The Embedding

Linguistics and sci-fi is a mix I always get behind. Source: Here

"Nice planet you have here.  How many languages are spoken?"

**SPOILERS** for the book await you here.

Published in 1973, Ian Watson's debut novel is packed to the gills with idea after idea, and follows three main plot strands:

• An English laboratory where children are raised in isolation under supervision of linguist Chris Sole and taught... unnatural languages to see if they create their own language out of it.
• An Amazonian tribe who consume a special psychedelic drug to access another language and partake in religious rituals but are in danger of their land being flooded by the construction of the world's largest dam.
• Aliens from beyond the Solar System who seek a sample of the world's languages in exchange for valuable technology - but at a price.

All 3 of these could make a decent novella or short story alone and the book does start off promising, easing us slowly into each of these various plots and constructing a picture of this world like ours, but not like ours. The big linguistic ideas at play here are Universal Grammar and Sapir-Whorf theory:

1.) Universal Grammar: suggested by American linguist Noam Chomsky as an innate mechanism within humans related to the acquisition of language.

2.) Sapir-Whorf: a theory developed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf which suggests that the structure of a language changes how its users think.

You can see how both come into play fairly early in the book: Sole's raising of the children in an isolated environment without external input that isn't controlled by him to see if they can create their own unnatural tongue, and the Xemahoa using mind-altering substances to access their other language and change how they perceive the world, and what really stuns me is the strength with which Watson tackles these ideas. Even if he doesn't properly apply linguistic theory his centering of both as pivotal parts of the plot - in his debut novel - suggests a writer unafraid of tackling Big Ideas.

Sadly, about halfway through the plots lose their strong and begin to unspool, with the ending being rather anticlimatic - you find out that the aliens' ultimate goal has to do with Sapir-Whorf theory. By collecting enough brains and enough languages the aliens can "map out" a full map of reality and achieve transcendence in pursuit of aliens who contacted them thousands of years before and had done the same thing. It's a little strange but hey, this is sci-fi, I can roll with that.

Back in the Amazon, the Xemahoa are unconcerned about the dam and enter a drug-induced ritual to seek a solution. They've been providing some of their psychedelic drug to a pregnant woman and the ritual concludes with a rather gruesome Caesarean birth - and lo and behold, the baby is rather significantly altered by consumption of the drug. So you think the aliens will have this unique brain, will they achieve their goal and transcend this reality. Nope! There's a very distasteful scene that makes me a little sick thinking about it so I'll spare you the details.

It ends with the US and USSR briefly uniting to take out the alien ship, and the first subplot resolves itself with the main scientist "tripping out" on the language he embedded within the children he experimented on. It's very strange and if the effect was meant to be transcendent, I did not get that impression. I felt a little underwhelmed if I'm honest.

I'm a big fan of "idea" books. I can forgive weak characterisation if the ideas are strong enough - Arthur C. Clarke being the key example - and here they would be if they were followed up on in any meaningful way. One key theme is the price of the acquisition of knowledge, paralleled with the unethical experiments conducted on the children and the aliens' price for trade exchange (six working human brains, fluent in different languages). If there was a statement Watson was trying to make I'm not sure it came across clearly. 

Sadly how he handles and concludes big ideas like Universal Grammar and Sapir-Whorf theory left me largely unsatisfied with the book as a whole. It's interesting enough to check out for how Watson handles the ideas but I wouldn't recommend it if you want a fulfilling read.

Gateway

A suspense-filled novel. Source: Here

“They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever...and the other one scared me out of my mind.” 

Where to start with this book? One of the very few joint Hugo/Nebula award winners, and rightly deserved too.

Published in 1977 and written by Frederik Pohl, Gateway is set in a far-flung future in a overpopulated solar system. Earth is wracked by economic inequality and resource scarcity, with the rich able to access the latest medical technology and the poor with little option but to farm kelp or mine shale to grow the slimy bacteria that makes up the majority of these people's food. In the Solar System, humanity has discovered an asteroid hollowed out to form an alien space station with functioning ships within.

There are just a few small problems. We don't know how the ships work; what the different controls do or indicate; what fuel the ships run on; how much fuel the ships have; the destinations of the ships and whether they're still safe to travel to. People don't know how to reprogram the ships' courses, or whether they'll have enough food for the return journey - but the prospect of striking it rich with the discovery of new alien wares makes the prospect all too appealing. What Pohl does well here is dropping in strange new technology but visualising it in broad strokes rather than going into detail and therefore ruining the mystery.  

Quite frankly, we don't even know how safe anything is, and that works in full favour of the book. Keeping so much under wraps, keeping this many blanks in our knowledge really adds to the aura of mystery surrounding every facet of the novel, and allows the reader to fill in the blanks themselves. We don't even see the aliens behind all this! What I found really effective was how nonchalant Pohl made the prospect of dying out in space seem - to our protagonists and everyone they know, it's simply a hazard of the book. The very premise itself, the fact that the possibility of dying horribly far away from Earth is far more preferable to staying there is enough to drive home how dark this narrative can get.

As for the protagonist, Robinette Broadhead, I found him flawed. Not as in executed badly but simply a flawed human being with his own neuroses and fears which I really appreciated, even if I didn't particularly like him very much. The main thrust of the story alternates between Broadhead's own experiences on Gateway and his sessions with A.I. psychiatrist Sigfrid (also my favorite character), slowly unfurling just what happened that traumatised Broadhead so much. We know that something tragic happened but the journey we take to get there is one I'd travel again, just to fully immerse myself in this strange world once more.

On the whole I found myself supremely satisfied with this book. As the first of Pohl's books I've heard it's a more than welcome introduction to his body of work, with an engaging plot, great well-rounded characters (it was especially nice to read older science fiction where female characters were more than just cardboard cutouts and were given roles that weren't subservient to men) and a killer premise that still rings with me now.