But I would have pored over them earlier, and much later have come to enjoy them all the more, in spite of the flaws. I first discovered his works while I was in college, and found them opaque and self-absorbed. (Although both treks are aesthetically closer to Road Warrior than Star Wars, George Lucas does seem to have picked up a couple of ideas here, including the famous alien bar scene.) There is one disclaimer: The topologies of Delany's writing are not for everyone. Though shorter (sort of), Empire Star gets in its LUMPs (Linguistic Ubiquitous Multiplex Computers) as well.ĭelany, anagramatically AKA Muels Aranlyde, writes sagely about the joy of linguistics (in a Whorf-ian sense), the anguish and sadness of slavery, the questing journey, non-standard sexual proclivities, and a whole new slant on death being no excuse to stop working. Babel 17, The longer of the two, is a narrative of mayhem, murder, mystery, madness, and metaphor. Delany's early classics is a wonderful piece of publication, as the two novellas together make yet a third window on the combined story. I never know whether an old favorite will live up to my memory of it, but this one certainly does. We also get a genuinely sick chill from the head of the weapons lab - as well we should, from the hypocritical genteelness of a man so dedicated to death en masse.īabel-17 instantly became one of my favorites when I first read it. Delany's writing is so good that we really care about that mousy little bureaucrat who approves Rydra's star flight. Fast-paced adventure pulls the reader along, with plenty of worthwhile characters along the way. Every fact that sheds light on the language only darkens the real mystery: who speaks this language? And why? Rydra chases Bable-17 in a trail of sabotage across the star-streams, learning bits and pieces of the language as she goes. It's a language instead, with its own words, grammar, and lethal internal logic. Rydra discovers that codename Babel-17 is no mere cipher. Because of her past skills at decryption and current skills in many human languages, her help is asked in decoding messages that precede devastating acts of sabotage against our side. Her readership also spans two sides of an interstellar war. Rydra Wong is a poet - the poet of her generation, though only in her twenties, with a readership spanning five galaxies.
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