Hello!

Amplitudes is on the longlist for Best Collection in the BSFA awards, which I forgot to mention last time, so if you’re a BSFA member, do consider putting it on your ballot (which will get it on the shortlist). (Award nominations are confusing.)

I am Excited about The Language of Liars

When S.L. Huang asked in a group chat if anyone wanted to blurb their upcoming novella about language and linguistics, I put both my hands in the air and did the most stereotypical “ME ME ME!!!” thing. You can see my blurb on the website, along with ones from much more illustrious people like Yoon Ha Lee and Wole Talabi.

I loved this novella, and it is devastating. Y’all should definitely read it.

what’s it about?

The Ponto are a species with empathic abilities, and this ability allows them to jump with their consciousness into a different species's mind. The Star Eaters can sense the meridian element, which allows people to travel faster than light, and they have been used for many years (unspecified) to collect the meridian element so the other species can refine and utilize it.

There are a lot of open questions about the Star Eaters, including what they call themselves and whether they actually consent to the work they’re doing. In the past, they were more like slaves (watched over by robot Overseers), but some people objected to their treatment, so they asked the Star Eaters if they wanted to keep working and made the Overseers less hostile and made their rooms in the collection ships less like prisons.

The Star Eaters are also dying out. They’re very long lived, so the rest of the universe didn’t notice for a long time that new Star Eaters weren’t being born, so one of the important questions that every polity in the universe wants to answer is “How do we trigger Star Eaters to bud?” (They reproduce asexually.)

Ro, the protagonist, is a linguist, and he is being trained in the Star Eaters' language and culture so that he can understand them and create the empathic synchronization that will allow him to jump. Ro loves language and wants to know how it works, and he learns a lot of languages. (I can relate.) He wants to jump because he believes it will allow him to understand Star Eaters from the inside (literally) so he will be able to answer his questions about grammar and inflection and discourse markers.

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Unfortunately, grammatical and cultural analysis aren’t what the leaders of his polity are interested in, which he learns, much to his dismay, after jumping into a Star Eater’s mind. He stumbles around at first, making friends and enemies, but eventually he settles in and starts collecting meridian and making his reports to his leaders.

But his fascination with and knowledge of other languages leads him to an insight that he never expected — nor did anyone else — and this insight changes everything.

what’s it ACTUALLY about, though?

Imperialism, colonialism, extractionism, and exploitation. All the species in the universe have expanded from their homeworlds using meridian element, and the Star Eaters are the only 

species that can detect meridian. The other species coerced and exploited them until some people demanded that the Star Eaters be treated better. But they’re still plainly being exploited, though it’s hard to say whether they’re being coerced. Work is life, say the Star Eaters when they're asked, so the hundreds of planets and interplanetary coalitions and empires continue to use them to find meridian. 

Linguistic worldbuilding

There was so much good linguistic worldbuilding in here. Huang made up just enough about a dozen or so languages that Ro can talk about them and compare them to his own and to each other. The Star Eaters are radially symmetrical space starfish, and they use a gestural language with direction words like redward and blueward.

The fact that translation isn't always one-to-one, and that sometimes you have to use extra words to show gradations of meaning, is often conflated with "untranslatability" in popular media, but not here. Huang shows how Ro considers various words in various languages and how best to render them in his own language. The first chapter is a musing on the meaning of doubt and types of doubt and what it means to lie in a dozen different languages, and in none of them does Ro say they're "untranslatable." One of the open questions about the Star Eaters' language is what the question words mean and what "quota" means, and Ro tries to solve these puzzles by asking other Star Eaters, but he can't let anyone catch on that he's not actually one of them.

To sum up

If you liked other works of linguistic science fiction or fantasy, like Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life, R.F. Kuang’s Babel, or Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan duology, you should preorder this yesterday.

Until next time!