Being Gorgeous
Dec. 15th, 2004 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel18 Aug 2004
Babel-17 - Samuel R. Delaney - Gollancz 2004
* * * *
There are, in essence, two types of SF writer - the tale tellers and the stylists. The tale tellers are those who describe extremely odd things in clear, simple straightforward prose. Their model is the story told around the camp fire, or perhaps the scientific paper. To them, writing is a craft rather than an art. Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin are perhaps the greatest exemplars of this approach, but all the early SF writers - Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein - fall into this category.
The stylists, on the other hand, believe in being gorgeous. For them, exotic, glittering environments require exotic, glittering prose to match. Most of the cyberpunk brigade, William Gibson foremost among them, are in this group, but one could also include Gene Wolfe (at least in his Book of the New Sun days) and latterly Jon Courtenay Grimwood and John Clute, whose book "Appleseed" is an almost unreadable example of sophisticated prose. But the original stylist, the granddaddy of them all, is Samuel R. Delaney.
On the whole I prefer tale tellers to stylists - too often the sheen of the writing disguises weaknesses in the background, plotting or characterisation (as in fact is the case here). For Delaney, however, I have always had a soft spot. I even made it through the nine hundred-odd pages of Dhalgren and generally enjoyed the experience. Delaney is an honest to goodness intellectual with a thorough working knowledge of semiotics so it is perhaps not surprising that Babel-17, which is about a language, is generally regarded as his best.
Perhaps because of his semiotic leanings, a number of themes crop up repeatedly in Delaney's works. One is that his protagonists are almost invariably poets or have poetic tendencies and that is certainly the case here. Rydra Wong is, somewhat implausibly, both a starship captain and a poetess (mind you, nothing in this book is really plausible). A military man called General Forester comes to her with a problem. Acts of sabotage at military installations are being carried out, each preceded by a burst of incomprehensible babble which has been dubbed Babel-17. Forester wants Rydra to decode it for him. Rydra deduces where the next sabotage will take place, and decides to investigate in the hope of finding someone who speaks the language.
I could tell you more of the plot, but frankly there isn't any point. It rests on a series of monumental coincidences and clearly Delaney wasn't particularly concerned with it. Instead, the way to appreciate this book is to go with the flow and enjoy the likeable (if not deep) characters and colourful settings. To be honest, the whole thing is just a little too warm, cosy and middle-class - there are no really dislikeable characters, except for one who only appears briefly, and despite a number of dramatic events you don't feel that anything really bad will happen (even when a character dies, they simply come back in a discorporate form).
Ultimately, this book is really about ideas concerning language and about poetry. The ideas are flawed by Delaney's apparent belief (shared with a number of post-modernists) that you can't think something if you don't have a word for it. This is simply wrong - some thoughts are best expressed as music, or dance, or painting or sculpture or craft or mathematics or any of a dozen other means. Like these other media, language is simply a tool that thought can use. That's not to say that language does not affect thought, just that the absence of words to express a thought adequately doesn't mean that it is unthinkable.
Nonetheless this is a book that should be read, if only because it is the book that above all others made poetical prose in SF possible. Poetry is a natural response to the astonishing, awesome, beautiful universe we live in and as the literary form that most concerns itself with the cosmos, it is right that there should be a place for poetical expression in SF. Though perhaps rather better than the samples of Rydra Wong's work which preface each section of the book, which are dreadful. Now examples of Babel-17 itself would have been much more impressive...
Babel-17 - Samuel R. Delaney - Gollancz 2004
* * * *
There are, in essence, two types of SF writer - the tale tellers and the stylists. The tale tellers are those who describe extremely odd things in clear, simple straightforward prose. Their model is the story told around the camp fire, or perhaps the scientific paper. To them, writing is a craft rather than an art. Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin are perhaps the greatest exemplars of this approach, but all the early SF writers - Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein - fall into this category.
The stylists, on the other hand, believe in being gorgeous. For them, exotic, glittering environments require exotic, glittering prose to match. Most of the cyberpunk brigade, William Gibson foremost among them, are in this group, but one could also include Gene Wolfe (at least in his Book of the New Sun days) and latterly Jon Courtenay Grimwood and John Clute, whose book "Appleseed" is an almost unreadable example of sophisticated prose. But the original stylist, the granddaddy of them all, is Samuel R. Delaney.
On the whole I prefer tale tellers to stylists - too often the sheen of the writing disguises weaknesses in the background, plotting or characterisation (as in fact is the case here). For Delaney, however, I have always had a soft spot. I even made it through the nine hundred-odd pages of Dhalgren and generally enjoyed the experience. Delaney is an honest to goodness intellectual with a thorough working knowledge of semiotics so it is perhaps not surprising that Babel-17, which is about a language, is generally regarded as his best.
Perhaps because of his semiotic leanings, a number of themes crop up repeatedly in Delaney's works. One is that his protagonists are almost invariably poets or have poetic tendencies and that is certainly the case here. Rydra Wong is, somewhat implausibly, both a starship captain and a poetess (mind you, nothing in this book is really plausible). A military man called General Forester comes to her with a problem. Acts of sabotage at military installations are being carried out, each preceded by a burst of incomprehensible babble which has been dubbed Babel-17. Forester wants Rydra to decode it for him. Rydra deduces where the next sabotage will take place, and decides to investigate in the hope of finding someone who speaks the language.
I could tell you more of the plot, but frankly there isn't any point. It rests on a series of monumental coincidences and clearly Delaney wasn't particularly concerned with it. Instead, the way to appreciate this book is to go with the flow and enjoy the likeable (if not deep) characters and colourful settings. To be honest, the whole thing is just a little too warm, cosy and middle-class - there are no really dislikeable characters, except for one who only appears briefly, and despite a number of dramatic events you don't feel that anything really bad will happen (even when a character dies, they simply come back in a discorporate form).
Ultimately, this book is really about ideas concerning language and about poetry. The ideas are flawed by Delaney's apparent belief (shared with a number of post-modernists) that you can't think something if you don't have a word for it. This is simply wrong - some thoughts are best expressed as music, or dance, or painting or sculpture or craft or mathematics or any of a dozen other means. Like these other media, language is simply a tool that thought can use. That's not to say that language does not affect thought, just that the absence of words to express a thought adequately doesn't mean that it is unthinkable.
Nonetheless this is a book that should be read, if only because it is the book that above all others made poetical prose in SF possible. Poetry is a natural response to the astonishing, awesome, beautiful universe we live in and as the literary form that most concerns itself with the cosmos, it is right that there should be a place for poetical expression in SF. Though perhaps rather better than the samples of Rydra Wong's work which preface each section of the book, which are dreadful. Now examples of Babel-17 itself would have been much more impressive...