It’s been a long time (apart from Too Like The Lightning) that I’ve read a novel that felt so tailored to me like Babel-17. I mean, it’s a queer polyamorous scifi novel where linguistics are key, even to winning space battles, which there are plenty of. I have no words. It’s also been the first time in a while that a novel brought me to tears.
This is absolutely what scifi is supposed to be like. It’s rapid, and fun, and deep, and thoughtful, and introduces alien concepts and human behaviour, and …. I can absolutely see why it won the very first Nebula Award – even though I was very surprised to hear it’s as old as 1966. It doesn’t feel aged at all.
On re-read: I had forgotten the wonder that is Rydra. The brilliance. The empathy. The poetry. I had remembered some of the crew, but not the sheer wonder I felt at every little sentence. Just like in Empire Star, Delany draws entire worlds in hidden clauses, and makes me feel and see entire persons in two sentences. Two sentences! And imagine what he will do when he uses more than that. There’s a heart-wrenching paragraph about being poly in a mono world in there, and that’s an obvious one. But there’s so much more, in every little sentence.
Intermission: Imagine how Marilyn Hacker felt, being portrayed like that. Or used as a blueprint, at least – he wrote this while being in a relationship with her, the poet, and another guy, and … Oh, what do I know! Some people claim the four poems opening the four chapters are hers, and those people are the kind of old and knowledgeable that they are probably right – and the poems were taken out for later editions, which is a shame –
(correction: those people are right, I found some of them, but the best one, the very best, I can’t find published anywhere …)
And the worldbuilding details. There are aliens sailing deep space in a triple yolked huge egg, and it’s barely worth a mention and yet also deeply integrated with the story. The description of the language challenges in creating a treaty with them …! I put all those beautiful details into the plot summary, because it’s too hard to pick out the spoilers. But man, the space ship crew on its own would make this a five-star book.
And then there’s the fact that he just sat down and wrote poems that made it plausible for his protagonist to be a star poet renowned in five galaxies.
Plot summary
Beware: full spoilers! Also probably incomplete and possibly incomprehensible.
Rydra is the most famous poet in five galaxies. (And just back from six months teaching at uni, Mr Self Insert?) The galaxies are at war: Alliance (humans + three kinds of aliens) vs Invaders (humans + four kinds of aliens), with two more species sitting the war out. Everybody, including her, has just been through some traumatising decades, up to and including starvation to the point of cannibalism. She’s asked by the government and army to solve Babel-17, weird alien transmissions that precede attacks or sabotages.
Rydra decides to get a ship and a crew and go to where she intuits the next attack while continuing to solve the thing. She is licensed to be an Interstellar Captain, which involves a lot of crew management (very much anticipating CRM in modern aviation!).
The space sailor (pardon: transport worker) culture is rad. They have body mods like old Earth sailors had tattoos: suspiciously eyed by everybody else, but wonderful and adventurous. They come in all sizes and shapes: lizards, sphinxes, … They prefer to go fully or at least partially naked. Crews stick together. Pilots have semi underground wrestling exhibition fights in zero-grav bubbles to make a name for themselves. Zero grav wrestling is great: you win by throwing the other into the wall and only touching it yourself with one limb, so by cleverly handling recoil and rebound. Which is meaningful because they are jacked into their ships and more-or-less wrestle the space currents.
Rydra picks up Brass (pilot), saber teeth, claws, tail, mane and all (‘“Ca’tain Wong!” The mouth, distended through cosmetisurgically implanted fangs, could not deal with a plosive labial unless it was voiced.’). On his last trip, he lost a bunch of crew: his Navigator One, his Ear + Nose and his entire Platoon (12 people taking care of mechanical things, so only the Calli (Two) and Ron (Three) are left. And the Eye, but without Ear and Nose, the Eye can’t continue. Calli is a bear and Ron is a twink (with a rose growing on his shoulder), though Delany puts it more lyrically.
Eye/Ear/Nose (the Sensory team) and Navigators work in triples. A close emotional and sexual relationship with three people, because some jobs just can’t be done by one brain, or even two. Eye, Ear and Nose have to be dead, because live humans would go crazy perceiving the universe like that.
Rydra picks a new crew. (A Customs official has to be along to approve that all the psyche indexes integrate well.) Takes on a very new Platoon with only one flight under their belt to train them to her methods (“crazy, lazy, lovable kids”), and a Slug (“fat galoof with black eyes, hair, beard; moves slow and thinks fast”. For everybody else, they head to the discorporate sector. You can see the people there, and they look human, but as soon as you look away, you can’t remember them. Finds an Eye and Ear and Nose.
Then Rydra has to pick a new One for the broken up navigators. They head to the Morgue, where Transport people are frozen en masse, for further use (the crews are used to working with the dead). Not everybody can be called back, but people who die through “Morgue channels” can. She asks Calli and Ron what they want in their girl, and it’s all thoroughly heart-breaking. She finds Twa, who seems to be perfect (apart from not speaking English, but who’s counting – it’s intentional as Rydra knows it’ll make them get closer, avoid initial jarring miscommunications). Twa went to the Morgue to die there after she lost the other two in her triple some years ago.
Pretty much immediately on starting out, they get knocked out of their drive. They orbit Earth with all their instruments knocked out. That and some other damage points to sabotage. (They don’t even have windows to figure out where they are …) Rydra is clever and uses marbles and gravity and a watch to figure out where they are, whee. She got the idea from how Babel-17 works.
[Intermission: Rydra backstory. She was tripled, too. One died. One is in suspended animation hoping for a cure for a deadly disease, probably not going to be found in her lifetime. Fobo was a captain and engineer. The suspended one was Muels Aranlyde, the author of … Empire Star. Comet Jo was modelled after Fobo. There’s a whole series of books implied. One taught her to be a captain, the other to be a writer. Rydra tells Ron in the process of troubleshooting their new triple relationship.]
At the alliance shipyard, she and her entire crew is invited to dine with the Baron Ver Dorco. Rydra is uneasy and sets her Sensory crew up to spy. (Usually, people can only communicate with the discorporate via special equipment, because otherwise you forget immediately what they say. Rydra works around this by immediately translating their words. So whenever she catches herself thinking in Basque, she knows the thought isn’t actually hers.) The Baron is a creep proud of his collection of really fucking atrocious weapons. Described in detail. Including engineered humans, vat-grown to age 16 in 6 months, life span maybe 20 years, with full psychological programming, freely able to alter their biometrics. Just before dinner, Babel-17 starts being transmitted, the baron dies from a whispered word by a stranger, and Rydra’s ship is kidnapped (or rescued?) out of the exploding base.
Intermission: thoughts about language, basically prettily explaining Sapir-Whorf. She wakes up thinking in Babel-17; incredibly tight, compressed, accurate. Just by naming a web correctly, it identifies the point to break to unravel the entire thing, etc.
She and her crew are aboard a super weird ship, a shadow ship (radio dense, undetectable) with Captain Tarik. They are tolerated by the alliance because they keep the border safe. Space pirates! With special sections for the neurotic, the psychotic, the criminally insane. (“Neurotics advance. Maintain contact to avoid separation anxiety. […] Neurotics proceed with delusions of grandeur. Napoleon Bonaparte take the lead. Jesus Christ bring up the rear.”) Rydra uses Babel-17 to see how to win an encounter. (Her ship gets jettisoned, but they are, for the moment, honoured guests.)
Rydra starts having to sometimes force herself back to English to explain concepts that are trivial in Babel-17. Switching to Babel-17 in a battle gets her victory, in the ship’s mess makes her space out and see everything and everybody deeply, as deep as can be. She sees an assassination attempt forming in the mind of one of the crew, calls him out with poetry, and finds out that too much time in Babel-17 makes her sick, strains her body too much. She convinces the ship to go to Alliance Headquarters, because she knows the next attack is there – one hopes the reader understands at this point what’s going on (end of Chapter 3, 60% in).
(Just before that, they figure out that the faked take-off request was made with a recording of her.) While she travels towards Alliance headquarters, she figures out that Tarik’s second-in-command, the Butcher, has a language without the word “I”, whereby he becomes her ally. He asks her why she saved the commander from the attacker, and she struggles to answer without the word. He is uncomfortable with learning them. But she teaches him. There is a long section where he inverts “I” and “you”, and it is beautiful. And heart-breaking af.
Space battle. Tarik dies (discorporates). Butcher and Rydra live and take off towards headquarters with her crew. Brain-melds with the Butcher. Figures out he was a test subject for Babel-17, that it’s an engineered language. There is an entire love letter in there. And also Rydra figuring out what’s going on, with her, by looking at how the Butcher used to work.
They arrive at headquarters, still fully merged in Babel-17 mode, and the reader is infuriatingly flung back the her therapist and the customs officer whose life she changed just by being in it for a night (he gets a dragon installed in his shoulder). The psych encounters the entangled Babel-17 Rydra-Butcher-being. Rydra surfaces shortly to tell him that they took care of the sabotage, but that they are prisoners, and to disregard her body, and to find out the Butcher’s original identity as the sabotour of all the Babel-17 incidents. The psych feeds him with paradoxes to break through the Butcher’s amnesia, and he turns out to be the baron’s lost son, of course. Very Empire Star. He got made into one of those perfect machines by his father, and can command the others. But he got captured and sent back with amnesia and Babel-17.
Babel-17 is like a program and a language. The lack of “I” acts as isolation, it removes the possibility to reflect. It programs towards sabotage, makes sabotage so trivial to be inescapable, and provides technical mastery. In it, trying to destroy your own ship and hiding it from yourself with self-hypnosis is obvious. The only escape was to start fixing the language (and even then, the Butcher pulled Rydra under, until he got the rest of his memories back.)
The general locks them in, so they break out, steal a ship and are off, having left some nice Babel-18 instructions. Happily ever after etc.
