REVIEW-ARTICLE
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Dagmar Barnouw
Linguistics and Science Fiction
Walter E. Meyers. Aliens
and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction. Athens, GA: Georgia UP, 1980. 257p. $16.00.
Parallel to our making of our social world we can see ourselves engaged in "the
making of the universe through that which is at the root of our social being: our
language." Meyers quotes Ian Watson to this effect in order to emphasize the
potential usefulness of his proposed inquiry into the intermeshing of SF and linguistics
(p. 11). Watson is an intelligent and responsibly imaginative writer. Much of SF has dealt
with the problem of communication concerning aliens in a sloppy, irrational, unimaginative
fashion, as Meyers proceeds to show. Pleasantly sensible and concerned about communicating
with his readers, Meyers is neither too credulous nor too condescending in his approach to
the large number of SF texts dealings in various ways, with language.
There are, of course, many difficulties to cope with, many fallacies hard to resist.
Chapter Two, "The Future History and Development of the English Language,"
points to some of them. Too many SF writers are either not aware of or don't want to deal
with the fact that languages change. In the year 2500--the very near future in terms of
SF time--English will have changed: how to anticipate such changes intelligently and
consistently and how to make them palatable to the reader is a problem that has proved, to
Meyers' disappointment, almost unsolvable to SF writers. It seems easier to communicate
with dead cultures (see his third chapter, "Resident Aliens: Mummies and
Machines") or with animals--at least easier to write about them. Meyers points to the
overeager, distorting reception in SF of John C. Lilly's work on dolphins: with few
exceptions, reviewers in the field of SF have made much more far-ranging claims than has
Lilly. It is true, of course, that writers of SF need to be plausible rather than factual,
and it is understandable that they espouse all too willingly some of the potential
implications of Lilly's speculation on contact with intelligent extra-terrestrial
creatures (see the chapter on "The Importance of Interspecies Communication" in
his 1976 The Mind of the Dolphin). Reviewers and SF essayists, however, might be
expected to show some restraint with regard to the wider significance of Lilly's
attractively eccentric, yet guarded conclusions. Meyers contrasts the many instances of
more or less imaginative mushiness with the intelligent handling the problem received in
John Brunner's Total Eclipse (1974). Here the linguist-protagonist solves the
riddle of a language not based on a sound-to-symbol correspondence but on symbols that are
a direct reflection of what is going on in the alien's nervous system, and he does not
neglect to take seriously the problem of displacement. Such rigor is not often encountered
in SF texts dealing with language, and if it is, the reader fails to become engaged with
the fiction. Meyers' comment on W.P. Lehmann's "Decoding the Martian Language,"
published in the Graduate Journal of the University of Texas, is that while
" ...mighty short on plot, its science is impeccable" (p. 72).
There could be a great deal of ingenuity and imagination invested in working out exotic
channels for communication--smells, colors, tastes, touch. Meyers does not think very
highly of what has been done here so far. Yet his account of the
less-than-perfectly-satisfying attempts is, on the whole, instructive and useful, because
he makes his reader aware of the possibilities as well as the difficulties, and above all,
makes the reader participate in expanding the definition of language in ways which will
make the term "language universal" appear very insular (p. 85).
It is not only writers of SF that fall into the communication gap characteristic of the
projected situations of first contact. Poking gentle fun at the message designed by Frank
Drake and space enthusiast Carl Sagan and fixed to the Pioneer 10 spacecraft in the hopes
that it will be interpretable to intelligent aliens, Meyers points out that it is possible
to design messages that have far fewer ambiguities and that, in fact, some SF writers have
dealt very intelligently and imaginatively with that problem. He particularly admires a
1934 story by Raymond Z. Gallun, "Old Faithful," in which a Martian receives
signals arranged in Morse code and finally understands them to the extent that he can
attempt communication--a long and difficult process, carefully thought out and vividly
described. Meyers manages to convey a sense of the particular achievement of texts he
likes; he does not just assert it. In view of the scope of his inquiry, this is no small
achievement on his part. Concluding this stimulating chapter ("Take Me to Your
Leader"), Meyers points out that first contact stories have been particularly immune
to that pervasive modern literary pessimism with regard to communication:
Therefore when an attempt at communication with aliens is a total failure, as has more
often been the case in the last decade, we have still another sign of the disappearance of
barriers between the genre and literature as a whole, even though we might have wished
that influence to have proceeded in the other direction. (p. 100)
This sober position does not, however, prevent Meyers from appreciating a sophisticated
story of failure like Lem's Solaris. And it is useful to stress the importance of
the observation that communication is the opposite of violence. SF "presents examples
in great number of sane and tolerant responses to the most unexpected and frightening
situations; anyone concerned with the social dimensions of literature will find much in
the genre to praise" (p. 103). There are, for instance, a great many SF writers who
make their space travelers learn the alien language--it has been difficult to do the same
with US terrestrial travellers. In "Berlitz in Outer Space," Meyers examines
texts dealing with problems of language acquisition. He is not, on the whole, impressed by
the ways in which learning processes are handled. Writers of SF seldom spare their
protagonists where physical and mental degradation and suffering are involved, but they do
shy away from the rigors of learning a foreign language, resorting to methods like
hypnosis, neural changes, sleeplearning, electric shock, chemical means, DNA or RNA, and
that confidence game of "unsoundest" linguistics, the automatic translator.
The magic decoder has been an irritant to SF critics, especially the adherents to what
Meyers calls "the strong form of the theory of plausibility," which include a
high theoretician of SF like Darko Suvin. This strong form, however, does not work with
many interesting SF texts which are more fruitfully explored with the "weak form of
plausibility theory." Meyers agrees with its "usage" variant as "the
most sensible reconciliation of the different claims and arguments that have been advanced
on the subject" (pp. 128ff.). SF must not violate plausibility unless there is some
more important artistic reason. The fiction component in SF takes priority.
Those SF texts in which "problems of language are at the heart of the plot and
inform our perception on the work as a whole" (p. 146) are explored in chapters 10
and 11, where Meyers seems most engaged--and engaging. He deals with Tolkien's languages,
which he admires, and criticizes the Whorf hypothesis and its ramifications regarding
language control, the individual's and the group's. His interpretation of Jack Vance's The
Languages of Pao (1958) stresses the text's success as "hard" SF in terms
of the intellectual rigor with which a theory is worked out in fiction. Presenting the
dangers of a limited world view, one defined by Western science and technology, the same
text also presents a welcome questioning perspective on much "hard" science:
The only notes characteristic of Whorf not to be found in Vance's novel are Whorf's
somewhat mystical feelings about ultimate reality, shown most clearly by the linguist's
later interest in Theosophy, and Whorf's Rousseau-like admiration for non-technological
cultures. (p. 169)
Despite his relaxed attitude regarding the plausibility theories, Meyers is quite
clearly in favor of less rather than more of what Spinrad described as "rubber
science," so particularly attractive to SF--a case in point being Alfred Korzybski s Science
and Sanity (1933), promoted by Campbell without regard to its quite obvious quackery
and popularized by widely-read SF authors. His approach to Delany's Babel-17 and Triton,
written under the all-too-over- whelming influence of Whorf and Foucault respectively (pp.
180ff), is very useful to the reader in its mixture of prudence and openness. Meyers
points out the considerable and irritating weaknesses in Delany's argument and his
frequent factual mistakes. At the same time, he manages to draw attention to Delany's
admirable curiosity and his imaginative impulses to take risks. In the case of Ian
Watson's extrapolations in the sophisticated and disturbing The Embedding from
Chomsky's transformationalism, Meyers appreciates the writer's peculiar fusion of logic
and social imagination.
The concluding chapter, "The Children of Sir Thomas More," starts from the
notion that a high percentage of utopias will have language as an important concern and
that dystopian languages can be examined using the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis because all of
them involve thought control (pp. 199ff.). Skinner's Walden Two, then, appears to
Meyers as a dystopia because--its sensible arrangements notwithstanding--its society is
controlled by "the Code" which forbids the influence of another language
(exchange with the outside) or the extension of current words to include other meanings or
the invention of new words. Similarly, in Le Guin's Anarres (in The Dispossessed), Meyers
finds all the language controls that would make it a dystopian society. The
Dispossessed is a much more ambiguous case than Walden Two, though many
critics have responded in too simplistically positive ways. "If the Odonians have
become great, and they have many admirable qualities, it is in spite of a language
designed for propaganda and a government willing to employ it" (p. 208). Like More's Utopia,
with its repressive elements so clearly visible to the modern reader, The Dispossessed
should be read "as a thought- experiment in which the relative merits of
different social contracts can be explored before signing" (p. 208). This
experimental nature applies to all worthwhile SF, and its readers would benefit from being
open to it. SF has been seen as a means of mediating between the humanities and the
sciences; it seldom does so meaningfully, and why should one expect it to succeed with
this most difficult, if most important, of contemporary cultural problems? We have no
right, Meyers points out in conclusion, "to demand anything more than art from its
writers." However, he would not write on SF with so much fairness and appreciation if
he did not see the possibility for more than good or competent fiction: "the
possibility includes the chance to say something about language, something liberating and
tolerant and entertaining" (p. 209). By not asking too much of the genre but
approaching it with informed critical curiosity, Meyers has managed to realize this
possibility in his own study.
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