Reflection on Babel 17

After reading the first chapter of Samuel R. Delaney's Babel 17, I can say that he has done his job as an author of thoroughly enticing my interest into reading further. Above all else I enjoyed his writing style most of all. I, personally, am a sucker for authors whom wax poetic frequently, and who apply exensive and elaborate metaphor's to describe story details. When Rydra Wong is introduced, Delany describes her hair like "like fast water at night spilling over her shoulder". I find this kind of metaphor so much more tantalizing than "she had locks of dark, lustrous hair". When authors like Delaney use these kinds of metaphors, it provides readers with a broader experience of the story being told. When hair is being connected to a river, we get all the description that we need, and more. The sounds and textures of a river come into mind, and they augment our experience of her hair. This is what makes the art of writing so fantastic, it can make connections between similar elements in ways that no other art form can do so.

Rydra Wong does seem like a bit of an improbable character. She is too unstoppable, and has not very many apparent flaws. Not that there is anything wrong in that she is a superhuman of sorts, but characters need flaws to grow into. Without them, character development cannot occur, and the adventures of the story won't exhibit some sort of drastic effect upon the flaws of the character; causing them to either heal their wounds or correct their flaws.

I found the subject of the Babel-17 language reason enough to continue reading. Remnants in any form of ancient alien societies hit deeply within my imagination. Alien ruins are the kind of thing that will always give me chills. In Ridley Scott's "Alien" when the team is first on the planet exploring the wreckage of the alien space station and they encounter the skeleton of the space jockey, my mind was immediately taken back to however many hundreds of years ago that the space jockeys where all together up in orbit, and the alien must have broken out and killed everyone on board and it went crashing down to the planet to be left alone for centuries. Artifacts are the greatest story device to spark intrigue about the history of whats at stake. So in Babel 17 I immediately had to know, what sort of race created the Babel-17 language, and what makes the language so special. Well, now I have to read further in order to find out.

I'm not certain as to how much I enjoyed or empathized with the general as a character. I found him pretty typically cliche of male science fiction heroes. It felt like as soon as I knew he was a general, his character was ruined for me, because being a science fiction general meant his character was going to be pretty limited in terms of how they would be able to express themselves. Again this is just me assuming, but generals by their profession are people of conduct, order, and rules. Rules in stories tend to be boring, especially in the 21st century. Nowadays people want the loose cannon, they want the anti-hero, they want unpredictable, because most stories have become too predictable. The general status is limiting to his character, but it doesn't send the whole story crashing to the ground, it can still sail well as long as the rest of the characters and plot direction remain surprising and entertaining. I will discover if this is true once I read the rest of the story.

Matt