Babel-17 (Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: Samuel R. Delany
- First Published: 1966
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Science fiction—extrasensory powers
- Time of Work: The distant future
- Setting: Earth, the Alliance War Yards, and aboard the starship
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Language or languages
- Locales: Alliance, planets of the (fictive)
The Plot
Rydra Wong, a poet and linguistics expert, is asked to decipher mysterious transmissions in a code called Babel-17. The transmissions are picked up in conjunction with sabotage attacks by the Invaders, who have been at war with the Alliance for twenty years. Rydra determines that Babel-17 is not a code but a language of unusual analytic properties.
She recruits a starship crew to seek the location of the next attack. In Earth orbit, her ship is sabotaged, knocking out all external navigational sensors. Via Babel-17, she solves the problem of fixing the ship’s...
[The entire page is 1720 words long]
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