Tag: book-review

Six novels take a serious look at alien communication: Part 4, Children of Time book 1

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

In this series of posts, I review six novels with alien communication as a main plot point:

  • China Miéville, Embassytown
  • Ann Leckie, Translation State
  • Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea
  • Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Children of Time (book 1)–reviewed in this post
  • Cinxin Liu, The Three-Body Problem
  • Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed
cover of Children of Time, science fiction novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Find out more HERE.

Quick Note: I am writing these reviews so fast that mistakes inevitably crop up. As I spot typos and worse, I will issue corrected posts.

Children of Time bk 1, Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2016

Children of Time, winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award, is the first of four books in the series also titled Children of Time (short-listed for Best Series by the 2023 Hugo Awards). They are Children of Time (the novel I am reviewing in this post), Children of Ruin, Children of Memory, and coming in March 2016, Children of Strife. Each novel is part of a complex story-arc, but each one can be read stand-alone. Confession: I have only read Book 1.

In Children of Time (novel, not series), Tchaikovsky addresses the question of alien communication with an answer similar to Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea (reviewed in my preceding post). Nayler quotes the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who in an influential essay in 1974 had asked the question, “What is it like to be a bat?” The answer, for human beings, appears to be: We can’t know. In Children of Time, Tchaikovsky asks, “What is it like to be a spider?” How does a spider think, anyhow? how does it communicate with its fellow arachnids? And therefore, when a race of sentient spiders encounters a human mind it believes to be God, and when it decides it desperately needs to communicate with the Deity, how does that happen?

An insoluble problem, especially since the Deity is actually an entrapped human named Avrana Kern, a scientist who has evolved into more machine than woman in her eons of orbiting over the the spider planet and attempting to guide its long evolutionary history. Kern needs to communicate with her spiders as desperately as the spiders need to communicate with her.

Dr. Kern takes immense pride in her terraforming experiment and is immensely protective of “her” planet’s pure environment, denying an earth ship in distress access to it even though her denial might mean the death of the remnant of humanity riding inside. For Kern, the integrity of her experiment is paramount.

Here’s the irony: Kern thought she was releasing (to use the first chapter’s title) a barrel of monkeys into a pristine environment. She planned to enable them to evolve toward intelligence and become even greater than the bickering primates of the human race, in the process of destroying itself. For Kern, her monkeys will be the redemption of the human race, and the ragged remnants of humanity begging for sanctuary will corrupt it. As Kern orbits above what she believes to be her evolving monkeys, she devises a simple mathematical test of intelligence, escalating in difficulty to gauge where they are in their march toward sentience, and beyond.

I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that her dream is thwarted (I won’t reveal how), and that the sentient evolving beings on the planet below–which she hubristically thinks of as Kern’s World–are not primate but arachnoid. Kern’s simple little mathematical puzzles need to change.

Like Nayler, Tchaikovsky asks us to imagine how a species common to us on earth but utterly alien might communicate with us, and how we might try to communicate with it. How do spiders actually move and see, how do they experience texture, how do they experience gender? These questions and more drive the plot, especially when the human beings on the escape ship from earth come back to Kern’s World and create a crisis for Kern, for the spiders, and for themselves.

One especially interesting technique Tchaikovsky uses: how time expands and contracts in the experience of the characters. Kern has been orbiting her planet for eons, and her view is becoming less and less human. The spiders, with much shorter lives, much briefer epochs of arachnid history, have a very different experience of the world they inhabit, so we readers gain insight into their thinking through various archetypal spiders in their march through time: thinker, warrior, hunter, inventor. Over the epochs of spider history, the individuals occupying these roles change, but the roles and names stay essentially the same. That was a difficult move to bring off in a novel, and I thought Tchaikovsky handled it in an interesting and convincing way. The refugee human experience changes over their own eons and generations, as well. Most of these characters are in hypersleep, roused for the good parts of the plot (or their children or grandchildren), but one character gives the reader some continuity to hang onto, dragged out of his long nap for every major conflict.

I enjoyed this novel very much. Its promotional blurbs describe it as “space opera,” but I disagree. There are some fascinating, fleshed-out, thorny concepts here. Explored, though, with all of the thrill of good space opera. Full disclosure, I have arachnophobia, so maybe I’m not the best reader for this book, since I constantly felt something crawling on me as I read it. Trigger warning for fellow arachnophobes: the web page for this series on Tchaikovsky’s site has a photo of a big hairy specimen crouching at the top of it, probably a member of the Portia jumping spider species, source of the main spider character’s name. I’m not sure, though–I didn’t look too close. 😱

I should say that I found Tchaikovsky’s stand-alone novel Alien Clay (short-listed for both the 2025 Hugo Award for best novel and the Locus Award) much more convincing about the problem of alien communication than this one. In that novel, communication is architecture, biology, spatial relationships. It’s made up of the way a culture manipulates its physical space and inhabits its biological niche. Communication is the way the individuals of a culture and an ecosystem (maybe the same thing?) fit into the whole. I found that very intriguing, and the process the characters undergo to reach that conclusion very intriguing too, because it made me ponder what makes us human. See my quick review of that book HERE, but in that review, I paid too little attention to this fascinating communication aspect. I hope I’m rectifying that by mentioning it here. And I will also use Alien Clay for my next. . .

Speculative Fiction Advent Calendar of quotes. I give you the quotation for Day Three, Dec. 3, 2025:

Coming up next (yes, really!): my review of Cinxin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem

Six novels take a serious look at alien communication: Part 2, Translation State

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

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

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

Translation State, Ann Leckie (2023)–note: fixed a typo if you are reading the revised post

Book cover of Ann Leckie's SF novel "Translation State"
Find out how to get it HERE. (And if you are reading this around Black Friday, Orbit seems to be offering a discount code on its site.)

Leckie’s answer to the problem of human/alien communication is pretty brilliant, I think, and close to Miéville’s (see my last post). The characters in Translation State are embroiled in a politically very precarious situation, one so fraught it could easily lead to an extinction event for all the sentient species of the universe. The sentient species, I should say, which consist of individual species members.

These species on their various planets and in their differing cultures and biologies (or other constituent parts!) have enough trouble just dealing with each other, but at a time before the novel begins, they have encountered a radically different species, the Presger, who are so alien that communication with them seems impossible. Worse, the Presger are so much more advanced than the other species that they have the power to wipe out all the other species and think no more about it than a person stomping on a bug. Worse than even that, the Presger don’t recognize individuals or individual striving, pain, thought processes, inherent value–only the collective. How does a universe full of jostling, quarreling individuals communicate with THAT?

A very fragile truce has been struck before Translation State begins, and as with Mieville’s Ariekei/human communication dilemma, holding onto the truce depends on a jury-rigged and barely adequate bridging of the communication divide. As the novel begins, interspecies infighting imperils the truce.

Reader: It helps to understand the political (and legal!) quagmire in the back story of this novel if you have read Leckie’s wonderful Imperial Radch series (see my post HERE), and also her other Imperial Radch-adjacent novel Provenance, but it’s not necessary. Translation State, a lovely novel of found family, short-listed for the 2024 Hugo Award, can stand on its own.

In Leckie’s imagined world (universe), there is no way the Presger mind and a more human-like mind will ever fathom each other. But it’s crucially important to do so, because, on a mere whim, the Presger could end the other species at any time. In their inscrutability, the Presger themselves have understood the need for a treaty with the other species, and they have the vast intelligence to go about it. They have deliberately crafted an intermediate type of creature explicitly designed and educated to translate between themselves and the others.

Leckie’s imagined solution intersects in a very satisfying way with the individual personalities of her characters and their emotional needs. So her novel avoids that all-too-common SF trap of creating essentially an enormous PowerPoint of “what-if.” Her book is actually a novel, not a disguised diagram or tract. Her characters are actually characters, not bullet points. The characters of the novel occupy a translation state, and so does Leckie the author, between us readers trying to imagine the unimaginable, and that object of unimaginability.

What if you were one of those members of the interspecies “translation state,” her novel asks the reader. How would you understand yourself and live your life? What if the biological imperatives built into your physical and psychological fabric mean that your own agency is limited; that even though you are a thinking, sensing, feeling individual, you will die if you don’t fulfill a biological mandate? What if the fate of the treaty depends on your putting aside your own needs and fulfilling the fate you were specifically designed for? And so–what if the fate of all other sentient species in the universe depends on it?

This is a thrilling twist on the “Chosen One” trope. It is also a sensitive exploration of what it means to be different, what it means to suffer abuse, what it means to lack and then find a family and community. We readers shuttle between the thoughts and feelings of two young people caught up in an impossible situation. A third character becomes the catalyst bringing them together. But, the novel asks, along with the third character irself (no, not a typo): is this a good thing? Or a dangerous thing imperiling everyone?

A lot of questions here, but the novel is full of them and feels its way to its conclusion, just as we readers do. This is an SF book that engages the reader and takes the reader along for the ride.

I was struck with the differences between novels like Leckie’s and Miéville’s on the one hand, and some of the space opera solutions to alien communication on the other (see my previous post). Leckie and Miéville both deal with imperfect solutions to near-impossible communication problems–a very real possibility if a human-like species ever did come into contact with an alien one. But both Leckie and Miéville, interestingly, don’t deal with first contact. Their novels both look back to an imperfect solution and then ahead to a crisis point in that communication–also a very real possibility in such a communications attempt. Miéville wants to examine how language works in the context of a real impasse between species. Leckie is more interested in the conflicts among the characters when the impasse happens, and more interested in the way biology shapes communication. For example, Miéville does delve a bit into how the twin pairs are engineered to communicate with the Ariekei and what in the Ariekei biology might account for their need for the double messaging of their language, but he appears to be more interested in how language itself works, and then how it might work under extreme circumstances. Leckie takes us straight into the nitty-gritty and sometimes gut-churning details of how the translation state is physically achieved.

An inspired space opera like (pick any one of) Iain Banks’s Culture novels posits a universe where all these thorny communication problems have already been worked out. We don’t need to think about them or talk about them much. They just ARE. Don’t ask why Cinderella’s glass slipper doesn’t cut her foot. By the rules of the fairy tale game, it just doesn’t. Willingly suspend your disbelief, space opera tells us. With delight (if the novels are good enough, like Culture), we do. Such novels are content to let that problem alone. They are after other conflicts. (The heart of any good novel being: conflict. If all you are after is ideas, just go write an essay. Go format your PowerPoint.)

Novels like these by Leckie and Miéville want to poke the bear. How is communication between a human-like species and an alien being/consciousness even possible? How could it possibly come to be? And then–what happens when it all unravels?

Next up: Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

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