The message: unknown and entombed in a crystallized Tritovian stone named Jewel - the very same perceptive and multiplexed Jewel who narrates Jo’s story. With his last breath he urges Jo to deliver a message to the planet Empire Star. That is, until he stumbles upon a wrecked spaceship where a dying crew member emerges. Intergalactic space travel is not a feature on his résumé. But he’s a naive simpleton who’s perfectly satisfied with maintaining the status quo. Though, don’t forget the words of the Baroness Ver Dorco: “Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don’t you think?”Ĭomet Jo is a brass-clawed eighteen-year-old from the satellite Rhys who is as deadly with his claws as he is with his ocarina. Where you can let your imagination run wild along with that of Delany. Thus, we live a lifetime at the mercy of our own communication, always struggling to understand others whose culture is as foreign to us as their language.īut it’s also a precursor to and mash-up of Arrival and A Scanner Darkly in the most grand and dramatic sense. What she doesn’t realize: she and her crew have taken the adage, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”, more literally than was ever necessary.īorn out of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Babel-17 is Delany’s love letter to language, exploring the idea that each language has its own unique influence on the perceptions of its speakers. Here she hopes to “…find out who, or what, in the Universe thinks that way.”īut her plan soon unravels when she realizes a traitor is in their midst, one step ahead and ready to spin their ship and operation out of control. With her ticket punched and team recruited, she heads to the War Yards at Armsedge, the purported setting of the next attack. However, Rydra discovers that the code - dubbed Babel-17 - is in fact a language, one so compact that it has her spooked. Cracking them may yield the locations of imminent attacks, enabling the Alliance to foil their efforts before they occur. All the more reason to be prepared for the unexpected…if you can read between the lines.įor their part, the Alliance has taken every precaution to do just that, commissioning poet and language expert Rydra Wong to decipher what they believe to be coded transmissions sent between enemy Invaders. Language is a tool so powerful that in the wrong hands it can be used as a weapon.
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