Babel-17

I was very intrigued when I first began this book. Very quickly I noticed the odd way in which it was written. I had thought it to be a bad editing mistake, before I read on and realized that it was very intentional. Babel-17 by Samuel Delany is a highly philosophical novel.  This language has only third person in it; there is no “I” or “you” used. It is also a very precise language, each word layered with meaning. As a result, speakers of it would not have any ability to be self-critical, or to separate reality from what the language has programmed them to see as reality. Language mirrors ourselves, but those same selves are absent in the language. One of the questions raised by the novel is how much one’s language dictates the way in which one perceives the world. Does speaking another language change the way you think? Can one person ever truly know another?

The most important narrative thread of Babel-17 turns out not to be the plot, which bounces us across a couple of different planets and ships, but rather the question of whether communication between two people is possible. That is not to say that the plot is irrelevant or uninteresting though, the book is definitively not your stereotypical sci-fi novel. It takes the tropes and flips them upside down, which I found very refreshing. The hero is a telepathic Chinese woman who happens to be the most famous poet of her age. A woman, who also has weak moments. She can talk her way out of trouble and succeeds through using her wit and her empathy rather than force or technology. She’s not your typical warrior and, although fights take place, they have nothing to do with what turns out to be the hero’s victory. There’s none of the stereotypical male dominance. The crew on Rydra’s ship are all considered equals. The book shifts its focus away from what we’d expect from a space adventure yarn. The ongoing war between The Alliance and The Invaders is described not through battles but through the starvation and horror of its impact. The fact that humans have made contact with aliens is mentioned offhandedly in half a sentence. It just has a lot of elements that you normally wouldn’t expect from this genre, which made this a very interesting read.