Samuel R. Delaney's BABEL-17

"Sometimes worlds exist under your eyes and you never see them." 

I sometimes sleep way too long on Science Fiction Grand Masters* and end up missing out on terrific stuff. It's a bit perverse. I know part of it is a matter of "I'll decide for myself whom I think the greatest SF authors are, thank you very much" and part of it is a matter of "OK, I'm pretty much guaranteed that this is going to be good* so I'll save it for getting out of a reading slump (even though those are pretty rare for me) or when I don't feel like taking a chance on something for some reason."

This is also why I haven't read all of Philip K Dick's novels yet. 

Then when I finally get around to one of them, I spend a while berating myself for having slept on him or her, as happened this month when the good old "included in your Audible subscription" bug bit and finally got me paying attention to Samuel R. Delaney and his astonishing, and astonishingly perfect for me, like so perfect for me (except for one thing in sure I'll have too much to say about a bit later) all that's missing is insects or fungi, Babel-17.

The book's title refers to the code name a multi-racial pan-galactic authority has bestowed on what it believes is an unbreakable cypher being used by its enemy, another multi-racial pan-galatic authority we only ever hear referred to as The Invaders. As our story begins, the military has hit an immovable wall as far as Babel-17 goes, but the need to finally crack it is urgent: every time it has been used, devastating acts of sabotage have occurred, and the sabotage is getting worse. 

Enter Rydra Wong, a young woman with a tragic and traumatic past, restored to functioning humanity as a child by society's greatest psychiatrist, former military cryptographer, natural polyglot and universally renowned poet (we learn later in the story, anecdotally, that her poetry is even admired by some Invaders), whom everybody figures is their last chance to crack it. I mean, if I knew someone like her (or, let's face it, could be her!) she's the one I'd want solving a problem like Babel-17.

This would be story enough for me, but Delaney seems to be a guy who doesn't want to stop with the wild ideas and over the top world building. The space-faring world of Babel-17 is one in which there are two ways to travel through space: the ordinary, plodding, mechanical/scientific way preferred by the staid and conservative Customs faction, who mostly stick to the original solar system as a result, and the artistic, intuitive-yet-counter-intuitive hyperdrive/FTL way preferred by the free-wheeling Transport faction, who visit other galaxies and go out and discover wild new things and generally muck about having a good time, mostly. Wong is, of course, a member of Transport, and on top of everything else is a qualified starship captain, which comes into play almost immediately after she gets hold of a transcription of all known samples of Babel-17 and proceeds to argue the general assigned to wrangle her into disclosing more than he'd meant to, allowing her to realize that it's not a code but a language, and lickety-split, she's figured out enough of it to have a pretty good idea as to where the next sabotage is going to take place!

Rydra then plunges into the weird and exciting world of recruitment, Transport-style, dragging the Customs guy assigned to help her acquire and crew a ship through a whole new side of the port city they've both been living in. She needs a whole lot of very peculiar people with some really unusual abilities to make a spaceship go where she needs to be in time to make a difference, and here is where audio book pro Stefan Rudnicki really gets a chance to show off a bit. I was already pleased with him for not doing the stupid "raised pitch and breathy" stereotypical "male narrators doing a female voice" for Rydra, but then he really took off depicting characters that, though human, have unusual physiognomies of various kinds --  and making me believe that's how they sound.

Next thing we know, they are off on their mission, with Rydra mostly sequestered to work on developing a dictionary and grammar of Babel-17 but occasionally dabbling in integrating her new crew, which includes two members of a former sexual and professional threesome whose third had recently died, only for Rydra to blithely pluck a recently dead (by suicide) woman with the requisite skills out of the morgue, reviving her, and declaring her their new partner, even though she doesn't speak the other two's language. Learning to communicate will be a bonding experience, she tells them a bit smugly, because of course she's right; she's Rydra Wong! But the new trio isn't even close to being the weirdest of her new crewmates. The pilot, Brass, is an extreme chimeric straight out of Alastair Reynolds' Ultranauts and was surely an inspiration for same; and then there's the Eye, the Ear, and the Nose. These are three "non-corporeals," sort of technologically enhanced ghosts who have developed just one sense for perceiving the world and who can only communicate via gadgetry, or, with Rydra only, via very intimate non-contact that is kind of like telepathy, only even that way any contact with them immediately evaporates from memory until Rydra develops a trick of quickly mentally translating what they tell her into the Basque language, which she is then able to recall.

Yeah.

Rydra is a bit Mary-Sue-ish, but what she's doing and has yet to do is so interesting and daunting that I didn't care until after this hyperspeed-paced story was over and done, and the omnicompetence of the heroine proved to be necessary for the story to work at all and the story was so good that, fine, she can do everything. Fine. Totally worth it

Except...

Alas, in the middle of the book my unmitigated delight in it was rudely interrupted and threatened to be ruined by a stark reminder that, though most of this book is so fresh and unique and fascinating it could have been written today, it was, in fact, written in the 1960s. Samuel R. Delaney was ahead of his time in every way imaginable -- handles bisexuality with aplomb, no sexism, etc. -- but wrote a minor character in the most fatphobic terms imaginable, and Rudnicki found a way to make her even worse. I was so heartbroken and dismayed by this that I came really really close to just dropping the whole thing. I'm not 100% on this and I have no desire at this point to go back and check but I believe the character, the wife of the Baron in charge of the whole society's weapon development and production facilities, was even referred to as a cow. But even if that word isn't actually in the text, it might as well have been. 

But, if POC and also Irish and Italians can get through H.P. Lovecraft, I can get through this, I finally decided after a day or so. And I was rewarded.

A new and mysterious character soon joins the narrative, a member of a space pirate crew, 6'6 and strapping, with peculiar speech patterns and no memory of his life before committing some over-the-top crimes and serving time for them. And once Rydra figures out the root of his odd speech patterns -- that his first language was one with no first or second personal pronouns -- the two of them have one of the most intricately challenging, emotionally raw and fascinating conversations I've ever read as she tries to teach him what a self is, and what it means that every other human being has one. 

Making that conversation even weirder is that early on, this character, known only as The Butcher by the way, gets the words for "I" and "you" switched around and Rydra just decides to roll with it, so the reader/listener gets the unique experience of having to switch back all of the "I" and "you" statements in an ontological conversation about what those words even mean. 

And I thought Gene Wolfe made me work for it.

This effort to understand each other, as poetically lovely as it is confusing AF, blows the whole story open until we eventually learn the whole point of Babel-17's existence and its incredible implications. And that's pretty much it. This is a short novel (not even seven hours' listen at normal speed as an audio book), not a saga, and it's about the code/language, not the ultimate fate of the co-belligerents struggling to control the novel's universe. Girl meets code/language, girl learns code/language, girl gets her brain put through an emotional/psychological ringer and solves a bunch of mysteries along the way. That's all Delaney wanted to tell us.

But it's plenty.

Now, excuse me, Rydra gave me a bit of a complex, even though I just finished the entire Duolingo Russian course at the Legendary level the same night I finished this novel. I still have streaks to maintain and I'm not going to be much of a Duolingo polyglot if I don't take on a new course, soon.

After wrestling with the implications of Babel-17 and Babel-17, even Welsh or Hungarian sound like fun romps. If I can just finally pick one!

*Though I've been badly bitten by one or two of them. *Cough* Robert Silverberg *Cough*