Babel 17 - MXHDR BookWyrm

mass market paperback, 304 pages

French language

Published Jan. 1, 1973 by Calmann-Lévy.

ISBN:: 978-2-7021-0495-8

(2 reviews)

During an interstellar war one side develops a language, Babel-17, that can be used as a weapon. Learning it turns one into an unwilling traitor as it alters perception and thought. This is discovered by the starship captain Rydra Wong. She is recruited to discover how the enemy are infiltrating and sabotaging strategic sites.

17 editions

radio-appears reviewed Babel-17 (Sphere science fiction) by Samuel R. Delany

Part pulp, part high-brow

No rating

A confusing mix when it comes to tone, this story reads mostly as a pulpy space opera, except for those moments where it launches into complicated discussions of linguistics and grammar.

Rydra Wong is a poet with such a great knack for learning languages that it borders on telepathy (body language is a language too, after all), and she uses her talent to decode the messages of the Invaders who, as the name suggests, are at war with her society.

I'm not a linguist, but I believe that the scientific theories on which the premise of this book is based have been debunked , which didn't help my suspension of disbelief. Personally, I was much more interested in another idea Delany introduced: discorporate people. Basically, in the future we prove that ghosts do exist, we just haven't yet developed the technology needed to perceive them. Without technological intervention we simply …

A confusing mix when it comes to tone, this story reads mostly as a pulpy space opera, except for those moments where it launches into complicated discussions of linguistics and grammar.

Rydra Wong is a poet with such a great knack for learning languages that it borders on telepathy (body language is a language too, after all), and she uses her talent to decode the messages of the Invaders who, as the name suggests, are at war with her society.

I'm not a linguist, but I believe that the scientific theories on which the premise of this book is based have been debunked , which didn't help my suspension of disbelief. Personally, I was much more interested in another idea Delany introduced: discorporate people. Basically, in the future we prove that ghosts do exist, we just haven't yet developed the technology needed to perceive them. Without technological intervention we simply forget our interactions with the discorporate as soon as they happen, leaving us with nothing but the lingering feeling of being haunted. His vision of a future in which the dead are integrated into society is fascinating, and I would have preferred a book that focused on that idea.

Allen Shull reviewed Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

Good linguistic SF

4 stars

Very easy to see why this won the Nebula. Really good look at linguistics (not TOO hampered by Sapir-Whorf or limited understanding of computer languages), with inventive ideas and plot—only really hampered by the pat ending.

Although I’ve read it before, my appreciation has been amplified after reading Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman: perfect communication REQUIRES telepathy, and telepathy enables communication to be perfected. Interesting that so much in the 60s-70s really focuses on telepathy, but the novum gets dropped so abruptly in the 80s.