I thought the plot was pretty thin, and often the details about what was going on were obfuscated, at least for me, by the way the author experimented with writing styles and particularly in the way he expressed the internal thoughts of his characters. A, of course extremely evil, triumvirate of space opera, Hard Sci Fi with elements of cyberpunk, astrophysics, scientific theories,… and social sci-fi controls the output of the genre, leaving many of the too alternative concepts and narrative styles with less hope for large sales. And on the worlds of five galaxies, now, people delve your imagery and meaning for the answers to the riddles of language, love, and isolation.

Babel-17 is discovered to be a language that not only helps you understand the enemy, but become the enemy. I am a trilingual person who has quite a few monolingual family members, and I can't even tell you how many times in frustrated fascination I have contemplated the peculiarities of languages, the plays on words that are often impossible to translate, the confusing idioms, and the frustrating lack of certain concepts in one language as compared to another. After several attacks have been made by the invaders who speak Babel-17, she soon realizes the potential of the language to change one's thought process and provide speakers with certain powers, and she is recruited by her government to discover how the enemy is infiltrating and sabotaging strategic sites. What impressed me about this one, what set this particular book apart for the language-nerdy daughter of a literature teacher was exactly the portrayal of language in it, the mystery of the highly analytical Babel-17, the allure and the power the language has over people, their perception of the world, even their own selves. The ending resolves itself rather abruptly through the magic of timey-wimey science, but it works with the almost fairy-tale hectic pace.The problem with Babel-17, which is at first thought by the military to be only a complex code, is that this language can turn people into traitors and weapons.

Delaney’s 1966 Nebula Award winning novel and Hugo nominated book continues to excite and baffle SF fans more than 50 years later. To be fair: it is a very good book, but the language gets too flowery in places and the excitement of the plot waxes and wanes a bit too much, alternating between dullness, psychedelia and high drama. So many times I realized that merely voicing a concept in a different language changes your understanding of it, its connotation, and therefore the parts of its meaning.Beyond the scientific speculations, I have to comment on the narrative style of Delany - beautiful and haunting images, understated but powerful emotional content.

In terms of both ideas and prose style, it’s hard for me to name any other author, living or dead, who has similar work, though I can think of a fair few who cite Delany as one of their primary influences. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, and his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. A simplex person is a one-sided person, a simple person who accepts everything at face value, rarely asks questions or questions anything, and sits pat on firm conclusions; but a simplex can also be very intelligent, just not multifaceted (Dubya and others come to my mind). I suppose the issue is why am I shying away from giving it 5 stars, if I have the slightest issue, then surely it cannot be 5 stars.But this book was still very good, and despite being incredibly dated in terms of future gadgets, succeeds well in producing a literate, intelligent, and memorable SF novel that mirrored the dramatic social changes happening at the time. It explores the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of language and how it shapes personality, thought and actions, and spins off dozens of other fascinating ideas and images in just under 200 pages. This one was dated, riddled with anachronisms and some retro slightly offensive views on race and gender. The Navigator is a set of three people acting in unison, one of whom has to be raised from the dead and only speaks Swahili. It ‘programs’ a self-contained schizoid personality into the mind of whoever learns it, reinforced by self-hypnosis—which seems the sensible thing to do since everything else in the language is ‘right,’ whereas any other tongue seems so clumsy.

In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany casts an Asian woman as the captain of a spacecraft at a time NBC was telling Gene Roddenberry that he couldn’t have a woman serving as first officer of the Enterprise because audiences wouldn’t accept it. He has a habit of slamming one fist into his hand, and Rydra realizes he is doing this because he lacks words to express crucial concepts: I and you.If I asked them that, I know what they would have said: their blasted dictionary, or encyclopedia, or whatever it is. He started this blog as a way to experiment with writing science fiction and to learn from its many masterful practitioners.