Tag: alien-communication

Six novels take a serious look at alien communication: Part 1, Embassytown (REVISED)

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy1 Comment

In this series of posts, I will discuss six novels of alien communication I find convincing and satisfying:

  • China Miéville, Embassytown–reviewed in this post
  • Ann Leckie, Translation State
  • Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea
  • Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Children of Time
  • Cinxin Liu, The Three-Body Problem
  • Ursual LeGuin, The Dispossessed
Find it HERE.

Embassytown, China Miéville, 2011

Miéville’s take on communicating with an alien species is complex and stunningly detailed, not least because Miéville himself is a philosopher–AND a brilliant writer of fiction who builds worlds we readers can imagine ourselves inhabiting. Of the six novels I have read, I found this one the most compelling (even though The Scar is my favorite!). Embassytown is also the most difficult read, at least for me, and that includes the long prose poem that is The Iron Council. Find out more about Miéville HERE. See my previous discussions of Miéville HERE and HERE.

To be clear: I am no linguistics scholar. I am no philosopher. Some other reader could make a lot more sense out of this novel for you than I can. But let me try.

(And yes, I’m extensively revising my post, because in my zeal to make my thoughts clear, I engaged in some very awkward language this novel absolutely doesn’t deserve. Hey, it’s my post and I’ll revise if I want to. Revise if I want to. You would revise too if it happened to you.)

First off, Miéville’s society of space colonists have spent generations trying to communicate with their planet’s indigenous inhabitants, the Ariekei. The attempt has produced some success. The human colonists and the Ariekei, whom the colonists term “the Hosts,” haven’t gotten very far, but at least they have achieved a careful, cordial relationship. They understand each other enough to trade with each other for the precious metals and other important goods the colonists seek, which is fine with them. This is the way they prove their worth to their far-away origin planet. If they couldn’t do that, would the home world consider them not worth the trouble? The Ariekei planet is too distant, too far out on the frontiers of the known universe, only possible to reach because the goods can travel not through regular space but through the “immer,” a kind of hyperspace. Even with the immer, the trip out and back takes years, and this includes any communication with the home world. (The answer “Is it worth the home world’s while to go to this much trouble and expense” turns out to be yes, but in an unexpected way.)

Complicating the lives of the colonists, the Ariekei atmosphere is poisonous to humans. The colonists live in a fragile bubble of breathable air surrounded by a hostile environment. Without cordial relations with the Hosts, especially considering help from the home world is so distant, any misstep with the Ariekei might doom the colonists. Good communication is everything–yet the Ariekei are so alien to the colonists in physical and neurological makeup that contact between the two species is precarious.

The colonists understand their difficult position. They consider themselves an embassy to the Ariekei from their home world and from humanity. Hence, the name of their city-state in a bubble: Embassytown.

Avice, the main character, born in Embassytown, spent her childhood plotting to get away from the place. She became a mariner of the immer and traveled the universe, but in the present time of the novel, she has returned with her husband in tow. She plans to spend her time “floaking” (a kind of loafing around) while her husband studies the fascinating and barely-understood culture of the Ariekei. Instead, she gets swept into a swiftly-changing disintegration of ties between Hosts and colonists that imperils every human on the planet. Maybe they can hold out long enough to be rescued by their home-world. Very likely not.

One of the challenges of communication between human and Ariekei is that, while the Ariekei can hear the humans speaking, they understand the sounds emanating from human mouths as only noise. Not language. Centuries earlier, through a great deal of struggle, the colonists gradually realized that only when two humans speak together in a kind of collaborative call-and-response speech (the Cut and the Turn) do the Ariekei recognize the humans are attempting sentient communication. This type of double-speaking is how the Ariekei themselves communicate. Each individual Ariekei communicates through a sort of double consciousness based on their biology. They make double paired statements and can’t understand any other noise patterns as language.

Very gradually, the humans have realized that only closely related pairs of human speakers can mimic this situation, becoming in the Ariekei view a single speaker. Back on the home world, carefully trained and genetically engineered pairs of twins were sent out to Embassytown, and now for a long time these twins speaking in tandem have worked pretty well to establish a rudimentary communication between the species.

But there’s another problem. The Ariekei take every human statement very literally. They don’t know how to lie. Yet the heart of human communication. . .HERE IT COMES, the part where it would help a reader to have a higher degree in linguistics. . .is a type of controlled lying. A human word is never the exact counterpart of a human object, or person, or concept. It is always some approximate attempt to connect the two. This is a problem of human language that has baffled human beings throughout our history. It has fueled religions (“in the beginning was the Word. . .”). Given rise to endless conflicts, misunderstandings large and small, even wars. Resulted in vain attempts to purify (think Plato driving the poets out of the Republic). Caused humans to give up and use math instead. With this enormous gulf between human and Ariekei, the attempts by the engineered pairs of speakers–the Ambassadors–results in only enough crude communication to keep trade going.

As the centuries have proceeded, however, the Ariekei have gotten curious. They understand something of the gulf between themselves and the humans, and they want to explore it. So in childhood, Avice has had a very strange and disturbing experience. In order to understand human language better, the Ariekei have started trying to learn how to lie. That is, they have begun trying to use and understand figurative language. They take possession of some human child or other and turn that child into a living simile. A simile, if you remember, is a comparison using “like” or “as.” “My love is like a red, red rose.” This is different from metaphor (“My love IS a red, red rose.”), a comparison where the “like” or “as” drops out and the comparison is made via a bald assertion THAT IS NOT LITERALLY TRUE. In other words, it’s a species of lie–if, that is, you only see the function of language as telling truth or telling lies, no middle ground. The Ariekei can’t figure out how to experience simile. Metaphor is beyond them–and by the way, there’s a huge argument in both linguistic and literary circles whether a simile is simply a type of metaphor making the comparison clear, or whether metaphor is its own separate thought process. I’m probably putting this badly, so don’t hurt me, any linguists or semioticists or literary theorists out there.

In their literal-mindedness, the Ariekei take a human child and turn it into a living simile by forcing it to enact one. So they have taken the child Avice off to a dark room and have done some (left unspecified) terrible thing to her. In their minds, they have honored her, and she gains a kind of fan-club of Ariekei because of it. Her simile is this: “The girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was put in front of her.” Then they say to themselves, of something happening in their lives, “It is like the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was put in front of her.” None of the colonists quite understand what the Ariekei get out of these strange actions or what the similes mean to the Ariekei, but the humans placate their Hosts by allowing it. Avice, a slum-child, has little choice in the matter, and she can’t wait to leave the planet as she grows older.

When Avice returns to Embassytown, though, the whole simile cult has gone a step further. A few Ariekei are using these living similes to teach themselves how to lie. I won’t go into all the hows and whys of it, but as the Ariekei explore simile more and more, and as they start to edge into metaphor, their society fractures. To make matters worse, the home-world tries to test the Ambassador role by sending out a new Ambassador who is not a set of engineered twins. When this Mutt and Jeff combo tries to speak to the Ariekei, all hell breaks loose, the survival of the Embassytown humans is at stake, and Avice finds herself in the thick of it.

This book is simply fascinating. It takes some concentration to read it, but that concentration is well worth the effort. I will admit I had to read it twice to get the most out of it. But even after I had read it once, I was fascinated. Try it! If you’re already a fan of Miéville’s New Weird fiction, you’ll love it. If you’re encountering him for the first time, maybe try something a bit easier first? The City and the City would be a good choice (especially if you like police procedurals and are ready for one to go weird on you), as would Perdido Street Station (especially if you like horror). Whatever you do, don’t shortchange yourself by never discovering this amazing writer.

READY TO MOVE FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS?

This whole matter of fictions and language and whether they tell truth or lies, as I mentioned, goes back to Plato–probably past him. Plato saw how education in his day (5th/4th century BCE) depended on persuasive speakers and storytelling such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and he saw how that kind of education could be easily abused in the hands of manipulators. We see this danger in fascist states like Hitler’s regime and in the disinformation rife in our own society. It’s a real danger. In Plato’s own ideal invented society, the Republic, he simply banished all poetry (storytelling)–unless of the most patriotic type. I’m certainly ‘way oversimplifying this and maybe distorting it, so all you philosophers forgive me. I’ve always been struck by the irony, though, that the utopian society of the Republic itself is a fiction, and when Plato tried to implement it in real life, he became the tool of a despot and had to be rescued by his friends.

In the sixteenth century of our own era, Sir Philip Sidney wrote, “The poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth.” What he meant by “poetry” is “fiction” in the sense of “a made-up world.” In other words–some people see the world of language divided between truth-telling and lies. Others see that the truth-lies thing is a false dichotomy. There’s a middle place: the crafting of fictions.

For a light-hearted look at the difference, take Galaxy Quest. Have you seen this brilliant and under-rated movie? Go back and watch it again. I’m begging you. As with the Ariekei, the aliens in Galaxy Quest have no concept of any middle thing between lies and truth. So when they tune in on Earth’s tv broadcasts of a kind of Star-Trek-like show, they believe it to be a documentary. And when other aliens–evil aliens–menace them, these poor credulous attacked aliens turn to the cast of the Galaxy Quest tv show for help. Then one of the actors has to explain the differences–truth vs. lies, yes–but there’s a mysterious something outside of both: fiction. This is why your local Harry Potter book-burnings are based on a fundamental misunderstanding (pun intended).

Next up: Ann Leckie’s Translation State

Ready to communicate with an alien? SF shows us how it’s done

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment
By NASA; vectors by Mysid – Extracted from the Pioneer plaque (File:Pioneer plaque.svg)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6832714

Communicating human to alien–a lot of SF makes it sound like a snap, when of course it couldn’t possibly be. Here’s an article that explains a little about xenolinguistics. Here’s another. Those communications from NASA on the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager golden record are unlikely to communicate anything explicable to any random alien who might intercept them.

What WILL they make of those anatomically-correct drawings sent out with the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft? Suppose the aliens on the receiving end are not mammals? Maybe the Pioneer plaque, to use just that one example, tells US a lot more about us, and us at a single point of time, from the perspective of one human society, than it might tell any mysterious Them out there. Take a look at that dominant clearly Caucasian male, the one doing the hailing, and then that shrinking helpmeet woman hanging diffidently at his side.

If we ever do encounter an intelligent alien species, we’re very likely to have no idea how to communicate with them, probably no earthly way to do it.

Yet we humans want to think we can. And SF, our fictional form of dreaming about such matters, keeps trying. What SF novels and other forms of storytelling get it right? Which ones get it laughably wrong? Which ones don’t even care, because they’re trying for something else entirely? Here is a very partial list in no particular order:

  • Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)–Telepathy! Bene Gesserit superpowers! It seems silly, except a novel like this has so many other things going on in it that you don’t stop to think how silly. That said–this novel is set in a galaxy far, far away, a culture very far removed in space and time from Earth’s. So anything may be possible!
  • Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)–Empathic powers, the “mindspeak” used by Terran diplomatic envoy Genly Ai, allow him to communicate with the inhabitants of an alien planet. LeGuin’s version of telepathy is complicated and deepened by the sociocultural expectations of sender and receiver. I believed in it as a reader because, even though LeGuin never explains its physical processes, the psychological and sociological implications of its use are a main plot element and a main way she builds her characters, all masterfully handled. Further, the indigenous inhabitants of the planet (the “aliens”) engage in a complex cultural practice known as “shifgrethor.” Ai, who is of Terran origins (someone like us) must learn to understand this alien system of honor and face-saving before he can resolve the diplomatic problem he has come to the planet to address. LeGuin shows us how such cultural practices are just as much aspects of communication as language. And as for communication over long distances. . .I will save her concept of the “ansible” for another post.
  • The Star Trek universe (original StarTrek series, created by Gene Roddenberry, first aired in 1966–many spinoffs on film and television since): The actor James Doohan, who portrayed the character Scotty in the original Star Trek series, purportedly invented a few words for the hostile inhabitants of the Klingon empire to speak. Later, as the idea of the Klingons grew more important to the invented world of the series, American linguist Marc Okrand developed a real, if limited, Klingon vocabulary and ruleset. Since then, actual people have used the Klingon language in actual situations, and its uses have expanded in unexpected ways (“You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon”–the Bible translated into Klingon– etc.). If you’d like to go down this particular rabbit hole, the Klingon Language Institute is a good place to start. So–the Star Trek characters encounter aliens who speak Klingon, but it’s as if a German speaker encountered a speaker of French. It’s simply another language spoken by another human-ish group, and while you might need to consult your Klingon dictionary, you never get that WTF? experience that you might have if you are accosted by an alien without, say, a mouth. (On the other hand. . .I’m thinking of “The Devil in the Dark,” episode 25 of the original series’s first season, aired in 1967, when Mr. Spock communicates telepathically with a being resembling a mobile rockpile. Through the famed Vulcan Mind Meld, Spock empathizes with its pain. . .then it turns out the rockpile can write in English. . .🤷‍♀️)
  • The Star Wars universe (media franchise beginning with the first film directed by George Lucas in 1977; many books, movies both live and animated, streaming shows later, and the franchise is owned by Disney and keeps on keeping on): Another story-verse where citizens of a far-flung galactic empire speak all sorts of languages, but nothing a subtitle or two can’t demystify, even though some of the citizens look distinctly anatomically unhuman.
  • Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. Steven Spielberg (1977): The aliens communicate with us partially through a telepathic dream-state summoning certain carefully-vetted humans to Devils Tower, Wyoming. The manner of first contact is a succession of musical tones, a universal that supposedly transcends culture and even species. But does it? What if your species doesn’t communicate through sound at all? I suppose these particular aliens have come to communicate with us particular humans, who do use sound, so okay. And it’s very cinematic. Who doesn’t hear those five notes in their heads? From the same director–ET, the Extraterrestrial (1982), about an alien stranded on earth. He telepathically connects via his iconic finger touch with the kids who discover him, although he needs their help to phone home. Maybe the whole enterprise of fictional alien communication becomes easier to swallow when it’s the aliens trying to communicate with us.
  • Iain Banks, Consider Phlebas (1987): As in the other books of the author’s amazing and wonderful Culture series, the characters may speak different languages in their far-flung clashing galactic empires, and some might have difficulties with each other, but hey, nothing a galactic Duolingo course can’t fix. Horza, the main character, speaks the language of the Culture empire, although it’s not his native tongue, and that language serves as Lingua Franca for most of the humanoid characters. But his allies, the alien species called the Idirans, speak a language perfectly understandable to him too, in spite of a very, very different biology and physiognomy. It’s Space Opera-land, and of the highest, most enjoyable order, too. Every few years I have to re-read this novel!
  • William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984): People rely on implanted translation devices. This is a very tidy, very popular way to solve the SF problem of the alien encounter–the translation device or technology or (wincing here) creature–see Douglas Adams’s hilarious The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and the babel fish that burrows into your ear. Of course, all you really need to know is. . .42.
  • The Twilight Zone “To Serve Man” episode (aired in 1962, based on Damon Knight’s short story published in 1950): Sure, when the aliens arrive, you may not understand them, even big clumsy Lurch-type giant ones who can speak YOUR language and look, in retrospect, like SNL’s coneheads. But with a lot of study, you can figure out their mysterious writings. Don’t ingenious humans always? Spoiler alert: It’s a cookbook!

COMING UP NEXT: Novels that have seriously tackled the alien communication problem