Delaney's writing was initially odd and I thought I'd get used to it. Despite the offbeat techniques, Delaney quickly established a dystopian, interplanetary society that has an abundance of poor, violent people due to a 20 year war involving the Invaders and the Alliance. Common technological features of this age involve a process called cosmetisurgery, or cosmetic surgery where people can get animal like enhancements or bio mechanical attachments on their body. There's even a thing called the Morgue where dead people can be revived, or people who wish to die go. Their consciousnesses can be revived. A whole new person can be made from a group's borrowed thoughts, forming a new person with new thoughts and ideas. It's odd. Even then, people seem to live a long time; there are characters upwards 150 years old. The Morgue sequence helped me understand how the world worked, but only a little bit. Here's an excerpt:
"Any suicide who discorpartes through regular Morgue channels can be called back. But a violent death where the Morgue just retrieves the body afterward, or the run-of-the-mill senile ending...then you're dead forever; although there, if you pass through regular channels, your brain pattern is recorded and your thinking ability can be tapped if anyone wants it, though your consciousness is gone wherever consciousness goes."
Additionally there's these beings calls discorporate souls, I still don't know their exact nature but they seem pretty intangible. Rydra Wong, the ship's captain, finds these souls after going to a certain part of town to recruit them as pilots. She refers to them as Nose, Ear, and Mouth (I believe). These discorporate pilots control the ship through "stasis shifts" and "neural networks." Then there's something called psyche-indices and all I could guess is that they're a psyche rating.
Or at least from what I could gather because I've never read anything so incomprehensible and confusing in my life and I'm not exaggerating. Maybe because it was the 60s and nothing needed further explanation and you could just say "neural networks" and people would go "woah" but damn. The way imagery is described is confusing I don't know what I'm reading or what this world or it's inhabitants are composed of. The use of run-on sentences doesn't help the overall comprehension either. I found that what bothered me the most was that there was no connection between previous events; it's as if events do not matter or the character dialogue has nothing to do with anything. I felt like I picked up a novel from the middle of its series. There's no sense of tension, time, or suspense. No subject, person, place, or event is focused on enough so I'm just left with a cluster-fuck of a short novel with random-ass sci-fi words about language. There is no time spent on anything in this book. (Sorry Delaney)
I wanted to learn about so many of the ideas that Delaney was bringing to the table. Discorporate, tripling, the Morgue, Babel 17, language, etc but it was so confusing and hard to grasp onto anything in the story. The Baron sequence, sort of like the Collector, was the only mildly entertaining thing because more thought was put into describing how fat the Baroness is with her every movement instead of the details of world-building. Shameful.
It was later cleared up in class that Babel 17 was more about the nature of language and communication. There were some great points made about how more knowledge leads to how detailed one sees the world and how that affects their language. I can appreciate media that's less about the plot and more about the idea behind the plot, but Babel 17 was muddled and imperceivable that I couldn't find the point. I felt similar about Aye and Gomorrah.
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