 It also resembles a few preceding science fiction novels which deal with how languages shape the political and cultural stratum of societies, such as "The Languages of Pao" by Jack Vance or "Anthem" by Ayn Rand.Delany describes himself as having been "a die-hard believer in the Sapir-Whorf", as expressed in "Babel-17"; he eventually decided that "it was just incorrect", because "it fails to take into account the whole economy of discourse, which is a linguistic level that accomplishes lots of the soft-edge conceptual contouring around ideas, whether we have available a one- or two-word name for it or only a set of informal many-word descriptions that are not completely fixed", which motivated his later works considering language