Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delaney

Hello, Stranger.

Let's talk about Samuel R. Delaney's Babel-17.

The Short of It

Plot: A series of attacks by the invaders have only one thing in common: the mysterious language Babel-17

Page Count: 173

Award: 1966 Nebula. You read that right. This tied with Flowers for Algernon.

Worth a read: No
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character)
Bechdel Test: Fail
Technobabel-17: Go big or go home. 
Review: Boring. Very boring. Just so boring. Is the idea that language dictates thought interesting? Sure. Is it enough to carry a story? Nope. Dull story, tepid characters, belabored central concept. Handful of neat ideas that don't make up for the rest. Nap time in book form. 

The Medium of It

Spoiler Free!

This is probably the longest book I've ever read that was less than 200 pages.

There are a few concepts in this book that are fun. There are living tattoos, intense body modifications that allow people to take on all sorts of forms, and the use of dead folks as part of starship crews. There are a number of neat weapons as well, from shape-shifting metals to an array of dandy poisons. 

There is also no payoff on any of these things. They are in the book but not used to any particularly remarkable end. 

Babel-17 is centered on linguistic theory; that languages dictate how we think. It is effectively a number of lectures on the subject strung together with completely incoherent connective tissue.

Just don't read this one. If you're remotely curious, glance through the spoilers below, but don't waste your time.

Again, this novel tied with Flowers for Algernon for the 1967 Nebula, which boggles the mind.

If for some reason you do not wish to follow the above advice, consider using the link below - I'll get a few cents at no additional cost to you, and you'll have a terrible book to read.

This is the link to which I refer.

The Long of It

This one is really bad. To give you the proper feeling of reading this book, I have interspersed brief bits of commentary with chunks of text pulled straight from the text. I would call them "quotations" or "excerpts" but "chunk" feels far more accurate. I acknowledge that the distinction is small but it feels relevant. Quotation and excerpt both carry a tone of deference, while chunk conveys my disdain for the text. I hope I have fully explained my choices here.

See what I did there? I tossed in a note on language. 

Rydra Wong (+10 points for a cool name) has crazy protagonist powers: she is beautiful, brilliant, capable of comprehending almost any language, a starship captain, and is basically able to read minds. Did I mention that she is a poet who is famous across all known space? Don't worry! This all comes up in the first chapter. Pretty much any man she encounters falls in love with her immediately. She also has no discernible personality. Sure, she might not be interesting, but at least she only speaks in monologues. That said, everyone does. Except when they speak in poetry or song, which is a thing that happens.

“To the extent we used it, the life span reduction is seventy-five percent and over.” He might have smiled the same way watching some odd animal at its incomprehensible antics. “But, Madam, we are making weapons. If TW-55 can function twenty years at peak efficiency, then it will have outlasted the average battle cruiser by five years. But the experiential imprinting! To find among ordinary men someone who can function as a spy, is willing to function as a spy, you must search the fringes of neurosis, often psychosis. Though such deviations might mean strength in a particular area, it always means an overall weakness in the personality. Functioning in any but that particular area, a spy may be dangerously inefficient. And the Invaders have psyche-indices too, which will keep the average spy out of anyplace we might want to put him. Captured, a good spy is a dozen times as dangerous as a bad one. Post-hypnotic suicide suggestions and the like are easily gotten around with drugs; and are wasteful. TW-55 here will register perfectly normal on a psyche integration. He has about six hours of social conversation, plot synopses of the latest novels, political situations, music, and art criticism—I believe in the course of an evening he is programmed to drop your name twice, an honor you share only with Ronald Quar. He has one subject on which he can expound with scholarly acumen for an hour and a half—this one, I believe, is ‘haptoglobin groupings among the marsupials.’ Put him in formal wear and he will be perfectly at home at an ambassadorial ball or a coffee break at a high-level government conference. He is a crack assassin, expert with all the weapons you have seen up till now, and more. TW-55 has twelve hours’ worth of episodes in fourteen different dialects, accents, or jargons concerning sexual conquests, gambling experiences, fisticuff encounters, and humorous anecdotes of semi-illegal enterprises, all of which failed miserably. Tear his shirt, smear grease on his face and slip a pair of overalls on him, and he could be a service mechanic on any one of a hundred spaceyards or stellarcenters on the other side of the Snap. He can disable any space drive system, communications components, radar works, or alarm system used by the Invaders in the past twenty years with little more than—”

Things just kinda happen, a lot, for no real reason. Enhanced human thunder dome? Because reasons. Space pirates? Sure! A ghost seducing a guy and stealing his wallet? Alright, it was pretty funny. Polyamorous navigation triples? Something something something it's too complex a job for one person. Bank robberies by sleeper agents? In flashback! Cadres of orphans playing marbles in space? Happens more than once.

One might be inclined to believe that with all the things going on, some of it would be engaging. One would be wrong. Every scene drags on for what feels like an eternity. Here's a quick bite. Context: answering a question on why there are not so many interactions with aliens.

“Because compatibility factors for communication are incredibly low. Take the Çiribians, who have enough knowledge to sail their triple-yolked poached eggs from star to star: they have no word for ‘house,’ ‘home,’ or ‘dwelling.’ ‘We must protect our families and our homes.’ When we were preparing the treaty between the Çiribians and ourselves at the Court of Outer Worlds, I remember that sentence took forty-five minutes to say in Çiribian. Their whole culture is based on heat and changes in temperature. We’re just lucky that they do know what a ‘family’ is, because they’re the only ones beside humans who have them. But for ‘house’ you have to end up describing ‘…an enclosure that creates a temperature discrepancy with the outside environment of so many degrees, capable of keeping comfortable a creature with a uniform body temperature of ninety-eight-point-six, the same enclosure being able to lower the temperature during the months of the warm season and raise it during the cold season, providing a location where organic sustenance can be refrigerated in order to be preserved, or warmed well above the boiling point of water to pamper the taste mechanism, of the indigenous habitants who, through customs that go back through millions of hot and cold seasons, have habitually sought out this temperature changing device…’ and so forth and so on. At the end you have given them some idea of what a ‘home’ is and why it is worth protecting. Give them a schematic of the air-conditioning and central heating system, and things begin to get through. Now: there is a huge solar-energy conversion plant that supplies all the electrical energy for the Court. The heat amplifying and reducing components take up an area a little bigger than Jebel. One Çiribian can slither through that plant and then go describe it to another Çiribian who never saw it before so that the second can build an exact duplicate, even to the color the walls are painted—and this actually happened, because they thought we’d done something ingenious with one of the circuits and wanted to try it themselves—where each piece is located, how big it is, in short completely describe the whole business, in nine words. Nine very small words, too.”

These linguistics monologues come up with astonishing frequency. The above excerpt is from a back and forth with a man who does not use the words "you" or "I" and thus does not seem to understand the self. This discussion is a full chapter, approximately six percent of the book. This topic comes up multiple times outside of that chapter as well. 

ABSTRACT THOUGHTS IN A blue room: Nominative, genitive, elative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases to the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The North American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid. 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. Imagine, in Spanish, having to assign a gender to every object: dog, table, tree, can opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a gender to anything: he, she, it all the same word. Thou art my friend, but you are my king; thus the distinctions of Elizabeth the First’s English. But with some oriental languages, which all but dispense with gender and number, you are my friend, you are my parent, and YOU are my priest, and YOU are my king, and YOU are my servant, and You are my servant whom I’m going to fire tomorrow if You don’t watch it, and YOU are my king whose policies I totally disagree with and have sawdust in YOUR head instead of brains, YOUR highness, and YOU may be my friend, but I’m still gonna smack YOU up side the head if YOU ever say that to me again: and who the hell are you anyway…?

What’s your name? she thought in a round warm blue room.

Thoughts without a name in a blue room: Ursula, Priscilla, Barbara, Mary, Mona, and Natica: respectively, Bear, Old Lady, Chatterbox, Bitter, Monkey, and Buttock. Name. Names? What’s in a name? What name am I in? In my father’s father’s land, his name would come first, Wong Rydra. In Mollya’s home, I would not bear my father’s name at all, but my mother’s. Words are names for things. In Plato’s time things were names for ideas—what better description of the Platonic Ideal? But were words names for things, or was that just a bit of semantic confusion? Words were symbols for whole categories of things, where a name was put to a single object: a name on something that requires a symbol jars, making humor. A symbol on something that takes a name jars, too: a memory that contained a torn window shade, his liquored breath, her outrage, and crumpled clothing wedged behind a chipped, cheap night table, “All right, woman, come here!” and she had whispered, with her hands achingly tight on the brass bar, “My name is Rydra!” An individual, a thing apart from its environment, and apart from all things in that environment; an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented. I am invented. I am not a round warm blue room. I am someone in that room; I am—

Everything here is a delivery system for moments like this, which is why so much happens with zero consequences.

Here is the explanation of everything, given at the end:

“Anyway,” Rydra went on. “Babel-17 as a language contains a preset program for the Butcher to become a criminal and saboteur. If you turn somebody with no memory loose in a foreign country with only the words for tools and machine parts, don’t be surprised if he ends up a mechanic. By manipulating his vocabulary properly you can just as easily make him a sailor, or an artist. Also, Babel-17 is such an exact analytical language, it almost assures you technical mastery of any situation you look at. And the lack of an ‘I’ blinds you to the fact that though it’s a highly useful way to look at things, it isn’t the only way.”

“But you mean that this language could even turn you against the Alliance?” the General asked.

“Well,” said Rydra, “to start off with, the word for Alliance in Babel-17 translates literally into English as: one-who-has-invaded. You take from there. It has all sorts of little diabolisms programmed into it. While thinking in Babel-17 it becomes perfectly logical to try and destroy your own ship and then blot out the fact with self-hypnosis so you won’t discover what you’re doing and try and stop yourself.”

Lessons we can learn about writing from this story:

• Tell, do not show.
• Tell again, in case it was not clear the first time.
• Chekhov leaves guns everywhere and then forgets about them.

There is no word in my language for !@$#@!(*&, Stranger.

And don't forget to read a book!