Babel-17 (1966) is Delany's first novel in which his interest in linguistic ambiguities becomes prominent. The protagonist, the poet Rydra Wong, accepts a military mission to discover the origin and purpose of an undeciphered language which seems to accompany sabotage by an alien invasion. The language produces a schizophrenia in its speakers that allows the act of sabotage to be committed without their knowledge; her comprehension of the structure of the language provides her with a key to her own childhood trauma. This plot is fleshed out by many examples of communication across barriers of body, class, technologies, clothes, age — the central conflict reveals an Oedipal murder modeled on the plot of Bester's The Demolished Man (1953); the synesthesia of the novel, representing the experience of space-ship pilots wired into their ships, is also reminiscent of Bester's style.

His next novel, The Einstein Intersection (1967), may still be...