Starting Babel-17: A Book About Language That Can Hack Your Brain
What if a language could change the way you think? Not like learning French makes you say “ooh la la” more often. I mean actually rewire your brain. Make you see reality differently. Make you smarter. Or more dangerous.
That’s the idea behind Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. And I’m going to retell the whole thing, one post at a time.
Why This Book
I picked up Babel-17 because I kept seeing it on “best sci-fi ever” lists. It won the Nebula Award in 1966. It’s part of the Gollancz SF Masterworks series. People who love science fiction talk about it like it’s required reading.
But here’s the thing. When I actually read it, I realized most people haven’t. They know the concept. They’ve heard “it’s about language as a weapon.” But they haven’t sat down with Delany’s actual words. And those words are worth sitting with.
The book is short. Around 200 pages. But it packs in more ideas per page than most novels three times its size. So I figured, why not break it down? Go chapter by chapter. Talk about what happens, what it means, and why a book from 1966 still feels so relevant today.
What Babel-17 Is About
The setup is simple. There’s an interstellar war going on. Humanity is fighting the Invaders (that’s literally what they’re called). The war has been dragging on for twenty years. Cities are ruined. People have starved. It’s not pretty.
Then the military picks up a strange radio signal. They think it’s a code the enemy is using to coordinate sabotage attacks. Explosions at navy yards. Equipment failures. Deaths of important people. Every time something goes wrong, this mysterious radio chatter shows up before, during, and after.
They call it Babel-17 and hand it to their best code-breakers. Nobody can crack it.
So they call in Rydra Wong. She’s 26 years old. She’s the most famous poet in five galaxies. She speaks seven Earth languages and five alien ones. She has total verbal recall. And she used to work for military cryptography before she quit to write poetry.
Rydra takes one look at Babel-17 and says: “This isn’t a code. It’s a language.”
And that changes everything.
The Big Idea
Delany wrote this book around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. That’s the idea that the language you speak shapes how you think. Not just what you say, but how you perceive reality itself.
There are mild versions of this. Like how some languages have more words for colors, and speakers of those languages can actually distinguish more shades. Or how some languages don’t have past tense, and speakers think about time differently.
Babel-17 takes this to an extreme. What if someone designed a language that was so precise, so efficient, that speaking it made you think faster and see patterns nobody else could see? But what if that same language had no word for “I”? What would that do to a person?
That’s where this book goes. And it gets wild.
Who Was Samuel R. Delany
Delany was 24 when he wrote Babel-17. Let that sink in. Twenty-four. He was a Black, queer writer in the 1960s, writing science fiction that was decades ahead of its time. His prose reads like poetry (which makes sense, because the main character is a poet). His world-building is dense but not confusing. And his ideas about language, identity, and perception feel more current now than they probably did in 1966.
He went on to write many more books. Dhalgren. Nova. The Einstein Intersection. But Babel-17 is where a lot of readers start. It’s short enough to read in a day, but you’ll be thinking about it for weeks.
How This Retelling Works
I’m doing 19 posts total. One per day. Each post covers a chapter or two. I’ll tell you what happens, break down the important moments, and share my own thoughts along the way.
Here’s what the series looks like:
- Posts 1-7 cover Part 1: Rydra Wong (meeting her, the setup, getting a crew, heading into space)
- Posts 8-10 cover Part 2: Ver Dorco (things get weird)
- Posts 11-14 cover Part 3: Jebel Tarik (things get dangerous)
- Post 15 covers Part 4: The Butcher (one of the most fascinating characters in sci-fi)
- Posts 16-18 cover Part 5: Markus T’mwarba (everything comes together)
- Post 19 is my closing thoughts
You don’t need to have read the book. That’s the whole point. I’ll walk you through it. But if you want to read along, grab a copy. The Gollancz SF Masterworks edition (ISBN 978-0-575-07355-1) is the one I’m using.
What to Expect
I write these retellings because I think good books deserve more readers. And sometimes a 200-page sci-fi novel from the 1960s needs someone to say “hey, this is actually incredible, and here’s why.”
I’ll keep things casual. No academic analysis. No jargon. Just a guy who reads a lot of books telling you about one of the good ones.
Fair warning: there will be spoilers. This is a retelling, not a review. I’m going through the whole plot. If you want to go in blind, bookmark this series and read the book first.
So let’s get started. Tomorrow, we meet General Forester walking through a ruined port city. And then we meet Rydra Wong.
See you then.
This is post 1 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.