Infofiche

Five Minutes:

This book is probably not what you expect. If you have read modern SF work on created languages and fictive multilingualism, you will probably be shocked to see how little this book is concerned with what the authors are doing by including alien languages and communication. Radio, telepathy, translation devices are all considered, but never alienation, or the reader's response. I find he is hardly bothered about language(s) at all for the first half. The second half is more to my taste, being a brief history of linguistic preoccupations in science fiction and travelling through Tolkien, Whorf, General Semantics and finally Samuel R. Delany, Chomsky and utopias. The book is interesting but is too occupied with seeing if linguistics is done in a technically accurate way to the extent that Myers ignores much of what the works he considers are really trying to do.

The book is split into chapters, which fall into one of two halves (plus an introduction and a conclusion). The two halves are different enough to be considered separately.

Chapters 1 to 9:

The first chapter is an introduction to the book and course of study and Myers sets about picking his definition of science fiction (or rather, he explains how he is avoiding this problem). Then he surveys the relative lack of linguistic studies of science fiction noting that there exist books and articles on how physics and chemistry and so on have inspired and informed various stories, but very few on the impact of linguistics. After some speculation as to why this is, he tells us that it is a matter he is going to resolve.

In that sense, the first ten chapters of the book are rather successful. He does indeed go through various works (mostly short stories, but a few novels too) of science fiction and discuss how accurately or not they portray linguistics, and some of the linguistic consequences of their worldbuilding or things the characters say. Each chapter is grouped about a communication technology or idea, which I list:

2. English in the future,

3. Alien languages,

4. Communicating with animals (this is the 80s after all),

5. Means of communication - olfactory, visual, &c.,

6. First contact,

7. Learning languages,

8. Translation machines,

9. Telepathy,

It is clear that Myers is just more interested in these questions and problems than he is in literary analysis. The chapter on telepathy starts with "AKA how to skip the interesting stuff" (my paraphrase) and for the whole first half, we would be forgiven for thinking Myers were reviewing non-fiction. In effect, these first nine chapters are a museum gallery where we get to see how the authors of the past did it (usually wrong), and what this tells us about their writing then - rather than what it has to say about writing and science fiction now or in general.

Chapters 10 to 12:

Ironically, the second half of this book is, whilst ostensibly historical, is not a simple series of museum cabinets but a much more cohesive narrative (a well curated exhibition, if you will). It is also longer, taking over a third of the total page length of this volume. Here, Myers gives up being strictly science fictional and just picks out interesting cases of fictional languages and linguistics being used, and it much improves his analysis.

We begin not with science fiction but with a seminal work of fantasy --- the only time Myers makes this exception --- with Quenya and Tolkien and his career in philology. Myers translates a passage of Quenya into English using only published Quenya texts as his reference, to demonstrate how 'real' a constructed language it is and Myers is duly impressed by the verisimilitude and etymological depth on display.

He then crosses the ocean to consider the inverse, the American case of a writer much more remembered for their linguistics than their (admittedly unpublished) SF: Benjamin Lee Whorf. After explaining the idea and history of linguistic relativity, he traces its prominence in science fiction through several examples of controll(ing)ed languages. It is here that he starts to get analytical in the sense I like, as he discusses how the fictional languages are used in stories, along with linguistic relativity, to make points and explore themes rather than merely viewing "it's incorrect". It's almost like because strong linguistic relativity is wrong anyway, Myers gives himself the chance to write beyond that in depth for the first time.

In my opinion, the most interesting section comes next: at the start of chapter 11 is a discussion of the role 'general semantics' played in the cultural milieu of mid-century science fiction. I had never heard of it before and for those who don't know, it's effectively a pseudoscientific theory of consciousness and perception that promised to make its practitioners 'more sane and rational' by applying its principles. It was very popular with Campbell who spread it to writers in his stable, including Heinlein and van Vogt and it's genuinely wild to see how far they thought it would go, and how much science fiction its ideas appear in.

One such writer was Samuel R. Delany whose work Myers takes a characteristically uncharitable approach to. Never mind that Babel-17 and Triton are rightly considered excellent works of science fiction and explore much, they make multiple technical errors that are all Myers can find the words to talk about. Things like Delany getting his phonology wrong when describing a lisp or making a mistake in a fact about one language or another overweights all Myers' discussion about the novel and its themes. He really admires Delany's ambition and wide ranging linguistic interests, but finds him too erudite (Foucault? puh-lease) and the technical mistakes distracting.

Myers finishes his history with Chomsky and observing that, compared to the rest of linguistics, it has taken a much longer time for generativist thought to make its way into the hands of authors. The main work Myers considers here is The Embedding by Ian Watson, one of my least favourite books, which is nonetheless rather technically accurate in a strict syntactic sense (though its metaphysics and language psychology are bizarre). The book then ends by considering Utopias and some theory around them, and their reliance on language to exist.

Conclusion:

This work is okay. Using technical accuracy as the main mode of criticism is a strange choice, especially when applied to the new wave of science fiction which has other goals. It's more suited to the didactic sort of science fiction that seemed to be popular during the early twentieth century. It's impressive how quickly and resolutely that change occurred.

The most notable omission was any consideration of the role fictional languages play in science fiction (and fantasy). Myers' one section on a fictional language, Quenya, is about how well constructed and 'realistic' it is, rather than what role it plays in Tolkien's writing. The narrow minded focus on technical accuracy is really notable here, and although he mentions Delany inventing a dialect in one of his short stories, it nor any other language is considered. I found this sad.

I think this book is worth reading for the historical perspective, either as a sort of reference work for linguistically preoccupied science fiction (of the early twentieth century) or the second half which has a nonzero amount of interesting historical content. I suppose you could also read the work as an example of failed criticism. The introduction is quite good, and the writing is clear and occasionally excellent.

Nice green hardback with green sprayed edges on the top, high quality paper and printing, and the dust jacket has an amusing cartoon of a linguist enthusiastically noting down everything an alien says.

(Thanks for reading :) Not sure what next month's topic is. Wish me luck. In the mean time, I'm going to compile a sort of 'reading list' for science fiction criticism and linguistics for me to use as a reference and for me to work through.)