[In the following essay, Malmgren examines the function of language in Babel-17, which he views as the novel's central theme and also the central vehicle by which Delany creates an alternative world. According to Malmgren, the protagonist's struggle to master Babel-17, the alien language, asserts Delany's postmodern view of language as a mode of constructing and inventing—rather than simply reflecting—reality.]

Science fiction is a literature of the Beyond, as well as a literature of the impact of change on Man. It deals with the Beyond in a historical sense: the Future, that is rapidly becoming the Present. It must also deal with the beyond of knowledge—without losing touch with a sense of the social basis of Man, whose knowledge this is. For, just as we are here making our world and our society, so in another sense we are engaged in the making of the universe through that which is at the root of our social being: our language.

—Ian Watson, “Toward an Alien Linguistics”

In his essay on “Fiction about the Future,” H. G. Wells claims that the most significant “futurist” fiction, and the most difficult to bring off, would be that sort which uses as its novum an estranged social order—Wells uses the example of a world populated entirely by women—and then focuses on the struggle of a few individuals to come to terms with that social order. Kingsley Amis devotes much of his influential book on science fiction to those fictions which dramatize “social inquiry,” which serve as an “instrument of social diagnosis and warning” (87). And Isaac Asimov baldly states that what he terms “social science fiction” is the “most mature” and the “most socially significant” form that SF can take (273). All three writers are privileging or valorizing one particular SF form, alternate society science fiction, the dominant novum of which is an estranged or alternative social order.¹ The paradigm for this fiction involves the visit to a utopic or dystopic society, during which the visitor (in some cases the reader) is invited to compare that society with his or her own. Alternate society SF poses a wide assortment of questions, including the following: What constitutes a good or bad society? What is the proper relation between the individual and the community? To what extent are freedom and order mutually antagonistic? What are the main determinants of “social reality”? What is the function of particular social institutions? What is the relation between language and social order? These fictions, many of which figure as science fiction classics, mediate the proper relation between Self and Society, in general eliciting a normative reading, the establishment of a framework of value.

Dealing as it does with alien cultures and futuristic societies, alternate society science fiction often refers to, calls upon, or plays with a spectrum of language novums—from neologistic forms to alien tongues to invented languages. Indeed, these linguistic novums, as both Katherine L. Spencer and Eric S. Rabkin have shown, serve to real-ize the imaginary SF world: “the items do more than denote the simple thereness of the world they belong to; they also tell us—again, usually in oblique ways—something about the nature of the world we find them in” (Spencer 43), a world whose linguistic norms call into question the norms of the originary society.²

Science fiction is a literature of otherness and change, and the most self-conscious alternate society SF tries to take into account the inevitability of linguistic change and the possibility of linguistic otherness, if only by acknowledging that new and different societies presuppose new and different languages. Sorting through these linguistically self-conscious fictions, we can identify different levels of metalinguistic engagement. Some authors, such as Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, incorporate forms or examples of the new language into the discourse and dialogue of the fiction; in so doing, they are able to inject a degree of strangeness into that discourse (to “defamiliarize” it), while at the same time reinforcing the mimetic contract and adding another level of signification. Burgess’s Russian/American patois at once underwrites the verisimilitude of his futuristic society and serves as an index to the idea of superpower domination. The metalinguistic function of “nadsat,” Rabkin notes, is to make “a reality claim about the narrative world being a possible future state of our own world” (93). Other authors, such as Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, more fully thematize language by incorporating episodes which foreground the form and function of the linguistic novum; in these fictions, language becomes a topic or theme highlighting the nature of the alternate society.

But, in a relatively few science fictions, an invented language becomes the narrative dominant, in-forming the plot, the themes, and the discourse of the fiction. These fictions necessarily investigate the nature of language, the relation of language and reality, and the possibilities of linguistic otherness. In The Languages of Pao, for example, Jack Vance imagines the transformation of an entire planet through the introduction of new language systems. The new languages—one militaristic, one mercantile, and one bureaucratic—are imposed from above on separate segments of the people of Pao, whose native tongue tends to render them passive, obedient, and communal. Once the languages are in place, Pao begins a metamorphosis from feudalism to industrial capitalism. Because “every language imposes a certain world-view upon the mind” (115), Pao evolves into three separate language communities, each nurturing a certain outlook and each pursuing a corresponding activity. Ultimately, there appears Pastiche, an amalgam of the three tongues, a language which incorporates all three ways of looking at the world and is therefore more encompassing, less self-absorbed, less one-dimensional. The more languages one speaks, Vance suggests, the less self-centered one becomes and the more other-directed one is. Pastiche becomes “the language of service” on Pao, assuring that the planet will survive and evolve in a humanitarian way.

In a similar way, Ian Watson’s The Embedding explores the possibility of using various languages, both artificial and natural, to discover “the plan for language,” the “mind’s idea of all possible languages” (43). The linguists in the novel believe that such a plan will enable humans to find or invent a language that can “bespeak” reality—that is, totalize reality and then control it. Fictions such as these assume that language is not merely instrumental, that a person is to some extent spoken by the language he or she speaks. The most celebrated of such fictions is Samuel Delany’s Babel-17. Although not a single word of the invented language Babel-17 appears in the novel, its centrality is indicated in the title itself. The novel systematically interrogates the function of alternate languages, the relation between language and reality, the problematics of communication, and the linguistic possibilities of SF in general.

At one level, that of form, Babel-17 hardly seems worth close examination; it is, after all, action-packed, fast-paced, “Star Wars” space opera, involving intergalactic war, treacherous spies, exotic locales, strange aliens, dangerous missions, and rousing space battles (see Hardesty 63–69; Slusser 31ff). But Delany has worked a number of important transformations upon the simple space-opera formula. His protagonist, for example, is not a macho male roustabout, but rather a female poet. The most dangerous weapon in the work is not an SF gadget but a mysterious invented language. The real villain of the piece is not a mad scientist or an evil empire but rather the inability of one group of human beings to communicate with another group. The plot involves gaining control of the mysterious language and using it to overcome that villain. These transformations signal the fact that Delany has taken a marginal form—space opera—and tried to bring it to the center by reinventing it.

Language is not only the motor that drives the plot of the novel; it also dominates the text’s thematics. The problematics of communication are frequently thematized explicitly. The novel opens with a scene in which a general meets with the poet Rydra Wong to discuss the problem of the new language of the enemy, Babel-17. On his way to the meeting he wonders about the needs of the city’s inhabitants: “Take any of them, take any million. Who are they? What do they want? What would they say if given a chance to say anything?” (4). After he meets Rydra and falls in love with her, his feelings are mixed: “My god, he thought, as coolness struck his face, all that inside me and she doesn’t know! I didn’t communicate a thing! Somewhere in the depth the words, not a thing, you’re still safe. But stronger on the surface was the outrage of his own silence. Didn’t communicate a thing at all” (13). Babel-17 is a novel in which strangers try desperately to learn how to communicate with one another, in which Rydra Wong searches for a language that will go to “the depth” of words.

In the course of her quest, Rydra discourses at length about languages in general and “Babel-17” in particular, explaining to her comrades aspects of phonetics, syntax, and semantics, comparing languages and vocabularies, and discussing the limits of semiotic systems such as sign language and poetry. Throughout the novel, Rydra’s crewmates testify to her ability to communicate with them, to cut through the separate worlds of isolated individuals, enabling them to converse and grow. The novel ends with a chorus of such testimony:

“She managed to say so much to me in that one evening, so very simply.”

(172)

“She told me flatly: No, I would have to tell her more. That’s the first time anyone’s told me I had to do something in fourteen years. I may not like it; I sure as hell respect it. … It’s so easy to get caught in your fragment of the world. When a voice comes cutting through, it’s important.”

(174)

“She found a way to talk to us without [a discorporaphone]. She cut through worlds, and joined them—that’s the important part—so that both became bigger.”

(81).

Indeed, at times it seems that the favorite topic of conversation is conversation itself:

“Well, you … you come to us and immediately we start to learn things, things about you, and ultimately about ourselves.”

“We’re used to talking to each other.”

“Yes, but you tell the important things. What you like, what you don’t like, how you do things.”

(80)

In such a linguistically self-conscious text, even accidental or “noisy” references to the act of communication are partially foregrounded:

“Please, I’ve got to talk to you.”

(14)

“He seemed to know what he was talking about.”

“Talk, talk, talk.”

(26)

“You’ve got nothing to say to me.”

(37)

“Now, you talk to me, Calli, Ron.”

(44)

“I just wanted to say …”

(50)

“Who can talk to people like that?”

(176)

And the novel ends with Rydra’s claim that she “can talk [her] way out of anything” (193). Despite its space-opera dressing, what Babel-17 talks about is, in a very real sense, talking itself.

Language is central to the novel in large part because Delany’s view of language is Whorfian; he sees language as constitutive of reality, not as reflective of reality. We see what our language enables us to see; we think according to the ways that language makes available to us. As Rydra Wong says at one point, “there are certain ideas which have words for them. If you don’t have the words, you can’t know the ideas” (132). Robert Scholes has suggested that the novel might well “have begun with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion that our language is the limit of our world, or the Whorfian linguistic hypothesis that language shapes perception itself, so that people from different cultures actually ‘see’ different worlds around them” (qtd. in Meyers 178). Another critic, Walter Meyers, takes Delany to task for relying on “this questionable idea,” claiming that Whorfianism is unidirectional and cannot account for ideational innovation (181). While we might acknowledge Meyers’s objections, we could counter that Whorfianism supplies a valuable corrective to an instrumentalist view of language that underlies certain misconceptions, such as the ideas that the language of science is neutral and universal (see Sefler) or that perception is itself unmediated by language (see Eco). Perhaps we should see Delany’s adoption of Whorfianism as a strategic move, one meant to foreground language, to stress its instrumentality in our perception of reality, while at the same time, showcasing the possibilities of SF’s invented languages.

At the very center of his novel, Delany places an episode that at once highlights his notion of the powers of language and serves as a paradigm for the larger plot. Rydra has been captured by a pirate spaceship, and she awakens strapped to a bed in the infirmary. She is thinking of language:

Abstract thoughts in a blue room: Nominative, genitive, elative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases to the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. … The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid. If there’s no word for it, how do you think about it?

(97)

Locked into English, Rydra awakens to a certain reality—she is trapped in a strange restraining web. In desperation she switches in her thoughts to the language Babel-17, which she has partially mastered: “She looked down at the—not ‘webbing,’ but rather a three particle vowel differential, each part of which defined one stress of the three-way tie, so that the weakest points in the mesh were identified when the total sound of the differential reached its lowest point.” The perspective afforded by the new language enables her to see the weakness of the webbing: “By breaking the threads at these points, she realized, the whole web would unravel” (99). Switching to another language creates another reality: Rydra is able to free herself. In every key episode of the novel—the initial sabotage attempt, the assassination attempt, the battles in space—the formula is the same: Rydra moves from a language frame in which reality is constrictive or uncertain or exigent through the language frame of Babel-17 to a new reality in which obstacles are overcome, dangers neutralized, conflicts resolved. At the global level of macroplot, this structure informs the entire novel; ultimate mastery of Babel-17 means an end to the devastating intergalactic war.

An interpretive summary of the novel’s five-part structure clarifies Delany’s view on the relation between language and reality and the limits and powers of language in general. Each of the novel’s five sections is named for a specific protagonist, and there is direct correspondence between the character and the thematic topos of the section. In the first section, titled “Rydra Wong,” we are introduced to the “most famous poet in five explored galaxies” (5) and to her mission: the Alliance wants her to decode the language Babel-17 and to discover its role in acts of sabotage being perpetrated by the Invaders. In order to accomplish these ends, she requisitions a spaceship and recruits a crew for a flight to the Alliance War Yards where she feels the next act of sabotage will take place. The nature of this crew invites an allegorical reading, one which sets up the five-part structure of the novel. First Rydra enlists a pilot whose “nervous system [will be] connected directly with the controls” of the ship’s “hyperstasis” faster-than-light drive (35). At the same time she finds a team of navigators to act as the computational “brain” for the journey. Later she makes a trip to the discorporate zone—the place where the energies of those that have discorporated but not died congregate—in order to recruit an “Eye,” “Ear,” and “Nose” to read the “hyperspace currents.” It seems that there are some jobs on intergalactic flight that normal human beings just cannot perform; a “live human,” one navigator explains, “scanning all that goes on in the hyperstasis frequencies would—well, die first, and go crazy second” (37). Once Rydra has signed up a platoon to do all the menial and mechanical jobs on the ship, her crew is complete. It should be clear that at a metaphorical level what has transpired is the assemblage of a composite human being, complete with brain, nervous system, senses, and body. Within this assembled totality, Rydra occupies the key position, her centrality having been signaled by the title of the section. She is that element which coordinates the disparate functions, which synthesizes the group by facilitating communication. Given her profession of poet, one might suggest that she serves as the Imagination of the assemblage; that is certainly one of her main roles in the adventures that follow. Describing to a friend how she went about selecting a crew, Rydra says that there was one basic criterion she applied: “they had to be people I could talk to” (49).

The mission of this crew, this composite being, is quite simple—to acquire control of the mysterious Babel-17, a language being used by the Invaders in acts of sabotage against the Alliance. But at the figurative level the crew must acquire a language with which to heal the breaches between alienated and isolated human beings. As one critic notes,

The movement of Babel-17 is directed by impulses towards more perfect communication: Rydra’s psychological motivation, her unique talents, and the plot device of the mysterious language to be deciphered all point towards a climax of perfect communication. Delany emphasizes the need for it by repeatedly presenting gaps between people: between individuals, like the “triple” of Calli, Ron, and Molly; between groups, like the planet-bound and the spaceship crews; between “the Invaders” and “the Alliance” in the intergalactic war (Stone-Blackburn 248).

The world of Babel-17 is one of “isolated communities, each hardly touching its neighbor, each speaking, as it were, a different language” (64). That breach is figured most forcefully in the war itself, which pits not humans against aliens, but humans against humans from another galaxy. Indeed, Rydra is disturbed by the fact that her poems are immensely popular with both parties to the conflict, that her allegiance to the Alliance has been determined by an “accident of birth” (64). At the literal level mastering the new language will end the war; at the figurative level it will enable humanity to bridge the gap between Self and Other, healing the breach of isolation and alienation and clearing up the “misunderstandings that tie the world up and keep people apart” (19).

Part Two, titled “Ver Dorco,” takes its name from the Baron who commands the Alliance War Yards. In this section, Rydra and her crew are exposed to the brutal reality of war minus a controlling language; they in effect experience the world “raw” (an appropriate metaphor given the food motif in this part.) Again the section begins with a paradigmatic episode. Rydra and her crew are preparing to eat; their preparations are interrupted by an act of treachery which jeopardizes their lives. Rydra resorts to her rapidly expanding knowledge of Babel-17 to analyze the problem and to effectuate a solution; she learns how “to go to another language in order to think about the problem clearly” (60). This formula is repeated several times in the novel, but its connection here with the act of eating is significant. The section culminates with a banquet that the Baron arranges for Rydra and her crew, a banquet disrupted by the assassination of the Baron and his key advisers by saboteurs responding to radio commands given in Babel-17. The banquet devolves into a madhouse scene of food, murder, and chaos. The ending of the section thus establishes a motif connecting food, language, and disorder; this motif suggests that the world untempered by language is at once murderous and carnivorous, that this kind of world will eat one alive.

The second section is littered with references to eating and with food imagery. The Baron is described as possessing a “disquieting appetite for [Rydra’s] presence, a hunger for something she was or might be” (65). The “lean and hungry” Baron complains of being “starved” for intelligent conversation (a metaphor which links food and language) and interrupts a tour of the war yards because he is “famished” (65). When the Baroness refers to Rydra and her crew as “cool and pleasing, so fresh, so crisp,” Rydra objects to being described as a salad. The Baroness responds, “I dare say if you stayed here long enough we would devour you. What you bring we are very hungry for” (80). Behind the veneer of a civilized conversation lies a carnivorous reality, something Rydra is figuratively unable to handle because she lacks the proper language. The section ends in murder and chaos.

Rydra and her crew are rescued from the debacle at the war yard by a passing pirate ship named “Jebel Tarik,” which means “Tarik’s Mountain” (101). The third section, taking its name from the ship, deals with Rydra’s retreat from the world to a “mountainous” refuge. The epigraph for the section contains the line, “I would make a language we could all speak” (95), and that is the task that. Rydra undertakes on Jebel Tarik. The pirate “shadow ship” represents a refuge from the carnivorous reality of the intergalactic war, a place where Rydra can perfect her understanding of Babel-17. During her stay on the pirate ship, she uses the language to foil an assassination attempt; her success here should be contrasted with her failure to prevent the death of the Baron in the previous section. She also demonstrates a growing mastery of the external world and its strife. Command of Babel-17 makes her into a formidable war general, and she wins two space battles with Invader fleets.

More important, in this section she meets another speaker of Babel-17 (though she doesn’t realize it at the time), the dark other half that Rydra must link up with in order to make her language whole, the brutal ex-convict Butcher. At one point, the pirate leader, Tarik, suggests to Rydra that any whole person is “necessarily of two minds on any matter of moment” (108), thereby hinting at the central action of this section, the encounter between two minds, or better, the two parts of the mind which must connect for there to be wholeness; the conscious and informing mind of the poet must tap into the inarticulate and brute power of the unconscious. Butcher’s mind is quite explicitly linked with the unconscious; his thoughts are “ego-less and inarticulate, magic, seductive, mythical” (159). During Rydra’s stay on Jebel Tarik, he repeatedly shows himself capable of a “red bestiality” (128) that Rydra finds fascinating. Butcher’s connection with the unconscious mind is underscored in the final section when he discovers, once his amnesia has been lifted, that he is Niles Ver Dorco and that he is responsible for his father’s (the Baron’s) death.

The meeting of the two minds in the fourth section, “The Butcher,” is engineered through Rydra’s power of telepathy. The poetic epigraph speaks of the birth and awakening of the dark “twin behind the eyes” (155), and the section represents an awakening to the power and amorality of the unconscious mind. The mind-link is at once sexual—“She had entered him in some bewildering reversed sexuality” (159)—and archetypal—“the Criminal and artistic consciousness meeting in the same head with one language between them” (160). This experience is necessary for Rydra to become capable of doing what she has to, namely acting with the kind of ruthlessness it takes to put an end to the senseless and destructive intergalactic war. During the mind-link she says to Butcher:

“You’re teaching me something and it’s shaking my whole picture of the world and myself. I thought I was afraid before because I couldn’t do what you could do, Butcher. … But I was afraid because I could do all those things, and for my own reasons, not your lack of reasons, because I am, and you are. I’m a lot bigger than I thought I was, Butcher, and I don’t know whether to thank you or to damn you for showing me.”

(162–63)

By tapping into the unconscious, by making ego go where id had been, Rydra has indeed become larger; she has, in effect, become whole.

In the fifth section—named after Rydra’s doctor, Markus T’mwarba—Rydra, Butcher, and the crew make a final break from the Alliance and from the war altogether with full control of Babel-17. With a “language [they] could all speak,” they will be able to heal singlehandedly the illness that has infected the world: “This war will end within six months,” Rydra confidently predicts (193). And thus a new language will create a new, more satisfactory reality.

At the beginning of the novel, no one can control the language Babel-17, in large part because it is an “impersonal language” (Weedman 41); it lacks the concepts “you” and “I.” This lack is constitutive of more serious deficiencies or gaps. The lack of an “I” shortcircuits the self-critical process; the speaker of Babel-17 is unable to stand apart from her or his linguistic formulations, to subject them to critical meta-commentary. As Rydra notes, the lack of an “I” “cuts out any awareness of the symbolic process at all—which is the way we distinguish between reality and our expression of reality” (189). Without the concept “I” we are unable to recognize language for what it is, a modelling system. And the concepts “you” and “I” are essential to the moral sense; without them, we cannot know that “for an I to kill a you without a lot of thought is a mistake” (139). Without these all-important concepts, the novel insists, we are blind to the idea of the Self and the Other; we exist apart from moral frameworks, are condemned to be both suicidal and sociopathic. Rydra is able to gain complete control over the language by creating personal pronouns for it. By adding an “I” she personalizes Babel-17 and converts it to Babel-18, the language with which she and Butcher will change the world. The language system Babel-17—the novel—also lacks a first person, in the form of the reader. Once that person has been added to the novel, once he or she has personalized it, then it too assumes a moral dimension, it too becomes self-critical. It becomes a language system that can affect reality.

One of Rydra’s crewmates attributes to her the following quality: “She cut through worlds and joined them—that’s the important part—so that both became bigger” (181). This same quality, of cutting through and joining worlds, is elsewhere attributed to science fiction as well: reading SF, “you start thinking that maybe those people who live in other worlds … are real. If you believe in them, you’re a little more ready to believe in yourself” (180). The reader of SF becomes, in effect, a little bit bigger. Babel-17 also serves as a bridge between fragmented and isolated worlds, as a language system with the potential to make its “speakers” grow. Armed with this language system, we can, like Rydra Wong, begin to tell right from wrong, begin to right a wrong (Hardesty 69), indeed begin to change the world.

At one point early in the novel, Rydra complains to Markus T’mwarba that she feels dissatisfied as a poet because to this point she has simply been expressing the unarticulated ideas of others. “Now,” she says, “I have things to say that are all my own. They’re not what other people have said before, put in an original way. And they’re not just contradictions of what other people have said, which amounts to the same thing. They’re new” (17). At the end of the novel, she says that she may write a novel of her own, because she has “a lot to say” (193). Whether or not we conclude that Babel-17 is her novel, we can still say that it has been author-ized by someone who shares her feelings and her ambitions. Samuel Delany has original things to say, and he needs a new language to say them in. The science fiction genre affords him the latitude within which to explore new domains, to express original propositions.

The most linguistically self-conscious alternate society SF frequently tries to do just that. In Babel-17, for example, the discorporate zone episode in part one, the awakening scene in part three, Rydra’s foiling of the assassination attempt in part three, and the mental/sexual link-up in part four represent specific attempts on Delany’s part to render new or extreme experiences in language. One critic has noted that Babel-17 works as well as it does because there is a direct connection between its words and the realities they define (Collings 64). The same could be said of the novel Babel-17: it undertakes a direct connection between its words and its realities. By enacting linguistic otherness, it tries to motivate the relation between signifier and signified. In so doing the novel aspires to the condition of Coleridge’s Symbol, which “partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible” (30).

Invented or alien languages, then, offer the fictionist specific venues in which to enact real otherness or to encode innovative semantic spaces. Suzette Haden Elgin, for example, takes on this kind of linguistic experiment in Native Tongue. She imagines a brutally patriarchal near-future society in which the 19th Amendment has been repealed and women have been relegated to the status of legal minors, well on the way to being reduced to chattel. The women are forced to invent a specifically female tongue, “Láadan,” in order to subvert that social order: “And then, as more and more little girls acquire Láadan and begin to speak a language that expresses the perceptions of women rather than those of men, reality will begin to change” (Elgin 250). Láadan contains, among other things, distinctly feminist encodings, “the making of a name for a chunk of the world that so far as we know has never been chosen for naming before in any human language,” “a chunk that has been around for a long time but has never impressed anyone as sufficiently important to deserve its own name” (Elgin 22). “Encoding consists,” one critic says, “of assigning names and descriptions to female semantic perceptions” (Bray 51), of giving voice to a uniquely feminine perspective. With new languages like Láadan, we can speak the unknown or the unspoken; in so doing, we can bespeak new realities. In Ian Watson’s The Embedding, one character notes that it is really almost impossible for one person “to imagine the otherness of another person” (7). The most cognitively rewarding SF tries to enact that otherness, to real-ize it so that readers can experience it for themselves.

Postmodern writing is acutely aware that all systems of notation offer us models of reality rather than descriptions of it. Fiction, of course, is one such notational system; as Delany says, “fiction makes models of reality” (Jewel-Hinged Jaw 151). Science fiction’s notational system presents us with a model at one remove from reality, a counterrealistic model. For Delany, however, SF is a privileged system, because in it, more than in any genre, one can legitimately undertake the search for new language models with which to construct or invent reality. In SF novels such as Babel-17, the fictionist can “use language in much the same way that Babel-17 is used: to … force the reader to think in new ways” (McEvoy 58). From this perspective, it is not at all surprising that most SF featuring an alien or invented tongue as its narrative dominant adopts a Whorfian view of the relation between language and reality. Such SF wants to emphasize the extent to which any new language system can affect our view of reality. As Jack Vance says in The Languages of Pao, “when people speak different languages, their minds work differently and they act differently” (65). Delany would add that science fiction gives us many new and different languages to speak. Mastering these languages, we learn to think and act differently.

Notes

1. For a further discussion of alternate society SF, see Malmgren, chap. 3.

2. Spencer deals at length with the way in which neologisms and other linguistic novums contribute to the real-ization of SF worlds. For a similar argument, see Delany, “Generic Protocols: Science Fiction and Mundane.” Rabkin focuses on the way in which these novums underwrite the mimetic contract and interrogate contemporary value systems.

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