Episode 52 transcription - Suzette Haden Elgin - "Native Tongue" (1984)

(listen to episode on Spotify) 

(music: Chrononauts main theme)

introductions, non-podcast reads 

Gretchen:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Gretchen, and I'm joined here with my co-hosts, J.M. and Nate. How are you both doing tonight?

Nate:

I'm doing pretty well.

JM:

Really good. Yeah, starting off the new year, it's been a bit since we recorded. We managed to survive the holiday chaos and everything. Yeah, I don't know, things have been kind of different with my situation the last couple years with family and stuff like that. So the December time is always kind of weird and stressful, and now everybody's really scattered all over the place, so it's kind of... It's different, but I made it through, and yeah, things are pretty good. It's really cool here, but yeah.

Nate:

Yep, definitely survived the holidays, did some cool research for some upcoming podcast episodes, which we'll be really excited to share with you in 2026. I think we have a lot of fun plans for the new year. And we're starting off with a great book and episode tonight, and I'm really looking forward to talking about this one.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I'm looking forward to this one, and my holidays were pretty good. It was really busy, especially it's my first time where I... Since now that I'm out of school, I don't have a break, so I had to kind of make a little... It was less time really to spend for the holidays, but still had a good time. Still got to see some family and friends, which was nice.

Nate:

Yeah, good to hear.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I'm excited to get into the book for tonight. Before we do so, you can find Chrononauts on all major podcast platforms, Spotify, Apple. We have a blogspot at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com, where you can read a number of texts and translations. You can also follow us on Twitter at @ChrononautsSF, and Facebook at facebook.com/chrononautspodcast, or email us at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com.

Nate:

And new to the blogspot is Francisco Baltzer's "Summer Vacation", which is, I guess, the opposite season to be posting that one. I thought that one was a lot of fun, and we'll be covering that one in a couple episodes time. So check that one out. It's an interesting take, if you like vintage season, you might find a lot of similarities to that. But yeah, it's a lot of fun.

JM:

There'll be a lot of new stuff to cover, and we certainly encourage everybody to take a look at this stuff, because a whole lot of new material that's not been produced in English before, and we're going to be looking at some of those international stories.

Nate:

So I guess have you guys been reading anything interesting in the last couple months that we've recorded?

Gretchen:

Currently, my New Year's resolution has been, instead of quantity, I've been kind of going for a bit of quality, really, where I decide I'm not going to have a set amount of books that I'm trying to read this year, but I want to read books that are 500 plus pages, kind of forcing myself to slow down a little bit and enjoy them. So currently, I am reading "Lost Illusions" by Honore de Balzac, and I am really enjoying that one so far. I'm about halfway through it. I read "Pere Goriot", I believe I had mentioned that on the podcast when I had read it, and I really, really love that work, so I wanted to read more of Balzac, and this gave me the chance to check this one out, and I'm really enjoying that.

My exceptions for the rule are, of course, for the podcast readings, and also I am doing a science fiction book club at my library. For that, I am rereading "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

JM:

Yeah, that's really cool.

Gretchen:

It's a nice book to revisit. It's been since high school since I read it, so while I, of course, remember enjoying it a lot, a lot of the details have gotten a little fuzzy, so it's nice to go back and get to experience it again.

Nate:

Awesome, yeah, I haven't read that Balzac. I think I've read, like, maybe like a fair amount, but I mean, a fair amount for Balzac....

JM:

Yeah, Nate you read a lot of his stuff.

Nate:

Yeah, but it's like a drop in the bucket because he just wrote so, so, so, so much.

Gretchen:

Yeah, it's like prolific. I mean, I think it was like, I think there's like 90 novels or something and just the, you know, "Human Comedy", and then there's all of the stories and plays and stuff, you're on top of it. It's so much.

Nate:

Yeah, he's a pretty amazing author, so I definitely like to check that one out, especially if you've really enjoyed it so far. I've certainly enjoyed everything I've read by him. But yeah, I've been up to some good stuff, too. I mentioned last time that I was on volume three of the "Arabian Nights", which I got through, which was a couple of longer tales interspersed with a bunch of really short animal fables in the middle. That reminded me of Aesop's fables.

JM:

Oh, yeah, right.

Nate:

Though it's been like years and years and years since I've read any of Aesop's fables. I'm not sure how much direct influence there were there, aside from the obvious similarities that it involves animal tales. Yeah, there's this one amazingly, amazingly dirty couplet at the end of volume three. And normally I consider Chrononauts a clean show, despite the fact that we say the F word from time to time. And this is certainly too dirty, in my opinion, to repeat on the air here. So you just have to read volume three for yourself to see what it is.

Then I read Walter Scott's "Waverley", which is his first novel.

JM:

Oh, yeah.

Nate:

It's a romance in the Scottish Highlands around the time of the Jacobite rebellion. And for all the Doctor Who fans out there, if you remember the serial where Jamie joins the show, "The Highlanders". Basically, the novel "Waverley" ends right around the time "The Highlanders" begins, even though there's really not like a direct connection between the two stories aside from the general setting and political environment. It's kind of a neat tie-in there.

JM:

I remember doing a project in middle school about that and about the areas surrounding the Jacobite rebellion and leading up to the 1740s and stuff. Definitely was kind of inspired by that Doctor Who story, but certainly never ended up reading Walter Scott at that time.

Nate:

Yeah, it's definitely an interesting time period. I like the other two Walter Scott novels that I've read, namely "Ivanhoe" and the "Heart of Midlothian" better than this one, though. I didn't mind this one at all. I thought it was good, though. It never really seems to get going in the way that it kind of promises it might. Then after that, it's back to the "Arabian Nights" with Volume 4, which in this one is like a ton of shorter tales, including "The City of Brass", which we talked about all the way back in Episode 1, which is, again, there's a very, very brief part of a somewhat longer tale. But yeah, a lot of really cool stuff in that one.

And then I just started "The Best of Fritz Leiber", inspired by one of the episodes we did a while back. I've only read two of the short stories in it so far, namely, "Gonna Roll the Bones" and "Sanity", which I thought were both pretty awesome, so definitely looking forward to checking out the rest of the collection.

JM:

Yeah, I don't know, they're so good. They get pretty absurd, but in a fun way, so it's good. I love the way they're going to balance all these different elements. There's actually a lot of humor in them. Sometimes it can be kind of over the top in a ridiculous way, but it's like, yeah, I like it. I like the way he does it.

Nate:

Yeah. So that's what I've been up to.

Gretchen:

Nice.

JM:

Let's see. Alright, a few things. I'll just try and keep it somewhat brief. But finally read a book by John Dickson Carr, who's a pretty famous writer of mysteries, starting in around the 1930s, I think. Definitely not in the hard-boiled style, even though he's American. I mean, he's been praised by people like Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie. His most famous work is probably "The Burning Court", which has been made into radio plays, and I don't know if there's a film version or not. There might be. And he has a lot of books with recurring detective-type characters. The one I read was actually subtitled a Victorian melodrama, and it's called "The Scandal at High Chimneys". It was really good. It was actually, you could tell, you did a massive amount of research, and it was interesting that it was written in, I think, the early 1950s, while that's sort of a ways away from Victorian era, we're even further away from that time now. And so you're kind of looking at it through a different lens, in retrospect, as the would, as if it were a historical novel written now. It's just really interesting the way he sort of dissected the social conditions and mores of the time and stuff like that, and also created this kind of fun mystery. So I really enjoyed that.

I also read "The Inverted World" by Christopher Priest, which is certainly something I would consider putting on the podcast sometime, or at least covering something by him. Of course, everybody knows "The Prestige", which was made into a film by Christopher Nolan, not that long ago, I guess. Well, I guess it was a while ago now, but "The Inverted World" is a really interesting science fiction concept, and it wasn't really what I was expecting, but at the same time, towards the end of the book, the perspective really shifts, and the way things are revealed is quite interesting. There was quite a haunting quality to the book. I think the ending was a little, maybe a little unsatisfying, but at the same time, I'm not quite sure how I would have wanted him to wrap it up. So I really enjoyed the book, especially after getting about two-thirds of the way through and some kind of surprising, not twists exactly, sort of, oh, okay, this is what's going on, and this is like kind of post-apocalyptic at the start, and you kind of wonder what's actually going on, and it kind of slowly starts to introduce, "real-world", elements bit by bit, and you kind of realize that the setting you're in is actually a lot more familiar than you would first thought, and it's quite interesting the way he does it.

And I'm also doing a reread now, a book by Algernon Blackwood called "The Extra Day", and it's not a horror story. Algernon Blackwood, of course, really known for stories like "The Willows" and "The Wendigo" and the John Silence, the occult detective stories, and of course we did one on the podcast way back when we covered "House on the Borderland" and stuff, and this one is actually, I guess, in a way, it's a book for children, and it's really different, but at the same time, it has a lot of what you can see of his kind of philosophy in it, and it's basically about these three siblings and the awakening of their imaginations, and there's a huge sense of wonder to it. It's pretty slow-paced, I guess, but it's charming, and it's sometimes rather cute, but also has some surprisingly powerful insights, and I don't know, I really enjoy it. I don't know how many kids would get on with it very well nowadays, if you read it as an older person and let it work on your imagination and kind of imagine what it's like, again, being a young person in a certain environment, and I don't know, it's really good, it's definitely not very well read nowadays, and certainly if I hadn't known Algernon Blackwood for other stuff, I don't know, I would have come to it. Yeah, I read it first in, I think, 2010, and so I've been thinking about re-reading it for a while now, so here we go.

And I think that's mostly it. There's probably some other things that I'm forgetting, but I don't want to go on forever. It's been a while since we recorded. It's been a good reading time, I guess.

Gretchen:

Nice.

JM:

All right, cool. Yeah, so we've got an interesting one to talk about this month.

(music: eerie clanging)

Elgin biography, non-spoiler discussion 

Gretchen:

Suzette Haden Elgin was born as Patricia Ann Wilkins in Louisiana, Missouri, on November 19, 1936. Her parents were Hazel Wilkins, a teacher, and Gaylord Lloyd, a lawyer. As a child, she suffered from polio, which would cause her chronic pain and require her to wear a brace throughout the rest of her life. At 18, Elgin enrolled at the University of Chicago, where she studied from 1954 to 1956. While at the university, she decided to go by Suzette as she met so many women who had the name Patricia.

Also during this time, she met her first husband, Peter Haden. They married in 1955. The couple had three children, Michael, Rebecca, and Patricia. The family moved to San Bernardino, California, where Peter would work at the Norton Air Force Base until his death in 1964. Later that same year, Elgin met and soon married George Elgin, and they had a son together named Benjamin. In 1967, Elgin received her bachelor's degree from Chico State College and, for a time afterwards, taught at the Conservatory of Music in Chico, California, as well as taught classes on French, guitar, and music theory.

Around this period, Elgin had also performed folk music in a music show in Redding, California. She later performed and recorded "filk", and for any listeners not familiar with that genre, it is sci-fi and fantasy-inspired folk music. Some of her albums and songs are easy to find online, and they are really a fun listen. I really recommend it.

Nate:

I'll have to check that out, that sounds pretty funny.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I found a couple on YouTube, and while I was doing some research and reading about her, I was listening to it. It's really fun.

Elgin soon enrolled at the University of California, San Diego, where she earned both her MA and PhD in Linguistics by 1973, becoming the first student to write two dissertations, one in English and the other in Navajo. Alongside her teaching position, she earned the income she needed to support her studies by writing science fiction stories. Her first sci-fi work, "For the Sake of Grace", appeared in the May 1969 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This story served as material for her first sci-fi novel, published a year later, "The Communipaths". It marks the beginning of her Coyote Jones series of novels, one of the first of several series of sci-fi novels she would write.

In 1978, Elgin founded the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, which later created the Elgin Award in her honor. Serving as a professor at the University of California since 1972, she retired from teaching in 1980, moving with her husband to Arkansas for the rest of her life.

In that same year, she also released one of her more prominent works of nonfiction, "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense". This book and several that followed it concerned learning how to combat verbal abuse through techniques Elgin had created earlier, and they feel quite relevant to some of the characters in the work we're covering tonight.

She and George founded a virtual business called the Ozark Center for Language Studies, which offered more services and advice in the same vein. Elgin continued to write nonfiction and science fiction novels throughout the rest of her life, all of them with at least some linguistic focus, and she maintained a blog and a few websites which would sometimes discuss the planning of her work until a serious decline in her health in the early 2010s.

In 2012, George revealed that Elgin had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a condition that develops rapidly and doesn't respond to treatment or medication. Tragically, he wrote of Elgin's increasing inability to interact with others. "For Christmas, she wanted a laptop computer and a cell phone. She hasn't even started up the laptop, and she can't remember from day to day how to use the cell phone. It's a very simple one, ideal for seniors called the Jitterbug. She won't answer the hard-wired phone when it rings, and won't communicate in any way with anyone except immediate family, and a very limited way at that."

She did, however, retain her deep love of reading, devouring books that George bought for her. In 2015, on January 27th, Suzette Haden Elgin would pass away, though not without leaving behind a collection of works dedicated to the art of language and communication.

The work we're discussing tonight is no different in theme. Suzette Haden Elgin published "Native Tongue" in 1984, the first book in a trilogy that also includes "The Judas Rose" and "Earthsong".

JM:

Did anybody actually get a chance yet to read any of the other ones?

Nate:

No, I didn't.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I did not.

Nate:

I'm going to, like, later, just because we'll talk about it.

JM:

Yeah, I mean, obviously, like, we're just doing this one for the podcast, but so many things are going to come up as we talk about it that I'm just like, I have some, well, we'll talk about it, we'll talk about it, but yeah, I was just curious to know if anybody had actually made any inroads into the other books, because I think we all said we were kind of interested.

Gretchen:

Yes.

JM:

And going forward, and I am.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I am definitely interested in checking it out, because, well, this book came out a year before "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood, and usually when you see people discuss this work, I've seen many people compare it to "The Handmaid's Tale", which makes sense with some of the themes.

JM:

This book was a lot funnier than "The Handmaid's Tale", though.

Gretchen:

Yes.

Nate:

Though "The Handmaid's Tale" does have like a weird, quirky sense of humor that I really enjoyed, but yeah, I really like this one too.

Gretchen:

Yeah, and I think that also there's just a lot more going on. I think, and that's part of the reason I think what you mean, J.M., is I want to see how there's so much that could be elaborated upon in the coming works, because there's a lot of concepts that are included that sort of aren't really remarked upon or don't have a lot of elaboration that there's a lot that could be done with them.

JM:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

I did find an interesting quote that I thought I would share from Elgin, where she is talking a little bit about the differences between "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Native Tongue", where she kind of starts by discussing how "The Handmaid's Tale" is a little bit more of a violent takeover  that leads to the oppression of women, where Elgin stated, "there are the legislative methods for subjugation and oppression, and there are the medical methods. Those were far more effective methods and far more likely to be permanent methods for keeping women down than physical violence could ever be. With physical violence, there comes a day when the victims turn on the oppressors because there's nothing left to lose and nothing could be worse than the status quo. It can take many, many years for that to happen, but it always does. The nonviolent methods are quite a different matter and far more effective. Much of the time, the victims don't even notice what's happening."

Nate:

Yeah, and I think it's an interesting contrast because "The Handmaid's Tale" more or less takes place in contemporary day, where the dystopia, I guess you want to call it, sets in very, very, very abruptly, whereas we don't really get the backstory on how the "Native Tongue" world comes to be, but the story itself is not only set in the far future, but it's framed as a historical novel from even further in the future in the prologue.

JM:

Isn't "Handmaid's Tale" basically that, too, from what I remember?

Gretchen:

I was going to mention that where there's the last section of "Handmaid's Tale", which is a lecture about the work of this being somewhat. So it has that very similar kind of framing method as well, very similar to it in "1984". "1984" has the appendix at the end, which kind of implies that this is...

JM:

And in this one, it's a preface.

Gretchen:

Yes, yeah, so it's interesting.

Nate:

The main action of "The Handmaid's Tale" is like in the 1980s or even early 1990s, whereas the main action of the novel here is like the late 22nd century, early 23rd century. I don't know if they date when the preface is supposed to be, but you get the sense that it's supposed to be like centuries after that.

Gretchen:

I don't think there's any sort of indication. It just sort of says that this is something from the 23rd century, so it's probably much further than that.

JM:

It was a long time ago that I read "Handmaid's Tale", so my impressions could be different now as an older person, but when I read that book and now thinking about this book, I kind of feel like even though this one is set further in the future, this one actually felt more like... like the society felt more... When I say this, I don't mean to suggest necessarily that the dystopia was, "softer" necessarily, but it felt like this was actually closer to society that I could relate to, even though there's like aliens and it's far in the future and all this stuff. I just felt like "Handmaid's Tale" had more... maybe it's because of the atmosphere. Like "Handmaid's Tale" had a more focus on being almost like really haunting, whereas this kind of felt a lot warmer. It felt more fun, weirdly. I don't know. I don't know if you guys had that impression.

Like this book, yeah, it's dealing with some very serious issues and like there's serious oppression and everything like that, which she acknowledges and which she happily talks about, but this book just felt very... I don't know, it was... to me, there was a lot of humor in it. The condemnation of the society often took such a wry tone and it wasn't cynical either, even though like it's like some of this stuff is so ridiculous, you have to laugh about it almost. It feels like that's where she was kind of going with it and maybe that was just softened the blow a little bit. I don't know, because yeah, I mean, when you think about it, there's a ton of oppression being described in this book.

Gretchen:

To continue the comparisons, unlike the "Handmaid's Tale" where we're getting it all from one character, we get a lot of different perspectives in this book and there's times when the perspectives, even though we are getting it from a character that is the oppressor, there's this tongue-in-cheek to it that even when it's taking on the thoughts of the oppressor, it is almost like this is such an absurd thing to say or it's almost like this is such a... it kind of points out the absurdity sometimes in the thought processes of these people and like of the misogyny that we see.

Nate:

Especially in the epistolary documents that we get a lot of in the beginnings of chapters, like we get excerpts from a journal entry or a conference paper or an exam or something like that and that's when she like really lays into the satire and her humor comes out a lot there.

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of humor sprinkled out through the rest of the novel. There's this one amazing line of dialogue where one character says to another, "you can't administer hallucinogenic drugs to a baby!!" and... Yeah, it's just fantastic just taking out of context. It's one of the best things I've ever read in my life.

JM:

Yeah. There's a lot of man perspective in this book and it was done in such a very funny way. She had this way of putting us in head of especially one man character who is really, really infuriating when he was dealing with anything around the woman but when he was dealing with men and when he was dealing with everybody else and the government and all this stuff, she always made him like, oh, he's the most reasonable person in the room. Like he's saying all the right things, right? I thought it was just so... I don't know, it was clever and funny the way she did that because it's also, I guess, a little bit... You trick yourself into starting to identify with this guy and then he starts talking to his wife and his daughter and all this stuff and you're like, oh, that's horrible.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

I think it's also a good mirror of how society actually functions. I mean, you see some people put on a certain face for the public and they kind of project an air of sympathy and kindness, but behind closed doors they can be just as arrogant and cruel as the thing that they're condemning.

Gretchen:

Yeah, and of course, it's very easy to appear rational and to discuss something rationally or professionally with someone when you consider them an equal and like a human being. But, you know, if you're talking to someone else and you kind of are like, well, they're lesser than me so I don't have to act that way. Well, obviously, what I think is rational is that they're nothing or that they matter less or something similar to that. Biologically, they don't matter as much.

JM:

Yeah, I mean, this is a work of feminist fiction, right? Obviously, in the end, it's like the real focus that she seems to be driving at, although it doesn't really come up that much till the end, but the whole idea of Láadan, the women's language and all this stuff and how important it is, and you really see all that and how the society oppresses women. But I also thought it was interesting, too, again, as somebody who mostly identifies as a man, to say the interesting thing about this book was that she also shows how the society messes with men and screws up men and makes their lives restricted in a different way as well. It's just really interesting the way she's talking about one character and how he's like so obsessed with having this appearance of being a straight back, sturdy man, but he's in all this pain and he's like got terrible anxiety and trying to keep the right posture and he's hurting all over the place. These men need to relax.

And, you know, again, I think it's as part of the way she ties in and "Handmaid's Tale" does this, too, as far as I remember, but she ties in the Christianity angle, right? However the world got the way it did, Christianity, at least in the United States, has a big part to play in making use of the symbols and stuff like that and the iconography and everything like that as a form of social control. Certain people would probably argue that Christianity or religion doesn't naturally oppress women, but it's certainly been historically used somewhat that way by various religious organizations and stuff like that. But this book is trying to do a million things at once.

Nate:

Yeah, and it brings up a lot of interesting things right from the get-go. There's one really interesting thing in the preface where she says that the, I guess, novel we're about to read is as framed as a novel in text, that it, "gives us a sense of participation in the linguist lives during the first quarter of the 23rd century that we cannot gain from any history of the time, no matter how detailed, no matter how abundantly documented."

And this, like, sentiment, which she doesn't really revisit at all, really, throughout the rest of the novel, is more or less the reason that I love doing this podcast, reading historical fiction, especially when we're dealing with older stuff. I mean, I don't think we have a lot of difficulty visualizing the far-off time of the early 1980s, but when we talk about stuff from, you know, the 50s, from before, from the 19th century, especially the really, really early stuff, the fiction that was produced during the time gives you an amazing sense of what the people of the time were thinking, what their fears are, what their anxieties are, what their thoughts are, of how technology is going to progress for the future.

JM:

Yeah, that's actually something I've been thinking a lot about recently, too.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

That's one of the reasons why it's so cool to read stuff like that, right?

Nate:

Yeah, definitely. And again, it's one of the reasons why I love doing this podcast, is just digging into various corners of history and how people express their anxieties about technology and society through future technology and their speculations on where that can lead. I mean, we've gone down so many different angles, you know, probably the last like 10 episodes alone. And yeah, it's just always fascinating to read that stuff, and the fact that she just described it so succinctly and the preface I thought was a really cool thing to be immediately greeted with.

Gretchen:

Yeah, bit of a note. This was written after the Equal Rights Amendment had failed to pass, and like that's such a clear thing that is brought up in the work. And I think even just like looking at this particular text and the way that it captures like maybe thoughts of like second wave feminism over even the third wave and modern feminism today is really interesting.

Nate:

Yeah, absolutely. And there's definitely a lot of feelings of disappointment throughout this novel. I think that definitely reflect that. Even in some of the writings on her website, she was very disappointed at Láadan and didn't take off as a language in the same way that Klingon did. And I mean, I can kind of understand her point of view, and I think we all like this, but at the same time, like I think we could all understand why this did not succeed in the same way that Star Trek did.

JM:

To make a really silly analogy, it kind of reminds me of, and sorry, this might not mean a lot to you Gretchen yet, but there's the band, Cirith Ungol, and in the compilation of their demos and stuff that I have, the drummer from the band goes on quite a bit about how he thought that it could have been as large a band as Metallica or something like that if certain things hadn't set them back. And when you listen to the band, you're like, yeah, but the vocals, man, the vocals, right? Yeah, they have this like shrieking bird on vocals. Like he sounds like a bird shrieking, right? That's one of the things that we love about them, but that's also one of the things that make them, they're not going to be that popular.

And I'm a little sad that this book didn't take off like "Handmaid's Tale" did. This book was published first. I mean, I guess it's just one of those things, right? Like, I haven't read nearly all her stuff, and I will say she's a good writer, but I have some opinions about Margaret Atwood. I don't always like her. Sometimes you hear her talk and stuff, and they hear people. I mean, okay, I'm a Canadian, I'm supposed to stand out for her, right? But I don't know. Sometimes I hear things like, yeah, maybe she's not a very nice person, and sometimes it shows in her writing. So I don't know. Whatever. It's fine. I still think she's a good writer, but I don't love everything that I've read by her either.

So just to think, though, that Star Trek was such a huge phenomenon, right? And this book was out of print for so long, right? First of all, there's not really any actual examples of the language in this book. It seems like she did do some work on the language, and she has her audio cassettes and everything, where it's like those teacher yourself Klingon tapes, which you can actually get, right? And so I see why she's making that parallel, but yeah, she just didn't have the distribution network and the high-caliber TV kudos that Star Trek eventually got. Right? So, I mean, this is the way it goes. Sometimes people don't really, they don't embrace their own idiosyncrasies.

It's pretty charming that the drummer from Cirith Ungol thought that they should have been that big, but you can kind of see why they were, right?

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, as much as I love "King of the Dead", you can see why "Master of Puppets" is the record that pretty much everybody hails as one of the greatest metal records, even people really not into the genre, and "King of the Dead" will just never have that mass appeal as much as I do like it. And again, I don't think this is necessarily, in the same way, I think this is definitely more accessible to a normal person than "King of the Dead" is, but reading some of the Goodreads reviews of this, I was definitely kind of puzzled, again, sometimes at how much some of these people missed the point. Some people thought she was actually a women's separatist as advocating for a gender-segregated society in real life, which I don't really think that that's what she's getting at with this novel.

JM:

Okay, so this reminds me of something I was going to bring up. So I got to admit something to you guys. Gretchen, I was really, you know, I wasn't unhappy when you picked this book. I remember mentioning it in the linguistic episode because I came across reference to it. I'm like, yeah, that sounds kind of interesting, but it didn't necessarily something, like, it didn't jump out at me as something I maybe necessarily want to read. And Gretchen, you're like, yeah, I want to do this book. And I certainly didn't object. I didn't feel any reason to object, but there was a small voice in the back of my head preparing myself to read this very didactic, dry work of feminism that was like going a lot into the reason why women needed their own language. And I wouldn't necessarily have minded that. I'm sure it would have been fine and maybe just as good as interesting as some of the works that we did in an early episode on the podcast when it was just me and Nate and we did stuff like "Unveiling a Parallel" and what were some of the other ones you did, Nate?

Gretchen:

Like "300 years hence"?

Nate:

Yeah, "300 Years Hence". "A Blazing World". We did a whole bunch. And yeah, there's like no shortage of those from the time. There's a couple that we didn't cover, but this is like way better than all those.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Right. But I was kind of thinking, OK, even though it's from the 80s, maybe prepare yourself for something a little more like that. And I was thinking like this might not be one of my favorite books. I was thinking on the chin and I was going to be like, yeah, it'll be fine. It'll probably at least be really interesting. But it ended up not really at all being what I thought it was possibly going to be like. Like I said, I took away a lot of humor from this book. And there was a lot of other stuff in there. And now maybe one thing that frustrated me a little bit about the book was the opposite of what I thought it was going to be and that I thought this book was trying to do so much that I feel like some of the threads, they didn't exactly get lost, but it just seemed like there was so much compared to something like "Handmaid's Tale", which is very devoted to its one principle. Whereas this is like, OK, we have the oppression of women. We have religious stuff. We have aliens. We have out of control capitalism. We have colonies all over the solar system and other places. But at the same time, too, it was weird because at no point until the very end of the book did she even mention how things were in other parts of the world besides the United States.

Gretchen:

I will say that was something that I remember being very confused about through some of the work was like, what is going on in other countries? Because there is a major focus on the US, which I have seen in some of her interviews when she is discussing even just the oppression of women she discusses like, I am focusing on the US because that's the region I'm familiar with.

JM:

And that makes sense.

Gretchen:

Yeah, but it is very strange when throughout the book I was thinking for a while like, what's going on in other countries? What's going on in the rest of the world? Are they also similarly oppressed? I mean, the beginning of the novel tells us that US laws are passed to oppress women. So what are the laws going on in other countries?

JM:

Right. But toward the end of the book she does mention like an African linguist house or something and I think she says something about Switzerland. Like there is just like one sentence, you know? It's just like, oh, okay, well, so that stuff is happening too, right? But it just seems like, yeah, it is a little weird. I think it's just a part of my one perhaps issue is that like, yeah, there is just so much stuff she is trying to do at once, right?

And like the thing, the stuff with the aliens is kind of unclear, right? Especially is like, I was telling my friend about the book and I'm like, oh yeah, and there's aliens too and I'm going and talking about that and she's like, that sounds like it's from a completely different book and I'm like, well, you know, and at the time I was like, no, no, it totally works but I hadn't finished the book yet. And then I finished the book and I'm like, well, she didn't really say it's kind of one other reason why I'm curious about the others but the way she set it up, because the end of "Native Tongue" is so focused on the language but only the end really, like only the last few chapters almost.

This is something I've been noticing a lot in the structure of modern TV shows for example, that are really serialized. They will build a lot of stuff up in each season and then the last episode of the season might wrap up some things but it's mostly setting things up for the next season, right? And so I'm just kind of wondering if this is that kind of thing and if it's the case, is she going to be able to... is this all going to get tied together somehow? We'll get to it in more detail I guess but when one of the aliens' cultures send a group of females to the negotiation table as an insult and everybody's so upset about this and yeah, then I started thinking, well, okay, so are they negotiating with anybody else? Like, do the people in Japan and the people in Germany and the people in Algeria and Brazil would they all be equally insulted? Or would they all, like, react this way? I don't know, I don't know. There's a certain lack of pulling everything together, I think.

I really like the book because I think the humor of some of the situations really, it really kept me engaged really well and I mean, I'm not to say that the book wasn't deep and it had some serious things to consider because it did. I was happy to go along with all that but her sense of humor was on point a lot of the time and I guess one of the best ways to examine society and examine what might be wrong with our social interactions in terms of especially how men have traditionally treated women in a lot of areas of society and so on. In the 80s, well, I mean, when I think about the 80s it doesn't seem like that long ago and yet, yeah, like, have we come really far since the 80s? I don't know, I don't know.

Gretchen:

Yeah, reading the quote from earlier from Elgin and the legislative and medical forms of oppression it is very easy even now to see some parallels with what she's saying especially, you know, speaking after now that the Roe vs. Wade has been overturned, you know, there is something very pertinent in the words that she has spoken about that.

Nate:

Yeah, absolutely. And she definitely nails a lot of the social issues in a very prescient way, I think. But yeah, the fact that this is really not a self-contained novel is basically my only complaint about this. Otherwise, I really, really liked it. I liked it pretty much better than everything we covered in the linguistics episode aside from maybe "The Story of Your Life". Yeah, I really, really like this one overall but I guess it speaks to how the sci-fi genre in particular pivots to a more series, novel series, that is, base focus rather than those other series we get in, like, the Amazing and Astounding where, you know, each month we get a different adventure from the pulp hero whereas this is clearly building towards something in the second and third books which you see in a lot of contemporary science fiction for sure. And that's something I guess we'll figure out how to examine on the podcast because we obviously can't cover, like, a ten book series in one episode or something like that. But the genre obviously takes a turn towards that direction at some point and it's interesting to see in 1984 it was pretty much already there for Elgin's writing.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I am interested to see where she could take this but I wish we had had a little bit more of a definite ending and maybe a few more threads had been wrapped up a bit more at least given some satisfactory ending even if they were brought up in the following books. But I do really enjoy the glimpse that we see of what Elgin has in mind in this book.

JM:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

I do like the expansive way at least of, like, multiple having these multiple characters and seeing from their perspective how this oppressive system works and I really like that we open each chapter with sort of a bit of a, like you were saying, Nate, with the different articles and different poems and songs kind of giving a little bit of a sense of some of the world building even though there are definitely questions still left at the end or maybe some holes in the world.

Nate:

For sure, yeah. It's a really interesting view into the world and I definitely plan on checking out books two and three at some point this year probably when I'm finished up with "Arabian Nights" which isn't exactly the most progressive view on women in a lot of those stories but yeah, I really like this overall and definitely curious to see where the whole thing goes even if she doesn't tie every thread together she raises a lot of stuff and I guess the brief summaries that I read of the second and third books sounds like it goes to some interesting places for sure.

JM:

Another thing I wanted to bring up generally though is the structure of the book so I'm jumping back and forward in the timeline and I found it a little bit, normally I have no problem with that but I kind of found it a little bit disorienting at certain points and I found myself trying to think hard about, okay, wait, is this taking place when, for example, I don't know, when Nazareth is a teenager or when she's older then, you know, I kind of, I stop worrying about it too much and I'm like, well, it doesn't matter really because these are other characters anyway, right? I'm just trying to keep it all straight in my head because there's different things going on there's the Chornyak family but then there's the experiment with the babies that the government is doing and stuff like that and there's Michaela, the murderous nurse, I'm gonna be saying that a lot there's different things going on I'm just like, okay, these things are happening concurrently, right? I found myself a little bit wondering why she just didn't make it totally linear I guess I get it, it was kind of cool to, well, not cool but it was kind of like, I guess, a good way of starting it off where Nazareth's older and they found out she has cancer and stuff and she's produced nine children and we're like, wow, what's the story about this woman and she does kind of take us back a little bit and she takes us back into her childhood and her teen years and stuff.

So, I mean, it worked it works mostly because I stopped worrying about it and I stopped kind of being like, well, is the experiment going on then or then, like, you know, and I kind of stopped being bothered I guess a lot of this stuff is happening over a period of several years so...

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, Nazareth is pretty much set up to be the main character from the start but she's largely absent throughout most of the first half of the novel which I think is an interesting way of doing it.

Gretchen:

Yeah, it's very much like, she is a central character but it's kind of, for a while, it's mostly about her but not necessarily from her perspective or including her a lot of the issues arise sort of from some of the... something that she has created and something that is put into motion by other characters from her

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, yeah, that's true. Clearly we all enjoyed it it sounds like I was preparing myself to hate it and I really wasn't but I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I did maybe it's just generally thinking of some of the "message" science fiction that I've read sometimes I don't enjoy it that much no matter what the message is, right? It's not specifically that it's feminist-oriented or anything like that I'm not against... I'm not like... Oh no, I have to read a book about feminism! Crap! It's not like that.

Nate:

A lot of people on Goodreads definitely say that exact same thing which I thought was like pretty, pretty funny reading some of those reviews

JM:

Yeah, no this was a lot of fun and it was also interesting from me because it was kind of a follow-up to the linguistics stuff that we did a couple months ago

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, really good choice, really good choice perfect Chrononauts read, definitely.

(music: spacey reverations)

spoiler summary

Gretchen:

"Native Tongue" starts with a preface that says the following book is the only work of fiction by a member of the Lines, distinct from the scholarly work often published from them. It provides unique insight into linguists' lives during the 23rd century. 

The author of the novel is simply "the women of Chornyak Barren House", and the author of the preface is notably Patricia Ann Wilkins, who worked with groups such as WOMANTALK and the Láadan Group to publish this edition. Launching into the quote-unquote actual novel, we learn that in 1991, two articles passed which repealed the 19th Amendment and stripped women of their legal status, making them legally minors.

Over two centuries later, Thomas Blair Chornyak, head of the Chornyak household and all of the linguist's Lines, sits at a meeting with other men in his family, including his father Paul John Chornyak, his brother James Nathan Chornyak, and Aaron Adiness, a son-in-law. The final point of the meeting concerns the latter, though really it concerns his wife, Nazareth Chornyak, who is suffering from breast cancer and needs surgery to remove them.

The men are deciding whether to spend money on breast regeneration for her, something she wants but cannot receive without the financial approval of the men in her family. While one of the men, Kenneth, who married into the family and isn't a born linguist, thinks they should pay for this, Nazareth has produced nine-linguist infants after all, the rest disagree. While they do have the funds for the procedure, they fear the public's reaction to what could be perceived as a frivolous use of money. 

The vote is no on the regeneration, and Clara, the aunt of Nazareth, is tasked with breaking the news to her. Clara finds her watching a child with the Alien in Residence, or AIRY, in a device known as an interface, where he's merged in learning the extraterrestrial's language. Clara informs her of the decision, and Nazareth readies herself to go to the hospital for the surgery, but not for the breast regeneration.

The novel brings us back to a few decades earlier. Aquina Chornyak is sitting as a backup translator during a meeting between one alien race, the Jeelods, and the US government. The latter have an issue with the blue containers used by the Terrans for shipping, as the color blue is taboo in their culture.

JM:

Yeah, and Aquina is, she's the first example of a type of character that I noticed in this book with the women, and so I think Elgin did a really interesting thing because maybe when I say it's a soft dystopia that applies, that I'm saying it's like somehow not as oppressive or something like that. I don't think I mean that, but just in the writing, right? You kind of almost lose track of how revolutionary these women need to really be, right? I think that's only because, again, it's almost a trick that she's pulling, right? Because it's commented on the book very often, how women have to use things like knitting and gossiping and discussing different blends of tea or something like that as a kind of distraction, right? They're kind of like a deception. Men are watching them all the time, and the men are like, oh, you know, there's just these frivolous women doing their frivolous things, and like it doesn't matter, it's harmless, right? Like let them do their stuff, and almost sometimes makes you forget that this is a life and death struggle, right? 

And then you have these women like Aquina, a couple of characters coming up like Belle Anne, where these women are like, they don't think twice about self-sacrifice. They're just like, well, we just have to do this, right? Everybody else makes them seem really unreasonable. And then you kind of think about it, and you're like, yeah, but they're not wrong, right? They do have to do this, and like everybody else is talking about ethics and stuff like that. But it's like, well, these times are desperate, we need to change things, right? They're like telling Aquina, oh, don't be so political and stuff like that. But I don't think they really mean it, you know what I mean? Like they know she's in the right kind of, but the voice of the book is very tender in a way, even though a lot of the men, most of the men in the book are part of the oppressive patriarchy and all that. And she doesn't really wish them malice as a whole through her characters, she points that out quite a lot, right? 

There's a certain warmth and tenderness about the whole thing, which I thought was kind of neat, because it wasn't done in an overly saccharine or sentimental way, but it's there. And then you got these extreme figures coming out of it, who it almost shocks you, you know, it's like how far they're willing to go, right? And my gut is like, oh, that's not right. She shouldn't be doing that, right? Yeah, I don't know. It was interesting. It was interesting, though. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, that quote about the way that the oppression in this almost works is that the victims sort of are like, well, it's not that bad, or it's maybe we have more time to work on this or the actions of Aquina come off extreme compared to the other women almost because like she's kind of a radical and she's like, well, the reason we aren't doing this is because it's safer than the unknown of what could happen if we do revolt or if we do take kind of more active stance against this. 

JM:

Yeah. 

Gretchen:

And I feel like the narrative and Elgin's voice towards her is very sympathetic. And I kind of like that we have a woman who maybe doesn't agree with some of the other characters, but isn't villainized or anything for that. She's shown as just having a very strong stance on this, not anything incorrect or wrong about that.

JM:

Yeah, I agree. I don't think that's it's really interesting as we go to point out. There were certain times when I was a little unclear of motivations. So maybe we can talk about that too as we go. But I think it was something that I sort of started to come to understand more as I finished and after I finished. I think sometimes during the reading, I was a little bit like, why is she doing that? Right? And there's still a couple of things where I'm not sure quite how we got there, but with the men doing their experiments for the government, it's kind of clear that she's satirizing, right? 

This is somebody who would have lived through the weird Psyop stuff in the 1950s and early 60s and stuff like that and everything that was going on. It's clear that she's kind of influenced by that, right? 

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

The things you learn about in psychology class when you learn that, oh, they did these experiments on people with LSD and they wanted to see how they could use it. And it's like, okay, yeah, that must have been an interesting time. She kind of brought that into it too. Yeah, I don't know. It was a lot. She could have gone on so many different directions. And I think I say that a lot when we talk about books on Chrononauts. They could have gotten a lot of different directions. And that's definitely the case here. And there were times when I was reading it that I thought maybe it was going to go in a certain direction that it didn't go in. And yeah, it's interesting. It's trying to cover a lot. And I guess that's like, one of my takeaways is that it was cool, but also maybe a slight source of frustration because there's so much, right? Like only about 300 pages. So I don't know. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. Yeah. Besides Aquina Nazareth at age 11 is the main translator. And one of the only human beings with any familiarity with the Jeelods's language, her education of it beginning in infancy. During a break in the negotiations, Aquina looks to Nazareth's writing tablet and asks about what she sees. Nazareth tells her that it is encodings, the creation of words for concepts not yet named in any language. As Aquina looks at the encodings, she gets excited. The concepts which Nazareth is working on look truly unique and have potential as actual encodings. 

When Aquina gets back to the Chornyak Barren House, to all of the older women who no longer reside in the main house, she tells them of Nazareth's notes. She copied one of Nazareth's encodings, the concept being "to refrain from asking with evil intentions, especially when it's clear that someone badly wants you to ask". For example, when someone wants to be asked about their state of mind or health and clearly wants to talk about it. 

Aquina confirms Nazareth was trying to give these encodings lexicalization in Langlish, the language the women of the Lines have created, and the center of what is known as their encoding project, because that is the only woman language Nazareth knows of. She does not know of the more secret linguistic project of the women, Láadan the real language made for and by women for which Langlish is a front. 

The others assume Aquina wants to add Nazareth's encodings to the computer program where they work on the project, but Aquina instead wants to find Nazareth's notebook and copy them down. The rest of the women are against this as it violates the girl's privacy in the same way as reading someone's diary, but Aquina argues that it's not the same. One's diary is only important to oneself, whereas Nazareth's writings are important to every woman on this planet and every woman beyond and all women to come. She decides to find the notebook and work on the encodings, even if she has to work on it alone. 

We cut to another character, Ned Landry, who in a book full of men who are misogynistic is probably one of the worst ones. This was a person where every paragraph I'd get more angry at. The one line is when he's talking about his wife, Michaela, where he's like, she's so cute when she's angry. She looks so cute when she looks upset. Isn't that cute?

He is married to Michaela, who he essentially bought from an agency which trains women to be the ideal wife. Ned finds this to be the case as Michaela predicts his every need. 

JM:

Yeah, that's so funny because she did it from his perspective, right? 

Gretchen:

Yes. 

JM:

I think that's one of the things that I found so fun about this book is that she's like, okay, let's hang out in the heads of these men, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah. Michaela, who is a perfect listener, she listens so intensely and she's just so interested in what I have to say when no one else is versus, you know, some of the the Chornyaks and the other linguists who are like, oh, you know, the silly women with their encoding project, it just gives them something to do. Nothing going on there. It's just their silly little project. 

JM:

So there's an aspect of this that actually made me think like it's, I don't know, again, it's kind of one of the things that about the structure of the book and so on it made me kind of almost think sometimes like now as we're summarizing it especially, I'm kind of feeling like even though like this wasn't a fix up kind of stories that we've been talking about before that I'm sure we'll talk about again, it almost feels like you could divide this book or even like make this book and expand on the different aspects of it that these are a whole bunch of different short stories. The characters all have their stories and their backgrounds and they're like, sometimes the things that are going on with them are so different, too, that it's like it feels like it would work like that. You know what I mean? 

It's really interesting now to me. I mean, I think while reading, I was a little bit like, I'm not sure if this is all going to tie together and now I'm kind of like actually feeling good about it. I mean, sometimes there's some uncertainty about what's going to happen, you know, and it's like, what's the future going to be? I'm certainly curious to see if she'll tie up all the threads. So this story, meanwhile. 

Gretchen:

Yes. Yes. Michaela's story here, where it begins, and she's the perfect wife. She listens to everything that Ned is saying very intently, which is very different from everyone else he knows, unlike everyone else she listens. However, he finds his home life disrupted after Michaela gives birth to a child, taking her attention away from Ned. He decides then to give his child up to a government project while Michaela is out of the house. She comes home and he explains that it's the fault of the linguists, "those filthy lingos", as the government is using the children volunteered to attempt to communicate with non-humanoid aliens. 

Michaela takes this with grace, and the next day she kills him, rids herself of the evidence, then draws the attention of the authorities. She plans to take up being a nurse, one of the only jobs afforded to a woman, and has even bigger plans from there. 

The Landry's child unfortunately suffers the same fate as Ned. This is not surprising to the scientists working on this linguist project. Every child they have exposed to a non-human alien in their interface has died, exploding or being turned inside out by the alien in residence's incomprehensibility. Brooks Showard, the head of the project, sees the latest results of the government experiment and exclaims he is sick onto death of killing innocent babies. The other researchers under him, Lanky Pugh, Beau St. Clair, and Arnold Dolby, are as well, but have tried and failed many other ways to achieve the results they need.

JM:

Did anybody else get like kind of almost like a Lovecraft feeling about all this stuff that they're like throwing these little children, infants into these? They don't really know what's going to happen because the aliens are so alien that it might change your whole perception, it might turn you inside out, it might like, it was kind of scary, it was an aspect that was nowhere else in the book. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, it is kind of a cosmic horror type of concept, I feel like, you know, there's this alien that's so incomprehensible that trying to learn its language, your body, just transforms. 

Nate:

Yeah, it literally turns you inside out in really gross ways. It was a lot more graphic than, I guess, well, the rest of the novel and really, quite frankly, more graphic than I was expecting it to be. 

Gretchen:

Yes, yeah, when you get to the section, you don't really expect exploding babies, I think, when you start this novel. So I remember, yeah, it's a very surprising development.

JM:

So I have some names, you know, I got like my recurring thing, Michaela, the murderous nurse. So my name for the Pentagon, I don't know, Pentagon government guys or whatever, those guys, it's the Four Stooges. Pretty much, they're not completely idiots, but they are, right? Like, every now and then, one of them will say something kind of canny, that actually means something, right? But they're just so ridiculous, these four guys, right? 

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

Especially the way they interact with each other, right? 

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

They're hilarious. It's like, it's weird too, though, because like this part of the book, I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed that, but it almost felt so disconnected from everything else, in a way. I'm glad that it was there. I enjoyed it. Like I said, I enjoyed that aspect, the kind of government bureaucracy satire. I enjoyed the silly, I don't know, like the way those these four guys interacted. I enjoyed the sort of somewhat, I don't know, weird fiction-esque, Lovecraft maybe-esque aspect of the aliens. And of course, the eventual resort to LSD was interesting. But yeah, it just, it did feel like another thing, like it just felt kind of like a sideline. And I was almost like warning myself, don't get too distracted by this, right? Don't get too invested in this part, because this is really supposed to be about a women's language, right? 

Then, I don't know, it just, again, like, this is sort of this feeling of being slightly overwhelmed by how many things she tried to tackle in this book. Or you're like, your personality might be like, I wanted to go in this direction, I wanted to focus more on this, and it's not going to, right? 

So it's interesting. Again, now that I finished it, and now that I've had time to think about it, I don't mind any of that. I can talk, just talk about it, right? Like we're doing now. I always enjoy this, because we get to talk about the book and how we each feel about it. And like, I always kind of come away usually feeling more positive a little bit, even though I started out pretty positive most of the time. But you know what I mean?

Gretchen:

Yeah, I will say like initially, although I was intrigued by the storyline, I did like the cosmic horror as sure, you know, this very strange concept.

JM:

Oh, I will say the way that ended was so funny to me, and we'll get into that. But again, it's like she she merged the humor with the cosmic horror in a way. And I just, well, we'll get to that. But yeah, yeah, I enjoyed that a lot too. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, it's kind of a Lovecraft mixed with like "A Modest Proposal" type. You know, for a satire, it feels right to have something similar to that here.

JM:

Yeah. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, so it is a need to the results that they need. Their superior says that they must have the language without really elaborating further on why they need it. Showard has an idea, though, of kidnapping a linguist's baby to put in the interface. He argues that their procedure of attempted language acquisition is the same as the linguist's successful one. Besides, he and his team are slaughtering innocent infants for something that the linguists who leech off the resources of honest working citizens should be doing for them instead.

Finding out that there is a linguist who has recently given birth, or whelped, and given the approval of their higher ups, the men, except Pugh, who is too valuable as a computer scientist, draw straws to determine who will steal the baby. The duty falls on Showard, who disguises himself as a doctor and takes the baby of the St. Syrus family of the Lines from the ward. Thomas Chornyak receives a message about an emergency meeting where he meets with two government agents. These two agents, called John Smith and Bill Jones, inform him of the kidnapping. They tell him they have taken emergency custody of the child and explain the experiment and its purpose to him. 

Thomas wants the agents to elaborate further on the importance of this project and, more specifically, the justification of stealing one of the Lines' infants. Jones claims that, despite the statements that there are no genetic differences between linguist children and other children, which the government supports to keep tensions between the groups low, the government doesn't believe this statement is factual. Thomas tells the two agents those of the Lines have been telling the truth and they have failed to learn the language of their non-humanoid alien because human minds simply cannot physically perceive and understand the universe the way such a different species can. 

Thomas sums up the government not believing the linguists have killed multiple children and now believe they are entitled to a linguist infant, an infant who will die like all of the other infants. Still, Thomas agrees not to tell the St. Syrus family of the other linguists that the kidnapping was orchestrated by the government or back any linguists out of the diplomatic duties they're performing. He reserves that latter move for the possibility that the government succeeds in communicating with a non-humanoid species whose perceptions can be tolerated by humans and conclude the linguists aren't the only people who can acquire alien languages. 

As he leaves the meeting for the St. Syrus household, he witnesses Michaela Landry getting an Infant Hero Medal on behalf of her dead baby. A short time later sees Michaela acting as nurse for Stephan Rue Verdi, a member of the Lines. He is 103 and a talker, so Michaela is tasked with being a listener, doing as well as she did for Ned.

Eventually, Michaela decides it's time to get rid of him, part of her goal of killing as many linguists as she can. Michaela the murderer, the murdering nurse. In the meantime, Thomas meets with the head of the St. Syrus household, Andrew, who has just found out that a child of his household has been kidnapped. Thomas acts rightfully shocked and indignant at the news and asks Andrew if it was his child. It wasn't, though Andrew feels awful for his brother as it was his first child. The sympathy, of course, isn't extended to the mother who has been sedated so no one would have to suffer with her catarwalling. All the women are carrying on, knowing that even if there was a ransom they could pay to get the baby back, the Lines would not pay it. 

Thomas suggests Andrew find something for them to do to distract them, and Thomas also promises to get private investigators on the case, no matter the price. Soon after Thomas learns from John Smith that the baby is dead, dying in the interface just like all of the non-linguist infants had. Smith argues that what the government did wasn't the same as if a non-linguist had been kidnapped. Lingos don't have any feelings for their children, having so many and working them from birth, using them simply as products as more lines of communication. Thomas in anger points out that despite the accusation of mistreatment and abuse of their children by people like him, the government doesn't step in, and that's because the sacrifices linguist children are forced to make ensure the comfort of other children.

It is a reality Smith is unable to face just as the rest of the public seems incapable of facing. He warns Smith that such a kidnapping must not happen again. He then meets again with Andrew and lies by telling him an investigator discovered. 

JM:

The way Thomas just demolishes this guy is incredible, right? I kind of let my guard down for a second and I'm like, yeah, I mean this guy is kind of cool, right? Like he's saying all the right things. He's being so like, why can't he think better about the whole gender thing, right? It is so ingrained in the society, right? And he just, he's a really interesting character is Thomas. He's also obviously very frustrating, right? And like, yeah, maybe we can talk a little bit more about the individual characters at the end worth focusing on, I mean, there's some that definitely get more attention than others and Thomas is definitely somebody we spent more time with than almost anybody else really in the book. So it's interesting that she's focusing a lot on him.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I feel like this part in particular is a moment of kind of where you see that dichotomy clearly between Thomas being very rational and being able to very clearly articulate the,  not necessarily the oppression, but perhaps the hatred that the linguists receive from others. And yet he can't really extend the same kind of thought process to women in general, where there's almost things that he says distinguishing the treatment of linguists from non-linguists is very similar to what's happening to women. And yet that's normal for him. That's normal that women are treated that way. And they should be because that's the way it is.

JM:

So it's really interesting to me that she made this book with the society where, first of all, okay, women are severely oppressed. Second of all, linguists are treated like everybody hates them, right? Everybody from the government officials to the working class. There's weird conservative TV programs that are like some weird thing where I don't follow the talk shows, but I'm kind of imagining like Alex Jones or maybe what was that guy's name? He used to be on the radio, Rush Limbaugh. I kind of imagine like we haven't really talked about the interchapter excerpts and stuff. It's something that Frank Herbert did a lot for the "Dune" and like Jack Vance does it all the time, but it just kind of gives you these like background bits into the world. And she does this a lot, right? With the different things. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. Yeah. And like rereading "Left Hand of Darkness", the alternate chapters are always like a kind of story or some archive piece. So it's very, it's very similar in that where it gives this piece of the world to the audience. 

JM:

Yeah. Yeah. But the linguists are like despised. And there's all kinds of things that make people feel like, so I don't know, I can't think of a parallel. Can you guys think of a parallel in terms of like, I don't know, an occupation or I mean, I guess with the linguists, it's almost more than that because they're brought up in this when they're babies, right? And it's not just an occupation. It's their entire reason for being, I guess. I don't know. The closest parallel I could even think of was like race, right? And I'm like, well, that's kind of a weird parallel to draw. I don't know if that makes sense, right? But it just like, sometimes it seems unreasonable to me, like, I'll talk about it more when we get to chapter, I don't know what chapter it is now, but it's talking more about Michaela, the murderous nurse and how like, her motivations for doing the things she does. And it's like, well, it's just like, everybody hates linguists that much, right? But it's like, wow. 

Gretchen:

I mean, already up to this point in the novel, the reason that they took the linguist baby is because people genuinely believe that linguists are some other species or somehow different genetically. So it is very much like, very similar to, well, the reason we need to take care of women as minors is because logically or biologically, they are different from men. They have a different brain. So we have to infantilize them. Or is that that's the logic that we get from the men in this book, including the linguist men? 

JM:

It's funny that it's linguists though. It's kind of makes me, it's cool. But it makes me laugh a little bit too. It's like, the science fiction fans imagining that they're Slans or something like that. It's like, well, now the linguists, they're like, we're in a society where the most valuable people in the entire world are linguists. And they're the most important people in the world. And of course, everybody hates them for that, right? But is it just like, well, a linguist would maybe like to imagine that? It was really, yeah, I mean, I don't know, I'm sure she's aware of the humor side because like, yeah, there's so much funny stuff in this book. But yeah, it's funny and cool at the same time, right? It's like, oh, linguists, you know, like the most terrible people in the world. They're probably not even Christian. 

Gretchen:

The dirty lingos. 

JM:

They keep their babies in a group crash thing. It's so unnatural. 

Gretchen:

They're living in communes and they violate the child labor laws. Yeah. Well, after Thomas warned Smith that a kidnapping shouldn't happen like this again, he meets with Andrew and he lies to him, telling him that an investigator discovered the infant had been taken by a xenophobic terrorist group and killed, bringing the whole affair to a close.

JM:

Okay, so we'll continue on. We're splitting this up. So now we're going back to a younger Nazareth time, I guess that's the best way to express it. There actually are some year indications at the beginning of some of the chapters, but I found it a little bit inconsistent. It didn't necessarily help me that much, but there's enough context. So it's fine. So this time, Thomas is on the way home from an award ceremony that he thinks is hypocritical. And it seems to have something to do with the government employees learning bits of alien languages. But there are obviously not as good at this as the linguists of naturally. And the linguists themselves wrote the grammars. 

So he goes on to muse about the fickle silliness of women and how he doesn't understand them and how it's a constant chore, but sometimes a source of amusement to keep them in line. He goes home and finds the household in a bit of turmoil because their child, Nazareth, is sick. And it sounds, I mean, the way it's described almost makes me think of food poisoning or something like that, but could be something worse. And Thomas's wife, Rachel, is quite worried, but Thomas dismisses it as the silly woes of a young girl wanting attention. And she has work to do the next morning with some negotiations with her specialty aliens, the REM 34 Jeelod aliens. 

Thomas uses this confrontation to basically order that Nazareth should have less free time and suggests that Rachel's really tired. And it's not just because of a foolish team. And she needs to spend less time messing with that made up language that the Barren House women have put together. 

As soon as Rachel leaves, Thomas's brother, Adam, shows up and insinuates that Thomas is letting Rachel walk over him. And that he should keep her under control. Adam apparently should speak for himself because in the thoughts of Thomas, he treats his own wife like a man when they argue and forgets that women are no more than somewhat sophisticated children. It's always put as though, again, Thomas is the reasonable guy in the room whenever he has the point of view. And yeah, Elgin's pretty good at showing this, but also how horrible Thomas really is in a way. So plenty of men do think like this still. They may not say it in public, but when they're hanging out loose with their friends, a lot of it comes out. 

But he gets on the phone with this government rep and tells them there's a chance Nazareth won't be available. And he slightly suggests that if they want more skilled language speakers, they should send some of their own babies for interfacing. He's using some of Rachel's tactics here and he knows it. But he doesn't seem aware of the hypocrisy. He just thinks it's convenient. 

So meanwhile, in Barren House, Aquina is in a lot of trouble because she's been found out and she's secretly in looking through all of Nazareth's private notebooks and decided to take matters into her own hands, which means that she's going to poison Nazareth to make her infertile. So she would come to Barren House early and help them with Láadan, the true women's language. 

Now, hey, maybe if she had succeeded, Nazareth would have actually had a better life. And you know, this was one of the interesting ethical quadries that the book put me in. Because yeah, like a part of me was like, well, that's a really mean thing to do, right? But I don't know, considering the future that Nazareth had, and the fact that she didn't even really feel that attached to especially her sons. Yeah, I mean, maybe it would have been better. 

But she's already come up with, or Nazareth that is already come up with lots of new encodings, which the women consider very valuable, as they're basically new concepts that could only be expressed in the new language. The other women think it's selfish and unethical, of course, but also really dangerous for all of them, since Aquina was so easily found out, and they have a lot of secrets. So it really wouldn't do to have the men discover all this stuff. And indeed, the medical computers or something have come to the conclusion that poisoning is the most probable cause of Nazareth's illness. 

S this is another weird thing that happens in this book. So an inspector comes to the Chornyak house. And his name is Inspector Morse, which is kind of funny, because there's this traditional British police procedural mystery series about that "Inspector Morse". And so I forget the name of the writer, but it's also been made into a BBC series and stuff. And it's been around forever. 

Because of the emphasis on this character and the description of the inspector, I thought there would be some more coming of this, and we'd see him around for a bit, and he'd be sort of like an antagonist, you know, or that you kind of love to hate sort of person, right? But he's kind of cool. He just comes in for a little while and then he's gone. But so it doesn't really happen that way. And but I enjoyed hearing him go through the different types of poisoners, for example. And he tries to reason out the situation. And Morse will start an investigation. And he wonders if someone is out to poison linguists children, a representative maybe of a terrorist organization that doesn't think Earth should be in contact with aliens. 

But actually, though, it doesn't take long, because nobody ever really inspects Barren House as such, which is one of the earliest things he wants to do. And the announcement, which Thomas is "kind" enough to make, lets the women know what's going on and what they need to do, because they need to come up with a plan really quickly. Luckily, they have a sudden new, I don't know, fall guy. Is that an appropriate word? 

Nate:

Fall ladies, I think. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

So Aquina wants to be, but she gets shut down real fast. Instead, they settle on this woman named Belle Anne. And it's again, this thing, their conversations are all very low key, but they really have these revolutionary, quote, dangerous spirit at the heart. And some of them are willing to die for the cause. Or be irrevocably locked up and altered and suppressed by heavy doses of whatever psychiatric drugs they decide to give her in the end. 

So Belle Anne has a history of what the men would call mental instability and never had any interest in bearing children and prevented herself from doing so every time. And that's why she ended up at Barren House pretty young. And the doctor thinks she actually does this with the power of her will, and she's a sort of witch. And luckily, most other women don't seem to know this trick because they would have a huge problem if they did. And it's hilarious how openly and boldly the doctor just admits that. And also hilarious that because this is a flashback. So this is hilarious. Thomas Chornyak, when he hears this, he goes, "Judas Galloping Priest". It's a good curse. I encourage people to use Judas Priest more often in this way, right? 

Anyway, Belle Anne has to scapegoat or something. She volunteers. So it's not like she's doing this against her will. So before the police can swarm all over Barren House, she just shows up at the police station and she's a deeply religious woman, apparently. I'm not sure how much of it is an act and how much isn't because we don't really get to know a lot about Belle Anne. She does say in the flashback kind of thing that she destroys the fertilized eggs and stuff through her praying. And that's how she said she did. 

Morse is pretty dumbfounded because yeah, Belle Anne's confessed about trying to kill Nazareth. And she says that the Lord told her to do it. And she wanted to hurry Nazareth on to join with her heavenly father. Belle Anne goes to the nut house and Adam cautions the women at Barren House about religious mania. I guess the men are quite relieved and actually so are the women since they're safe now that their secrets are untouched for now. 

Anyway, anything else to say about Belle Anne at this point? 

Gretchen:

That's I felt that maybe was like one of the more disturbing moments for me. I feel like that is a moment that really, I know, J.M., you had mentioned a little bit about kind of it being maybe a little like, as you said, maybe softer, although not necessarily that, but for lack of a better term, kind of a softer oppression. But yeah, I feel like that's one of the more haunting results of what's happening to the women.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely. And I think it could admire the Belle Anne character because she knows very well what she's getting herself into. And like you said, she does it voluntarily. She's not forced into it. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, it doesn't entirely victimize her. I mean, she does it for the cause and it's a very noble thing to do. 

JM:

Yeah, yeah. It was interesting. I mean, you know, again, it would have been cool to know a little bit about that. Like, you know, just like you have this character that you can just dump as a sacrifice. And they do. I mean, Elgin does go into the background and stuff. And it's more sexist a picture now. He's happy that he's a police inspector because he gets to experience stuff like this. And he's like, he wishes he could go to the pub and talk to his buddies about the crazy thing that happened at work and the crazy Jesus freak lady that he got a confession from. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, this finishes like our little foray into detective murder mystery genre for a little bit. 

JM:

Yeah. Yeah. So but yeah, we don't get to see any more of him. But meanwhile, the four stooges are still trying to solve their problems uselessly. And they figured out that they can't crack alien languages with computers. They might be helpful after the initial stages. Finally, someone wants to, bothers to wonder, I think it's actually Lanky Pugh, you a bothers to wonder what the Beta-2 alien thinks about all this shit being cooped up in the makeshift interface for a really, really long time. And again, it makes me wonder about all this stuff with the aliens. Are they prisoners? Did they agree to all this or what? But I guess presumably with the linguists, they did. But I don't know about this one. This one just seems really strange, right? Apparently they need something. They need something from the Beta-2 world. Yeah, but it's not really specified, right? 

Gretchen:

Yeah, later on, they do communicate or at least as much as they are possible to other aliens of this species. Yeah, like they contact them with a message. 

JM:

I think if she had like, really explored every corner and direction this book would have could have taken this book would have been like 800 pages long.

Nate:

Well, I suspect that's why there's the two sequels because I'd imagine that this is really just like the first third of a more or less 900 page novel. 

JM:

Yeah, I guess. But again, you know, it kind of makes me wonder, I got the feeling that I again, I could be wrong, but I got the feeling that the next book is going to focus a lot on the language, right? But I don't know. Again, it could be maybe not, maybe not, right? 

So, so meanwhile, the effing linguists just won't tell these guys what they're doing wrong. There's going to have to keep experimenting. And Beau St. Clair has this amazing idea. And he thinks that maybe if they start giving babies hallucinogens really, really, really early on, they might be able to drop the barriers and allow them to perceive a different reality or something. And that's accommodate themselves to the Beta-2 language. And then the baby might be ready for anything. And Brooks Showard thinks this is absolutely brilliant. And yeah, this is when Arnold Dolby, he sputters in outrage and he says that quote Nate said, it's really funny, right? 

But it's token resistance only. And Brooks wants them to start blackmailing a few linguists, ones who aren't the so morally squeaky clean and suggest they enlist the help of the NSA. So again, nothing really comes of this. This part later, there's this thing about how incompetent all the spies are and how they really can't get anywhere. I don't know, it might have been interesting to see this, like they just, they just seem to be the stooges, right? They just seem to be throwing stuff at the wall, right? They just seem like, Oh, that didn't work. Well, let's try this. Let's, we need this kind of baby blackmail some linguists, get some narks in there and try to figure out like, I don't know, trying to get some dirt, maybe we can get some leverage somehow. Like, nothing really comes of that. 

But about the babies, he thinks the safest would be to start with test tube babies or tubies, experiments on them, which makes sense, I guess, nobody will miss them. So yeah, so we're still splitting about a time of it between chapters, I kind of debated how to do this, if I should just focus on one thing at a time, but we'll go in chapter order, I guess. 

So meanwhile, things are progressing for Nazareth and Thomas plans to marry her off at 15 with this guy, Aaron, and Nazareth really hates him. He's a selfish, inconsiderate, mean brat. And Rachel knows this, but Thomas doesn't care at all. And Nazareth will be married and pretty much ready to start making babies. And remember, at the beginning of the book, it stated that she had nine of them. So that's quite normal for this time. And again, this is kind of an interesting thing about the book, because this came out in 1984. And this is around the time when people started really becoming aware of like, you know, overpopulation, like that things were, I don't think, I mean, sure, it's something that had been kind of bandied about a little bit before. But I don't really think before this time, people were like, "Hey, the earth might become too crowded, it might become too populated with people, maybe we shouldn't have so many babies", right? 

But in this future, it seems like priorities are reversed. We want to have as many babies as possible. 

Gretchen:

It is mostly the linguists that feel this way. Other people, it seems in the public, have only like one child or two. 

JM:

Yeah, it's mostly maybe also the linguists, right, specifically, right? 

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

Yeah. So that's a fair point, right? But we also have colonies on other planets. So again, it's like, we don't really know how life is there, right? It's kind of an interesting thing too, because like, yeah, I just can't help but think, well, surely, I mean, we know we heard about how the American Constitution changed and all this stuff, but like, we're a global society, but we also have like colonies all over the place, like, they can't all be the same, right? They surely can't be, right? So I don't know. Why don't the aliens negotiate with some of these people instead of Americans? I don't know. 

It's really strange to me. Again, I sort of see, you know, Gretchen, you kind of explain why she might have done that, and I get it, but it's just, yeah, I don't know. It's kind of a hole in it for me. I'm just, I'm not, there's probably a reason for it, but I'm just not clear on what it is. So that's, I just got to go with it. 

But anyway, Rachel and Thomas get into another horrible fight, where Rachel basically abases herself and Thomas acts very condescending and incredibly belittling. The Barren House women commiserate with Rachel, and somehow the test tube baby situation with the hallucinogens, it's gotten out somehow. The supposed secret that the Four Stooges are supposed to have, it's, it's not really a secret. So the women know about it, or at least rumor about it. And then, so they want, actually want Thomas to try and look into it. 

Meanwhile Nazareth's being watched and guarded all the time, but she still manages to get to Barren House, and the women bolster her up and say she needs to do this marriage thing, even though it'll be hard, and she hates the so-called adding a stud, Aaron. At this point is where Aquina's little trick gets exposed, and naturally Nazareth's really upset. And we learn a little about the real language the women are making under the cover of the silly language that the men already know about, which is called Langlish. And the men have to be encouraged that the women are just really silly and not up to anything useful, just some fluffy female hobby. And yeah, that's it. 

So then chapter 14 starts with the Tubie song, which is really fun. I was kind of disappointed that it wasn't a real song, but also it's cool that it's just something she made up. 

Gretchen:

So showing off some of her filk skills. 

JM:

Yeah. Maybe somebody needs to write the Tubie song, right? That's it. We're in the future now and studios drop a whole bunch of nonverbal babies off at this government orphanage. And these testive babies have become completely non-communicative. And yeah, the they don't have names or anything, they just have a bunch of numbers. And it's a really funny interaction between Stooge Dolby and this government guy. And nobody knows what to do with those poor Tubies. They're being handed over because the experiment didn't work. And now the babies don't respond to much of anything, although they can they move around and they seem to react to certain things the way you would expect. But yeah, they're completely not open to any kind of language communication or signs or anything like that. 

Thomas Chornyak knows about all this. He examined them and he theorized the babies had an absence of lexicalization. Basically, their heads were full of nonverbal ideas and experiences. There's a funny bit where Thomas offers to take all the Tubies because he thinks maybe being exposed to a large amount of native speakers of various human and alien languages might help them to sort of lexicalize and Dolby thinks that would be so horrible and be worse than what they did to the babies already. 

But he doesn't have any ideas and just turns them over to this government guy. And we don't know what happens to them after that. 

Meanwhile, Michaela, the murderous nurse, has been going through various Lines of the linguists, going after elderly men. And she bumped off an old guy and supervised the natural death of another. And now she's on her way into Chornyak House. And this time, though, her idea is that she'll be working at Barren House. 

At first, she doesn't seem to have any qualms about potentially murdering women because, I guess, again, she hates linguists that much or thinks she does. So I'm not really too sure about all this because it was the government program that her former husband gave the baby to, not the linguists. So you'd think she'd direct her hatred mostly elsewhere. But I don't know. I guess the linguists are just indirectly responsible. I don't know. It's strange to me. 

I can't quite, I really enjoyed her as a character. I thought she was a lot of fun. But I just, I couldn't really figure her out also. I don't know. She didn't seem to specifically want to murder men, necessarily. And she didn't necessarily, it wasn't the linguists who, like, they weren't the ones who killed her baby. So I don't know. I was just, I guess, it's just because society was that way, right? And again, like, all that stuff pointing to orientating the linguists so much. I guess she was a victim of that. I guess she bought into all that up to a point, right? And, you know, she kind of changes her tune as the book progresses. 

But I couldn't quite wrap my head around that, I guess, because on the one hand, her murders seemed very rationalized. She was such a calm and collected person. And she didn't seem like she would do anything without reason. So it was strange to me. But I really enjoyed her anyway. 

Gretchen:

I mean, I know that when Ned first revealed to her that he had given their baby away, I know he was the one that was sort of blaming the linguists. And even though I don't know why Michaela would listen to anything Ned said, maybe it's just that she needed some sort of scapegoat. And that was the best that she had. 

JM:

I guess so. I guess that's it, right? It doesn't take her long to kind of figure it out by living with the linguists, right? So, but I mean, I don't want to, I mean, we're talking about her character, I guess I might as well. I mean, this is a spoiler thing anyway. So, but I was sad when she did what she did, and it was gone, right?

She was a cool character that kind of wanted to see her come through. 

Anyway, Michaela's ready. She's excited about beginning her new life and continuing her murder spree. 

In the next chapter, we have to go back to Nazareth, who's now progressed a little more in years and she's 19. And of course, she's very unhappily married, and she's still working hard for the linguists. And she already has three children. And her husband is an egotistical, abusive nightmare. Now, on her birthday, she's supposed to interpret for negotiations over a Parisian import tariff, aren't they all, with Jeelod aliens again. And her support person is a new guy, Jordan Shannontry, who is courteous and charming. But the negotiations don't happen that day because the aliens have insulted the entire American government people by sending female negotiators. And it's a clear slight, Nazareth's secretly delighted. 

So Jordan impresses her by letting her school him and a message for the Jeelods and marching out of the room and delivering it to them face to face, something she as a woman wouldn't have dared to do. But he's also so nice about it. And she admires his quiet assertiveness and comparing him with her husband. 

Now, back to the Stooges, though, they're not done with babies and LSD. So Dolby spins it in a way that, yeah, the experiment didn't actually work, but we didn't learn anything about Beta-2 or the language, but we still learned something important. And now, yeah, you guessed it, they need a different kind of baby again. So they're going through this again, you know, it's like, okay, this kind of baby didn't work. That kind of baby, you know, and it's like this earlier on, they're kind of thinking, well, the Linguist babies must be special. There must be some weird genetic thing with them, even though that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Like that must be a thing, right? Let's try that.

But yeah, somebody's brought in a new "volunteer quote" baby. And well, it's not a tubie. So they're just going to try the same thing on that one. And they don't waste any time. And they grab that little guy, and they throw it in the interface with a weird, flickery alien. And yeah, I cracked up at this. 

So the alien just seems to lose its shit and go nuts. And I don't know if anyone else thought this, but to me, it was like the Beta-2 alien just metaphorically threw up its hands and went, Oh, my God, not this again. I've had it with these idiots. I'm out of here. I don't know, it could be that or maybe the Beta-2 alien was really traumatized. And that's the kind of the other thing is right. They just don't know. They don't know they have no clue. The end result is that the baby seems kind of okay. But the Beta-2 thing is well, it's either gone or dead or something. 

The linguists won't help at all. And Arnold and the Stooges are terminated from the project. 

Finally, we have the final story here, I guess he could say, where Nazareth continues to work with Jordan, and he starts to develop feelings of affection for him. And he compliments her and even brings her flowers. He really does seem to while it seems like he wants something. And I guess I can see why that's her perspective. Really, he's just doing that thing. But sometimes we do, I guess where like the only reason he's doing it is because he can. And there's not really any anything deeper than that. 

So there's only to be one more session between them, and she has to act as she sees things. Don't forget, he's also like twice her age. So as they're walking to the car with their escort, she whispers, "I love you so very much" into his ear and runs and is very childish, but also quite sweet. But the results, not great, just takes a few hours.

So Jordan goes and tells and Nazareth gets balled out by Thomas, who of course, makes her feel ridiculous and stupid. Aaron is there too. And yeah, the men agree that Jordan acted with all propriety and as he should. But Nazareth, of course, was a silly little fool. 

Aaron makes lots of cruel jabs. And in the end, both men are laughing at her. That's the last time Nazareth feels any affection for a man, or any male past the age of a toddler. And yeah, Nate take it away.

Nate:

All right, so chapter 18 opens up with an interview excerpt from Thomas, where again, we get this kind of duality of his character, where he one, feels bad for the women despite their access to computer education and their language training, but comes off incredibly patronizing and powerless at the same time. He's clearly wrestling with the morality of oppressing women. But at the same time, he doesn't seem particularly concerned about upsetting the status quo, aside from vague big hand waving that he'll do something about it in the future.

So back to the main story, Michaela shows up at Barren House and she's appalled at the conditions there, overcrowded and lacking in privacy. However, that's how the women want it. They've always grown up in communal living and it naturally lends itself to the creation of a counterculture with a secret language. It's safety in numbers after the anti-linguist riots, and the women certainly know how to stick together and survive. 

Michaela is interested in all the language talking, but can't really understand any of it, but still keeps her ears open. In chit-chatting with some of the women, Michaela learns the language classification schema, not something easy like Jovian. As oftentimes, these alien cultures will have more than one language, which I think is something really underappreciated in most science fiction. And then we were talking about Klingon earlier. It's like, what do we really believe that all of the Klingon race speaks one language is considering there's like thousands of languages spoken on earth. It's not really very likely. So I appreciate that she threw this little tidbit in there. 

But yeah, all the languages begin with REM, which comes from the common usage of BASIC, which is I think incredibly charming and quaint, considering how fast BASIC fell off in the programming world. When I took a introductory programming course in like the year 2000, the first thing the professor said is, all right, forget everything you've learned about programming from BASIC. So it's not really something used anymore. But it plays a major part in this novel. And certainly other science fiction novels from around the time period, you definitely see some of it in Frederik Pohl's "Gateway", which again, it's a kind of interesting relic of the time period. 

But the first number is the sequential order of species they've encountered. Never number one, as that would mean humans. Two is reserved for potential earth cetean languages, which is interesting considering whales and dolphins on earth are really quite chatty. But the next is a classification number, meaning if the language is subject object verb or verb subject object, etc. And the last number is the sequential order of languages that they've discovered altogether. 

So Michaela's first chosen victim is Aunt Deborah, a 97 year old, but she starts to get cold feet and is in fact very hesitant to kill any of the women. They don't fit the stereotype of the "bitch linguist", which is just a very odd phrase taken out of context. And she likens them to overworked farm animals, rather than people actively trying to harm society. She starts to grow quite fond of them, in fact. But if she doesn't kill them, then what will it mean for all the other men she's killed? Aside from Ned, of course, who had it coming, definitely deserved it. 

In caring for Sophie Ann Lopez, a 94 year old, Sophie blurts out in delirium that it won't be long now, referring to the mass adoption of Láadan, and more or less spills the beans on the entire project. Michaela thinks it's nonsense at first and is talking about it with Caroline, who tries to deflect away and divert her to Langlish. And we're then treated to an extended definition of pigeon versus creole versus native language and how they progress into one another. And it's really quite interesting how she expounds on all that process. 

JM:

Yeah. So finally, we're getting into the linguistic stuff more at this final stage of the book. 

Nate:

Yeah. And it's cool how she gets into it, and she definitely seems to have a real passion for the subject. 

JM:

Yeah. 

Nate:

But since Michaela can't go through with her mass murder plan, she approaches Thomas and asks him for leave, citing the demanding nature of the work and poor conditions, which he grants, but asked if she'll stay on. He gives her more staff. Thomas asked her to look after her father, which makes her happy as she'll be able to kill, but it won't be a woman. And maybe she'll be able to see how Láadan progresses in the process. Thomas is quite delighted with her, both her listening capabilities and her sexual prowess, which they start engaging in three months after she starts, which makes him feel more like a man. 

Then we get an excerpt from a description of gynecology from a medical address saying that gynecology isn't for women. No, it's in fact for the men. It allows men to maintain the women as if they were their property, like they were a farm animal or something, keeping them in the best of conditions. 

So after this lovely address, we are now in the summer of 2205, and Nazareth is recovering from disfigurement surgery, which I'm assuming was like disfigurement of her face and a forced mastectomy, but they didn't really go into it too too much. She's mistreated by hospital staff quite severely and quite rudely and discharged. She wants to be sent to Barren House for good. And that is indeed where she's headed now that she's barren.

Aaron asked Thomas for a divorce, which is socially taboo despite being technically legal, and after Aaron hinting that he's aware of Thomas' relationship with Michaela, Thomas then caves under the condition that it be done quietly and discreetly.

So on top of this condition, it's that Aaron waits a year before marrying the 15-year-old Perpetua, and then they agree on this with all the conditions laid out. Michaela meets Nazareth at the hospital as her nurse and is very insistent that they take a cab together rather than Nazareth taking the Robobus back to Barren House. 

We got a brief musing on how naming unnamed things makes them appear. In the case here, it's the athad, the space of skin between the fingers and the forearm, which segues into generally how language works by defining concepts and bringing them into the world as if they were magic. I mean, even between now in 1984, we see modern things like social media, the phrase that just did not exist to describe something, but now when we say that phrase, we all know what it means. 

When Nazareth has recovered sufficiently, the women tell her about Láadan, she's angry, not that they hit it from her, or that it's a bad language, but because they're not already using it. So here's one, except from this part. "You know what you're like Nazareth demanded? You're like those idiot artists who will never let their paintings be put on the wall because they always have to add one more stroke. Like those novelists never willing to let their books go who die unpublished because there's always just one more line they want to put in." So I kind of wonder who Elgin had in mind for this part. Not sure if she's a fan of Proust or not, who was a serial reviser and died before, like the final versions of his last novels were actually published, or if she had a couple of friends who were just continually revising their novels and never actually put them out into the world. But clearly, she definitely did have somebody in mind here. And then this part really kind of stuck out at me. 

So at this stage, Láadan has about 3000 words, not nearly as many as English, but certainly enough to be functional. They say that the "New Testament" has less than 1000 words in it, but it appears that she's quite wrong. At this point, as according to some quick googling, a William D. Mounce says that there are 5,437 unique words in the "New Testament" with 319 words making up about 80% of the total word count. By contrast, James Joyce's "Ulysses" and the complete works of Shakespeare both have about 30,000 unique words each. So while 3,000 words isn't huge and probably not ideal for poetics, so S. Belsky might be annoyed by Láadan as he was by Esperanto, but it's certainly functional enough for a base. 

JM:

Yeah, that's really interesting. 

Nate:

Yeah, yeah. I'm not really sure where she got the less than 1000 figures from the "New Testament", probably somewhere between the 319 words and the 5,000, and maybe something got lost in translation if you pardon the pun. But the process of adopting Láadan might take several generations, but eventually it'll get there. 

Putting it into immediate use would run the risk of being found out, in which case the med would stamp out all traces of it and separate the women, but they might get away with it given how frequently the little girls speak unknown alien language, which no one can understand, and wouldn't this just sound the same to them anyways? So after some debate, they decide to go ahead and send word out to the Barren Houses. 

Michaela is musing on her next victims and her regrets. She's starting to feel for these people and doesn't want to kill. Her next intended victim, the elderly John Chornyak, dies of natural causes, and she feels relieved that she doesn't have to kill him. We get modified lyrics to the "House of the Rising Sun" for some reason. 

JM:

Oh yeah, yeah. 

Nate:

Yeah, it's kind of odd.

JM:

Pretty cool little things. Like, it definitely reminded me a lot of a few different things, actually, but like, weirdly, like, in a strange way, I guess, Poe by way of like, Borges or something, where you're like, you kind of look at all the references here, we want to find out which ones are true and which ones aren't, right? And she does attribute them sometimes, like, obviously, we know "House of the Rising Sun", and I guess the LSD, the report of that Neil's guy on LSD a few chapters earlier. Yeah, right. I think that was a real thing. Yeah. And the, yeah, I mean, I didn't recognize the, I don't know, the, what was it, the 70s feminist poem or something? Did you? 

Nate:

I didn't Google that either, no, I didn't recognize it. 

Gretchen:

I didn't look into it, although I imagine, I feel like they might be Elgin's just because she was a poet and she, I mean, she founded the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. So I kind of assumed they might have been her own creations. 

Nate:

Yeah, I figured that might be the case as well. But I didn't really look super hard into it. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

Nate:

But yeah, I'm assuming she really liked the song "House of the Rising Sun". That's why she stuck it in there. And it feels a little bit less awkward than some of the other music references I've seen in some other books, like Stephen King kind of forcefully puts in the Ramones a lot in "Pet Sematary" or I talked about "The Time Traveler's Wife" and some of the shoe horning of like punk bands in there that feel like really, really unnatural just kind of feels off. But I mean, as an epigraph at the beginning of the chapter, I think it's kind of fun how she does it.

But now it's summer of 2212, not 2112, like the Rush song, but Láadan is being spread, secrecy is fun after all. And it appears that it's spreading faster than some of the women had anticipated. It'll still take generations to grow. But it's used to becoming widespread, especially among the little girls who are growing into it as a native language versus the adults who are more or less speaking it as a second third or fourth or however many languages these linguists can speak or languages alien languages seems like they all know quite a bit.

They're still making Langlish absurdly complicated, which I really like, especially in all the linguistics studies I've done in my personal time. Sometimes you encounter quirks of languages or read about some languages like the languages of the Caucasus that are just like really, really complex for seemingly no good reason at all. Just aside from the fact that that's kind of how they organically evolved. But if you really wanted to make a language absurdly complex and make it impossible to learn, you can definitely, definitely do so. And that's what they're doing here with the elaborate case system and word endings and various tenses and all that that just are like not practical to speak. 

So the women blue sky about breaking free, escaping with frozen sperm and setting up colonies somewhere. 

We get an excerpt from a linguistics exam that quotes more excerpts of a famous linguist describing things like the theory of universal grammar before we skip ahead to Thomas's 70th birthday. And it's a time of mirth and good cheer. And Thomas and Adam, however, notice a change in the women. They're no longer these dour shrews nagging them all the time. And isn't that weird? 

JM:

Isn't it strange what could be happening? Well, whatever it is, it must be good, right? 

Nate:

Yeah, well, we'll see. 

JM:

Yeah. 

Nate:

And Thomas realizes here that they're all speaking the same language. And how could it have happened? Weren't the linguists, especially him supposed to notice things like this? Langlish is obvious, total nonsense. But what is this new language? He needs to talk to Michaela about it since she says a good listener, she listen and listen, she does. He lets off way too much. And she realizes that the jig is up. She knows she has to act fast to preserve the women and Láadan. So while he's asleep, she just injects him right then and there with a lethal dose. She'll be caught, of course, and it will be a big scandal, certainly, but the secret will be safe. 

After a bit of a somber page from Nazareth's presumably far future diary, the surviving Chornyak household convenes the lines. The murder was indeed a scandal, and they've decided this newfound pleasantness in the women has no cure. As such, they need to punish them by further segregating them from the men. They, of course, need them still for alien language translation, and will have to figure out a solution to keep them employed on doing that. But they'll make Barren Houses for all the women now. And of course, when the women hear about this, in the Barren Houses, they all burst out laughing. This will accelerate Láadan and make the need for breakaway colonies pretty much moot.

And then the last chapter of the book, we get a nice basic program that does nothing, a classic 10 REM statement with a 20 GOTO 10 loop. And in a brief epilogue, Lanky Pugh is in a California government facility interface point between humans and whales, where they decide making the excess of tubies to genetically modify them to make them more alien in order to get the jump on the alien language. So again, trying more stuff, which probably won't work, but I guess we'll see if it does in book two. 

JM:

I completely forgot about that.

(music: bubbling voice)

spoiler discussion

Nate:

Yeah, so that's "Native Tongue". It doesn't really tie up a lot of the threads, but I do like the way that it ended with Michaela's murdering of Thomas with Láadan being safe. And it really kind of growing into this thing that is being widespread across the women, furthering the development of a counter culture revolutionary movement, which presumably will grow more and more in books two and three.

JM:

So I guess it's just going to keep growing, right? Now, again, somebody in one of the women, even though she wasn't really part of the main group, she realized that something needed to be done really quickly and she acted and she was a sacrifice. She sacrificed herself without thought. I don't think that any of the women at Barren House even realized what happened.

Nate:

Probably not. No. 

JM:

I guess not, right? They probably just thought, oh, did they actually believe that she did this because she was jealous and she was screwing Thomas and it was like, I don't know, I don't know, you know, I kind of wanted to see something of reaction or something, right? It just seemed like, oh, she's just gone just like that. Her life is kind of unbearable anyway, because she kind of realized she murdered without purpose. And so now she's upset, right? But she's also growing closer to these women. And it's just like, I don't know, I liked her. I wanted to see something more, like this little sad and unsatisfying. She's just like, oh, okay, that's it then. She's just gone now, right? Nobody gave her an epitaph or anything, right?

I don't know if the women knew what was going on. If only I got a part of me and maybe this would have been over the top, but a part of me wanted her to write a letter to Nazareth or something like that, where she poured out her soul or something like that. At least somebody got to see something, right? It just seemed like I felt really bad for her in the end, because it was like, I enjoyed the character. And even though I didn't quite understand her, I wanted her to be happy in the end. 

Nate:

Yeah, she's definitely an interesting character. And she's clearly modeled after real world serial killers. And there's definitely quite a few of these both in Elgin's time and before, as well as some after Elgin, of nurses who just like literally murder dozens and dozens of their patients. And it's like really a strange phenomenon. But yeah, she's an interesting character for sure. And I liked her presence in the book. And we don't really get a lot of scenes with her and Nazareth, but the scenes we do get between the two I think are just like really tender and touching. 

Gretchen:

At first, I had thought that I had been hoping that maybe Michaela would be able to become more involved in Láadan and maybe like help spread it outside of the linguists, like the Lines, or you know, attempt to do so or maybe not necessarily in this book, but another book. I'm glad that she was able to make a sacrifice for Láadan and for the women that she knew and had grown to care about. I would hope that they had known that was why she did it. 

JM:

Yeah. You know, and about Nazareth though, I mean, it's weird because she's the focus of so much of this, right? But at the same time, yeah, we don't really, I feel, I feel a little bit like we don't know her, right? Like, again, everything I'm thinking of would have expanded the page count enormously. But I'm also thinking like, we kind of learned about her relationship with Aaron in a sort of an abstract way. We know that he's horrible, obviously, because yeah, like that interaction, the one or two interactions we see, especially when when Thomas is there and the two of them are together is enough, I guess. But again, we don't really, I don't know, I kind of do feel like I don't really know her character, right? And she seems like we always keep kind of going back to her in a way. But at the same time, like, there's a distance there.

Gretchen:

I feel like I do kind of like the approach we have with Nazareth. 

JM:

Yeah. 

Gretchen:

I think it's kind of an interesting subversion of expectations, you know, this is like a person who is an inciting person of this movement. And you know, is the reason that Láadan is able to be spread. But at the same time, she's not like a great woman, you know, there's not like any sort of like prominent. It's not like she's leading it or you know, necessarily is someone that has a great amount of importance. Like she's just a woman, she's just a regular person, in a way. And for most of it, it's almost like she has this distance because everyone's sort of using her for their own gains.

JM:

She was valuable. Yeah, I do like how a lot of it is on her being a teen, though. And it is like, I guess, when the thing happens with what's his name, Jordan, and she's kind of confronting her father and husband at the same time. And she's like just so flustered and exasperated. And it's almost like she says she's like, Yeah, okay, but I don't think it would tattle. Her dad's like, No, really, child, that's not the appropriate word. And she's like, Yeah, that's exactly the appropriate word. And it's such an awesome teen thing to say. But it's all right. That's exactly what happened. But it just so it's just really, I don't know, that made me laugh kind of too. 

You know, it's like, Yeah, I mean, in the end, she gets kind of walked all over and it's really sad because, like, Yeah, it's horrible, right? And no doubt, this influences the fact that she can't even feel affection for her, especially male children, right, when they grow up. She doesn't, you know, it just says that like it is as a final sentence on that chapter is like, as she didn't feel anything for any of them after that, right? And it's like, well, that's fucked, you know, there was still some humor in that chapter, like she was just so like, and he went and tattled what the hell's wrong with this picture. Like, and her dad's like, Oh, well, he did the right thing. He's a gentleman. 

Nate:

Yeah, I like how she's kind of set up at this beginning to be like an exceptionally talented linguist at birth, more or less. I mean, she figures out some original concepts as a very young child. But she is not really the one who develops Láadan. And I mean, her main role in the language is development is just really telling the other women, all right, you have this language now start using it. And she just really like convinces them to use it what they already have.

Gretchen:

It's not like a chosen one sort of narrative, which like you said, it's like set up where it's like, Oh, she's going to be this exceptional person, this like, you know, legendary person that was like a genius and is going to like form the language entirely or have this revolutionary thing. But yeah, it's like, it's not just her, but the work of all the other women and she just happens to have a very significant role. But all the women before her had roles as well.

JM:

Yeah, I mean, I think there's this kind of this dichotomy in the book between the act now and act firmly or lie and wait for as long as possible until everything is perfect and that act. But then there's the danger of if you keep the latter mindset for too long, you could be sitting there for years and years and decades and decades not doing anything until the thing that you think do you want it to be perfect? Is it ever going to be perfect, right? Something like a language grows by being used, right? So, and yeah, so she's right. You know, it's like, yeah, we need to, you know, like, let's start now, let's start now. It's like, there's never going to be a perfect time, right? 

So that was really cool. I did feel a bit of that like, okay, we're wrapping up to the final chapters. Now we're like, focusing on what the thing needs to focus on for the next book, right? Like, I did get that feeling a little bit. But again, that's cool. I mean, we've all kind of said, even if it's not for the podcast, yeah, maybe, you know, we'll do a what we read segment where we're talking about, was it "Earthsong"? 

Nate:

"Earthsong" and "Judas Rose". 

JM:

Yeah, yeah. 

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, I definitely planned to read both in 2026. I, you know, like I said before, I really like this, and I really want to see where it goes. And I think she introduces a lot of interesting concepts, and I'm sure she's going to introduce more interesting concepts in the next two. 

JM:

Yeah. So Gretchen, you read some of her nonfiction work, right? And preparation for this? Do you have any more feelings on that? Because I didn't actually really, I kind of meant to look at some of that because I had a couple of things, but I was in the middle of moving from computer system to computer system, and I didn't really get to look at some of the old stuff I hadn't really looked at. I hadn't figured out. 

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Where I put it all. So I didn't really look at any of that. So I was just kind of wondering if you had any thoughts about that. 

Gretchen:

So yeah, so I read in its entirety, "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-defense". And I just sort of skimmed through at the UAlbany Library, there is a copy of the linguistics textbook that she wrote. So I was just kind of looking at some of her chapters on like certain linguistic concepts. But I think she has like a very large emphasis in most of her nonfiction does seem to cover the verbal self-defense that I mentioned. And she's very concerned with, and I think this also ties back, the reason I read the quote at the beginning of this episode is she's very concerned with violence in other ways, besides the physical. And you see that a lot in her approach to verbal abuse as something she seems to focus on and trying to empower people to fight against it, which is kind of what the entire book that I read was about, where she breaks down certain phrases that come up in people who are using verbal attacks and gives a person a way to defend against that. 

I think that that kind of is even seen a bit in the novel with the way that, especially Aaron and even with Thomas, how they treat Nazareth. Nazareth very clearly being someone who kind of has to deal with these attacks by people.

JM:

Yeah. Okay, I can kind of see how that does tie into the novel a little bit, right?

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, there's also the element of the linguist being really good at perceiving subtle changes in people's speech, body language, and things like that, and how to read people's true intentions, like pretty much right off the bat. You primarily see that through Thomas's character when he's dealing with the various government stooges and stuff like that, but... 

Gretchen:

Yeah, and those are, I know we had mentioned a little bit talking about the one where he is talking to Smith about the way linguists are treated and are kind of hated by the public. But even before that, like some of the conversations, Thomas is great. He makes some really great conversational battles with these people. There's this one part where he's able to kind of extrapolate from the concept that linguists are different than other people. Genetically, it's like, oh, all the inbreeding. You're saying we're incestual. It's this whole moment of like, oh, he's really great at sending everyone off guard through his words.

JM:

Yeah, I mean, I kind of felt like there was a lot more than this book just to get into, and she really had focused on the Láadan. And do we know to say it, there's an accent on the first..?

Gretchen:

Yeah, it's supposed to be La-a-dan. 

Nate:

Yeah, it's La-a-dan. 

Gretchen:

From what I have seen people mention, it's sort of like you sing it a little bit, and it's a rise and fall.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, we don't really get too many in-text examples of Láadan in the text, but I understand it's supposed to be like a very vowel heavy language rather than like a harder, consonant focused language. I mean, again, Klingon is the example. 

JM:

It seemed like though she'd codified some of it elsewhere, right? 

Nate:

Yeah, there's an online dictionary, and I think they published like a physical copy of the dictionary. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, it is out of print, but even like in the interviews, there's mentions of people asking about where to find more of it. There was a primer that was released, I think it was like 1986 or like two years after the book came out. It was like formally published, but through her website, some of the things are defunct, but I know there are other links to a Láadan dictionary and other essays that she wrote about it and like guides.

JM:

So I guess this kind of brings me to a question. I don't really know how to answer it, so I'm going to keep quiet, but maybe, but obviously in the context of the book, I can see how Láadan would be extremely useful and good. Now, from what it sounds like, Elgin actually wondered whether it would be useful and good in reality or something like it would be useful and good to the people of time. So I guess what I'm wondering is, do we actually think that that's the case? Do we think that a language for women has a place in society? Could we imagine if it wasn't, I don't know, like let's be honest, if it wasn't from made by a somewhat obscure science fiction writer in the eighties, would we see such a thing taking off maybe? I mean, or becoming something that women would use? I don't know. I'm kind of curious about that because that seemed to be something that Elgin took seriously. So I wonder, what, what do we think of that? I personally don't know. 

Nate:

So yeah, languages just don't really develop that way naturally. I mean, yeah. And you kind of rely on gender stereotypes for that to be true in the first place. I mean, she says that Klingon is a very masculine language. And I mean, I guess the Klingon culture is with a constant emphasis on dueling and honor and battle and all that stuff. But Star Trek has a huge cross-gender appeal, as we talked in the Star Trek episode we did in the Fanzine episode. It was like hugely, hugely, hugely popular with women. I mean, not just the Klingon language in particular, but yeah, I don't know. Like a totally gendered language. I think it would rely on stereotypes that would again be kind of specific to the Americas as different cultures view gender in different ways than the West did. And aside from like an actual active dystopian scenario where like we have in the novel where you have an actually segregated society, they're just really, I don't think would be a practical need for a language to develop like that.

Gretchen:

I think that the concept of Láadan, I think it's very much a product of the second wave of feminism and more of the ideas of past feminist thoughts. This concept of maybe more of a gender essentialism rather than maybe a more fluid approach to gender, which I feel I align a little bit more with. So I feel that while it may be interesting to have certain concepts that maybe are part of more of a feminine experience, that could definitely be something that might be useful. I don't know if even I remember looking a little bit into Láadan and one of the critiques that I saw is that there is a pronoun for women and the pronoun for men is the same as like a pronoun you would use for like an object, I believe, or like I think it's like he and it, the equivalents are the same. And I saw someone say that that kind of still puts women outside of it still kind of exceptionalizes women in a way that you still see in other languages. So I feel like maybe singling out a particular gender maybe might not in my opinion be as feasible.

Nate:

There's certainly more of an emphasis on intersectionality in modern feminism versus the kind of feminism you'd see in the 60s and 70s where Elgin was obviously growing her political and linguistic thought. 

JM:

So this is really interesting. So we're getting into some interesting territory that's kind of abstract that I thought of at some point while reading this. So okay, so this book was published in 1984. I was four years old when this book came out. I certainly wasn't reading anything like this. But I kind of like thought about the, what's the word, zeitgeist of that time period, right? And then the 80s thinking like, you know, she's probably very influenced by what happened in the previous decades. Do we think that this book is very much a product of that time? Or do we think that if this book were written nowadays or something like this would be a lot different? 

One thing I noticed. So I don't know, I'm not sure how to talk about some of this stuff because I don't have any background in like, gender studies and stuff. And I guess, I guess I'm like, I don't know. I mean, it's something I think about sometimes of like how much my own sexuality perhaps reflects a normative mindset or whatever. But I just kind of wondered the society that's depicted in the book and the way it focuses a lot on male strength and male propriety almost in a way and like the men are supposed to act in a certain way, even like things that involve women. Okay, the science of gynecology is all product of male doctors. And the whole idea is to make your fellow men feel better, right? Because, you know, you're like looking after their property, I guess, being women. 

And the whole like thing around that, it seemed to suggest this like, you know, the male primacy and everything like that. And it kind of felt slightly homoerotic to me sometimes, like just this whole like, even the thing that I focused on earlier, I can't remember who it was. It was a family member. It wasn't Adam. There's one of these guys who has this complex about being as masculine as possible. And yet, she points out like that, you know, inside he's like in all this pain. And he's really struggling, right? That he's like, not he wants to maintain this image so bad. And he's like so stiff. You're like, if you just met the right person who was able to make you relax, and let you chill, and maybe it could be another dude, maybe maybe that that could be the thing that you need, right? It's just like make you chill out a little bit and relax and not have to be so uptight all the time about being a man, right? And it's just, I don't know, it is, it was weird. Some of the thoughts I had while reading this, and I was just like, well, there is no mention of non stereotypical gender roles or anything in this book, right? And that was a very much a thing by the 80s still, right? Like, it didn't get brought up, which I thought was kind of interesting. Like, I kind of feel like if this book were written now, especially given the fact that there's a lot of humor in "Native Tongue", I kind of feel like that aspect would have been exploited a little more, and that it just feels like nobody knows how to break away from their roles, right? That there nobody knows how to break away from their gender stereotype roles, right? 

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

Nate:

I think that's kind of the whole point is that this toxic masculinity forces everybody into these rigid roles. 

JM:

I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah. And especially, I mean, we're talking about this time period where these women have been placed into these roles for like, over two centuries. This is like two centuries after we see the inciting moment of women's rights being stripped away. So it's like, at this point, probably anything outside of these roles is almost inconceivable to the characters of this novel or would obviously, even if they were conceived of, would never be able to be enacted, they would be stomped out. 

JM:

Well, I wanted to know about all the secret societies based on ancient Hellenic ideals of manhood. We're actually going on behind the scenes of society in America in this masculine dominated future. 

I don't know. It's like, but yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, there's like, there's so much stuff, right? I don't know. It's a really interesting book to talk about. And there's so many angles where it could have gone. But like, this is one of the things that we've talked about often in the podcast, and I probably repeated it because I often say it, but like, one of the cool things about science fiction is it gets you thinking about stuff like this. When you read a book or something, and there's all these things that are not included that you also end up thinking about, right? It's inspiring, right? When I was a kid reading science fiction, I kind of figured out now that maybe I'm not a writer, maybe I don't know how to string together really awesome stories. But when I was a kid, you know, like, yeah, I could write this stuff, it'd be really awesome, right? Because, you know, I'm thinking like, all these things that I'm learning about, and I'm reading about, and it's like, and there's so much that's not said, right? There's so much that's implied, or that's like, it makes you think about all the possibilities. And it's not there. But you could bring it up, you could you can take it, do your own thing, right? 

And it's just like, it's kind of exciting and cool. And this was like, it was weird because it's a dystopian book of sorts. But it also felt really like positive. I don't know, I'm used to thinking of so called dystopias as being very grim and being like "1984", where it's like, you finish it, and you're in this like gray fog of depression for a week afterwards. Because you're just like, there's no way that any of them can really defeat the party, right? This book wasn't like that at all. Maybe that's why it's a soft dystopia. 

But I'm also thinking like all these different things that are factors in the creation of the book and how much the book is a product of its time. And that's not a bad thing. That's not a bad thing. But yeah, you know, I couldn't help but think like, there could have been other things that she included in the book that are there not brought up. It's not just the sexuality thing, but it's the global thing, like it's so we don't know what the rest of the world thinks. If we take it the way people thought in the 80s, everybody wants to follow the United States of America, right? That that's how the United States of America like to portray things. Sorry, guys, but you watch all the movies and stuff from that and all that. It's like, yeah, everybody wants to be American, right? Everybody wants to move to America or be like from the United States. 

Nate:

Well, I don't know if too much has changed, considering if we take Greenland, Canada will be surrounded on three sides by the United States. And you know, what does that mean for you guys? 

JM:

Yeah, yeah. And we really don't know. You know, I'm curious about that because I kind of feel like anybody who wasn't American, wasn't from US who picked up this book would be like, well, okay, so would it all these people think like we don't know these aspects of, I guess, slight frustration or not frustration, that's not the right word, not having our things answered with this book is more interesting than annoying because yeah, you can kind of think about it as an extra to the text, right? It's not part of the text. So I don't know. But if you read a good science fiction book, you sort of exist in its world for a long time, even when you're not reading it. So you kind of think to yourself, let's imagine Thomas Chornyak taking a trip to some other country or whatever and having to deal with how everybody else thinks, right? Like how would he deal with that? He's used to dealing with his own government. He's used to dealing with his own things. Let's say he's hanging out in, I don't know, Japan or India or Australia or Brazil or like Sweden. How do they deal with things, right? We don't know. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, there is like one moment, fairly early on, I think it's right around when we learn of some of the items that Barren House doesn't want the men to find out they have. And they mention getting things from like an underground network of women around the world. And there's almost, when I first read that, I thought, well, maybe like these women are still like liberated. They are free or they are women that aren't necessarily oppressed in the same way that the women in the US are. And I kind of remember thinking like maybe this will come up and maybe it will come up in "Judas Rose" and "Earthsong".

JM:

Yeah, there's little things that make you pause and not read between the lines, she at least acknowledges, right? So the fact that I have some like, objections almost, again, it's not a mark against it. One of the things I like about this kind of stuff that we do is, yeah, it makes you think about not just the book you're reading, I'm not Elgin. So the way that I might imagine this book going is not necessarily the way that she does. And I don't know, we'll see how the other books go. Yeah, I almost wanted to shout out the Tubie song and all that. 

Gretchen:

I did want to mention the Tubie song. So I was glad you did. 

JM:

Yeah, yeah. And I enjoyed the right wing talk show or whatever the hell that was going on about the lingo. 

Gretchen:

The kiddies and... 

JM:

The way it was written was really goofy and funny. It is like, you imagine the dude with the really messed up voice that they put out on there, like you listen to Alex Jones or something like he starts out seeming like fairly normal. But as his show goes on, his voice gets weirder and weirder. And it's odd. It's odd. But some of the others were pretty cool. But yeah, I don't know, I didn't really note them down as much as I kind of had the thought that I was going to kind of wanted to revisit some of the chapters, but I didn't really end up. Yeah, I mean, I always liked that I was like when a science fiction author does that. And again, Frank Herbert and Jack Vance are certainly two that I could think of where yeah, in "Dune", you get that with every chapter in Vance books, you get sometimes that plus footnotes and end notes, right? And it's just like, yeah. 

Gretchen:

I love a good footnote in science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin does that too a lot. 

JM:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

I thought before we finished up, I'm not fluent in Láadan, but I thought I would read a couple of words from a Láadan sampler of words with new definitions, the encodings.

JM:

Yeah, yeah, cool. 

Gretchen:

So there is Lirini, an achievement that seems small to others, but means a lot to the achiever. There is Radona, unfriendliness for foolish reasons.

JM:

I have no idea how to pronounce most of these. So good. 

Gretchen:

I'm doing my best. Rahom, to non-teach, to deliberately fill students minds with empty data or false information. And Thehena, joy despite negative circumstances. I really like a lot of the words that I've so far seen in Láadan, typically have, and you see that even in the one encoding that we get from Nazareth at the very beginning, you have like an action and it shows the intentions of the action that's being taken, such as not asking for evil intentions or unfriendliness for bad intent. They have a lot of those. And I think that's really interesting that they point out the intentions of the people that are being discussed.

JM:

Thehena reminded me of Joanna Russ' story that I can't remember the name of, but I have this cool idea that struck me all of a sudden that we should do an episode Chrononauts where we read a couple of micro short story anthologies and we talk about the stories that we find particularly interesting. But there's one, I'm sure it's been published elsewhere, but it's in these two anthologies edited by Isaac Asimov and they're like "100 Great Short Short Stories", right? And there's like really, really short stories we're talking about. And there's one by Joanna Russ. And so it allows us to be kind of like experimental, right? And Joanna Russ is another pretty well known, I guess, I don't know, I guess you could say feminist science fiction writer, right? And she wrote this thing and it's like a phrase book. It's like a phrase book. It's like the kind of thing that if you're a tourist somewhere that you need to carry with you so that you can say various important things when you're stuck or whatever and you need to talk to somebody and it's like a tourist on an alien planet or something like that. It's like, the phrases start out really normal and they get weirder and weirder until you're getting, you're seeing things like, please don't eat me or that thing is my face. The phrases get weirder and weirder until you're like, what the hell? 

You know, but a lot of stuff kind of makes sense, right? Like, I guess it's kind of what I pictured when they talked about the necessity of this language. It's sort of an abstract concept to try and understand like, because these are all things that men in the society that they have right now don't seem to understand. So I don't know. 

Again, I wonder about the future where the preface comes from, right? And how much Láadan is spread at this point and who knows it. 

And this is really interesting. Being able to pronounce the words, I don't really grasp that part, but the phrases and stuff were interesting or the concepts that they were expressing. And then it took me a bit to wrap my head around this idea of the encodings, right? 

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

That encoding is like a concept that mostly just gets expressed and most effectively in that language. In other languages, it might be really difficult to bring across because you have to say like an entire sentence or something like that, just to try and accommodate the thought process. Whereas it's like, maybe you can express it in a word or two, or you can like, I don't know, I think that's my understanding of it. Anyway, I don't know if I'm right. 

Gretchen:

It's really interesting that the definition or what we learn about encodings does come from one of the openings of a chapter. So it's like, you kind of miss that if you kind of try to skip those or something, you're missing valuable information. 

JM:

Yeah, yeah. Did anybody hear her actual speaking the Láadan language? Like there were those audiotapes, right? We weren't able to find those. I don't think, right? 

Nate:

No, I wasn't able to find them. 

JM:

Yeah. So yeah, another victory for Klingon, I guess. Yeah. Going back to what you were saying about that earlier, Nate, I think we talked about this, maybe it was during the linguistics episode, maybe it was a different episode. We talked about this how in a lot of old science fiction stories, it's like everybody's on Earth speaks one language, right? Or like the whole idea to unify language seems awesome, because it seems like it would help people communicate with each other, right? Like we should all speak one language, it would be so much better, right? And then we kind of speculate as to whether that would really be better or not is now we kind of tend to think that the diversity of languages and so on is good for us and that it helps us. It's like something to be embraced. But then you get guys like Forrest Ackerman or whatever. He's like, no, Esperanto is the future, right? 

Nate:

Yeah, definitely more on him in a couple episodes. 

JM:

Yeah. This book should get the David H Keller MD Award for Baby Content. 

Nate:

Yeah, definitely a lot of that. 

JM:

Yeah. I don't know if you would be very impressed with the feminism, but he would certainly be impressed with all the baby matter. That would be something. Yeah, sadly, he probably wasn't around. I forget when he died, but he certainly never read this book. So kind of funny, because if you remember the fandom episode, and we were talking about David Keller writing it and being like, "I'm the only one who dares to talk about babies. None of you guys want to write about babies and how important they are." So we had plenty of baby talk in the "Native Tongue". So that was cool. I'll save my last comment about that till the very end of the episode. 

But I think we're pretty much talked out about this cool book, though. This is a really cool book. And I'm really glad that we read it. Not really entirely what I feared it might be. And I'm happy about that. And it was a really, it's a lot more fun than perhaps some might think it just based on, I guess, this book's place in science fiction history, which is as you know, it's mentioned in, I can't remember what the book I was reading. When we're talking about the linguistics episode, though, it has an entry on linguistics. I think it's one of these science fiction encyclopedias or something like that. And it might be the Brian Stableford one, it might be the one edited or that Neil Gaiman participated in that this is a bunch of the "Greenwood Encyclopedia", there's a couple of them anyway. And they have interesting organization where you can actually look up different fields or different areas like both writing styles or subgenres, but also like fields in science or history or stuff like that and see what science fiction books might relate to those is very, very handy for people like us, who are trying to put together Chrononauts and decide what to read and sometimes do things thematically. But this book was mentioned. And again, I was like, well, it sounds interesting, but maybe it's, maybe it's going to be dry and didactic. But not at all, not at all. It's really funny and charming in a lot of ways. So yeah, I would recommend, we all had a good time with it. So maybe we'll, we'll individually dive into the other books and we'll see. We'll talk about it maybe sometime in 2026. One or more of us will bring this stuff up.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I definitely am interested in reading the other books in this series.

JM:

Cool. Yeah. Yeah, I'm definitely I want to see where she goes with it. I've been kind of thinking about this lately and it makes me afraid because I just started watching this TV show called "Severance" that came out not that long ago. And I finished the first season. And I'm just kind of thinking like, they didn't answer anything. They didn't resolve anything. They're just trying to keep going for another season. Right. And I'm just kind of like, it was good, but I'm also kind of annoyed at the same time. Right. So we'll see. We'll see how she handles this. Right. At least I think books might have a better track record of this than television does. So yeah. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. Yeah. Now I'm thinking I've got flashbacks to the "Kindred" mini series that we discussed when we covered it. 

JM:

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So what are we doing next? So we're talking about magazine that we alluded to before. We've actually talked about a couple of things that have been published in this magazine already, including, well, for example, "The Big Time" by Fritz Leiber. There were probably other things too. Can you guys think of any ideas? We've done some Galaxy stuff, but we haven't really done a focus on Galaxy magazine. So that is going to be our focus for next episode. And we've chosen six stories. And we've chosen six, I think, really awesome stories. And this is going to be a hell of an episode where it's going to be a lot of different things to talk about. And a lot of really interesting stories. So we've each picked two. Why don't we start with Gretchen this time? Gretchen can tell us what stories they picked. So here we go. What have you got for us?

Gretchen:

So I actually, a few months ago, picked up a huge compilation of some of the stories in Galaxy, called "Galaxy: 30 Years of Innovative Science Fiction". And a couple of the stories have an introduction where the authors discuss their processes of writing them. And so I decided to pick two from this one. And the two stories that I've chosen are "Something Bright" by Zenna Henderson and "Slow Sculpture" by Theodore Sturgeon. 

JM:

Cool. I've read a couple of Zenna Henderson stories. I don't think I've read that one. And yeah, I've read a lot of Theodore Sturgeon, and I really have wanted to feature him more on the podcast. So I'm really excited to talk about this one. This one is kind of interesting because if I remember right, the Sturgeon can actually write in a lot of different modes. And even though, Nate, I think you said that the writer Kurt Vonnegut makes fun of a lot. 

Nate:

Yeah, Kilgore Trout.

Gretchen:

Kilgore Trout.

JM:

Kilgore Trout is based on Theodore Sturgeon, right? And I think that's really silly because Theodore Sturgeon was at least as capable as Kurt Vonnegut and didn't deserve to be made fun of. Even if some of his, yeah, like, you know, he had a weird personality that sometimes shows through in his work, but it's really cool. But this story, from what I remember, is not very science fiction. Like, it's got a slight science fiction framework, but it's really a drama. So we'll see if it's what I remember exactly when we get to it. But I'm looking forward to reading it for sure. Nate, what are your two stories? 

Nate:

I picked "Contagion" by Katherine MacLean. So I wanted something from issue number one, which this one appears in. And I also picked "Roberta" by Margaret St. Clair to focus more on issues of gender and sexuality and how those play together, especially queerness in a modern sense and how it was looked upon in the 1960s. 

JM:

I was actually looking at Margaret St. Clair too and wanting to include her. And because I started reading her, I don't know if it was last year or the year before, maybe late the year before, maybe early last year, but I started reading a lot of Margaret St. Clair. I thought she was really interesting. And I wanted to include her in this, but I'm like, I was kind of thinking like, I'm not really sure what story to include. And a lot of them are really, really short. And I was kind of like, I'm struggling to kind of figure out what story by her to include and thinking, well, maybe not this episode, maybe some other episode. And now Nate, you picked one. So that's perfect. I don't know if this is actually one that I've read. I don't think so. So I'm looking forward to getting to this as well. I really like Margaret St. Clair a lot. And I'll certainly have some things to say when we talk about her because I've probably read a good 30 or 40 of her stories by now. And I'm really like, you know, really impressed with her style and her individual way of doing things. She reminds me a lot of Ray Bradbury, but she has her own voice for sure. And raw fascinations, which make her stories really interesting. So yeah, that's going to be really cool. 

So I picked two stories to the first one I picked is "The Marching Morons" by C.M. Kornbluth. And this was published in 1951. This is a story that I've known for a really long time. Cyril Kornbluth, of course, was one of the original Futurians. He's friends with Damon Knight, Judith Merrill, and Frederik Pohl, with whom he did a lot of collaborations with. And actually, some of his most famous work now is stuff that he and Pohl wrote together. But Kornbluth himself wrote a lot of short stories. And yeah, he's a really interesting, diverse bunch, kind of an interesting figure in science fiction, a little bit tragic, in my opinion. I think he could have, he could have got on. He was getting better and better almost in a way. And I don't know. Yeah, he died quite young. And I don't know. The thing about this story is it's very vicious. It's really funny. But it's also very vicious and troubling. And I think especially nowadays reading it in 2025 is going to be kind of disturbing, maybe what some people would call problematic. But there are some things to keep in mind about him and the story itself, which I'm not going to get into now. But when we talk about it, I think it'll be really important. So yeah, I'm looking forward to talking about that. 

And then we're going to be talking about a story by Raphael Aloysius Lafferty. Yeah, even though I struggled with it, I love to say that name. Generally known as R.A. Lafferty. Raphael Aloysius Lafferty was a writer from Oklahoma who essentially had a very, very unique approach to writing genre fiction. And even though he comes from a basically place that has a kind of a conservative Catholic sort of background, and that sometimes does come through in the stories, there's just such as freedom and like just real playfulness and zeal in his writing and in his stories that I just love so much. And I'm really happy to be able to talk about R.A. Lafferty on the podcast. So we're going to be discussing a story called "Rainbird". And yeah, it's just really fun and really cool. And it's going to be so, so awesome to talk about. 

So I'm really excited about the Galaxy magazine stuff that's coming up because, yeah, Galaxy was trying to be something different than they were trying to be. I mean, yeah, I mean, we talked about Planet Stories a few months back, and we related them to Galaxy and how Galaxy was like almost advertising themselves as the anti-Western science fiction magazine. And sure, I mean, we love Planet. We love the Sword and Planet. We love Leigh Brackett. We love the good stuff in that field. I know I do. I've actually been reading through some of the Planet Stories issues. I didn't mention that in the reading section, but I've been going through some of the stuff. And it's a really interesting time capsule. A lot of not that great stuff in some of these, these issues, but it's still kind of fun to read, right? Galaxy was going for something else. And they were definitely a social and very political magazine. And I think we're going to see in the stories that we're covering next time, a lot of variants, a lot of politics, a lot of confrontation, and a fair bit of whimsy, and a fair bit of just sort of playfulness in style. And I think particularly with writers like St. Clair and Lafferty, you're going to get to see a little more weirdness, a little more experimentation. So it's going to be awesome, guys. I'm really happy and I'm looking forward to it. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

But for now, I think we're going to sign off and say good night. The testtube babies are crying. And it's come time. I would encourage you to do some LSD and learn some alien languages. Unless you're a baby. And if you're a baby, what are you doing listening to Chrononauts? Go, go out and play. Have some fun. We are Chrononauts and we wish you good night and happy new year. See you next time.

Bibliography: 

Elgin, Suzette Haden - "Song at the Ready" https://youtu.be/SlElFLJqW_0 (1984)

Elgin, Suzette Haden - "Suzette Haden Elgin's Verbal Self Defense Home Page" - https://www.adrr.com/aa/

Encyclopedia of Arkansas - "Suzette Haden Elgin (1936–2015)" https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/suzette-haden-elgin-3403/

Láadan Language homepage - https://laadanlanguage.com/

Marsh, Stephen R. - "An update on Suzette Haden Elgin from her husband" (2012) https://ethesis.blogspot.com/2012/02/update-on-suzette-haden-elgin-from-her.html?m=1

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America - "Suzette Haden Elgin biography" https://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/index.html#Biography

Wells, Kim - "An Interview with Suzette Haden Elgin" (1999) https://web.archive.org/web/20170302034339/http://womenwriters.net/editorials/hadenelgin.htm