(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: Chrononauts main theme)
introductions, recent non-podcast reads
JM:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I am JM and I'm here with my lovely co-hosts, Nate and Gretchen. And if I sound like a new man today, it's because I have a brand new mic setup. So I wanted to show off my new mic setup by doing the intro. So to the two or three people who have complained that my audio in particular sometimes doesn't sound good, especially during the interlude parts, this should solve the problem. And you can now listen to my lovely voice in your car without straining. So isn't that awesome?
But we're really a science fiction literature history podcast and it's been a while since we got together. So really nice to hear you guys again. And we are podcast that discuss science fiction literature and we have a lot of different places where you can find us. We have a blogspot at chrononautspotcast.blotspot.com. There you can find all kinds of cool things like the first digital editions of certain things we put up, including some works translated into English for the first time from several languages, mostly Russian and Spanish. But also a couple of Italian works will be and all this stuff will be discussed on the podcast in the future.
Nate:
Yep, and definitely a lot more coming up in the near future. I've take a little bit of a break from translating just due to other stuff in my life. But I think now I'm getting back into it and I've started working on a first draft of a Francisco Baltzer short story, "The Factory Ship", which is pretty cool so far. So I'm definitely excited to post some more stuff that I have in draft form and get the rest of this Argentinian science fiction magazine stuff up there for you all to read.
JM:
Yeah, so I'm interested in history to get into there as well.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
You can also find us on all your favorite podcasting platforms of choice, Google and Apple and Spotify. You can email us at chrononautspotcast@gmail.com and you can also find us on Twitter/X at @ChrononautsSF. And finally, we are on YouTube as well under the Chrononauts podcast channel. And yeah, we highly suggest that if you like what you're hearing and you like what we're doing, you can definitely subscribe to the podcast and leave us some comments or send us an email if you like that better because, yeah, sometimes these platforms are not the best for communication. But whatever you want to do and say, we'd be happy to hear from you.
But today we have a really special theme that we've been cooking up for a little while here and it's a theme on language and linguistics and communication. And I'm really excited to get to this. But since it's been a while since we all got together, why don't we all talk about the stuff we've been reading and consuming of late. We'll go around. We'll start maybe with you, Nate, and I'll go last.
Nate:
Sure. Yeah, I started off the year with a bunch of stuff from Edith Wharton. So she has a lot of really awesome stuff, including some genre work and ghost stories, but this is the more New York socialite type stories. So I read the collection of novellas "Madame de Treyme" and three novellas, which also include "The Touchstone", "Sanctuary" and "The Bunner Sisters". "Madame de Treyme" is pretty good. It's like a typical Edith Wharton story involving like a love triangle and aristocracy and Europe and stuff like that. I really, really liked "The Touchstone" and especially "The Bunner Sisters", which was just absolutely fantastic.
And then I read her novel "The Custom of the Country," which is this absolutely brutal social satire, like completely unlikeable characters, just a lot like "Vanity Fair", but set in New York a couple of decades after. A lot of the same kind of themes have just rotten humanity. It's a really, really good, but definitely dark read at times. Really like Edith Wharton a lot. Again, her socialite, social commentary novels are a pretty cool addition to her ghost story stuff, which I would like to read more of.
Then I read "Pamela" by Samuel Richardson, and I absolutely hated this. One of the worst things I've read in a long time, I think it's the origin of the trope where a man treats a woman like shit the entire novel and she just falls in love with him.
JM:
Wow. Yeah, I remember having to read that for an English class, actually.
Gretchen:
I think even I've had some classmates that have had to read it in one class and I remember them complaining about it.
Nate:
Yeah, it's still widely read and widely influential in the history of the English language novel. But yeah, it is rough going for sure. And the Librivox version is just absolutely dreadful.
JM:
Yeah, that's too bad that some of their narratives or the recording quality are just not really up to good standards. But yeah, it's a good thing. The good thing they're doing for sure.
Gretchen:
It does seem to be a mixed bag.
Nate:
Yeah, for sure. That's one of the ones where they have like 25 different narrators each doing like small chunks of it and they're all not....
JM:
Yeah, because none of them really enjoy it, right? Most likely. So they all pronounce things differently too. And yeah, they all have different recording quality.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Isn't there a parody work that was created not long after called "Shamela"?
Nate:
Yeah, there's several. So "Shamela" was how Henry Fielding got his start. I would like to read that because "Tom Jones" is one of the great comedic masterpieces of the English language, I think. I absolutely love "Tom Jones".
JM:
Because I remember talking about that in that same class and I think we did read one of his books, but I can't remember which one it was.
Nate:
Yeah, he has another couple books, "Joseph Andrews" and I forget the other one. But one is also like a take on "Shamela", but you know, inverted. Everybody is viceful and wicked and social climbers whereas... I don't know. I didn't really like it as much as "Tom Jones" and yeah, "Tom Jones" is a classic picaresque. Yeah, one of my favorites for sure from that era.
But yeah, after "Pamela", I need a bit of a palette cleanser. So I read some genre fiction, namely the "Hellbound Heart" by Clive Barker, which I really, really liked. The LGBT themes come out a bit more in the novella than the movie, though they're still a bit muted. I just really liked both the film and novella.
JM:
Yeah. If you're into the "Hellbound Heart" novella specifically, I really recommend listening to the Baffle Gab productions, audio drama of that. They did a really fantastic job. The actor playing Kirstie does an incredible performance, I think. Sometimes when I read Clive Barker, I feel a little bit detached from the emotions the characters are feeling and stuff. Like I still really enjoy it, but I kind of feel a little bit like I don't quite grasp the intensity of some of the feelings that like some of the characters have. So I think it really helped actually listening to that version and hearing just how traumatized she was by the whole experience. I mean, the performance, hopefully not the actor herself, but it was really, really well done. It's very faithful to the novella more so than the film, but yeah, it does make a few changes for the most part. There's nothing wrong with the changes they made, I don't think so.
Nate:
Yeah, I'll check that out. I listened to an audiobook reading that was multicast and I think they did a really good job with that too. Yeah, a really cool piece. I haven't read too much else from Clive Barker.
Yeah, so after that I read "Ringworld" by Larry Niven, which I was a little bit mixed about. There's some cool stuff. There's some stuff I didn't like. Definitely some of the stuff that I didn't like from that novel will be present in one of the ones we'll be talking about later tonight.
Then I read "Mary Barton" by Elizabeth Gaskell, which is one of her more, I guess, serious social novels. I'd previously read "Cranford" and "North and South" and "Cranford" is like a light zippy comedy whereas "North and South" is more of like Dickensian social type novel. And "Mary Barton" is much closer to that though it gets into politics a bit. And there's like a whole courtroom drama and yeah, there's parts of it that do read like tragedy porn, but I think overall they liked it a lot. And I really like Elizabeth Gaskell's writing in general. She's definitely becoming one of my favorite Victorian authors.
Gretchen:
I've only read "Wives and Daughters" by her so far. I haven't checked out her other works yet.
JM:
Yeah, that's one I haven't read and I would definitely like to read that because that's also very, very well acclaimed. So the three works I've read by her, I've all really, really enjoyed.
I read two works by Jane Austen, namely "Mansfield Park" and "Sense and Sensibility". And I don't know, I'm just like not a big Jane Austen fan. I get why people like her, but she just doesn't come alive for me in the same way that some of these other authors from that time do.
Then I read "Mother Night" by Kurt Vonnegut, which I'm normally not a big Vonnegut fan, but I just really, really like this one. Easily the best thing I've read by him or at least my favorite anyway.
JM:
A lot of people really love him and I've always been like interested in reading more. And every time I read something by Vonnegut, I'm kind of like, okay, I sort of enjoyed that, but afterwards I can't really tell you too much about the experience. You know, just kind of, and yeah, there's a certain like, maybe a certain smugness at times that creeps in. It's not too crazy about that, but I really enjoyed "Cat's Cradle" and I would like to read "Galapagos" and "Sirens of Titan", I think at some point.
Gretchen:
I'm definitely interested in "Sirens of Titan". I'd like to try that one out. I've read "Cat's Cradle" and I've had to read "Slaughterhouse Five" a couple of times once I read it just for myself and then I've read it for some classes.
Nate:
Yeah, I haven't read Sirens of Titan, but I have read Galapagos and really, really did not like it at all.
JM:
Oh, really? Okay.
Nate:
Yeah, I've read a fair amount of his stuff, or at least the fair amount of major works anyway. And "Mother Night" is definitely his least science fiction out of all of those. And it's definitely the one that I've, read where again, the smugness is the least present or at least toned down. There's some of it there, but yeah, a lot of the smugness, especially in "Breakfast of Champions" or "Cat's Cradle" or...
JM:
Yeah, that was the last one I read was "Breakfast of Champions".
Nate:
It can get a bit much at times and I mean, I don't know, poor Theodore Sturgeon. Yeah, but yeah, then after that I read "Evelina" by Francis Burney, which was a major influence on Jane Austen, but I like this way more than the Jane Austen novels. It's just like really, really funny and just kind of flies by even though it's a fairly long novel.
And I am currently in the middle, roughly around the halfway point, of "Barnaby Rudge" by Charles Dickens. It's the last major novel of his that I have yet to read, so I'd like to read some of the novellas and short stories. But this one is almost always considered to be his weakest and while it's definitely slow going, I'm enjoying the ride and we'll see where it goes.
So yeah, that's what I've been up to this year, definitely a fair amount of stuff. And I got a whole bunch more on my shelf that I'm looking forward to getting into.
Gretchen:
I brought all of my, well not all of them, I still have a lot, but I've brought a bunch of unread books that I've filled my new bookshelf here and my new house that I'm leasing. I've got to get to those at some point.
So far, what I've read, I think one of my favorite books that, and we will be talking a little bit more about Ursula K. Le Guin later on in this episode, but I did end up reading "The Dispossessed" recently, which I love "Left Hand of Darkness". It's definitely one of my favorite novels in general, not just sci-fi, but I just, I think it's a great novel. And I think "The Dispossessed" might be what I enjoyed even more than that. I think it's really interesting.
JM:
I need to reread "The Dispossessed" because I read that really long time ago and I was quite young and I'm not really sure. I think I enjoyed it. I remember doing a book report on it in school, but I don't really know that I really grasped everything about it. So that's something that I would like to return to because I'd read "Left Hand of Darkness" later on when I was at university. I definitely enjoyed that one a lot, but I didn't come back to "The Dispossessed", so it's something that I'd like to return to at some point. So maybe future Chrononauts material.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I definitely would like to cover it. I think it's a really interesting expansion of the ideas of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". It feels like a much broader kind of exploration of what she did in that short story, but in a more complex way. I really enjoyed "The Dispossessed".
And then I read this, I cannot remember the author's name, but it was the biography of Elaine May, the director Elaine May, which was really interesting called "Miss May Does Not Exist". So far I've only seen "A New Leaf" and "Mikey and Nicky" that she directed. She did a couple other films directed. I'd like to check them out, even though her film "Ishtar" isn't as looked upon as critically acclaimed as some of the other ones. But I thought that was a really interesting read.
And recently, well, I just finished "Père Goriot" by Honoré de Balzac, because one of my professors has been recommending Balzac to me and a couple of the other fellow classmates. And yeah, I really enjoyed that novel. I thought it was incredible. And I'd love to read more of The Human Comedy, look into some of the novels and I have a collection of short stories that the New York Review books published that have like connections to the different characters in it. So I really like to give that a read.
Nate:
Yeah, such a huge universe. And yeah, everything is interconnected. These minor characters will be major characters and another novel or short story and people pass through some. It's really amazing that he was doing that in like the early half of the 19th century.
JM:
I'm not even like what we would now call genre work or anything like that. Just something he felt like doing.
Nate:
We did cover him twice on the podcast.
JM:
I think we probably wouldn't go further than we already have, I imagine, on the podcast. But yeah, you never know. Some weird bonus episodes. We're already talking about reading "Rocket to the Morgue", which is a mystery novel that takes place around a bunch of sci-fi conventions and writers and stuff.
Gretchen:
Yeah, you know, I definitely, it would be very cool if we could find a way to fit him into the podcast again, because I definitely want to read more of his work and yeah, like the level of intricacy. Of course, like I said, I haven't read any of the other work, but it's, I know before we started the recording, Nate, you were saying you got like the editions that are don't really have a lot of the notes. The one that I got is the Norton Critical Edition, so it has like a lot of footnotes and there's like these footnotes where it'll be like this character has like this story that he writes about later on. It's so interesting to see that world building that he does with that.
But yeah, I finished that and now I'm currently, I only just started and I've been reading it a little bit while working at the library. The book "Go Tell Down the Mountain" by James Baldwin, which I'm very excited to get more into that.
JM:
Cool. Well, for me, I'll just mention four things. There's been my usual glut of short stories from all sorts of writers and that's been really cool. I've read two kind of more literary novels, one contemporary and one classic and two more genre ones, one classic and one trashy. So we'll start with the two literary ones. I reread "Notes from Underground" recently by Dostoevsky and that's always, I've always really enjoyed his work and that one, I always thought of that one as being a good introduction, but apparently not everybody agrees with that and they say not to start with that.
I think what probably prompted this was initially a video on a YouTube channel that I watch sometimes from the creator known as Unsolicited Advice, which focuses a lot on philosophy content and stuff like that. And he has a really fun way of presenting stuff. He's also talked about some fiction, including a few science fiction works like Huxley's "Brave New World" and Orwell's "1984" and stuff like that. But the video on "Notes" kind of made me think about it again and I'd been already thinking about maybe rereading it for several months, closer on a year now I guess, and just hadn't got around to it. So I did a buddy read of it with Star and yeah, we had very different impressions of the book, which was interesting as well. She didn't really get on with it and kind of got me thinking about the reasons why we read and how we might read differently. People read things for different reasons and I used to think I was a very plot-oriented reader, but in recent years I've come to realize that's not really the case and that's not really the thing that I look for most. And it's the voice, the stylistic voice and stuff like that and the, I guess, tone of the book is what sucks me in really, more so than anything else.
I find the underground man an interesting, relatable character in a way, even though he's very spiteful and horrible in a lot of ways. It's really interesting how you can see little glimpses of yourself or people you know or, you know, start wondering about how society shapes people and so on and makes people perhaps less than they could be because they're so overcome by their own insecurities and fears. And the way that he expresses contradictions within his own personality is just really amazing to me because we are all probably a mass of contradictions. So you can say one thing and mean another or say one thing and then just deny it and say it was joking and it's just kind of like, I personally am not very frustrated by it. Some readers apparently find this really tough going, especially the first part of the novel where he's just explaining his worldview and his philosophy. They say that it seems to go on forever. I read it pretty quickly and it didn't seem that bad, but certainly in terms of page count, it's not very long. But I guess some people just find it just so tedious and difficult to relate to that they just, all they can come away with is a feeling that they hate the narrator and they don't want to spend any more time with them.
So I don't know. It's an interesting experience when you and somebody else reading a book have such different feelings about it, I think.
Yeah, I enjoyed that. I also read a contemporary book by the Italian writer Elena Ferrante. I read the book The Days of Abandonment. I think the reason I read this was because a few years ago when I had a pretty traumatic domestic situation and end of a relationship and end of a bunch of other stuff and a lot of things started to change and then Corona time happened and everything. I was kind of looking for stuff like this. I wanted to read about people's experiences or see some of it reflected somehow in a way that I thought was interesting. But I didn't get around to a lot of it then as it turned out. I just kind of looked for the books and I thought, okay, maybe I'll read this sometime. And yeah, sometimes I just use the random generator script from when I built Windows PowerShell and just run it and just pick something to read that way if I can't decide. Because we all have the media overload thing now where we spend all this time scrolling and scrolling and not deciding what to do. And so I'm like, well, okay, I'll just let the machine decide for me. And if I really don't want to, I guess I don't have to, but otherwise I'll just go with it.
So I went with it and it was a pretty good little book. Definitely a very strange way about writing about what is, after all, a rather mundane and relatable situation. And that this woman narrator, she's been married for quite some time and her husband leaves her for a younger woman, basically about how she copes or doesn't cope with the situation. And it gets increasingly bizarre at times as she describes how she's completely unable to perform what most people would consider perfectly normal tasks. But she writes about it in a way that it's like, so today I got home, but I couldn't get into my apartment. I couldn't open the door. And I think like, I'm not sure if there's something wrong with me or something wrong with the door. I think my kids are really upset. And my dog might be dying. But it's like, it's really interesting seeing her kind of try to get along being now a single mother. She has a lot of trouble dealing with the kids and their childhood things and so on, even though she did it a lot in the past. But I guess like her situation has changed so much that now it's just almost impossible. Trigger warning for those who might want to read this, the dog doesn't make it. It's pretty sad. But it was a pretty good book. It was short. So I think it was just one of those things where the style, even though it's translated and everything. The style was just very easy going and I read it in a pretty quick time and I had a reasonably good time with it. So I like that.
And yeah, then I read "Psycho" by Robert Bloch. Obviously, the Hitchcock film is classic and I like it a lot. I watched it a bunch of times and I always really enjoy it. Even though there's some things about the final scenes that maybe are not so great where apparently he actually had, I don't know if it was somebody else as a producer or something like that. Basically tell Hitchcock that he had to include some more explanations of Norman's condition and stuff like that and have like, I think that he wanted to keep some stuff a little bit more, not on the nose, but apparently it didn't work out that way. So I mean, it doesn't really spoil the film. But interestingly, the book kind of presents all that stuff there too, but in a very different way because it starts right off with Norman from the beginning. And we spend most of the time with him and his other personalities including, of course, Norma. And, you know, we get basically one of the characters jokes. It's like the three in one. We got Norman, Norma, and Normal all together. And they just have how they coexist and stuff like that. And yeah, we get the story of Annie or something. I think she's like, she's still a part of this. But I think the movie emphasizes her story a little more because we spend time with her right from the beginning and we're with her all through the first half of the film.
Bloch doesn't really seem as interested. He kind of definitely highlights the fact that she's not very, maybe not very bright in certain ways. And she's like being a bit foolish with what she's doing. And we see that in the film too, but I think we relate to her a lot more. The sister, though, is a pretty strong character. And yeah, we get to know her and I don't know. I thought there was going to be a romance between her and the fellow there, but that didn't happen. So there was not even any romantic replacement element. And I don't know, it was good. One thing I did not realize when I started this is that Bloch actually wrote two sequels. I had no idea that that was a thing, but it is. So I'm not sure if I'll be reading those or not. Maybe someday. Not really a priority, but I enjoy Robert Bloch. But before now, I've mostly read lots of short stories by him. And I kind of appreciate that he's one of those authors who can kind of like Fritz Leiber work in multiple genres. And he doesn't really feel like he has to stick to one thing all the time and try a lot of different things. Some kind of Lovecraft-like horror, some more contemporary horror, some science fiction. A lot of stories about old Hollywood and stuff like that. Of course, a couple of Star Trek episodes and most of the Amicus films, a lot of them anyway, both the anthology horror films and some of the longer ones are, of course, based on his work. So I didn't like to read something longer from him. So that was cool.
I also read "Bioterror", a contemporary, I guess, horror thriller from Michiganian author Tim Curran. And yeah, a lot of mixed feelings about that one. It sort of feels a little bit, I don't know, of its time, but also now I guess that we're getting into some volatile situations in the Middle East again that are affecting all of us. It kind of feels weird that I was reading this now, but it definitely does a lot of callbacks to like the Second Gulf War and stuff like that. And it's basically about all these bio weapons that were tested and people getting infected with parasitic worms and bringing them back to their homelands and stuff like that. And it's a kind of an end of the world type scenario and there's a lot of descriptions of really, really, really disgusting body horror. So if you're into that, you might enjoy this. Those parts were fun, but the political side of things I didn't really enjoy very much. Just a lot of, I don't know, you know, when you watch the X-Files and it's kind of just like, oh, you know, here we go. Like another element of the conspiracy and, oh, there's another shadow puppet guy. After a while, it just starts to not mean anything. And that's kind of the way I felt about this. You know, just kind of like, oh, yeah, there's two types of political figures in this book. There's the ones that are totally ruthless and remorseless and don't care about anything but their own personal gain. And there's the ones that are mostly like that, but are consumed by guilt. And that's about it. And it's a couple of cool, decent main characters, a couple of reporters and everything else. But everybody's pretty much cannon fodder for the worm infestation. And yeah, the world ends very abruptly. Everything just, he kills everybody off.
The thing is, I probably wouldn't have read this at all if I say, I read everything in e-text. And I didn't quite realize how long the book was going to be when I started it. I thought it was probably just, oh yeah, you know, like 200 page, pulp horror or whatever, like, might be fun. Turned out the book is almost 600 pages long. And by the time I realized that I was too close to the end to give up. So I ended up skimming a lot of the end just kind of just like, okay, okay, get on with, let's finish this, right? And like, I don't know, it was okay. If you really like body horror, you'll probably love it because it's got some of the grossest stuff I've ever read in my life. But I'm not exaggerating. But yeah, I don't know, not too great, I guess, but no regrets really, though. And that's about it.
So yeah, fun times, I don't know. I'm sure I read some good short stories, but I didn't write it all down. So maybe next time, I'll talk more about some of the shorter work. I did really, really cool piece in "The Weird" by William Gibson and John Shirley called "The Belonging Kind" that I liked a lot. And that was cool. And I read a few other stories from that collection. It's kind of one of those things that you can just dip it out of because it's so big, right? You're never going to read the whole thing cover to cover probably, but every so often you just pick it up and read a story and stuff. And yeah, there's some really good stuff in there. The other really good one I read was, I think, by Elizabeth Hand, I think. I can't remember the name of the story now. I don't have to look, but there were some really good ones that I still have yet to read, especially from after the 60s, I'd say, because I read pretty much all the early stuff that's in there. Some of the later stuff I have yet to get to. So definitely some authors doing some cool experimentation with the genre styles and in writing styles and everything. So good times.
(music: electric clangs and static)
general overview and discussion of linguistics and science fiction
JM:
Languages is, of course, the essential component of human communication. And linguistics is a study of language, not specific languages, but language as a whole. It's a universal thing. And it's a scientific study based on the analysis and structure of grammar. So you'd think this would be a very important field to science fiction. But although it's clearly something authors think about, it's largely been ignored. Aliens just speak English, or there's a vaguely explained universal translator, or the TARDIS' telepathic circuit does all the work. And it's an obvious story shortcut. Apparently, people find endless scenes of language acquisition boring. Brian Stableford even comments on this in his "Science Fact, Science Fiction Encyclopedia", which is a very useful book that I highly recommend to anyone who really wants to get into, I guess, themes that science fiction might cover. So essentially, it has all kinds of entries from A to Z that concentrate on everything from science to sociology to history and different things. And as well as doing a brief introduction of those subjects, kind of like what we do here on the podcast. Basically, he lists works that cover those kind of themes and just usually discusses them more or less chronologically. Not in great detail, but enough where you might be like, well, if I wanted to cover that theme, this is something that I might be interested in reading. So it's actually a very useful resource for us, because we're not necessarily absolute experts compared to some people in terms of all the genre stuff we might have read. I think we're all somewhat well read, but certainly there's a lot that I haven't read yet, and I'm still kind of delving into the classics. So especially if it's newer, I probably don't know yet.
And as well as that, there's also the "Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy", which is actually very similarly structured work in three volumes. It's a little more casual, a little more friendly, I guess, and it also covers films and TV. So it's a little different, maybe not quite as, I wouldn't say the Stableford work is academic in nature because it's not. But it's a little bit more pop culture-ish, I guess, but it still gets into a lot of the same kind of background material. So it's really interesting.
Of course, exceptions to this. Science fiction writers who have been fascinated by the possibilities inherent in communication across time and space. Would extraterrestrial or indeed non-human beings still be allowable into the general framework of linguistics? If so, commonalities can be found and communication made possible. The study of linguistics posits that languages are more similar than different in many forms and functions, and that universal principles can be usefully applied. Before we get into that, I'll get into a passage from probably one of the most notorious linguists that's ever been. And that is, of course, Noam Chomsky. And I will talk about this, just read what is actually part of the introduction to his book, "Reflections on Language," which was published in 1975.
"Why study language? There are many possible answers, and by focusing on some, I do not, of course, mean to disparage others or question their legitimacy. One may, for example, simply be fascinated by the elements of language in themselves and want to discover their order and arrangement, their origin in history, or in the individual, or the ways in which they are used in thought, in science, or in art, or in normal social interchange. One reason for studying language, and for me, personally, the most compelling reason, is that it is tempting to regard language in the traditional phrase as a mirror of mind. I do not mean by this simply that the concepts expressed and distinctions developed in normal language use give us insight into the patterns of thought and the world of common sense constructed by the human mind. More intriguing to me, at least, is the possibility that by studying language, we may discover abstract principles that govern its structure and use, principles that are universal by biological necessity and not mere historical accident that derive from mental characteristics of the species. A human language is a system of remarkable complexity. To come to know a human language would be an extraordinary intellectual achievement for a creature not specifically designed to accomplish this task. A normal child acquires this knowledge on relatively slight exposure and without specific training. He can then quite effortlessly make use of an intricate structure of specific rules and guiding principles to convey his thoughts and feelings to others, arousing in them novel ideas and subtle perceptions and judgments. For the conscious mind, not specifically designed for the purpose, it remains a distant goal to reconstruct and comprehend what the child has done intuitively and with minimal effort. Thus language is a mirror of mind in a deep and significant sense. It is a product of human intelligence created anew in each individual by operations that lie far beyond the reach of will or consciousness."
So I think that's a really interesting passage that really sums up a lot of what we'll be covering in the next couple of episode blocks here. So let's talk about the traits of language that have been generally agreed upon by linguists, though as we'll see there might be some debate possible around them.
Number one, language is used to communicate signs or symbols that communicate ideas from one mind to another. This is based on signs and conventions agreed upon meanings. So the study of signs is called semiotics and semiotics extends to both animal communication as well as nonverbal human communication.
Two, signs are arbitrary. There's no intrinsic link between the sign and the thing being described. Although of course there might be exceptions and complications here like lots of derivatives and also onomatopoeic words like I don't know 'bang' for example. You can get into a lot of stuff. I found this an easy topic to get sidetracked on because there's so many little things you can get into. And this is tied in with so many branches of science and sociology and so on that it's difficult to really distill stuff and getting into the specifics is definitely way beyond the scope of Chrononauts. We can definitely suggest a couple of works if you are interested in studying this stuff, which maybe I'll talk about at the end.
But number three, language is organized hierarchically. So language is organized according to the rules of grammar and all languages use these systems to combine units in a particular way and order. Traditionally, linguists organize from smallest to largest, sounds, syllables, words, phrases, sentence and sentence groups.
Number four, language is produced and perceived. Language is produced by various parts of the human anatomy working together. This could also include nonverbal stuff. In so-called sign language, for example, the gestures are entirely the thing. Language is perceived by the human senses, vision and hearing, of course, and maybe touch too.
Number five, language is quintessentially human. Language is very important to humanity's success as a species and the development of this thing we call society. It adapts to the community's requirements. It's highly interactive and evolving. Languages can even compete for dominance with each other, like humans generally.
Number six, there is a genetic component to language. The fact of human language acquisition is a genetically inherited trait. There are several apparent facts that demonstrate this, i.e., it doesn't depend on intelligence. Acquisition is usually relatively fast in humans with children learning their parents tongue quickly and able to speak sentences in some cases by age three. The so-called innate-ness hypothesis stipulates that humans are born with a genetic disposition towards language acquisition. Obviously, children are better at this, adults less so, which is common with all genetically endowed traits.
So, disciplines are multi-form in linguistics and they're related to larger fields as well, like mathematics, biology, anthropology and sociology. And there's many words also that can define the linguistic specialities like phonology, semantics and pragmatics. Generally, a very wide field that has been developed over quite a long period of history. Let's get into that a little bit.
An important thing. So, before we get into that, there's, of course, worth mentioning is the International Phonetic Association's development of the IPA symbols, representing sounds. So, the list includes 600 continents and 200 vowel sounds. There's quite a lot, really, when you think about it. Certainly, it's something that I struggled with a lot when I tried to study this subject in school. I didn't get very far with it back then because I had no way of actually representing the symbols. Not much help, so it was kind of something that I had to look away from for a time.
But the first great work in the field, going way back now, it's assumed to be Pāṇini's study of Sanskrit from the 4th century BCE. Greek and Latin codified grammar follows between 190 and 180. Of course, we don't know about how much ancient work was lost. And there were attempts to create a generalized study of grammars in the 13th and 14th centuries AD, but little progress until the 18th and 19th century comparative studies.
So, we're pretty much having to wait for the Enlightenment for the study to become serious. A significant name, Jacob Grimm. Yes, that one. In 1822, he suggested that there were what he called a lot of their schiffung. I don't know, probably pronouncing that wrong. But sound shifts common in the relation and evolution of Germanic languages. It's in Germany that this movement seems to have taken flight. And it has a somewhat nationalistic character at this point, perhaps unfortunately.
Johann von Herder describes how language helped to define the German character and thought. And this was an important step toward the creation of a unified Germany. This was all taken up by a statesman, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who wrote about the dynamic and ongoing shifts and evolution of language as a continuous project. Of actualization.
In 1916, after the death of Saussure, the founder of structuralism, we have a posthumous work entitled, "A Course on General Linguistics", which proved to be highly influential. This work drew an important distinction between language, the underlying formula of linguistics, and parole, or the way people actually speak, or perform language, and also the different ways in which speakers put that language into practice.
So I think this was popular with academics, possibly because it allowed a certain sense of detachment from the language and users they were studying. The structuralist approach also became popular in the science of anthropology. And this particularly sought to emphasize the link between language and myth among various cultures. The famous Inklings really took off with this, especially, of course, JRR Tolkien, who had a background in these fields and a huge interest in languages, creating his own Elvish, Orcish, and so on, based in part on Nordic languages.
In his collection of essays from 1861, Lectures on the Science of Language, F. Max Müller, speculated on the common origin of all human languages, drawing in aspects of mythology too, and the science of anthropology to question the possibility of a single root or stock. The structuralist approach provided some authors a fun study of dialects, like P. G. Wodehouse, of course, made farce of it, and other writers I haven't heard of, but they didn't do a lot of theorizing or talk of the mechanics that would have been counted to their part of their little stories.
So here is where the Stableford book came in really useful to me, because it definitely explains how, right along when this was happening, the concept began to be imported into science fiction. So many stories are listed from borderline cases such as "Experiences in Monkey Language", and it was published in 1894.
Nate:
The person who wrote Personal Experiences in Monkey Language is named Bill Nye, just like the popular TV science presenter, but lived in the 1800s.
JM: Okay, cool, yeah. And we also have "An Undiscovered Isle in the Far Seas" from Charles Loring in 1926. And this isn't something that, say, Amazing Stories considered itself very much with at the time. But of course, we did have "Language for Space Travelers", and "Language for Time Travelers", and that's a good time to mention our good old friend, Sprague. And yes, this was a work published in Astounding in 1938. And of course, we also had the Willy Ley one that we covered in the 1939 Astounding, which was kind of a response to that.
The actual Sprague work, which I did read, I considered actually adding it to the list early on, but, yeah, decided we didn't really need to do that, but we already have the LeGuin to cover, which is sort of a similar work of, I guess, extrapolation. And it's not similar in content. The Sprague work is very much like the Willy Ley, in that it starts with a time traveler going into the future, and he ends up on a farm in the 25th century or something like that, and he meets a rustic character, and they can't talk to each other. And it's kind of played up for humor, and then Sprague goes into the history of English and different languages and talks about how things have shifted over time and how they may shift in the future. He certainly knows his subject, Sprague, so he makes some crazy generalizations, and maybe it's a bit outdated, but I don't know. eIn general, I thought the piece was more fun than the Willy Ly one, even though Ley might be more of a person you might maybe want to know and hang out with than Sprague.
No, it was cool. It was an interesting way to, I guess, introduce this subject to the science fiction reader in 1938. But of course, it wasn't long after the advent of the telephone that we did get people already thinking about mechanical translation, though this was often expressed in science fiction as a humorous concept, like in Frank Stockton's story, "My Translatophone".
But the translating machine would increasingly become the hand-wavy backgrounds for a lot of communication, and were very helpful to the science fiction story in general. And I guess this was ultimately would result in the ultimate satire of it, the ultimate WTF, the Babel Fish in Douglas Adams Hitchcock's Guide to the Galaxy, which is just a fish that you stick in your ear and telepathically translates everything for you. Problem solved.
Nate:
It was also one of the first web-based machine translators if you went to babelfish.altavista.com. That was like an early version of Google Translate.
JM:
Oh yeah, I remember using that a lot. So highlighting linguistic problems was, by definition, not reader-friendly, according to Stableford, but I think it's not long before we see this changing. In fact, as science fiction arguably embraced the so-called soft sciences, especially starting in the 1960s, I think we'll see this kind of thing addressed more and more, both the future of languages among humanity, i.e. stuff like "Clockwork Orange", and of course communication with alien or non-human life.
So the more alien the life, the more challenges often present themselves in terms of the possibility of communication. And this in itself became an interesting fodder for the science fiction story. So here, I think, is probably a good time to introduce the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which was developed by Edward Sapir and his peer, Benjamin Whorf. And Gretchen, do you want to talk about this? Because I think you had some notes on this that might be more specific.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah. I did. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is, this term is a bit of a misnomer, as while Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf worked together, they did not consciously work together on this hypothesis, nor was it even a formal hypothesis they both proposed. The hypothesis arises from the location of a stance both figures took in their writing, especially in Whorf.
So both Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf were linguistic anthropologists. Sapir, in fact, was the student of Franz Boas, often considered one of the forefathers of anthropology. So Sapir and Whorf, like Boas, were interested in studying indigenous American languages. And they questioned the idea of JM that you brought up of this sort of nationalistic idea, this hierarchy and labeling of, "primitive" languages and, "modern" ones. So Sapir himself, like Boas, in an attempt to challenge racist and nationalist concepts in linguistics, rejected correlations between language, culture, and race. This thinking, unfortunately, would enforce the opposite of what he was trying to achieve, since the separation of language and culture from race resulted in race being further tied to biology and inadvertently supporting scientific racism.
It's really this mindset of language as self-contained, or as Sapir himself compares it to a mathematical system which is closed off from other influences that dictates some of the more extreme interpretations of this Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The fact is, of course, that language and culture are incredibly linked, as are the environmental and geographical factors around you. So it can be tricky actually determining the extent of the validity of the hypothesis as many of its critics point out.
Returning to what the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis actually is, it deals with two main ideas, linguistic determinism and linguistic relativism. The first regards the claim that language determines your worldview, while the second regards the claim that these worldviews imposed by different languages are distinct from each other. Strong interpretations of these two ideas, which imply that language impacts one's very ability to experience reality and abstract concepts, have been pretty disproven. Just because a language doesn't have a word for something doesn't mean a native speaker can't perceive said thing.
We English speakers don't have an equivalent for Schadenfreude, but that doesn't mean you can't feel it. And we're not really reading "1984" for this episode, but while the premise of Newspeak is interesting, I don't believe it would hold too much water. This idea that without these words to explain certain concepts, we can't actually think of these concepts or have them as something that we can experience. One of the major texts that inspired the formation of the hypothesis Whorf's exploration of the Hopi language and its discussion of time has had some of its more radical opinions, such as the claim of the "timeless" Hopi given the language's lack of separate tenses for the past and present disproven.
JM:
Well, I think it's interesting how powerful the hypothesis is and that I think that it's actually shaped a lot of science fiction. But now I feel like, yeah, like, we should probably call that into question a little bit because, like, for example, according to the "Science Fiction, Science Fact Encyclopedia" in its most extreme form, basically people took that to mean, well, okay, so science itself then is a product of European languages. And it's not, in fact, an empirical way of measuring the world. It's, in fact, just a, I guess, inherently inter-European, perhaps colonialist thought process. And I don't know, I think maybe part of why that's been, if not totally discredited, maybe not considered as valuable a hypothesis or more complicated now than it was 40 or 50 years ago is that we kind of have to acknowledge that that can't really be true, right?
I mean, I don't know. It's funny because I can't really figure out whether assuming it would be true would be more or less presumptuous, right? It's kind of, I've heard both arguments. They say, well, how can you assume that people coming from different cultures or whatever could not have created these thought processes and could not have come up with their own science? And we kind of know that's not true. But then they've heard other people say, but, you know, like, you're just being, your reliance on scientific fact and so on is just your blinkered European worldview and so on. And like, I don't know, it's a difficult subject, I think.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And I will say that some of the, as there is obviously still this conflict going on between people who are supporting and disproving the concepts of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, a lot of the supporters of the Hypothesis do kind of have that very challenging of colonialist and imperial ideas of, like, well, a lot of the reasons we think that language has, like, more universals than it might possibly have is because we mostly examine European and Western language, which is an interesting, and, you know, I think that's an interesting thing to bring up.
But there are weaker versions of the Hypothesis that have been supported, so not as radical as saying that language can be completely influenced the way that you experience the world, but where language can influence the way we think about and process what we experience.
So there's a couple of examples of this. One example of this is seen through the way various languages describe color. Both Russian and Greek have distinct words for what English calls light blue and dark blue, and studies have revealed that both Russian and Greek speakers can more easily discriminate between those colors than English speakers can.
There are also many prominent examples regarding temporality to return to the topic of time, which is relevant for Whorf, and for very specific work we'll be discussing this episode.
So, like Hopi, there are many languages which use fewer than the three tenses English speakers use, and there are also languages that use more. One example of the latter is a language of a group in the Amazon rainforest, Yagua. As Caleb Everett writes, "five of the tenses break apart the past in fine-grained ways. There is a distant past tense, another tense for events that happened between a month and a year ago, another for events that happened about a week to a month ago, another for events that happened about a week ago, and yet another for things that happened yesterday or earlier in the day of the moment someone is speaking. There is also a present tense, and there are separate tenses for events that are about to happen and those that are expected to happen further into the future."
And the difference in tenses doesn't mean that people experience time in dramatically different ways, but it does shape how people process those experiences. One thing that we do kind of have universal experience with, all human beings are generally agreed to experience time as linear and often conflate temporality with space in different metaphorical language, though the way those are mapped onto each other is often determined and expressed through language.
English speakers conceive of the movement of time as movement from left to right, in contrast, Arabic and Hebrew speakers, whose languages are written right to left, also picture the movement of time from right to left. The indigenous Australian language of Kuuk Thaayorre describes time in relation to the movement of the sun, which mirrors its speakers' articulation of space. Instead of referring to the locations of objects in relation to the body, like saying this microphone is to my right or my bookshelf is behind me, speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre use a geocentric way of speaking about space, always in relation to the directions of north, east, south and west. These speakers always know which direction is north, with such a sense of direction being essential to their way of expressing their experience of the world around them.
In a similar vein is the Amazonian language, Nheengatu, which has no words for the hours of the day, instead relying on gesture to indicate time. If a speaker says that something happened at noon, they point to the position in the sky where the sun would be at noon. Unlike many gestures during speech, which only serve to, or I should say vocal speech, as JM, you had mentioned sign language earlier, which only serve to emphasize what is being vocally conveyed, this point is necessary to complete the message.
English not only conceives of time moving left and right, but forward, saying events in the past are behind us or we are looking towards the future. This is in contrast to languages such as Aymara and Arandic language and the Tibeto-Burman language of Lisu. These languages conceptualize the future as behind the individual. Speakers of Aymara and Lisu place the future in front of them because past events are known and visible, and thus it is imagined as facing the speaker. So the image I get in my head is of a person trying to take a picture, stepping backwards to incorporate more of their surroundings into the frame. When these speakers talk about events that are happening or events that have happened in the past, they will usually gesture forward instead of backwards, which is usually what English speakers and those who see time as moving forward would do. With these last examples particularly, it's clear that metaphorical and figurative language may have an impact on our perception of time and other experiences, other concepts, and it also shapes our processing of those concepts.
As an example from "Metaphors We Live" by George Lackoff and Mark Johnson, a lot of language in English surrounding arguments compares it to war with phrases such as to defend your claim and the linking of the word fight to argument as much as to battle. This gives one a much different view of arguments than if more metaphors spoke of them using collaborative, less competitive analogies. Now this also involves cultural perceptions of concepts such as arguments, and it's not like we can say that language came first, but it still further perpetuates culture. Metaphorical language is also a significant part of one of our chosen works, but not the first one that we'll be covering.
So yeah, there's some of the ways that people have sort of tried to stand. Yeah, it's a very fascinating look at these examples and kind of what people have tried to claim the Sapier-Whorf shows us in how we perceive different things and how we process things.
JM:
Yeah, it's really cool to kind of think about how this might actually be at least somewhat true, because yeah, I mean there's been evidence collected and we can see how this influences both actual cultures and would-be or might-be cultures. I guess the most famous example I can think of where this really applies, that everybody probably knows that we could have probably done for this episode if we wanted to is of course "1984", right, the Newspeak and how they basically try to not only eliminate words from the vocabulary but eliminate concepts from human thought by eliminating those words. And it's like the only language whose vocabulary gets smaller and smaller, right?
Nate:
Yes. In a sense, we kind of talked about that last time when we talked about S. Belsky's "Under the Comet" where he goes on his anti-Esperanto rant talking about how this new constructed language, Birdspeak, just takes all the artistic flair out of writing in general because it's only like four syllables.
JM:
Stories in the 40s and 50s dealing with these topics despite a couple of mainstream examples seem like they were a little bit infrequent, but the "SF Fact Encyclopedia" does cite several examples, which I'll mostly refrain from mentioning since I haven't read most of them, but it includes stories by Anthony Boucher, Poul Anderson, Chad Oliver, and what I have read, "That Share of Glory" by C. M. Kornbluth. And it also lists the first novel discussed in this block on Chronanauts, The "Languages of Pao" by Jack Vance, noting in particular that it's an extrapolation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
So linguistic studies really took off in the 1950s with several rival schools, most notably Noam Chomsky and his generative grammar, syntactic structures, in which an attempt to draw a grammatical link between all languages was made. The subject became quite predominant in academic circles from this point onward. So there's lots of mention of a literary experimentation in the 60s and 70s, especially by writers like Christine Brooke-Rose, who I'm not familiar with, either of you read any of her work?
Gretchen:
No, I had not.
JM:
Okay, it looks like she mostly did fiction, but yeah, it's a lot of experimentation with language and structure. So it looks kind of interesting. The book, again, I love the way he's able to just draw in all kinds of things from outside the field, too. It sometimes just feels like Stableford showing off his general knowledge and everything and how well-read he is, because he is a translator, too, so he brings in a lot of non-English stuff, but it's pretty interesting. So it does spill over into popular fiction and, of course, SF, and we get figures like Samuel R. Delaney coming up very soon, being very interested in subjects around this nature.
Many writers are now addressing these language and communication issues. Of course, movies and TV are lagging a few decades behind, but they're also entering the game.
So here I want to make a little fun tangent and talk about something that we all know and love as fans of this genre somewhat, and we'll probably refresh your memories and go back a little bit to the Doctor Who and Star Trek episodes that we did. But let's talk about the science fiction argument.
So this is the lingua of science fiction, and it's something that I would say normal people maybe have trouble understanding, but less so nowadays. I think it's just really interesting how that's happened, and a lot of these terminologies through, I guess, especially movies and TV and the internet have now entered public consciousness, and you guys, I'm sure, can think of many examples.
So, yeah, why don't we just do that now? I'm going to think of a word, and we'll just go around maybe four or five times. You guys just think of the first thing that tops up to the top of your head, maybe not so much proper nouns, but words that you think probably come from a science fiction context that might or might not be reasonably well known, or that at least fans of the genre would know. Maybe outsiders now mostly know them too, because the lines are so blurred and comic book movies are so popular and stuff like that, and all this stuff is, yeah, it's generally widely known.
So I guess I'll start. Let's see, we'll go me, Gretchen, and Nate, and I don't know, we'll stop after four or five times or when we get bored, but okay. So I'll start with Phaser.
Gretchen:
I was thinking a transporter.
Nate:
I guess Warp.
JM:
Tardis.
Gretchen:
Dalek.
Nate:
Tractor Beam.
JM:
Force Field.
Gretchen:
Grok.
Nate:
Holodeck.
JM:
Telepathic Circuit.
Gretchen:
Starship.
Nate:
Robot.
JM:
Hyperspace.
Gretchen:
Hyperdrive.
JM:
Anyway, you guys get the idea. So I just thought it's kind of fun how these words have been incorporated into popular language too. And of course, we also have examples of made-up languages, not just dialects, but actual languages. And we do see this a lot in Star Trek, of course, but some others do it as well. Of course, Klingon is very popular. I won't attempt to speak any, but I don't know. Do we have any Klingon experts in the house?
Nate:
No, I don't know any Klingon.
Gretchen:
I've always seen that it would be very, very fun to attend one of those Hamlets in Klingon. That would be very fun to see.
JM:
Yeah. But yeah, stuff can seem a bit silly at times, but it's also fun, especially when somebody has actually taken the time to create a whole set of rows around it, and it's not just random syllables thrown at you. But not everyone is a philologist like Tolkien, right? So, but some are like author Suzette Haden Elgin. She is a linguist, and she created the Láadan language in her book, "Native Tongue", in 1984, to express entirely the worldview of women. And this work comes complete with vocabulary, grammar, sample lessons, and readings. It feels kind of almost like something out of "Star Psi" or something like that. It's kind of neat that she went through all this trouble to do that, and apparently it's actually something that's brought up sometimes in some language and linguistics courses. So I guess she did a pretty thorough job of coming up with that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, actually, I have a copy of "Native Tongue", and I had blanked on it when we were talking about this episode. After doing some research, I suddenly recalled it when I was looking into some of the other works that were talking about this episode. And yeah, I know I've seen a website where you can learn Láadan, It's supposed to be musical, is what I remember when I was looking into it.
JM:
Yeah, really interesting. And there's actually so much that we could have gone into, and we could talk about for this. So we know that we're only scratching the surface, and you know, if we decide to return to themes in the future, there's certainly a lot of other stuff we could potentially look into. This subject in particular has really unearthed quite a goldmine of interesting seeming works. And for sure, as we delve further into things, I'm sure we'll be highlighting this side of things now, especially that we've been talking about it. But yeah, now I think maybe after a quick break, we should start talking about the really short piece that we decided to cover for this episode.
(music: cavern keys)
Ursula K. Leguin - "Author of the Acacia Seeds"
Nate:
This is sort of a minor work for Ursula K. Le Guin, an author I think will be coming back to multiple times. I know I want to cover at least "Left Hand of Darkness" and "The Dispossessed" on the podcast, so I think what I'd like to do for this story is just give a brief overview sketch so we can ground where it is in her career, and then maybe talk about our feelings about Le Guin in general for a minute before we get into "The Author of the Acacia Seeds and other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics", which will set the tone very nicely for the other stories that we're going to be talking about tonight.
So Ursula K. Le Guin was born on October 21, 1929. Both of her parents were scholars and writers, and her early reading included stuff in Thrilling Wonder Stories and Astounding. Some of her favorite authors and works included Lewis Padgett and Lord Dunsany's "Dreamer of Tales".
JM:
Oh yeah, I love Lord Dunsany.
Nate:
Yeah, I actually haven't read anything by him yet, but I would certainly like to at some point. I'm not sure if he's like a little bit too far afield for us on the podcast, but he's certainly an influence on Lovecraft, I know for sure.
JM:
Yeah, definitely the early Lovecraft, which is more like dreamlike and sort of fantastic lands and stuff like that. That's very Dunsany-esque. Not so much, you know, the whole Cthulhu mythos and all that stuff. That's kind of his own thing, really, but.
Nate:
Right.
Gretchen:
And he's in "The Weird", right? There's a story by Dunsany in "The Weird"?
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely more like, more on the fantastic side of things. Really cool, really cool short stories that are very fairytale-esque, almost very beautiful prose.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely one I'd like to check out someday, and certainly if we can bring him on the podcast, that'd be pretty cool. So if we can figure out a way to sneak him in, we definitely will. But by the late 1940s, Le Guin became a little disillusioned with the direction that science fiction was going, feeling that it was, "all about hardware", and instead got into Tolstoy and Dickens, something I can personally relate to very much, as I think I had somewhat of a similar experience with those very two authors.
But in the 1960s, she got back into the genre when her friend lent her some magazines that had some Cordwainer Smith stories in them. And her first published story was "April in Paris", published in Fantastic Stories of Imagination in the September 1962 issue, which was a Ziff-Davis publication.
She had two short stories in 1963, "The Masters" and "Darkness Box", and in 1964, "Selection". And several stories set in her Earthsea cycle, including "The Word of Unbinding", "The Rule of Names", and is also when she started writing stories in the Hainish cycle, including "The Dowry of Angyar" , which she'd continue in 1966 with the novels for "Rocannon's World" and "Planet of Exile", and in 1967, "City of Illusions". These two universes would be the novels that would make her rise to prominence, namely a "Wizard of Earthsea" in 1968 and "Left Hand of Darkness" from 1969.
JM:
I never read any of the Earthsea books, even as a kid, so I'm not sure. Now, kind of people think that it's an uncredited influence on Harry Potter. I don't know if that's true or not, but it definitely, it feels like there might be some similarities.
Nate:
Yeah, I've read the first one, and I definitely liked it. I mean, it definitely felt like younger in tone than "Left Hand of Darkness", for sure. I don't know if young adult was really marketing term. Using the 60s, I don't really think it was, but it definitely feels way more, not quite children's literature, but...
JM:
Yeah, somewhere on the borderland.
Nate:
Right, like aged 12 or 13 or something like that. Seem much more geared for that audience.
Gretchen:
Kind of like "Wrinkle in Time" sort of.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I thought it was cool. I mean, you could definitely see some superficial similarities with that and Harry Potter and that. Yeah, there's like both a lot of like magic in this world and the main character is a young kid and all that. But I don't know, I didn't really like it nearly as much as I liked "Left Hand of Darkness", which I thought was just absolutely amazing. And yeah, definitely like really, really liked it and would really like to cover it on a podcast someday.
JM:
Cool, we should do it.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And the fact that there's like a lot of short stories that were also published in the cycle before and I think would make like a nice lead into the novel for like a course of episodes or whatever. But yeah, I don't know, "A Wizard of Earthsea" is kind of neat, but definitely one of our most famous works and series. And her career in general was incredibly prolific, writing short stories more or less until her death in 2018. Her last novel was "Lavinia" from 2008.
JM:
Yeah, I haven't read too much of the later stuff, but I definitely have read some short stories, especially in the early 90s that were published in Asimov's magazine, which I used to get at the time. Yeah, her name was been familiar to me for a long time, as well as the books that we've already mentioned, "The Lathe of Heaven" was one that I also quite enjoyed.
Gretchen:
Yes, yeah, I have read, well, I got to it during the intro to this episode when we were just starting. Yeah, "The Dispossessed" and "Left Hand of Darkness" and "Lathe of Heaven" are the three novels that I've read by her. And I've read like "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and I've read a couple of other short stories, but I definitely would love to read more of her work. Everything I've read by her so far has been has been great. I think the way she just explores so many different concepts is fascinating.
JM:
Yeah, just thinking about it now, now that I realize and remember the first, Le Guin story was actually a story I read for kids, I guess, in an anthology for children that was like specifically a science fiction-themed anthology and did feature some somewhat well-known authors. This would have been the late 80s, I guess. And it was a story called "Cat Wings" and it was a story about a family of cats that had wings. And it was really cute and sad. Yeah, that was the first Le Guin I ever read. So, yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, the only thing that I've read aside from "Wizard of Earthsea" and "Left Hand of Darkness" was the short story "Nine Lives", which I read significantly before we started the podcast, so I don't really remember anything about it, but I definitely like to revisit it one day. I would definitely like to bring her on the podcast for sure multiple times, so I'm sure we'll talk more about her life when we do that.
But yeah, this story is definitely considered one of her minor works, though I think it has a lot of interesting themes that it brings up and definitely a lot of her personality and world-building in it.
JM:
And it is mentioned in several reference works that I've looked at around this topic, so yeah, it's certainly been noticed.
Nate:
Yeah, for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I remember when I was first telling one of my professors about this episode and I mentioned reading this work for it. They immediately recommended this one book because they're like, it's right in the introduction. This story is mentioned and kind of talked about in the introduction of that work, so you should check it out.
JM:
That's cool.
Nate:
Yeah. So this one, "The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics", was initially published in the "Fellowship of Stars" anthology in 1974, which was edited by Terry Carr and also contained stories by Frederik Pohl, Fritz Leiber, and a few other authors, the Le Guin being the closing story in the anthology. And it ties into the themes of what makes a language a language and not just communication. This line I think is a fascinating line to draw as right now we only consider human language to be language, but certainly animals can communicate with one another. I used to have two dogs, Ralph and Polar Pig, and they would all make a series of sounds that were different from one another, but clearly meant to communicate certain things, and they were definitely consistent with how they use certain vocalizations.
But yeah, also birds, dolphins, other primates all have interesting methods of communication. And there's one book that I found, "Perspectives in Zoosemiotics" by Thomas A. Sebeok. I'm probably saying his last name wrong from 1972. And it's this really fascinating collection of essays that talks about a number of things. I'm just going to read the titles of the essays in the book:
Coding in the Evolution of Signaling Behavior, Communication in Animals and Men, Animal Communication, Discussion of Communication Processes on Chemical Signs, Goals and Limitations of the Study of Animal Communication, Semiotics and Ethology, Zoosemiotic Structures and Social Organization, and The Word Zoosemiotics.
So a lot of direct tie-ins to this work that we're going to be taking a look at tonight. And the first essay in particular has some really fascinating overlap as it relates to information theory, and cites people like Claude Shannon, John Von Neumann, Robert Fano, and generally speaking, the language throughout the book is pretty dense scientific academic language. But again, a lot of these topics play pretty directly into the Le Guin story. And if you're interested in, I guess, the nonfiction element of what she's talking about, definitely check this book out. Tons of types of animal communication are discussed. So bee, dolphin, primate, crocodile, cats and dogs. But there's one bit about the crow really stuck out at me, and I want to read this in its entirety.
So he says: "crows in this country are known to exhibit distinctive alarm notes, inducing other crows to disperse. Distress calls when caught, and assembly calls emitted when they sight a bird of prey or a cat. These calls were tape recorded and when played to wild crows in American woodland, elicited much the same reactions. However, when these tape recordings were tested on crows in France, either there was no response or the French crows assembled where the Americans would have fled. Captive Pennsylvania crows respond abnormally to the calls of Maine crows and vice versa. But crows free to migrate between the two regions, construct a diasystem, which enables them to understand both local dialects."
So I mean, I don't know, just stuff like that is fascinating to what degree animals can communicate with one another, what degree there is some kind of standardized form of communication, even if they pertain to direct needs and situations like a predator being around or the presence of food somewhere or communicating some kind of emotional state.
JM:
Yeah, you got to like, I've never been into a jungle before, but I sometimes wonder if it's as teeming with sounds as is often portrayed, right? And you figure like those sounds must mean something like yeah, like what you were saying, Nate, predator approaching, right?
Nate:
Right.
JM:
An important piece of news to communicate in some manner. And even if it's like something about the sound or the emotion of the sound or something like that, does convey a message, even if it's not, you know, words as we would necessarily recognize.
Nate:
Yeah, it's an all very interesting line. And again, this book goes into a lot of these concepts from a very academic scientific point of view. So again, if you're interested in the subject at all, from a non fictional standpoint, definitely check that book out, which is "Perspectives in Zoosemiotics".
JM:
Yeah. Well, this story, like when is definitely hypothesizing somewhat playfully, obviously, the idea of actual verbal communication, even if it's not spoken as such among animals. Yeah, right.
Nate:
So yeah, basically in a non spoiler sense, it's kind of really hard to spoil because it's not really a story. It's basically three separate fictional pieces that are published in a fictional future journal sometime, and they mirror very much academic language. I read this one piece of criticism written on some blog Onion and Artichoke. This one was apparently written by Artichoke. I guess Onion has other reviews, but I didn't really look around too much on, but they talk about how the story portrays an inclusive rather than an exclusive approach to academia and say "there's an idea in academia behind limiting and restricting what can be poetry and what can't be, for example, so that you can more easily judge, quantify, sort and talk about the concept of poetry. It is a way to attempt objectivity at what is fundamentally subjective."
Yeah, it's an interesting way of looking at this story, especially when we really consider only human communication to be language, even though there are these cases like the crows where there's some kind of localized dialect being formed that is standardized in some way. So I mean, theoretically, you could push the line further out. It just depends on how you define what is a language and what is communication. And this story takes that concept seriously as these three forms of animal communication that we get, namely ant, penguin and plant and how that plays out.
So yeah, I guess what did you guys think of this story?
Gretchen:
I was really fascinated by this story. Like, I think that it's going a little further, you know, like the difference between language and communication. There's also, of course, this question of language and art. When does communication convey a meaning that is artistic and has even can be interpreted as how do we define art and how do we classify that? Can we say that other species, when conveying meaning, can be artful and how they convey it?
JM:
Yeah, yeah, I enjoyed that aspect of it. I enjoyed the thought experiment. I thought it was a little too dry to be really enjoyable. But at the same time, it was short. And it was a fun thought experiment, like it was also playful, right? And it didn't really cause me any pain or anything like that. If it had been much longer, maybe I would have been a little frustrated. But I don't know, she kept it really short. It's in three parts. The first one with the ant script is the part I enjoyed most probably. But yeah, I mean, I also liked the penguin one a little bit because it had that whole thing at the end that was reminiscent a little bit of "Erewhon", which I think you'll probably point out when we get there.
Nate:
I was actually going to point out something else that we covered on the podcast, but we'll see what it is.
Gretchen:
It's funny, I think that as a grad student, I was like, no, this is not dry to me just because I've read much drier in my time in academia. So this is, I can see how this is very reminiscent of other academic journals and articles. So it does have maybe a bit of a drier tone than obviously typical short stories would. I really appreciate that approach. I think it's just very clever approach to do.
Nate:
Yeah, she mimics the form and the tone very, very well, which I think adds a lot to do with this story.
JM:
Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. Like I said, I didn't, he wasn't long enough for me to be aggravated. And I guess that's one of the reasons I like short stories so much is that you can do things that in a longer form would probably aggravate a reader like me and you can get away with it. And I won't be unhappy, right? So it's fine. She divided it up into three parts. And I can tell that some of it was, it seemed quite satirical, you know, like, yeah, she's taking the idea seriously. But she's also maybe poking fun at the thought that you might be taking this seriously too, right? I don't know. I enjoyed that.
Gretchen:
I always like the idea that in order to make fun of something or mock something, you do have to kind of take it on its own merits and do treat it seriously or else it doesn't really, it is mocking, but in a way where I think she is still very genuine about it.
Nate:
Yeah, she seriously engages with a lot of concepts in a very, very short amount of time. And I think the length is one of extremes. I don't think we need to have the entire run of the Journal of Therolinguistics here, but three select articles is a nice amount. And I would certainly read a prose novel out of any of these scenarios, namely the ant, the plant and the penguin. I think she would come up with some really good stories.
JM:
Well Nate, maybe you should subscribe to the Journal of Feral Inquistics. You might see something here.
Gretchen:
Yeah, gotta check JSTOR for it.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
But I certainly am glad we incorporated it into this episode. It's a cool thing that I noticed because I thought we were going to do this at some point. And I saw it brought up a couple of times and it thought, it would be an unusual way to bring Le Guin onto the podcast for the first time.
Nate:
Yeah, no, I think it touches upon nicely pretty much all the themes that we're going to be taking a look at in the short stories and novels that we're going to be covering after this. So yeah, it's pretty short. So I'm just going to quote a fair amount from it. So the first segment is the ant segment. So we get the notice that the messages were found in a touch-gland exudation on the germinated acacia seeds.
JM:
Yeah, an MS found in an ant hill. Like, there are a couple of things in this that made me think about Poe. Yeah. And that was one.
Nate:
Yeah. But yeah, it's found at the end of a narrow erratic tunnel leading off from one of the deeper levels of the colony. And it's mostly fragments of anthood thoughts with one disturbing message at the end. And there's some musings given to grammar and the difficulty of translating without fully knowing certain aspects of ant language. So the first block, seeds 1-13, reads, "I will not touch feelers. I will not stroke. I will spend on dry seeds, my soul's sweetness. It may be found when I am dead. Touch this dry wood. I call. I am here." And here, an alternate translation is provided using third person pronouns as the ant language uses the same pronouns for both first and third person, which mirrors Spanish and Italian imperfect, and presumably some other romance and other languages as well.
JM:
Interesting.
Nate:
Yeah. They give, "do not touch feelers, do not stroke, spend on dry seeds, your soul's sweetness", and so on and so forth. But yeah, definitely introduces the topic of how to translate from one language to another when the vocabulary and grammatical structure of the language is different. And those are just decisions that the translator has to make infer from context in cases like these, or in cases where context can't be inferred, you know, you have to go through some unsightly footnote where you kind of have to explain that to the reader, especially when you're dealing with a lot of text where the double meaning of the word could be deliberately ambiguous, and thus almost impossible to translate in another language. Certainly, there's works written natively in English, like William Faulkner or James Joyce, or stuff like that, that I would imagine would be just like a total nightmare for anybody to translate into another language.
Certainly, with my experiences dealing with pulp science fiction, some of that stuff can be a little bit difficult to bring into English at times depending on who the author is, though it's certainly way easier with the 50s authors than the 19th century authors, I definitely have to say.
So the next two blocks seeds 14 to 22, and seeds 23 to 29 almost sound like religious texts. So 14 to 22 is "longer the tunnels, longer is the untunneled, no tunnel reaches the end of the untunneled. The untunneled goes on farther than we can go in 10 days. Praise." And Le Guin was influenced by Taoism in her personal life. And this just kind of reminds me of the philosophical discussion of like non dualistic existence that you see in the Upanishads, which are Hindu scriptures, but both worldviews have a non dualistic approach. So I don't know, it just reminded me a lot of that how Brahman can't be realized by human senses or measurement of like the no tunnel reaches the end of the tunnel that it seems to mirror that kind of philosophical thinking.
Gretchen:
You can definitely see the influence Taoism has on several of Le Guin's works that I've read. I know, "Lathe of Heaven" especially has quite a good amount of influence from that. And she did translate the I'm forgetting the name of the text for for Taoism. But I believe she did translate that. So I think that even makes that sort of exploration of translation here even more pertinent for her.
Nate:
Yeah, it looks like she translated the "Tao Tse Ching" by Lao Tzu. Yeah, I don't really know too much about Taoism. Apparently it's also non dualistic, like the Hindu scriptures are, but I'm just more familiar with the Hindu text. And again, it just seems kind of mirrored in that same sort of philosophical language, especially including a praise at the end.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
So the next one also seemed to mirror stuff from those texts seeds 23 to 29 "as the ant among foreign enemy ants is killed. So the ant without ant dies. But being without ants is as sweet as honeydew," which again reminds me a lot of the discussion of world renunciation that you see in those Upanishads. And then the last message that we get seeds 30 to 31 is "eat the eggs, up with the queen" and up is bad in ant language as down mean security and up is the the outside world where you could possibly get eaten by a bird or stepped on by a human, which again, they explain in the text and the journal. Yeah, rather disturbing thing to read because we see the hands body with its head severed nearby. So obviously something bad happened to this ant that put the ant at odds with the rest of the colony somehow.
JM:
Definitely a lot of appreciate the questioning of what the "up with the queen" phrase actually means in this context, whether we actually have a worker's revolution on our hands.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I especially love this section because it is so Le Guin, just from like her exploration of different ideology and stuff like this feels very in line with like something like "The Dispossessed", the idea of the individual and this revolt against what collectivism versus individualism that you see in some of her other work.
JM:
Yeah, if you're an ant, up with the queen might be bad. Yeah, one of the difficulties of translation, certainly well expressed there.
Nate:
Yeah, especially when you're only dealing with fragmentary text and the entirety of the language is unknown and you have to infer context and you don't really know really anything about the social situations that you're working with.
JM:
And also it's like, do we go for a literal or non literal translation?
Nate:
Right. Yeah.
JM:
Because if we go for a non literal one, and we know what the writer actually had in mind, which we don't because he's an ant, I guess. And you know, we're not quite sure what he had in mind. But if we did know, we might actually want to say down with the queen, because it makes more sense in the context that we know, right?
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the ants.
The next one that we get is the penguins. And that is the article announcement of an expedition. And we don't have any direct text fragments here.
JM:
But rather, right, let's go to Antarctica.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
Watch some penguins.
Nate:
Yeah. Instead, we get musings on the difficulty of penguin language. And penguin is difficult to read a very intense and flowing script that must be filmed underwater. If similarities to dolphin are a bit of a red herring, which you think would mean something good in both languages. But it would appear the languages are totally signed and gestured and not actually written on a medium and there's this fantastic breakthrough, "only when Professor Duby reminded us that penguins are birds that they do not swim but fly in water. Only then could the thorough linguists begin to approach the sea literature of the penguin with understanding. Only then could the miles of recordings already on film be restudied. And finally, appreciated."
Penguin is quite witty, like the fish, the emperor being the most remote and has the most difficult of the dialects. It's certainly worth bearing the minus 60 degree temperatures for it. And an expedition grant has been secured and they're on their way. And yeah, I suppose that this is like "Erewhon" a bit. But the thing that it really reminded me of is the appeals by John Symmes to visit the center of the earth through Antarctica and his Symmes going to Symzonia. I think this expedition might be a little bit more successful than that one. So who knows.
But yeah, that is the penguins more or less.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I definitely would be more interested in this expedition than some of the other expeditions we've seen through the podcasts, other works.
Nate:
Certainly wouldn't mind reviewing the film that they took.
JM:
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. Like, there's still room. Come with us. Yeah. You can send us some money too. We might need it, right? Maybe bring some supplies. It's going to be minus 60 out. Yeah, come to Antarctica. That was fun. Yeah, I don't know.
Basically, I guess my feeling about the segments were like, I was really pretty engaged during the ant one. And then as it kind of went on, and we got into the third one, I was kind of like, okay, I'm not sure now it's going a bit too far.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know. The third one's pretty cool. So that one is the editorial by the president of the Therolinguistics Association, where we get musings on the nature of art and Therolinguistics study animals as plants do not communicate. But does there exist a non-communicated vegetable art? There have been attempts of using time-lapse photography to produce sunflower lexicons. And the art of the plant is likely to be a reaction, thus passive art. Thus can it ever be known? She says, "it will be immensely difficult. That is clear, but we should not despair. Remember that so late as the mid 20th century, most scientists and most artists did not believe that dolphin would ever be comprehensible to the human brain, or worth comprehending. Let another century pass and we may seem equally laughable. Do you realize that the phytolinguists will say to the aesthetic critic that they couldn't even read eggplant? And they will smile at our ignorance as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike's Peak. And with them or after them, there may not come that even bolder adventurer, the first geolinguist who, ignoring the delicate transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the less still communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold volcanic poetry of the rocks, each one a word spoken how long ago by the earth itself in the immense solitude, the immense community of space."
And this last musing on the rocks, namely that each one a word spoken how long ago by the earth itself in the immense solitude in the immense community of space, also hints at those non dualistic metaphysics as the universal breath of life flows through the inanimate physiology of rocks really quite profound amidst the pretty funny image of a speaking eggplant.
Gretchen:
Yes. Yeah, I love that final paragraph. It's so very poetic.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Again, I because this is where we're coming into mocking or appreciating. I feel like there is this sort of sense of Le Guin really respecting this and having not just this satirical exploration of academia, but also, like you were saying, Nate, that one review that said it's very inclusive and very welcoming. And I feel like you can see that here.
Nate:
Yeah, and it definitely works a little bit better than the Butler thing from "Erewhon" where he talks about the rights of plants and all that.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Well, I mean, I think one of the biggest problems with the Ray Juan is that yeah, it went on and on, right? At least she divides it into three distinct parts and you can take them one at a time and then just said she wraps it up. She gets out of the way of the fact that you're willing to entertain the notions. But as it goes on, I think this satire really does take precedence more and more kind of whether it's a satire of academic writing or perhaps the way people might tend to read a lot into things, like I know some people really love their plants and think that they can perceive things and so on. And I guess for me, plant language would stress credibility, but language, I can swallow it a little more, which is I guess maybe telling it itself about me, I guess. I don't know. But yeah, interesting challenge either way.
Gretchen:
I'm reminded of those videos I've seen on YouTube where people will like hook plants up to like electric instruments and make them play music. It's really fun to watch.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And that's all that's what I'm thinking when I when I read this bit.
JM:
Yeah. I was also reminded of that movie, Short Night of Glass Dolls where there's this random bit where this scientist is trying to demonstrate that a tomato is feeling pain or something like that. And it's like really weird giallo that's not really like a normal giallo. And it's got all these like strange Kafka-esque parts to it, I think that are really cool and interesting.
Nate:
So yeah, I don't know. I just think that the idea of passive non-communicative art is an interesting concept to begin with. And that she just plays with it a little bit in this segment is interesting beyond the satire angle. And all that it's just a cool idea to think about in general as vegetables and flowers in particular have long been the subjects of human art and I guess considered to be art in and of themselves.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I'm really fascinated by the way that she approaches this. And I would actually love to experience more of the literature and the art that she discusses in these works. Like the mention of Weasel murder mysteries and Batrachian erotica sounds very fun.
JM:
Oh yeah, frog literature. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine they have quite some good ballots. Yeah. But yeah, cool. I don't really have a lot to say about this other than, well, we've kind of observed it was a fun little piece and a good way to start this off.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. I'm certainly looking forward to coming back to her on the podcast.
JM:
Cool. Me too.
Nate:
Now we'll be talking about Jack Vance.
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