On Babel-17 and Unlearning Irony
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany (1966)
“It’s a port city.”
A gorgeous, wildly popular poetess of Chinese heritage named Rydra Wong, who also happens to be a preternaturally talented linguist and a badass spaceship captain, goes on a top secret mission to save the galaxy from the Invaders by solving the mysteries of a strange new language. It’s like the book was written for me.
The plot is— the plot is not the point. The first sixty pages, out of a slim 219 total, are devoted to Captain Wong confidently navigating the seedy underbelly of the port city to assemble an eccentric crew of riffraff to fly her ship. It’s dark and edgy and very cool in a way that edges into cringe but never stops being fun. The rest of the book concerns itself with a meditation on the nature of language and epistemology and a bizarre idea of how faster-than-light spaceship travel will work. There are ghosts (“discorporate Sensory Observers”) who speak/think in Basque and perform complex data analysis, and co-dependent thruples who handle navigation by smell, and a spaceship called the Rimbaud.
One of the ideas at the heart of Babel-17 is a now-unfashionable theory of mind called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Basically, that language shapes reality in addition to communicating it. If you don’t have a word for something, is it possible to understand that something? You know, a pretty standard freshman dorm bong-rip kind of idea. Which sounds like a diss, but actually I absolutely love art that earnestly engages with those kinds of concepts. It’s art that refuses to be embarrassed by itself, that isn’t afraid of being naive.
This is an uncomfortable thing for me to admit enjoying, since as a younger millennial ex-hipster I find everything embarrassing and spent ages 12-25 encasing myself in a thick, protective layer of irony to keep the judgment at bay. Were you a hipster in the 2010s? Everyone was so mean! You had to die inside a little to survive in that scene. Sure, in my late teens and early twenties I discovered New Sincerity and it offered a glimmer of hope, but then you’re just another asshole telling everyone to read David Foster Wallace. The last several years of growing up have been an exercise in peeling away those layers of irony to discover if any sincerity remained or if my too-cool-for-school disaffection had rotted me to the core.
The key to that, for me, has been science fiction. I never stopped reading science fiction, even during my *sigh* lost years, but at that point I didn’t feel free to revel in the thing itself. Instead, I took more satisfaction from the aesthetic inversion of my enjoyment of sci-fi. Aren’t you surprised that I’m such a sci-fi nerd? Isn’t it surprising that a Drum tobacco-rolling, thrifted clothes-wearing, obscure experimental band-listening manic pixie dream babe like me is also conversant in the Golden Age greats? I relished any chance to shock anyone who dared make an assumption about me.
It was stupid then, but it sounds even stupider now, now that we’ve had 20 years of Marvel and the major mainstream success of countless sci-fi-inflected shows and movies. Nerd culture has become pop culture, but it wasn’t always that way. I’m old enough to remember when the preppy kids wouldn’t be caught dead enjoying a Star War— or at least they never admitted it. Art and theater kids might appreciate some dystopian literature, but they wouldn’t touch Asimov with a ten foot pole. They’d watch Twelve Monkeys and call it cool, but reading Arthur C Clarke was for dorks.
At least, that’s my recollection of middle school and high school, through a thick lens of neurosis and a smattering of genuine mental illness. Adolescence was a rough time, man.
That’s all to say, now that I’m in my thirties I am healing my inner child by reading lots of science fiction, the kind of science fiction that gives absolutely no fucks. Samuel Delany was a lone Black sci-fi writer pumping out Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels laced with Kiswahili and gorgeous Asian female protagonists in the 1960s. Does the plot make any sense? No! Are many of his paragraphs totally unintelligible meditations about language and ego and whatever? Most definitely! He doesn’t give a fuck! And it’s beautiful. He took that bong-rip idea and fucking ran with it. It’s intense, and silly, and a hell of a ride.
This was my first Delany and it won’t be my last.