There are holes in Delany's built world, and they are created by language. The result is a whiplash-inducing dislocation between bodies and things. (Neither are those of Wong's ship, the Rimbaud.) We learn a great deal about how things taste, feel, and smell, but we never learn, say, what the 'saucer-sled' used for travel looks like. When it comes to spaceships and other superobjects, however, Delany prefers to both pull out and describe around them: 'Ships rose on white flares, blued through distance, and became bloody stars in the rusted sky.' A pirate spaceship is referred to as 'a mountain' (a feature further coded into its name, Jebel Tarik), yet its interior or exterior are not even passingly described.

His nails were nub-gnawed on fingers like knotted lengths of white rope.' He flung out a quick smile and touched his forehead with a forefinger in salute. He was unkempt and towheaded and sapphire-eyed, but the only cosmetisurgery evident was the bright rose growing on his shoulder. Even the facial muscles stood at the back of the jaw and jammed against the separate columns of his neck. One of Delany's methods of generating this frisson is extreme closeups: '-but Ron was small, thin, with uncannily sharp muscular definition: pectorals like scored metal plates beneath drawn wax skin stomach like ridged hosing, arms like braided cables. Babel-17 is very deliberately about both the language in the text and the language of the text. The result is a narrative in which the dead pilot starships, epic space battles take place just off-screen, and Wong inaugurates a totally new kind of intimate relationship with a pirate who cannot say the word 'I'. Rydra Wong, famous poet, has turned starship-captain after being tasked by the Alliance with decoding a seemingly unbreakable enemy code, the titular Babel-17, which Wong recognizes, at least initially, as a new language. Bridging SF's Golden Age (think early Heinlein and Asimov) with the New Wave of the '60s and '70s (think Ballard and Moorcock), Babel-17 integrates rip-roaring deep space adventure and hard science with modernist prose and new social formations.

This contrast between pulp terseness and a kind of neo-gothic ornateness provides the primary frisson in Samuel R. West, ascending and descending transports, shuttling cargoes to stellarcenters and satellites, lacerating the clouds.' The economy of prose does not, however, continue into the second paragraph: 'Industrial gases flushed the evening with oranges, salmons, purples with too much red. It's not an opening as famous as, 'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,' but it's an equally effective evocation.

Empire star samuel r delany