreams of death in a million exotic show more configurations, and falls in with space pirates. The setting is a fantastic fait accomplai, artistic weirdness that holds together in a glittering pattern. This is a very strange world of people who consider their lives entirely mundane, and it's a fantastic tension.
The meat of the novel hangs on the ideas of what can and cannot be translated, and a space pirate named The Butcher who speaks a native language without the words 'You' or 'I'. Wong realizes that The Butcher is the key to the whole mess. Babel-17 is a constructed language designed for sabotage without self-awareness, a control system for a schizoid spy that with her genius she is able to rework into a force for good. This is a very strange novel, totally unique, and well worth reading. show less
Delany is a master of eyeball kicks of language, of strong self-indentity and beautiful decadence. Wong puts together a fascinating space crew of misfits, including a massive clawed pilot-wrestler, a live trinary navigation group and dead trinary sensor group, and a platoon of kids to turn the knobs. She visits a noble who dreams of death in a million exotic show more configurations, and falls in with space pirates. The setting is a fantastic fait accomplai, artistic weirdness that holds together in a glittering pattern. This is a very strange world of people who consider their lives entirely mundane, and it's a fantastic tension.
The meat of the novel hangs on the ideas of what can and cannot be translated, and a space pirate named The Butcher who speaks a native language without the words 'You' or 'I'. Wong realizes that The Butcher is the key to the whole mess. Babel-17 is a constructed language designed for sabotage without self-awareness, a control system for a schizoid spy that with her genius she is able to rework into a force for good. This is a very strange novel, totally unique, and well worth reading. show less
Delany, Samuel R. Babel-17. 1966. Orion, 2010.
I last read Delany’s Babel-17 sometime in the late 1960s, probably in its first Ace paperback edition. I was impressed at the time with its somewhat poetic style and its innovative use of linguistic themes in a space opera. The only things I had read to rival it were Dune (Frank Herbert 1965) with its power words and strange navigators and The World of Null-A (A. E. van Vogt, 1948) that delved into general semantics. Rereading Babel-17 now, I am less impressed by the linguistic theory, but I am still enchanted with its youthful ebullience and more appreciative of the audacious originality of its characters and its society. It is a world in which poetry and language in general shape minds show more and have power we never suspected. The novel provides hints of the gender bending themes and racial diversity that would mark Delany’s later novels. Stylistically, Delany gets away with things that in lesser writers would be insupportable. What, for example, are “hyperstasis currents” and “the spacelli Snap”? We aren’t told, but they just seem to fit. The ending of the novel seems rushed, but it leaves one with an intended mental whiplash. Much new science fiction today seems extremely pedestrian by comparison. Five stars, with flaws, but five stars for sure. show less
I last read Delany’s Babel-17 sometime in the late 1960s, probably in its first Ace paperback edition. I was impressed at the time with its somewhat poetic style and its innovative use of linguistic themes in a space opera. The only things I had read to rival it were Dune (Frank Herbert 1965) with its power words and strange navigators and The World of Null-A (A. E. van Vogt, 1948) that delved into general semantics. Rereading Babel-17 now, I am less impressed by the linguistic theory, but I am still enchanted with its youthful ebullience and more appreciative of the audacious originality of its characters and its society. It is a world in which poetry and language in general shape minds show more and have power we never suspected. The novel provides hints of the gender bending themes and racial diversity that would mark Delany’s later novels. Stylistically, Delany gets away with things that in lesser writers would be insupportable. What, for example, are “hyperstasis currents” and “the spacelli Snap”? We aren’t told, but they just seem to fit. The ending of the novel seems rushed, but it leaves one with an intended mental whiplash. Much new science fiction today seems extremely pedestrian by comparison. Five stars, with flaws, but five stars for sure. show less
Okay, this book really needed to be put in context for me to like it more, because I didn't grow up reading Delany and I knew nothing about him. Samuel R. Delany is a gay black man, and this book was published in 1966.
So that helps with how Rydra Wong is always described as the most beautiful desirable woman ever, because man oh man does it make me angry for a woman to be talking linguistics only to have the man fawning over how beautiful she is and not really taking in what she's saying. Which I guess might be accurate? I don't know, but the author is the one taking liberties to create this society so they don't have to put it in there.
It also helps with the description of Babel-17 at the end, because it's...kind of really dated.
But show more some of my issues with the book were my own personal discomfort with intimate settings. Rydra is exceptionally good at reading body language, so characters' movements and tics are described in more detail than normal. I've been struggling with how to describe it - more tell than show? Or it might actually be more show than tell because we see exactly what makes the body language indicate a certain mood. It automatically makes me kind of recoil when I read because it feels too visceral. But it's a deliberate choice of Delany's, which I have to respect. show less
So that helps with how Rydra Wong is always described as the most beautiful desirable woman ever, because man oh man does it make me angry for a woman to be talking linguistics only to have the man fawning over how beautiful she is and not really taking in what she's saying. Which I guess might be accurate? I don't know, but the author is the one taking liberties to create this society so they don't have to put it in there.
It also helps with the description of Babel-17 at the end, because it's...kind of really dated.
But show more some of my issues with the book were my own personal discomfort with intimate settings. Rydra is exceptionally good at reading body language, so characters' movements and tics are described in more detail than normal. I've been struggling with how to describe it - more tell than show? Or it might actually be more show than tell because we see exactly what makes the body language indicate a certain mood. It automatically makes me kind of recoil when I read because it feels too visceral. But it's a deliberate choice of Delany's, which I have to respect. show less
I’m not sure if I liked how the story tied up, but Delany wrote some lovable characters here and placed them in a really interesting setting - a string of galaxies ravaged by a war between two parties, classes within each party clashing with their attitudes towards sexuality, the body, and how you treat the dead (or ‘discorporate’). Delany navigates through the various densities of this social soup with lovely twists of language, much like our protagonist - “She cut through worlds, and joined them - that’s the important part - so that both became bigger.”
Members
- Recently Added By
Published Reviews
ThingScore 100
If Babel 17 were published now as a new book, I think it would strike us an great work that was doing wonderful things and expanding the boundaries of science fiction. I think we’d nominate it for awards and talk a lot about it. It’s almost as old as I am, and I really think it would still be an exciting significant book if it were new now.
added by paradoxosalpha
Lists
Survey of Classic Science Fiction
171 works; 48 members
Best Science Fiction Novels
816 works; 430 members
Novels featuring language professionals
98 works; 12 members
Bibliography for Among Others
159 works; 15 members
S.F. Masterworks (Complete)
229 works; 15 members
SF Masterworks
193 works; 8 members
Recommended Speculative Fiction by Women and People of Color
298 works; 45 members
Nebula Award
111 works; 14 members
New wave science fiction
23 works; 2 members
What Makes This Book So Great
102 works; 16 members
1960s, Best books published therein
254 works; 22 members
Readable Classics
110 works; 15 members
Speculative Fiction to Read
706 works; 32 members
Books With Numbers in the Title
308 works; 13 members
SFFCat 2015
35 works; 1 member
Diverse Horror
262 works; 6 members
Books mentioned in Vandermeer's Wonderbook
34 works; 2 members
Linguistics in Science Fiction
27 works; 4 members
Books talked about in Pamela Dean's Tam Lin
74 works; 1 member
Pre-1969 LGBTQ Literature
182 works; 69 members
Speculative Fiction: The Classics
36 works; 5 members
Books Read in 2019
4,052 works; 108 members
Books Read in 2016
4,666 works; 199 members
1960s
281 works; 16 members
Books Read in 2015
3,298 works; 126 members
BingoDOG 2015 Challenge
49 works; 3 members
BingoDOG - Language in Fiction
35 works; 12 members
Favorite Science Fiction
448 works; 214 members
Expand Your Reading Demographics!
47 works; 15 members
Author Information
196+ Works 28,784 Members
Samuel R. Delany Jr. was born in Harlem, New York on April 1, 1942. He is a science fiction and short story writer. His first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, was published in 1962. He has written more than 20 novels and collections of short stories, memoirs, and critical essays. He has received numerous awards including the Nebula Award for best novel show more for Babel-17 in 1966 and The Einstein Intersection in 1967, the Nebula Award for best short story for Aye, and Gomorrah and Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones, the Hugo Award for best short story for Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones in 1970 and for his non-fiction book, The Motion of Light in Water, and the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Gay Literature in 1993. He is as a professor in the department of English at the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York. (Bowker Author Biography) Samuel R. Delany is a professor of English & Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. (Publisher Provided) show less
Some Editions
Awards and Honors
Awards
Distinctions
Notable Lists
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Grandes Éxitos de Bolsillo (B-104)
SF Masterworks (6)
Work Relationships
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Babel-17
- Original title
- Babel-17
- Original publication date
- 1966
- People/Characters
- Rydra Wong; Butcher; Brass; Calli; Ron; Dr. Markus T'mwarba (show all 24); Baron Felix Ver Dorco; Tarik; General Forester; Mollya Twa; Carlos; Diavalo; Danil D. Appleby; Lome; Allegra; Flop; Baroness Ver Dorco; Sam; Lizzy; Albert Ver Dorco; Kile; Klik; Ratt; Geoffrey Cord
- Important places
- Transport Town; Alliance War Yards, Armsedge; Jebel Tarik; Administrative Alliance Headquarters
- Epigraph
- Nowhere is civilization so perfectly mirrored as in speech. If our knowledge of speech, or the speech itself, is not yet perfect neither is civilization.
-- Mario Pei - Dedication
- --this one, now, is
for Bob Folsom,
to explain just a little of
the past year-- - First words
- It's a port city.
- Quotations
- A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning. At best ... (show all)you can get a close approximation.
If there's no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn't the proper form, you don't have the how even if you have the words. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)And even without Babel-17, you should know by now, I can talk my way out of anything.
- Original language
- English
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 3,037
- Popularity
- 5,784
- Reviews
- 98
- Rating
- (3.67)
- Languages
- 11 — Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal)
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 36
- ASINs
- 53