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Babel-17: Including Empire Star
by Samuel R Delany
(Vintage Books, $12.00, paperback, 288 pages, January 2002; ISBN:
0375706690.)
In the 1960s, science fiction was going through its  rebellious
adolescence. A generation of new writers wanted to imbue the genre that
had so thrilled them in their youth with the preoccupations that were
transforming society around them. These writers came to be known as
the New Wave, and Samuel Delany was one of the most prominent among
them.
From 1966 to 1970, Delany's novels and short fiction earned three Nebula
awards and a further nine Nebula and Hugo nominations. Delany had
originally intended his novel Babel-17 -- a 1967 Nebula winner
and Hugo runner-up -- to be packaged in one volume with his novella
"Empire Star", but, until this attractive Vintage edition, these two
quirky adventure stories had never appeared together.
Both works are typical 1960s Delany. Linguistics is inextricably woven
into their narratives; Babel-17 tells of a poet recruited into
an interstellar war in which language is a weapon, and the hero of "Empire
Star" comes to understand his unusual quest through his increased grasp
of language. Both are space operas -- spaceships and aliens and all
that -- that fail to conform to expected plot formulas. In both, Delany
displays an unaffected compassion for outcasts and juxtaposes brutal
violence with tenderness. And the background world-building -- never
overlty explained, but gradually unveiled as the tales unfold -- is
informed by anthropology.
Delany's later fiction -- such as the bestselling Dhalgren --
is well known for its explicit and bizarre sexuality and for its heavy
use of semiotics. These early works offer a glimpse of the Delany to
come, as gender roles are questioned and the text is subtly peppered
with theory. This stage in Delany's career, however, when he was journeying
from pulp fiction to dense postmodernism, remains for many, myself included,
the author's quintessential incarnation.
Originally published, in slightly different form,
in The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 2 March 2002.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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