by Ted Chiang

At the beginning of the semester we talked about ineffability in the context of two stories: ‘Amnesty’ by Octavia Butler and ‘Toward a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles’ by Theodore McCombs. I found myself thinking about ineffability again after yesterday’s discussion.

In ‘Amnesty,’ what’s ineffable is the simultaneous one-ness and many-ness of the Community. Noah’s (largely self-appointed) task is to talk anyway—to keep trying to communicate with the Community across this impossible divide, and to keep telling her story to other humans in the hope that she might ‘change them a little’ and reconcile them to their future. She does her job very imperfectly: remember how her long trauma-laced monologue fails to win over the job applicants? (It makes a funny contrast with the support-group scenes in ‘Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom,’ where Dana avoids telling her own story.) Still, Noah persists in her impossible task: ‘I have to try.’ (p. 600)

In ‘Toward a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles,’ it’s the experience of Collider that’s ineffable. Peter’s ex, the ‘quantum guy,’ barely talks. His date at the dinner party needs to be prodded and prompted to tell the dead-finches story. Nobody is able or willing to describe the experience of Collider; Peter, who might have been, is denied access.

‘Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom’ is also about quantum theory and alternative lives, but has a very different way of dealing with the ineffable.

We talked a lot, I think with some distaste, about the form of this story: the dry fable-like prose, the many (too many?) shifts in perspective among the oddly flat and puppet-like characters, the ambiguous self-undermining end (if this is a fable, what’s the moral?). I’m so glad Nico reminded us of Ed Simon’s claim that every story is a Frankenstein’s monster (Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost, 2023). The metaphor is wonderfully apt here: mismatched parts of unknown provenance, awkwardly stitched together, resulting in something larger than usual, and adding up to…what?

I love this story though. As I tried to say in class, I love it because of the big, impossible question it’s asking: How do we reconcile our sense of free will with the overwhelming force of random chance? I keep remembering Chiang’s description of particles bumping up against each other: ‘The collisions between air molecules…can be affected by the gravitational effect of a single atom a meter away…[W]hen air is turbulent, it takes roughly a minute for a perturbation at the microscopic level to become macroscopic.’ (284) If our lives are being shaped by an unfathomable amalgam of accidents, how can we believe that our decisions matter at all?

I think most of us do manage to reconcile ourselves, but only temporarily and imperfectly. We have to keep facing and re-facing the question, never quite getting a handle on it even when we think we do. ‘Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom,’ with its incompletely drawn characters awkwardly bumping up against each other, believing they’ve gained insight when they’re still half-blind, showing us ‘progress’ but without any final resolution, seems to me a fine and appropriate response to the problem.

The Kierkegaard passage that Chiang’s title comes from is strange and difficult to parse. It evokes images of someone teetering at the edge of an abyss, holding desperately onto something concrete, falling (or leaping), then re-surfacing, riddled with feelings of anxiety, selfishness and guilt. This is also seems to me a fine and appropriate response to the problem.

Chiang approaches the problem of inevitability in some of his other fiction too, e.g. ‘Story of Your Life’ and ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.’ They’re all very different kinds of stories, and I like that he experiments with—and shows us—different ways of responding to the big impossible question.

Sometimes in office hours (!) I have conversations with students who see themselves at a crossroads and want my advice. The part of ‘Anxiety’ where Dana meets with her client Teresa was painful to read because it reminded me of some of these conversations. Teresa’s phrasing—‘the right decision,’ ‘the wrong choice’—is so familiar and heartbreaking and exasperating. Why do we torture ourselves like this?

I wish I could make these students believe what I believe—that they’ll be fine no matter what they decide—but there’s no way to say that without sounding pompous and dismissive (and unconvincing). So usually I try to honor their trust by telling stories about my own life, choices I’ve made and things that happened to me and what happened next. And I encourage them to ask other people for their stories too.

Telling stories is still a clumsy and inadequate response. Nothing I’ve done has ‘turned out’ in any final sense, and I never know if the student will understand what I intended to say. But telling stories seems to be the best way we have of approaching what we don’t fully understand. And I agree with Noah that we have to try.

by Ursula Le Guin

We had a moment of confusion in class about how old Hsing and Luis are at the end of the story. I thought maybe late 20s/early 30s; Nico thought 60s. I just reread the end and realized the answer to this question is ambiguous. The final segments aren’t dated. One clue is Hsing saying, ‘Alejo went fishing with the children’—so we know Hsing’s baby is no longer a baby, but is he a toddler (as I’d thought), or an adult with his own children? Luis’ hair is described as a ‘silver nimbus,’ but is that the hair color or the reflected sunlight? Luis is described as ‘both old and damaged’ and Hsing’s knees are ‘not so good these days,’ but is this due to normal aging over decades, or premature aging from the stress and trauma of the new planet?

Through most of the book, we know exactly when we are (the date is given in each section heading), but not where we are (navigation is off-limits to us as well as the characters). At the end, we’re finally grounded somewhere, but ‘time is not measured as it was’ (348); ‘time [is] not the same here’ (p. 353).  

Were you surprised by how similar Shindichew is to Earth? Usually a sci-fi story about space travel will reward us with some cool/weird difference: the new planet has two suns! little green men! constant subzero climate! etc. Le Guin doesn’t give us any of that: Shindichew  has one sun, changing seasons, brown dirt, trees, bacteria, tiny crawling invertebrates, water, wind, rain, grass, hills, rivers. It could be Earth. I didn’t even notice this as anticlimactic, which I think is the point (and brilliant of Le Guin): we’re seeing the planet through these characters’ eyes, and for them it is all new and weird and different.

We talked about the role of language and words in this story. Luis and Hsing both have an odd, fraught relationship with words. As Dani noted, they believe that the physical, acoustic qualities of words are meaningful: they want to replace ‘dinky’-sounding penis (high front vowels, voiceless consonants) with grander-sounding gowbondo (low back vowels, voiced consonants, additional syllable). They’re also fascinated with abstract meanings: they puzzle over superficial (p. 255), discovery (p. 270), nature (p. 276), belief vs. hope (p. 299), bliss vs. delight (p. 361), and of course freedom (p. 278). For Luis, words are ‘dark stars, some small and dark and solid, some immense, complex, subtle, with a powerful gravity-field that attracted infinite meanings to them.’ (pp. 278-279) Remember, Hsing means ‘star’ and Luis’ last name is Nova…

Hsing and Luis are drawn to physical things more generally, as we noted. Hsing refuses contraceptive shots, hates the kitten video and gets claustrophobic in the VR, and enjoys solving the navigation problem herself, without computers. Luis obsessively runs through every option in the ‘Jungle’ VR and leaves unsatisfied—he wants reality, with its unlimited, unpredictable options. His asthma means that he never has enough air on the ship; when he’s distressed he wants to go ‘outside.’  

When they finally do go outside for the first time, the experience is catastrophic: ‘to lose understanding, to go mad… to be translated into a language where no word—ground, air—transgress, affirm—act, do—made sense. A world without words. Without meaning. A universe undefined.’ (p. 348)

It matters that Hsing and Luis spent so much of their time on the ship in silence: ‘They were each other’s privacy.’ (307) It matters that Hsing gave Luis a physical book to write his thoughts in, and that she called it ‘A Box to Hold Luis’ Mind’ (p. 321).

The final scene—Luis and Hsing slow-dancing barefoot on the dirt—is utterly gorgeous and reminds me of Adam and Eve at the very end of Paradise Lost:

Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Those lines kill me, every time.

by Ling Ma

First, an unrelated note. Someone asked at our opera night about the difference between operas and musicals. I read up a little on this and the consensus seems to be that in opera, the voices are the main attraction – you go to an opera expecting to be wowed by big, powerful, wide-ranging voices trained in vibrato etc., whereas you might go to a musical for the acting, the dancing, or the story as much as for the singing.

I thought about Leonard Bernstein in relation to this because he composed both Candide (1956) and West Side Story (1957) – both in English, close to the same length, both with full symphonic scores, but Candide is almost always performed as an operetta and West Side Story as a musical. You can listen to these two tenor-soprano love duets side by side and hear the difference: ‘Oh happy we‘ (Candide) has those opera-sounding voices while ‘Tonight‘ (West Side Story) has musical-sounding voices. Here’s a more operatic version of ‘Tonight‘ that still, I think, doesn’t sound as operatic as any of the songs in Candide.

Anyway… maybe this wasn’t so unrelated after all, since we talk all the time in our group about the fuzzy boundaries between genres.

What genre does ‘Office Hours’ belong to? I’m not sure, but I would say not sci-fi. In fact, I think that’s why I was so distressed by this story: its world is extremely close to the real world – my real world! – but for the protagonist, this world is so ‘fucking impossible’ she just checks out.

‘Office Hours’ makes my/our real world look like a dystopia. The gross displays of decadence at department events, contrasted with Marie’s poverty and hunger. The way Marie has to package her life’s work as an inane commercial to serve as background noise for the donor event. The way everything that should make our lives meaningful gets relentlessly commodified and turned into a zero-sum game: community engagement –> number of committee assignments; curiosity and inquiry –> number of publications; teaching and learning –> enrollments and evaluations; time with family –> a ‘lost year.’

But I was also delighted by this story. I really liked the way it made me think of vampires as a counter-culture, a group that resists all this. Vampires are anachronistic, never changing. They’re not afraid to spend long stretches of time in utter stillness and privacy. They’re not interested in progress or advancement (the exception here being Count Dracula, who does want to expand his domain – but by invading England, the great colonizer). Vampires aren’t reflected in mirrors, which means they only ever show their authentic selves, never a pretend or fake version. Marie’s life is full of reflected and projected and performed versions of people.

Also, vampires move between worlds, but they respect the boundaries between those worlds. They venture into the human world only at specific predetermined times, and they don’t enter anyone’s private space without permission. There’s a hilarious parallel here to the rituals around office hours – the strict start and end times, the greeting and leave-taking scripts (“Okay?” “Okay”). Professors’ offices can be the entry point for ‘infecting’ a new generation of scholars, as one of you put it, and they can also serve as an interstice between the public and the private, a place where boundaries are blurred and interactions become ‘borderline.’ Marie’s cigarettes cast a literal haze over this space, and the Professor’s over-sharing and her naps are ways to flirt with transgression without quite crossing the line.

So even though this story messed me up, I also found it comically rewarding and weirdly hopeful: it lays out another pathway for resistance. Many thanks to you for recommending it and spending time talking about it with me.

On the side, I started compiling stories and films about doubled, halved and cloned selves. So far I have: ‘Toward a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles’ (Theodore McCombs); The Stepford Wives (Ira Levin); ‘Better Versions of You’ (Ted Chiang); Us and Get Out (Jordan Peele films), ‘Unknown Number’ by Blue Neustifter… what else?

Please add your thoughts. What else did ‘Office Hours’ make you think about?

the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, the 1931 film directed by James Whale, and the film score by Michael Shapiro performed by the Atlanta Opera on 10/28/2023

The last few weeks have been tough. Our group’s expansive, multifaceted experience of Frankenstein – re-reading the novel cover to cover, dipping back into my favorite bits of Paradise Lost, reveling in the weirdness of the film and enjoying the excitement of a group trip to the opera, plus our little group’s three discussions – was uncannily therapeutic for me. I love fiction best when it’s both an escape from and an immersion in the problems of life, and that’s how I experience the story of Frankenstein. So thank you for being willing to spend so much time with me on this story.

I’m going to record just a few of the key questions and points we discussed. I know I’m leaving a lot out, so please add more points, follow-up points, corrections or elaborations.

We talked a lot about the parallel-but-unshared loneliness of Victor and the creature, their craving for companionship, the fact that Victor seems much more intimately connected with Clerval, Walton and even his creature than with Elizabeth. One of you pointed out that Victor’s making of the creature is a kind of ‘procreation gone bad’ – something Victor does by himself, driven by a desire for fame and glory, instead of taking the familiar accepted route of marriage, babies and an ordinary life.

I thought Frankenstein would be a good chance to re-introduce a question one of you asked at the beginning of the semester: “Why do we tell stories?” We looked at the structure of the novel and asked this question of each ‘layer’ – Why did Mary Shelley write this book? Why does Walton write his letters to his sister? Why does Victor tell his story to Walton? Why does the creature tell his story to Victor? And why is Safie’s story necessary to the creature’s story?

With at least some of these layers, we found ourselves growing suspicious of the storyteller’s purported motives. Victor says he needs to tell his story as a warning to Walton: “Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!” (Letter 4, Aug. 13). But by the end of the book, he’s really waffling: “Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.”

Does Victor really think he’s done anything wrong? Do we? What about the creature – do we condemn the creature, and if so, for what? I keep coming back to these questions, even as I recognize how boring it can be to look for moral lessons in literature. But I can’t help seeing Frankenstein as a text that asks big, essential, moral questions about the human condition: How do we cope with the fact that we’re capable of doing ‘bad’ things, that we sometimes want to do bad things, that we sometimes can’t even see how they’re all that bad?

Frankenstein’s creature said Paradise Lost was the most influential of the texts he read (ch 15). We looked at the passage from Paradise Lost that often appears on the title page of Frankenstein (“Adam’s adolescent tantrum”): “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man? did I solicit thee/ From darkness to promote me…?” (Canto X)

Later in that same Canto X is another passage I that I described to you, where Eve is talking to Adam about how to cope with God’s punishment. She suggests that they destroy themselves, or refuse to procreate, in order to save an entire future human race from pain and misery and death: “so Death/ Shall be deceived his glut, and with us two/ Be forced to satisfy his ravenous maw…” And then Adam talks her down, by trying to make God’s punishment seem like no big deal at all:

we expected
Immediate dissolution, which we thought
Was meant by death that day; when lo! to thee
Pains only in child-bearing were foretold,
And bringing forth; soon recompensed with joy,
Fruit of thy womb: On me the curse aslope
Glanced on the ground; with labour I must earn
My bread; what harm? Idleness had been worse;
My labour will sustain me…

In other words: Yes, we’ll have pain and drudgery and then we’ll die, but we’ll also have joy and interests and independence and other rewards.

This speech is a really beautiful demonstration, I think, of what a difference a companion can make. In addition to talking Eve down, Adam is talking himself down here – just a while back he was having his big adolescent tantrum at God; now that he’s faced with Eve’s despair, he’s able to rein in the drama and find some courage to deal with what they’ve been handed. Is this what Frankenstein’s creature had in mind when he asked for a companion?

It’s a very strangely written canto, and it’s not clear to me that Milton really believed in Adam’s pep talk. I kind of like that ambiguity though. The answer to these big moral questions isn’t simple; it’s one we have to keep asking, and I think Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s way of asking them again and again and again.

See also George Saunders’ essay ‘Writing in Hard Times,’ which was published on the day of our last discussion.

Deborah Eisenberg

Today’s discussion was so good! Thanks to all of you for helping me understand this very strange but very appealing story.

I remembered the Ray Bradbury story this reminded me of: it’s called ‘Jack in the Box’ (hmm!) and it’s about a kid who’s kept trapped and isolated in a castle in the woods. There’s a very memorable scene where he climbs to the top of a tower, goes out a forbidden door and sees the big outside world for the first time. You can read it here.

I think I was also remembering the 2005 film The Island: a severely stratified society with an underclass kept confined indoors and ignorant of the wider world, constantly being shown images of an island paradise that each of them will get to go to someday (which of course turns out to be their doom). It was a summer blockbuster and a little silly, but I enjoyed its aesthetics.

Honestly, I think I had the creepy aesthetics of an amalgam of other stories and films – ‘Jack in the Box,’ The Island, The Hunger Games, Elysium – in mind as I was reading ‘The Third Tower,’ and that was partly why I liked the story so much. I don’t know how the author would feel about this though. Those of you who write fiction – does it bug you that your readers might be bringing in baggage that has nothing to do with your story, or is that all just part of the experience of writing for the public?

Since our conversation, I’ve been thinking about something else Dani said: that Therese is an artist.

What does that mean to you all?

• Does ‘being an artist’ just mean ‘being creative’? Or does it entail above-average creativity, if we assume that the ordinary human intelligence that gives us generative syntax is itself creative? (Sub-question: Is ordinary human language a kind of art?)
• Does an artist need to have what Therese has: a heightened capacity to make associations? Or is being an artist more about what Therese produces: a book that others could (in theory) see and interpret?
• Does art have to include an element of subversiveness?
• Do artists have to make their art intentionally, or can it be done by reflex/instinct? (You may remember ‘Message in a Bottle’ by Nalo Hopkinson, where some characters thought that a certain kind of seashell was an expression of artistic genius.)

I think this question may come up in Frankenstein too – I’ll be on the lookout.

As always, feel free to comment on what I’ve said here or on any other aspect of ‘The Third Tower’ you want. Thanks!

George Saunders

First, THANKS again for the rich and insightful discussion… can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying these conversations as a wind-down to every week.

We ended the hour talking about Eva. Afterwards, I wondered: Could we read the title as a way that makes the story about Eva? (Is Eva a ‘simple girl’ too?)

What do you think about the fact that we never find out the narrator’s name? Or the cat’s name? (or even whether the family has just one cat or several different cats, thanks to the article deletion… sub-tweeting LING-214 students here)

We talked a lot about form. It was lovely to read this story back-to-back with Flowers for Algernon, another diary – and by happenstance, I also read Dracula recently for the first time, another epistolary work.

In all three of these stories, the narrator/author complains or at least comments about how time-consuming and inconvenient it is to keep their diary/records (e.g. ‘was tired and had to come in and write in this stupid book.’ SGD 9/6). But hilariously, only in the two older stories – Dracula from 1897 and Flowers from Algernon from 1959 – do the writers try to actually solve this problem with technology: shorthand, voice recordings, typewriters. The Semplica-Girl diarist, who lives in the most technologically advanced world, insists on writing longhand on paper; in fact the whole inspiration for the diary is the purchase of this black book at OfficeMax. Ugh! More fake simplicity, commodified and sold.

I really enjoyed your observations about the diarist’s use of (!) vs. !. As I said to you, I think this narrator is performing, writing down thoughts and feelings that he thinks he’s supposed to have and stifling his true feelings of bitterness and despair. The ! shows up in places where I think his enthusiasm seems especially forced:

Have a feeling and have always had a feeling that this and other good things will happen for us! (9/5) Still, must fight good fight! (9/14) Ha-ha! Must keep spirits up (9/15)

The (!), on the other hand, may be where a more genuine voice is trying to come out, expressing authentic surprise or even disgust:

…who appeared disappointed by the lock of mummy hair, and said so, because she already had one (!)…the next gift was a ticket to the Preakness (!)

I ended up thinking that this is a very scary story, as well as a very funny and very sad one. This guy is really afraid of saying anything critical of the rich. And the ending now feels ominous and terrifying to me, rather than just confusing.

This is why I love re-reading things. What are y’all’s favorite things to re-read?

Have you read Dracula? (I was kinda disappointed. I think I had an unreasonable expectation that it would be more like Frankenstein.)

This is Banned Book Week. What are your thoughts about banned books?

And what else would you like to say about “The Semplica-Girl Diaries”?

for fun

We didn’t meet today, and I missed seeing you. I’ve also been thinking about question I thought y’all could help with: What are some of the funniest books or stories you’ve read?

And if you want, you can also tell me:

• What kind of funny are they? (Is the humor based on laugh-out-loud prose? wicked caricatures? ridiculous or ironic situations? etc?)
• Can you think of any sci-fi/spec-fic/dystopian stories that are funny? If not, why do you think that is?

I was thinking about this because it occurred to me that I really love books (and movies) that are both very funny and very serious/dark. Books like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; Nick Hornby’s About a Boy; Fredrick Backman’s A Man Called Ove; Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women. Movies like Little Miss Sunshine and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility.

But I also really love books and stories more like what we’ve been reading together – by authors like Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Ted Chiang, Dave Eggers, Elizabeth Strout, Kazuo Ishiguro – which aren’t often funny even though they do contain that blend of pessimism and hope that really appeals to me.

So, what about funny sci-fi/spec-fic/dystopia? Does it exist?

• I thought Nalo Hopkinson’s “Message in a Bottle” was very funny, mostly because the narrator & main character was such a pretentious, oblivious dope.
• I thought The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was funny when I read it, but I was 14.
• Andy Weir’s The Martian and Project Hail Mary both made me laugh out loud.
• George Saunders can be very funny. We’re probably going to read “The Semplica Girl Diaries” later on, which is interesting because I think the narrator/diarist is trying to be funny as he writes, and he often succeeds, even though what he’s writing about is so grim and awful.
• The Barbie movie is hilarious. I think it’s sci-fi. And it’s also arguably dystopian, even though its dystopia is our real world. Which makes me wonder if, say, Jane Austen is also dystopian…

I’ll leave it there for now. Please recommend some funny books for me!

Theodore McCombs, 2023

Wow, I had so many more thoughts about this story after our class today. So first, thanks to all three of you for helping me reflect on ‘TTAL’ and appreciate some new aspects of the story.

At the beginning of today’s class I said, ‘This story isn’t really about language or linguistics,’ and Dani shared some thoughts about how it might be after all. And after class I thought some more and started to understand TTAL as another story about ineffability.

Nico used the word ineffable last week in our discussion of ‘Amnesty’: the notion of a species that is both ‘many’ and ‘one’ at the same time is something we just can’t get our heads around, can’t describe with language; it’s ineffable. In TTAL, it’s the ‘quantum stuff’ that we (or Peter) can’t quite get our heads around (p. 10), as well as the experience of Collider itself. I think it’s important that Elgin won’t—or can’t—tell the story of the lady with the finches at the dinner party, and that Fran so often answers Peter with monosyllables or silences. And that the writing gets so chaotic when Peter is imagining all his alternative lifestyles (pp. 3-5). Maybe Peter’s insistence on clinging to all of life’s possibilities is also pushing the limits of language in this story.

I’m glad we got to talk about the finches together. We talked about growing up as a process of ‘shedding dead finches,’ choosing one path/self instead of another, because we can’t just keep carrying around all those possibilities forever (as sad as it is to let some of them go; I think Trinity and I both talked about this). Now I see that TTAL is brimming with references to light and dark, bright gaudy colors contrasted with ‘flattening’ blacks and grays. Take another look at the scene in the dark hallway on pp. 11-12, for example. Shivers!

All this brightness/darkness imagery as a way to contrast our earthly ignorance vs. heavenly omniscience reminded me of lots of things, including:

• “Funes the Memorious” (I mentioned this in class)
• Story of Your Life – Louise reflects that her newborn infant knows/sees only the present moment; the adult human sees the present as well as the past; and the Heptapods (and ultimately Louise) get to see present, past and future (maybe another kind of ineffable experience).
• Frankenstein – Dr. Frankenstein goes too far with his craving for scientific knowledge and ends up knowing/seeing too much and creating an abomination. Then the creature himself destroys his own happiness by reading Paradise Lost!
• The Barbie movie! Have any of y’all seen it? Do you think it’s sci-fi? (I kinda do…) Is the contrast between Barbieland and the real world sort of like the contrast between Peter’s fantasies and the real world—‘alternative lifestyles’ for ideal(ized) womanhood in Barbie, for ideal(ized) gay manhood in TTAL?

Finally, I did a little reading about St. Peter and have some thoughts about Peter as the holder of the keys to heaven, but I’ll hold off on those thoughts here. I’ll just say that the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Peter didn’t get into Collider because he just doesn’t need Collider yet.

Octavia Butler, 2003

Many of the readings we do in this class make us appreciate just how remarkable it is that we can change other people’s minds with language. To an outsider, someone who had no idea what language was or how humans used it, this might seem almost occult: I make some noises with my mouth and you start behaving differently. Just by talking, Frankenstein’s monster brings his creator from violence to calm. Just by talking, the serpent gets Eve to eat the apple. Some of the stories we read stretch this power beyond what the real world would allow: Just by uttering one word, Millie unleashes a deadly pandemic that destroys everyone she knows.

As I read ‘Amnesty,’ I started to see this power of language from a different angle. I found myself thinking about how – and how often – language fails to change minds or change the world, and how we cope with these failures and manage (or not) to coexist anyway.

Like other sci-fi, ‘Amnesty’ gives us a twist on our real world that allows us to see a familiar phenomenon in a fresh way. The main character Noah is a human translator. Ostensibly her job is to help humans communicate with another intelligent species that has arrived on Earth. Relations between humans and this species are largely hostile, for reasons we learn about in the story. Most humans call the aliens ‘weeds’; Noah, who knows more about them, calls them ‘Communities’ because each individual is actually composed of many individuals, a little bit like a swarm of bees but with no clear leader.

How do you change the mind of something that doesn’t have one mind?

How do you change the mind of someone who finds you utterly incomprehensible and repulsive?

The story consists of three interactions: Noah interacts with a Community subcontractor; Noah interacts with a Community employer; and Noah interacts with a group of scared and angry humans who are job candidates for the Communities.

Each interaction involves a different kind of failure to change minds with language.

Here are some of the things we discussed in our group:

• more thoughts about the nature of Community ‘minds’ – as part of this, we talked about the novel pronoun itselves, used on p. 600.)
• the mechanics of the language that has been developed between the two species; what makes it similar to & different from human speech
• Noah says she wants to ‘tell the truth’ as well as ‘change [people] a little.’ Do we trust her to tell the truth? Does she change anyone she interacts with? Does she change us as readers?
• How grossed out are we by Noah’s framing of the human-extraterrestrial conflict as ‘a kind of sibling rivalry’ (p. 601)? Can we accept Noah’s framing without abandoning our entire sense of justice and morality?
• What is amnesty? One of its cognates is amnesia – how are these concepts related? Who grants and who receives amnesty in this story? What is the role of amnesia/amnesty in the act of storytelling, and/or in the experience of being human?
• Noah in the Bible makes a covenant with God. What is a covenant? Why might this be an important idea for us to have in mind as we read this story?
• …and lots more that I’m forgetting.

Please comment! You can fill in things I left out about our discussion or about the story itself, argue with my comments above, or add follow-up thoughts and insights.

by Nalo Hopkinson. Available at baen.com. Published 2012, After: Dystopian and post-apocalyptic tales, ed. E. Datlow & T. Windling; and 2015, Falling in love with hominids.

Like ‘Mazes,’ ‘The Easthound’ doesn’t have the hallmarks of typical sci-fi: no science, tech, or space/time travel. But it fits our broader definition of sci-fi (adopted from PKD) in that it ‘dislocates’ us from our real world and delivers a ‘shock of dysrecognition.’ And crucially for our class, this story shocks us into an altered perspective on language.

The story opens with a group of kids sitting around a fire playing a word game. It seems like an ordinary scene from our own real world: kids bantering, bickering, passing a liquor bottle around; nothing is obviously off. But then we start getting clues. 

(This kind of structure is common to many of our readings – you’re thrown into a world in medias res and have to gradually piece together how it’s different from ours. We talked in class about the words and phrases that tipped us off: references to fears of growing (‘If you ate too much, you grew too quickly’), the passing reference to Millie’s ‘handless wrist’ (what?!) and her habit of sleeping outdoors in the warmer months, even, as Anna pointed out, the sentence ‘Everyone could see it’ at the very beginning of the story – all give the reader a growing sense that something is wrong in this world.)

Eventually it becomes clear that these kids are living in extreme and constant terror of something they call the Easthound. The big reveal comes about two-thirds of the way through the story. (ALERT: Stop here if you don’t want spoilers! Go read the story; it’s short!) Things are explained straightforwardly in a few paragraphs and then the action resumes, mounting quickly and precipitously until the end, which feels like leaping off a cliff. When you finish reading you immediately want to go back and reread, and doing so is immensely rewarding: you realize that Hopkinson’s narration all along was strewn with wordplay around wolves, moons and cycles.

What does this story have to do with language and linguistics?

The world has been destroyed; the human species is doomed. How does a kid explain a horror like this? How does anyone decide to go on living?

An answer ‘The Easthound’ offers is: with language.

Millie believes that she made the pandemic happen, by simply misreading the word eastbound as easthound on her dad’s phone. She thinks her utterance of the never-before-uttered word easthound worked like a curse and unleashed the disaster.

We can see how this might happen (as one of you said in class): a kid makes a silly mistake, gets teased and feels horribly embarrassed; then her mom comes home a monster and attacks everyone and both parents die and the whole world falls apart. Later the kid thinks, ‘Why did this happen?’ and her mind just remembers that bad stuff started happening as soon as she said easthound, and she confuses temporality with causality: instead of ‘I said easthound and then the world fell apart,’ it’s ‘I said easthound and so the world fell apart.’  

Is it ridiculous for a kid to believe such a thing? At first sight, yes. But we have to pause and remember all the things we adults take for granted that we do allow language to do in our world. 

With language, a worn-out piece of green paper can be seen as a $100 bill and traded for new shoes, a used bike or a nice meal for two. Language enables us to transfer property, get married, hold elections.¹ If I say ‘I quit,’ people will expect me (and possibly force me) to stop coming to my office; if I say ‘Class is dismissed,’ everyone will get up and leave.

We learn to call these performative speech acts in intro linguistics. We read Austin’s first chapter of How to Do Things with Words. It’s a fun day of class. But we don’t often (at least I didn’t) spend enough time being surprised by the fundamental observation:

We can use language – just language – to change other people’s behavior.

If we stop taking this fact for granted, we can truly appreciate that we’re dealing with a shocking, extremely valuable but also extremely dangerous power, bordering on the occult. If Millie can make Citron (who usually doesn’t see her as an authority) leave the shelter against his will, just by saying ‘I claim leader,’ why shouldn’t she also believe that she started the pandemic just by saying ‘easthound’?

(To be clear: I believe there is a principled difference between the two cases, but I believe it’s more important for people to puzzle through the difference on their own–that’s how we get to experience this sense of dysrecognition.)

Which is worse: to blame yourself for the end of the world, or to believe that there is no explanation at all? The children in ‘The Easthound’ have decided to let things be meaningful. They super-charge language by establishing new language games, speech-act rituals, and linguistic taboos. And perhaps this is related to why Millie decides to make her last act meaningful, too, when it would have been so easy not to.

Our next story, ‘Solitude,’ takes the idea of language as magic and runs with it. And ‘Speech Sounds,’ which we’ll read later on, is also about a world-destroying pandemic, but the role of language plays out very differently in that story.

1. I must cite Searle 2007 ‘What is language: some preliminary remarks’ here, since that paper got me to a deeper appreciation of money, marriage etc. as language-dependent institutions. Searle has since been found to have violated sexual harassment policies at Berkeley and has had his emeritus status revoked. ↩︎