Babel-17 Part 1 Chapter 1: A Ruined Port City and a Poet Named Rydra Wong

Part One of Babel-17 is called “Rydra Wong.” And it opens with a poem. Delany puts an epigraph at the start, a piece from Rydra’s own poetry collection “Prism and Lens.” It describes a port city at night. Hustlers, sailors, shadows, ambiguity. It’s beautiful and gritty at the same time. And it sets the mood perfectly for what comes next.

The General in the Ruined City

Chapter one starts with five words: “It’s a port city.”

We’re following General Forester. He’s walking through the streets in civilian clothes, feeling uncomfortable out of his stellarman-green uniform. The city around him is a mess. Industrial fumes turn the sky orange and purple. Garbage lines the curbs. Transport ships slice through the clouds above, shuttling cargo to orbital stations.

This city has been through hell. There’s been an interstellar war going on for twenty years, and during that time, six separate trade embargoes have strangled the place. Each embargo lasted months. Without interstellar commerce, the city can’t survive. And Delany doesn’t soften what that means. He mentions panics, riots, burnings. Twice, cannibalism.

The General remembers specific things. A woman sitting on the sidewalk holding her skeletal baby by one leg. Three teenage girls who attacked him with razors, calling him “Beefsteak” and “Lunch-meat.” A blind man screaming as he walked up the avenue.

But now? Now the people are “pale and proper.” They go to work. They talk about movie stars and music. They discuss the war with recycled phrases from the news. They don’t mention the embargoes much.

Here’s the thing. Delany does something clever in these opening pages. He’s not just setting a scene. He’s asking a question the whole book will keep asking: who are these people? What do they really think? What would they say if they could actually say what they mean?

And then we get the line: “Those with more intelligence and sophistication discussed Rydra Wong’s poetry.”

Meeting Rydra Wong

The General is on his way to meet Rydra Wong. She’s the most famous poet in five explored galaxies. He’s never met her. He sees his reflection in a bar window and thinks about how he looks, how he’s changed from “big and bumbling” to “massive and authoritarian” since the war started. He feels out of his element. He’s a military man about to meet an artist.

He walks into the bar. And his first thought when he sees her is: “My God, she’s beautiful.”

Delany writes the General’s reaction with this raw honesty. The man is immediately overwhelmed. He can’t even get out his planned greeting. She has copper lipstick, eyes like beaten disks of copper, dark hair spilling over one shoulder, a knitted indigo dress. Every time she moves, the General is “amazed, surprised, bewildered.”

And then Rydra opens with: “Babel-17. I haven’t solved it yet, General Forester.”

No small talk. Straight to business. I love that.

“It’s Not a Code. It’s a Language.”

This is the key scene of the chapter. The General expected Rydra to tell him she’d cracked the code. Or that she’d failed. Instead she tells him something nobody at Military Cryptography had figured out.

Babel-17 is not a code. It’s a language.

She explains the difference. A code shuffles or replaces letters and symbols according to a pattern. Once you find the key, you plug it in and get plain text. But a language has its own internal logic. Its own grammar. Its own way of putting thoughts together. There is no key. At best you get a close approximation.

The General isn’t happy about this. He thinks she’s telling him to give up. But Rydra corrects him. Unknown languages have been deciphered before. She mentions Linear B and Hittite. It’s possible. She just needs more to work with.

And here’s what I found really interesting. The military had given her ten pages of double-spaced typed gibberish labeled “Babel-17” and asked her what it meant. No context. No information about where it came from, when, or under what circumstances. She’s working blind.

So the General tells her the truth. There’s been a series of what looked like accidents, but they’re really sabotage. Explosions at naval yards. Equipment failures. Deaths. And every single time, right before and after these “accidents,” the area gets flooded with mysterious radio transmissions. Short-range signals, but also occasional bursts through hyperstatic channels spanning light-years. They recorded the transmissions and called them Babel-17.

Rydra’s eyes narrow. She gets it immediately. These radio exchanges might be instructions. The saboteurs are communicating in Babel-17.

The Phoneme Problem

Then Rydra asks for something the military doesn’t want to give her. The original recordings. Not transcriptions. Not copies. The actual audio.

She explains why, and this is one of those moments where Delany’s knowledge of linguistics really shines. She talks about phonemes and allophones. Here’s the simple version: different languages treat the same sounds differently. In English, the “th” in “the” and the “th” in “theater” sound different, but we treat them as the same sound. We don’t even notice the difference. But in another language, those might be completely separate sounds.

So when someone who doesn’t speak a language tries to write it down, they might merge sounds that should be separate. Or split sounds that should be one. The military transcription could be full of these errors, and nobody would know because nobody realizes Babel-17 is a language.

Rydra needs to hear it herself. She needs to make her own transcription “by feel.” Using what she calls her “knack.”

The General agrees. Of course he does.

What He Didn’t Say

The chapter ends with something painful. The General leaves the bar, and his last thought is devastating: “All that inside me and she doesn’t know! I didn’t communicate a thing!”

He’s fallen completely for Rydra Wong. And he couldn’t say any of it. He was “brisk, military, efficient.” All the words he wanted to say stayed inside.

And then Delany flips to Rydra. She’s standing at the bar, staring at the mirror. The bartender comes over, notices something wrong. Her knuckles are white. Her hands are shaking. She snaps at him, then rushes out the door.

Something happened to her in that conversation. Something about the General’s unspoken feelings, or about Babel-17 itself, has shaken her badly. We don’t know exactly what yet.

My Take

I have to say, for a first chapter, this is strong. Delany gives you the war, the world, the main character, and the central mystery all in about 20 pages. But what impressed me most is the emotional layer underneath.

This book is going to be about communication. About what we can and can’t say to each other. The General can’t express what he feels. The military can’t crack a language because they think it’s a code. And Rydra, the person who understands everyone, is terrified by something she’s starting to understand.

The epigraph poem talks about “the hub of ambiguity.” That’s what this chapter is. Everything is unclear. Everything is between meanings. And Rydra Wong is going to spend the rest of the book trying to make things clear.

Tomorrow: Rydra visits her old psychiatrist and announces her plan to solve the Babel-17 mystery herself. With a spaceship.

This is post 2 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.

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