My friend DJ wrote to me.
Had a seed for a story that might be interesting to mull over. With AI interpreting novel data types en masse and picking up patterns we’ve never even considered, it’s only a matter of time before we start translating animals sounds into meanings, in quasi-language form at minimum. Plausible that more intelligent creatures like dolphins, orcas, octopuses, elephants, apes, etc may have developed some forms of language that exist uniformly across geographically nearby groups in the species, and that AI could decipher, translate for us, and bridge translate back to them. We may be able to legitimately converse with some zoo animals during visits while our kids are still kids. That’s bananas.
Pushing that boundary further toward sci-fi, I feel like there’s a world to explore where another species (or plural) capitalize on human development of AI to communicate with each other and us, and over generations are able to compete with humans for global dominance of our own technology and supplant us as the controlling power species—even without the classic sci-fi natural disaster or war as the precursor event. So many directions it could go, many dark, but also with some serious opportunity for thought-provoking realism, consideration of mortality, the environment and our place in this universe, etc.
Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth1 tells the story of Hiruko, a woman whose country has disappeared. She’s made it to Scandinavia, although she doesn’t speak Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, or Danish. She’s instead invented a language all her own called “Panska.”
“Panska was not made in a laboratory, or by a computer; it’s a language that just sort of came into being as I said things that people somehow understood. Comprehensibility is what’s most important, so with that as my standard, I talked as much as I could every day. This was my great discovery—that the human brain has a language creating function.”
My friend Tim learned Argentinian Spanish by going to Argentina, and my friend Dan learned classroom Spanish by going to school. In college when we got really drunk they would start speaking in their Spanish dialects and I would stand in between them complaining. But that’s not what DJ is talking about.
There’s the stellar movie Arrival, one of my all time favorites, where Louise Banks must decipher an alien language that is nonlinear. (It’s based on “Story of Your Life,” by Ted Chiang).
But that’s also not what DJ is talking about.
In Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, a fungus-like semi-sentient being begins writing out bizarre nonsensical phrases, emulating language, but not exercising it.2 But of course, that’s not really language, just a pre-verbal imitation.
The Babel Fish ingests the brainwaves and speech patterns of any language and feeds them to its host in an instantaneously comprehensible form in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.3
“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.”
I suppose in principle the Babel fish is closest to the invention DJ theoreticized: instantaneous, and automatic.
But none of those connections get at the heart of DJ’s idea: what is it all these animals are saying?
I have not read The Mountain in the Sea yet. I picked it up at one of my favorite bookshops in Providence, Lovecraft Arts & Sciences, which has the square footage of a taqueria restroom and a single, extremely effective employee. As soon as I picked it up, they dropped their phone and said, “oooh. I love books that get into ‘othermind.’ ” I said something sheepish instead of what I wanted to reply with: what are some other books that get into ‘othermind’? They once similarly talked me in to buying A Scanner Darkly, so I know to trust them.
I have not read The Mountain in the Sea yet, but this is what it’s about. “A species of octopuses has been discovered that may have developed its own language and culture.”
I have read Silvia Park’s “Poor Unfortunate Fools.” The lives of merrows—like mermaids—are studied, prodded, and documented by scientists.4 There’s no translation. There’s just interpreting.
It’s circular, I guess; the map I’ve made. Hiruko made a language just using her brain; what humans like Tim and Dan did. Louise Banks translated the ink-writing of a squid-like alien species. The fungus in Annihilation imitated language, but lacked meaning. Babel fish captures both and more—language + meaning = meal => language + meaning (excretion). Nayler’s octopus might have culture and language. So do whales, by the way, chimpanzees, and elephants, at least. Park’s merrows are treated like animals—uncultured, thoughtless beings—even though they aren’t.
Which sort of character moves through the story DJ describes? A linguist, perhaps, like Hiruko or Louise Banks. VanderMeer’s biologist? Adams’s transient? The beings themselves?
The image that most strikes me is when DJ says, “We may be able to legitimately converse with some zoo animals during visits while our kids are still kids.” That’s the part of his idea I most see. That’s the part of his idea I’ve least seen elsewhere.
I’ll have to ask the kind person down at Lovecraft what they know.
If you buy through any of these links I’ll get a few pennies. I enjoy throwing those pennies at children, so thank you.
Dan, you would like this one. Get it at a library for god’s sake.
Dan, you would also like this one, but I’m betting you’ve already read it.
I found this short story in The Best American SF&F 2019