Babel-17 (S.F. MASTERWORKS): Samuel R. Delany

Product Information

Linguist and renowned poet Rydra Wong is brought in to decipher the code, which she names Babel-17, and she gathers a crew and a ship to travel to where she believes the next attack will be. But it’s a hell of a premise for a work of speculative fiction, and Delany runs it all the way home in a book that’s barely 200 pages. Rydra and crew escape to their ship, but the vessel seemingly takes off on its own, after more Babel-17 messages are mysteriously sent.

He arrives in civilian clothes and feels uncomfortable since he lacks the normal shield of his uniform.If you bounce hard off stories with no, well, story, just relax, this one's short, rather witty, and unlike anything I've read before.

I’ve never felt so close to a brilliant mind playing with the possibilities of language and the difficulty of communicating feelings as I have when reading Samuel R. I know that sounds like something invented just to give conservatives a conniption fit, but the overall effect is an odd beauty, a celebration of the strange and weird that reminds you of how much of what we think is strange and weird is rooted in mere familiarity. Pale and proper men and women now, who spoke softly, who always hesitated before they let an expression fix their faces, with pale, proper, patriotic ideas: work for victory over the Invaders; Alona Star and Kip Rhyak were great in "Stellar Holliday" but Ronald Quar was the best serious actor around.The story is good, and definitely different from most other SF (although I m sure I have read similar books in the past). This is the story of her and her crew as they travel through the galaxy investigating the sabotage and coming to an understanding about the saboteurs language that may help them solve the problem affecting the whole of humanity and its allies. I've enjoyed concept based SF many times before, and I loved China Mieville's Embassytown, a novel that plays with some fascinating ideas around language and culture. To counter this, Rydra translates each message to another language, Basque, one that she can capture and remember.