Babel-17

Babel-17, by Samuel R. Delany

A friend was telling me that I need to read some Delany, and let me tell you, they were right. Delany's prose is delicious: lush, poetic, vivid. BABEL-17 is a book where I really strongly recommend listening to the audio, because hearing the words read aloud is incredibly satisfying. It's got a mouthfeel so rich you can almost taste it.

This book was written in the mid 1960s, and there are some anachronisms that hit me strangely (at one point a character says something like, 'of course these spacefaring youths working on my space ship will have brought marbles with them to play with in their downtime,' which, marbles? What? But again, my paraphrase doesn't do the prose justice; this ridiculous idea is phrased so beautifully you don't even mind hearing it).

Beyond the marbles and the punch-card computers, I was really struck by the way this book's faith in the hidden depths of the human mind also feels archaic. I'd forgotten that in the 60s people really did believe that telepathy was just a scientific discovery or two away from being confirmed as a real thing. I suppose even people who weren't science fiction writers believed in brainwashing, subconscious programming, all that MK Ultra stuff. They didn't know yet that all torture and psychological manipulation can produce is traumatized, dysfunctional people, not elite supersoldiers who aren't themselves aware that they're on an assassination mission, who will snap into action and carry out a sophisticated plan when they receive the right signal.

It's interesting to me that this won awards (The Nebula in '66, if I recall correctly, and maybe a couple others). I do think that Rydra, the protagonist (whose last name is Wong and who lives in a galactic alliance with origins in Africa and Asia, although, amusingly, she's protrayed as a Nordic-looking white lady on the cover) felt a little bit... Asimov-esque to me. By which I mean, she's an extraordinarily skilled and confident and beautiful young woman who ends up swooning over a brute of a manly man and starts deferring to his desires and decisions as soon as he asserts his presence in the text. One of the major characters is a hilariously cliche Freudian psychoanalyst. Another is a hilariously cliche military officer.

There's a long sequence of events where Rydra goes around a spaceport picking up crew members, and then in the second half of the book those crew members are terribly under-utilized. A navigator who speaks Kiswahili and is a double widow--as in, she had two husbands simultaneously and both were killed in the same battle--spends about 90% of her pagetime dead and/or unable to communicate while Rydra picks her out of a catalog of cryo-frozen candidates and then thaws/resurrects her to hire her onto the crew. I wanted to know more about her, but we get nothing!

In fact, I almost want to say that the book completely falls apart in the last third. Rydra essentially transforms into a different character, with different motivations, goals, method of thinking, even a different language, OFF SCREEN, and then we get one final scene where she's just ditched her old life and gone off galivanting into enemy territory because her mind got hacked by a linguistic 'virus.' And like... that's it.

And yet, I still am glad I read it, because it truly is so beautifully written. I will probably read more Delany soon. So, you know, four stars.