Babel-17 is basically strong Sapir-Whorf, the novel. A series of attacks on Alliance military bases are preceded by strangely coded messages, and when polymath poet, linguist, and space captain Rydra Wong discovers that the Babel-17 messages are a language not a code, and one of incredible precision and expressive power, it's up to her to find the source and start a dialog.

Delany is a master of eyeball kicks of language, of strong self-indentity and beautiful decadence. Wong puts together a fascinating space crew of misfits, including a massive clawed pilot-wrestler, a live trinary navigation group and dead trinary sensor group, and a platoon of kids to turn the knobs. She visits a noble who dreams of death in a million exotic configurations, and falls in with space pirates. The setting is a fantastic fait accomplai, artistic weirdness that holds together in a glittering pattern. This is a very strange world of people who consider their lives entirely mundane, and it's a fantastic tension.

The meat of the novel hangs on the ideas of what can and cannot be translated, and a space pirate named The Butcher who speaks a native language without the words 'You' or 'I'. Wong realizes that The Butcher is the key to the whole mess. Babel-17 is a constructed language designed for sabotage without self-awareness, a control system for a schizoid spy that with her genius she is able to rework into a force for good. This is a very strange novel, totally unique, and well worth reading.