Tag: science fiction

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

Alien communication: Part 3, The Mountain in the Sea–and a new quotation for the speculative fiction advent calendar (slightly revised)

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

In this series of posts, I will review these six novels:

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

The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler (2023)

Here’s an enthralling near-future SF novel of contact with another species, and it doesn’t need outer space to do so. Is there other intelligent life in the universe? The answer lies beneath our own oceans.

And don’t we already know that? We have yet to access that intelligence, though researchers around the world are on it (see, for example, THIS). Nayler’s enthralling novel of an intelligent octopus species won the 2023 Locus Award for Best First Novel. I reviewed it HERE. Nayler asks the big questions. How does one species with a specific physical presence, we human beings (bipedal, brain housed in knob at top, armature of bones, lungs breathing oxygen directly from the air) inhabiting one type of physical environment (land), ever hope to communicate with an utterly unlike species, the octopus, with a completely different physical presence (fluid and soft, multi-limbed, completely different respiratory system, distributed intelligence throughout the body), living in a completely different physical environment (the sea)? And anyway, how are we humans expected to communicate with a species that alien when we can’t even communicate well with each other? Or with ourselves, in the locked-in loneliness of our own skulls?

Nayler’s novel follows the progress of a human researcher, Dr. Ha Nguyen, brought to a remote island to study the octopus species there and attempt to communicate with it. She is assisted by Evrim, the only completely lifelike android ever created, and guarded by Altantsetseg, a Mongolian veteran of a brutal war. Outside forces keep trying to breach the island’s security barrier–local people whose livelihood depends on fishing the increasingly empty seas, commercial companies operating massive AI-driven fishing vessels crewed by human slaves, and perhaps too a mysterious outside organization that will resort to anything, including murder, to infiltrate the project. The enigmatic Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan , creator of Evrim, keeps the project top-secret and the researchers on lock-down, because Ha’s success will be the breakthrough discovery of humanity–communication with an alien species–and bad actors await to either monetize it out of greed or destroy it out of fear. In fact, the fear surrounding Ha’s research is matched only by the fear of Evrim, the only android to pass the Turing test, uncannily intelligent, potentially very dangerous to humanity.

Into this intriguing mix, Nayler introduces two subplots. One involves a hapless man who is kidnapped and enslaved on one of the AI fishing vessels. By the end of the novel, this subplot connects to the main thrust of the story, but until that time, it’s interesting all on its own even though it seems only tangentially related. The other subplot is more directly connected all the way through: a hacker hired by an incognito organization (which we see, from the very beginning, as ruthless and unethical) to find a back-channel into Evrim’s mind.

The novel goes beyond the massive difficulties inherent in communicating with an alien species and into the problem of communication itself. How fiendishly difficult it is to decipher a new system of symbols without much to go on–no octopus Rosetta Stone to consult–yet knowing that language is inherently symbolic. And especially the mind/body problem that has caused philosophers through the ages a massive headache (I will resist jokes here) and spawned reams and reams of learned treatises. I have only a timid understanding of these matters, but Nayler’s novel helped me get a better feel for some of them. I refer you to this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where you can take your investigation further by looking into the numerous sources cited in its bibliography. Nayler himself also refers to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. I have started reading that myself. It is very accessible, even to me, the non-scientist.

As a side note: some have accused Nayler’s novel of being too didactic and explainy. I think that’s unfair. Nayler is grappling with one of the thorniest problems we know, but he is writing a novel, not a treatise. However, each chapter is headed by a purported piece of writing by either Ha or Mínervudóttir-Chan. Those fictional representations of actual research questions and the difficult issues arising from them help us understand the characters and the plot. This is not a new technique. Just right off, I’m thinking of the quotations from fictional historical documents that head each chapter of Frank Herbert’s Dune; the hugely-important mixture of fictional and real footnotes in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-stars; the technique in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to use footnotes for little side-essays, personal recollections, and historical facts. Or perhaps Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in its entirety, pretending to be a traveler’s real account of the strange lands he encounters. Any novel of ideas needs to do something of the kind to drive the story without turning the story into an illustrated lecture. Some are more successful than others. I account Nayler’s novel in the very successful category. (This leads us to: so why write a novel or a story instead of a treatise? I would love to address this, going back to Swift and Defoe and the origins of the novel, at least in English, but–lucky you–no time/space to do that here.)

We readers are kept wondering. Who is the true enemy here? How dangerous is Evrim? And above all, given the massive difficulties, the completely different sense apparatus and sensing of the environment, how will Ha reach out to the only other intelligent species on our planet that evolved separately from the line of mammal intelligence: the apex species of the ocean, the octopus. Nayler’s novel is superb. Ultimately it is about what it means to be conscious, what it means to be human, and the loneliness that haunts us all.

And so, for Day Two of my Speculative Fiction Advent Calendar of quotes, I give you:

Quotation for Dec. 2, 2025

NEXT UP: A fourth installment in my review of novels exploring alien communication, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. Sorry, next up is Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Children of Time AND a new quotation for the speculative fiction advent calendar.

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