PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF SAMUEL R. DELANY
“I consider Delany not only one of the most important SF writers of the present generation, but a fascinating writer in general who has invented a new style.” —Umberto Eco
“Samuel R. Delany is the most interesting author of science fiction writing in English today.” —The New York Times Book Review
Dhalgren
“Dhalgren’s the secret masterpiece, the city-book-labyrinth that has swallowed astonished readers alive for almost thirty years. Its beauty and force still seem to be growing.” —Jonathan Lethem
“A brilliant tour de force.” —The News & Observer (Raleigh)
“A Joyceian tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren … stake[s] a better claim than anything else published in this country in the last quarter-century (excepting only Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck and Nabokov’s Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature.” —Libertarian Review
The Nevèrÿon Series
“Cultural criticism at its most imaginative and entertaining best.” —Quarterly Black Review of Books on Neveryóna
“The tales of Nevèrÿon are postmodern sword-and-sorcery … Delany subverts the formulaic elements of sword-and-sorcery and around their empty husks constructs self-conscious metafictions about social and sexual behavior, the play of language and power, and—above all—the possibilities and limitations of narrative. Immensely sophisticated as literature … eminently readable and gorgeously entertaining.” —The Washington Post Book World
“This is fantasy that challenges the intellect … semiotic sword and sorcery, a very high level of literary gamesmanship. It’s as if Umberto Eco had written about Conan the Barbarian.” —USA Today
“The Nevèrÿon series is a major and unclassifiable achievement in contemporary American literature.” —Fredric R. Jameson
“Instead of dishing out the usual, tired mix of improbable magic and bloody mayhem, Delany weaves an intricate meditation on the nature of freedom and slavery, on the beguiling differences between love and lust … the prose has been so polished by wit and intellect that it fairly gleams.” —San Francisco Chronicle on Return to Nevèrÿon
“One of the most sustained meditations we have on the complex intersections of sexuality, race, and subjectivity in contemporary cultures.” —Constance Penley
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
“Delany’s first true masterpiece.” —The Washington Post
“What makes Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand especially challenging—and satisfying—is that the complex society in which the characters move is one … which contains more than 6,000 inhabited worlds and a marvelously rich blend of cultures. The inhabitants of these worlds—both human and alien—relate to one another in ways that, however bizarre they may seem at first, are eventually seen to turn on such recognizable emotional fulcrums as love, loss and longing.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Delany’s forte has always been the creation of complex, bizarre, yet highly believable future societies; this book may top anything he’s done in that line.” —Newsday
Nova
“As of this book, [Samuel R. Delany] is the best science-fiction writer in the world.” —Galaxy Science Fiction
“A fast-action far-flung interstellar adventure; [an] archetypal mystical/mythical allegory … [a] modern myth told in the SF idiom … and lots more.” —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
“[Nova] reads like Moby-Dick at a strobe-light show!” —Time
The Motion of Light in Water
“A very moving, intensely fascinating literary biography from an extraordinary writer. Thoroughly admirable candor and luminous stylistic precision; the artist as a young man and a memorable picture of an age.” —William Gibson
“Absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood … Delany’s vision of the necessity for total social and political transformation is revolutionary.” —Hazel Carby
“The prose of The Motion of Light in Water often has the shimmering beauty of the title itself … This book is invaluable gay history.” —Inches
The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One
Babel-17, Nova, and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Samuel R. Delany
CONTENTS
Babel-17
PART ONE
RYDRA WONG
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
PART TWO
VER DORCO
1
2
3
4
5
PART THREE
JEBEL TARIK
1
2
3
4
5
PART FOUR
THE BUTCHER
1
2
3
PART FIVE
MARKUS T’MWARBA
1
2
3
4
5
6
Nova
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Prologue: A World Apart
Monologues: Visible and Invisible Persons Distributed in Space
One: From Nepiy to Free-Kantor
1
2
3
Two: The Flower and the Web
1
2
3
4
5
Three: Visitors on Velm
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Four: Rescue on Rhyonon
1
2
3
Five: Rescue Continued
1
2
Six: Rescue Concluded
1
2
3
Seven: Home and a Stranger
1
2
3
4
5
Eight: Strangers and Visitors
1
2
3
4
5
6
Nine: From Breakfast to Morning
1
2
3
4
5
Ten: A Dragon Hunt
1
2
3
Eleven: A Tale of Two Suppers
1
2
3
4
Twelve: Return to Dyethshome
1
2
3
4
5
6
Thirteen: Formalities
1
2
3
Epilogue: Morning
A Biography of Samuel R. Delany
Babel-17
—this one, now, is
for Bob Folsom,
to explain just a little of
the past year—
Contents
PART ONE
RYDRA WONG
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
PART TWO
VER DORCO
1
2
3
4
5
r /> PART THREE
JEBEL TARIK
1
2
3
4
5
PART FOUR
THE BUTCHER
1
2
3
PART FIVE
MARKUS T’MWARBA
1
2
3
4
5
6
part one
rydra wong
…Here is the hub of ambiguity.
Electric spectra splash across the street.
Equivocation knots the shadowed features
of boys who are not boys;
a quirk of darkness shrivels
a full mouth to senility
or pares it to a razor-edge, pours acid
across an amber cheek, fingers a crotch,
or smashes in the pelvic arch
and wells a dark clot oozing on a chest
dispelled with motion or a flare of light
that swells the lips and dribbles them with blood.
They say the hustlers paint their lips with blood.
They say the same crowd surges up the street
and surges down again, like driftwood borne
tidewise ashore and sucked away with backwash,
only to slap into the sand again,
only to be jerked out and spun away.
Driftwood; the narrow hips, the liquid eyes,
the wideflung shoulders and the rough-cast hands,
the gray-faced jackals kneeling to their prey.
The colors disappear at break of day
when stragglers toward the west riverdocks meet
young sailors ambling shipward on the street…
—from Prism and Lens
1
IT’S A PORT CITY.
Here fumes rust the sky, the General thought. Industrial gases flushed the evening with oranges, salmons, purples with too much red. West, ascending and descending transports, shuttling cargoes to stellarcenters and satellites, lacerated the clouds. It’s a rotten poor city too, thought the General, turning the corner by the garbage-strewn curb.
Since the Invasion six ruinous embargoes for months apiece had strangled this city whose lifeline must pulse with interstellar commerce to survive. Sequestered, how could this city exist? Six times in twenty years he’d asked himself that. Answer? It couldn’t.
Panics, riots, burnings, twice cannibalism—
The General looked from the silhouetted loading-towers that jutted behind the rickety monorail to the grimy buildings. The streets were smaller here, cluttered with Transport workers, loaders, a few stellarmen in green uniforms, and the horde of pale, proper men and women who managed the intricate sprawl of customs operations. They are quiet now, intent on home or work, the General thought. Yet all these people have lived for two decades under the Invasion. They’ve starved during the embargoes, broken windows, looted, run screaming before firehoses, torn flesh from a corpse’s arm with decalcified teeth.
Who is this animal man? He asked himself the abstract question to blur the lines of memory. It was easier, being a general, to ask about the “animal man” than about the woman who had sat in the middle of the sidewalk during the last embargo holding her skeletal baby by one leg, or the three scrawny teenage girls who had attacked him on the street with razors (—she had hissed through brown teeth, the bar of metal glistening toward his chest, “Come here, Beefsteak! Come get me, Lunch meat…” He had used karate—) or the blind man who had walked up the avenue, screaming.
Pale and proper men and women now, who spoke softly, who always hesitated before they let an expression fix their faces, with pale, proper, patriotic ideas: work for victory over the Invaders; Alona Star and Kip Rhyak were great in “Stellar Holliday” but Ronald Quar was the best serious actor around. They listened to Hi Lite’s music (or did they listen, wondered the General, during those slow dances where no one touched). A position in Customs was a good secure job.
Working directly in Transport was probably more exciting and fun to watch in the movies; but really, such strange people—
Those with more intelligence and sophistication discussed Rydra Wong’s poetry.
They spoke of the Invasion often, with some hundred phrases consecrated by twenty years’ repetition on newscasts and in the papers. They referred to the embargoes seldom, and only by the one word.
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?
Rydra Wong has become this age’s voice. The General recalled the glib line from a hyperbolic review. Paradoxical: a military leader with a military goal, he was going to meet Rydra Wong now.
The streetlights came on and his image glazed on the plate glass window of the bar. That’s right, I’m not wearing my uniform this evening. He saw a tall, muscular man with the authority of half a century in his craggy face. He was uncomfortable in the gray civilian suit. Till age thirty, the physical impression he had left with people was “big and bumbling.” Afterwards—the change had coincided with the Invasion—it was “massive and authoritarian.”
Had Rydra Wong come to see him at Administrative Alliance Headquarters, he would have felt secure. But he was in civvies, not in stellarman-green. The bar was new to him. And she was the most famous poet in five explored galaxies. For the first time in a long while he felt bumbling again.
He went inside.
And whispered, “My God, she’s beautiful,” without even having to pick her from among the other women. “I didn’t know she was so beautiful, not from the pictures…”
She turned to him (as the figure in the mirror behind the counter caught sight of him and turned away), stood up from the stool, smiled.
He walked forward, took her hand, the words Good evening, Miss Wong, tumbling on his tongue till he swallowed them unspoken. And now she was about to speak.
She wore copper lipstick, and the pupils of her eyes were beaten disks of copper—
“Babel-17,” she said. “I haven’t solved it yet, General Forester.”
A knitted indigo dress, and her hair like fast water at night spilling one shoulder; he said, “That doesn’t really surprise us, Miss Wong.”
Surprise, he thought. She puts her hand on the bar, she leans back on the stool, hip moving in knitted blue, and with each movement, I am amazed, surprised, bewildered. Can I be this off guard, or can she really be that—
“But I’ve gotten further than you people at Military have been able to.” The gentle line of her mouth bowed with gentler laughter.
“From what I’ve been led to expect of you, Miss Wong, that doesn’t surprise me either.” Who is she? he thought. He had asked the question of the abstract population. He had asked it of his own reflected image. He asked it of her now, thinking, No one else matters, but I must know about her. That’s important. I have to know.
“First of all, General,” she was saying, “Babel-17 isn’t a code.”
His mind skidded back to the subject and arrived teetering. “Not a code? But I thought Cryptography had at least established—” He stopped, because he wasn’t sure what Cryptography had established, and because he needed another moment to haul himself down from the ledges of her high cheekbones, to retreat from the caves of her eyes. Tightening the muscles of his face, he marshaled his thoughts to Babel-17. The Invasion: Babel-17 might be one key to ending this twenty-year scourge. “You mean we’ve just been trying to decipher a lot of nonsense?”
“It’s not a code,” she repeated. “It’s a language.”
The General frowned. “Well, whatever you call it, code or language, we still have to figure out what it says. As long as we don’t understand it, we’re a hell of a way from where we should be.” The exhaustion and pressure of the last months homed in his belly, a secret beast to strike the back of his tongue, harshening his words.
Her smile had left, and both hands were on the counter.
He wanted to retract the harshness. She said, “You’re not directly connected with the Cryptography Department.” The voice was even, calming.
He shook his head.
“Then let me tell you this. Basically, General Forester, there are two types of codes, ciphers, and true codes. In the first, letters, or symbols that stand for letters, are shuffled and juggled according to a pattern. In the second, letters, words, or groups of words are replaced by other letters, symbols, or words. A code can be one type or the other, or a combination. But both have this in common: once you find the key, you just plug it in and out come logical sentences. A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning. At best you can get a close approximation.”
“Do you mean that Babel-17 decodes into some other language?”
“Not at all. That’s the first thing I checked. We can take a probability scan on various elements and see if they are congruent with other language patterns, even if these elements are in the wrong order. No. Babel-17 is a language itself which we do not understand.”
“I think—” General Forester tried to smile—“what you’re trying to tell me is that because it isn’t a code, but rather an alien language, we might as well give up.” If this were defeat, receiving it from her was almost relief.
But she shook her head. “I’m afraid that’s not what I’m saying at all. Unknown languages have been deciphered without translations, Linear B and Hittite for example. But if I’m to get further with Babel-17, I’ll have to know a great deal more.”
The General raised his eyebrows. “What more do you need to know? We’ve given you all our samples. When we get more, we’ll certainly—”
“General, I have to know everything you know about Babel-17; where you got it, when, under what circumstances, anything that might give me a clue to the subject matter.”
“We’ve released all the information that we—”
“You gave me ten pages of double-spaced typewritten garble with the code name Babel-17 and asked me what it meant. With just that I can’t tell you. With more, I might. It’s that simple.”
He thought: If it were that simple, if it were only that simple, we would never have called you in about it, Rydra Wong.
She said: “If it were that simple, if it were only that simple, you would never have called me in about it, General Forester.”