Infofiche

(SPOILERS FOR PROJECT HAIL MARY!) (September 2/2)

Project Hail Mary is Andy Weir's 2021 novel of alien caused apocalypse and first contact. And, as a first contact novel, it is partially concerned with matters of communication. Below the fold we'll consider how Weir constructs his fictional language, as well as how he uses it in characterisation, especially how he treats the language in such a way as to minimise alienation. Spoilers for the whole plot below!

Weir gives himself a strange problem. In including an alien alien, Rocky, (as opposed to a human with extra bits) he needs to alienate them from the human readers and his protagonist, whilst at the same time the emotional heart of the novel revolves around the close bond between Rocky and Grace, and this would be impeded if the alien were too different. (See how the alien in Arrival isn't exactly a friend.) Fictional languages can further both of these goals, but not usually at the same time. On the one hand, inventing a really strange language serves to strongly alienate the alien from us. On the other hand, giving them a language gives them a means of communication which can overcome that barrier, and makes them a character coequal with the others in the story - it enables explorations of their inferiority, and allows empathy. But the more alien the language, the harder it is to communicate.

Weir wants both; he wants a strange language to show off his speculative science, and he wants Rocky to be the secondary protagonist, whose feelings and character we can access and care about and - as proven by the effect the novel has on readers - feel empathy with. This is the heart of what I'm discussing today, and I think Weir succeeds. Rocky is very alien and impressively thought out as one, and they're also lovable and we understand their character. Weir achieves this through a sort of narrative time lapse of monolingual fieldwork and problem solving, the end result being that they can communicate fluently.

For those who read Project Hail Mary a while ago, here's a recap of the mechanics of first contact. Two ships appear arrive in the same system with a common goal. They find each other due to engine emissions, and spend a while copying each others motions in space ("you spin, I spin"). They exchange an iconographic map of where they come from, and then exchange some hull material. A tunnel is built with a dividing wall and airlock. A transparent wall in inserted and they start communicating with pantomime and gesture, they then establish some of their units of measurement, learn the number system through sharing clocks, and use diagrams of molecules to describe materials. Then they begin communication proper.

The Eridians (the aliens) are blind and five limbed. They are possessed of an excellent hearing and move through physical space via echolocation. Their vocalisations consist of simple notes played over one another, like chords, forming words and variated in sequence, like music to create sentences. Pitch shifting up or down, and texture gives intonation. The two of them conduct monolingual fieldwork to work out each others language, and each becomes a fluent listener of the other (they don't have a way of vocalising in common). Grace works by writing a computer script to apply a spectrograph and lookup table to translate words and generate glosses of Eridian utterances starting with pointing, simple actions, nearby objects and building up to more elaborate and symbolic concepts, before he eventually becomes fluent. The communication barrier is pretty quickly overcome and the above is narrated as a montage to minimise the time spent in incomprehension.

A big part of Weir's work is the real science and puzzles inside the fiction. Watching the characters "work it out" was really fun and engaging, especially trying to work alongside them and solve the same problems faster or in a different way (this is mostly due to Weir's excellent pacing of Grace's problem solving, as a smart guy who still makes mistakes and gets things wrong, thus giving the reader more page time than him to work it out and reach a satisfying conclusion). But it's clear Weir doesn't care about linguistic detail that much, not as much as physics or exobiology, and Rocky's language is relatively undeveloped. We read it on the page as either "🎵🎵" (which is cute) or glossed into English, and there's some details such as it has a question particle that goes at the start of a phrase.

Mechanically there's a few things I find implausible and which aren't really important, but one opportunity I think Weir missed was the chance to involve vocal fry in the translation effort. When we speak, a lot of what we say isn't actually useful language. It's us going "um, errr, so..." starting a sentence and then stopping midway and saying it a different way, or getting interrupted by other sounds like eating or a hiccough. in monolingual fieldwork, especially in alien first contact, one can't be sure that those extraneous noises aren't a part of the language. For example, an Eridian hearing English for the first time might hear the sound of a mouth closing and think that's part of the grammar and somehow you'd have to learn that it wasn't. I would have found that neat and a fun problem to include.

It turns out the language of Eridians isn't really that strange. It is perfectly audible (this is discussed) and comprehensible by humans and can eventually be spoken fluidly with a speech aid, and additionally if it were stranger I expect we would have had more focus on it. This might seem unrealistic (especially as real life monolingual fieldwork isn't done with "just get the computer to match sounds with words" for a reason), but it's because it really isn't the point of Weir's first contact. He isn't here to make us question what it is that is human by exposing us to the most unhuman person he can, he's here to give us a secondary protagonist who is fun and who we can feel emotionally invested in for his save the world plot and at this he succeeds. And he does this by using the narrative device of the montage to show us the work of sincerely overcoming alienation, without ever subjecting the reader to it.

I like Project Hail Mary because of how clear this is. I feel like a lot of the literary SFF criticism I read rewards the author for how strange an alienating they make the alien, how much of a 'vast unknown' they are (if I were a better critic, I'd quote someone now), but for a lot of SFF this isn't the aim. Star Trek would certainly be worse if no one could understand each other, and so would Project Hail Mary, what I think is more interesting is noting how the author has very deliberately made that choice, and how they've used fictional languages both to alienate, and then quickly moved past that and used it to simply communicate.

Thanks for reading! My next book here is Embassytown by China Miéville. Hopefully I'll get that out on time, and around that I want to read Darko Suvin, in response to whom Miéville was writing. This will also give me some actual SFF criticism to refer to. Woohoo! Have good weeks everybody :)