This is possibly the best science fiction story I’ve read this year, and I’ve been reading Asimov.
Oh. My. God.
It’s the kind of book I won’t shut up about any time soon: I’ll go out in the street, and grab random people by the collar, and shake them, and tell them they need to read this book. Everyone needs to read this book.
The story follows Ro, a young linguist from a species that can “jump” and merge consciousness with other alien species provided they align their thoughts with the other being’s thoughts. For this, they train in linguistics and they have meditation chambers, because language isn’t as simple as it seems (a concept I’ve been trying to get across, in the era where people are convinced an automatic translator can easily bridge linguistic gaps). Language reflects identity, belief: some languages might have dozens of words to convey a concept another language is struggling to find a word for. Such as the mysterious alien species called the Star Eaters, with whom Ro is trying to connect. They just have a word for “lie”, while Ro’s language has dozens to explain the nuance and the many reasons one might, in fact, lie. As such, the novel centres on language, secrets, identity, and the political and moral costs of exploiting other beings.
And yes, it’s a weird one. And yes, at the beginning it seems to be trying to do too many things at the same time, with both the language and the body dysphoria, and yet it all comes together gloriously, in a splendid sci-fi love letter to the power of language, to the necessity of understanding and, above everything else, to the crime of cultural appropriation.
If there ever was a sharpest way to say that cultural appropriation is genocide, I can’t imagine it.
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