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.