How cool is this man? Damn cool, and I don’t just mean the beard. He’s Samuel Delany, multiple winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction, as well as a respected writer of literary fiction, autobiography and criticism.
I recently got my hands on a copy of Babel-17, one of his masterworks (for which he won his first Nebula in 1966), and indeed included in that grand SF series. Excerpt follows…
“Look, you and I are going to talk about something. But first I have to teach” - she stopped - “the brain something.”
“What?”
“About you and I. You must hear the words a hundred times a day. Don’t you ever wonder what they mean?”
“Why? Most things make sense without them.”
“Hey, speak in whatever language you grew up with.”
“No.”
“Why not? I want to see if it’s one I know anything about.”
“The doctors say there’s something wrong with the brain.”
“All right. What did they say was wrong?”
“Aphasia, alexia, amnesia.”
“Then you were pretty messed up.” She frowned. “Was that before or after the bank robbery?”
“Before.”
She tried to order what she had learned. “Something happened to you that left you with no memory, unable to speak or read, and so the first thing you did was rob the Telechron bank - which Telechron Bank?”
“On Rhea-IV.”
“Oh, a small one. But, still - and you stayed free for six months. Any idea what happened to you before you lost your memory?”
The Butcher shrugged.
“I suppose they went through all the possibilities that you were working for somebody else under hypnotics. You don’t know what language you spoke before you lost your memory? Well, your speech patterns now must be based on your old language or you would have learned about I and you just from picking up new words.”
“Why must these sounds mean something?”
“Because you asked a question just now that I can’t answer if you don’t understand them.”
“No.” Discomfort shadowed his voice. “No. There is an answer. The answer must be simpler, that’s all.”
“Butcher, there are certain ideas which have words for them. If you don’t know the words, you can’t know the ideas. And if you don’t have the idea, you don’t have the answer.” […] “Don’t you see, sometimes you want to say things, and you’re missing an idea to make them with. In the beginning was the word. That’s how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn’t exist. And it’s something the brain needs to have exist, otherwise you wouldn’t have to beat your chest, or strike your fist on your palm. The brain wants it to exist; let me teach it the word.”
The book is set in the corner of a much larger space-opera war scenario and relates the poet Rydra’s search for Babel-17, a mysterious language linked to a series of sabotage attacks. The book is tacitly concerned with the linguistic theory known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which states that there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. Quicker definition: the words you have to describe the world define how you experience it.
It would be tempting to go off now into a long discussion of why books with long words in them make your brain bigger, and why people who only read childrens’ books are essentially autistic, but I’ll demur.
Sticking to the point, Babel-17, as well as being a great story in its own right, is a fantastic example of the way great science fiction takes one small but clever idea and runs with it, extrapolating theories across galaxies or tweaking the world slightly and making it a more fascinating place.
Having gobbled up Delany’s Sci-fi, I intend to turn my attention to his literary works. Reading Babel-17, I got a strong sense that there was a powerful and dissonant sexual undercurrent to the work - the teams of navigators on the starships are made up of bisexual ‘triples’ - and I didn’t have to look far to have this confirmed. Delany has been out for many years, and his autobiographical description of life as a black, gay science fiction writer living in an open marriage, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village won a Hugo award in 1988. Many of his other novels, including Dhalgren (1975), The Mad Man (1994) and Hogg (1995) are sexually explicit and sometimes outright pornographic, and much of his criticism deals with and in Queer Theory.
Well, I’m off down the Fantasy Centre. See y’all in September.
[Oh yeah, and whatever you do, don’t google image search ‘Samuel Delany’.]
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