The Language of Liars

Introducing author S.L. Huang

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0:38I'm Mike Folo. Bob Garfield is away this week. Today on the show, a conversation with S.L. Huang, the Hugo Award-winning author of speculative and science fiction, Hollywood stunt performer, firearms expert, and, if that wasn't enough, MIT-educated mathematician. But it was a deep interest in languages that inspired their most recent novella called The Language of Liars. Publishers Weekly called it a fascinating linguistic puzzle that will entice hard sci-fi fans and literary scholars alike.

1:16S.L., on the Venn diagram of various cohorts, sci-fi fans and literary scholars, that's a pretty good overlap, don't you think? Wow, thank you so much, and thank you for that wonderful introduction. I've been really blown away by the reception to this book, obviously very honored by what people are taking away from it. Many works of science fiction, they're not easily summarized in a way that captures the narrative, but I'd like you to try. Without giving away any spoilers, what is the plot of the book?

1:51I've actually had some complaints from readers that we even give away a little bit too much on the back cover, people say. So I'm going to try to give the premise.

The premise of The Language of Liars

2:00The Language of Liars is about a protagonist who is a young academic linguist, very obsessed with language learning and linguistics learning. I should mention also a small furry alien, not human, and is a member of this large galactic civilization. And his government, he lives in sort of a small country-ish city-state the size of about Singapore. His government has realized that his species has this ability to, if they can sort of match the linguistic point of view of another species or another person,

2:31like anywhere in the galaxy, they can jump into the body of that other being. And like a government might do, they have decided to use this to create spies. So they recruit young linguists who are very interested in this field and show great talent, and they train them to be spies for their own little country's interest. And that sort of kicks off the book. I guess I'll stop there to avoid giving away too much, but it is a love letter to linguistics, but at the same time examining a lot of themes that are very important to me, like colonialism, linguistic oppression, language oppression,

3:05kind of how we intersect our interests and bridge-building with other cultures, with also not speaking over other voices in the world. So this main character to whom you alluded, we meet him in the very first sentence of the book, if I remember correctly. Tell me a little bit more about him. You refer to him as a furry alien. Tell me about his species. They're called the Ponto. Yes. I was trying to make this world feel as alien as possible in the sense that I wanted people to feel that these were not species that were based on humans,

3:40but also give us a little bit of an on-ramp into this so it doesn't feel too strange. So his species is a little bit closer to, you know, maybe what we're familiar with. They're mammalian, but have very different bodily systems. They have neurological differences where they have an empathetic sense with each other that they believe is what allows them to do this linguistic jumping that they're able to do. And then when our main character finally jumps into the body of another alien, we get into a much deeper alien world where this species is much less like what we're used to.

4:12And as a scientist by background, that was incredibly fun to write. Also quite a challenge to try to imbue this world with senses that, you know, we're not familiar with as people. Yeah, and we'll get to the species that he jumps into, but first just staying on the Ponto for a moment. They have a kind of hive-like social structure? Yes, yes. You know, you kind of feel the warmth of their social structure in a way that we can relate to as humans, but still feels very different, where they have these large family hives.

4:43They're mostly a kind of burrowing species a bit, but they have this very large, very civilized city, mostly underground. They have these very, very large overlapping family units, but a lot of love within them for their various kin. So you can kind of see how this feeling of, I want to help and save my family can be used as a motivation for a maybe slightly naive young linguist who wants to help his people and also just learn more about other people, other languages, and has that curiosity. The species that he's trying to jump into, they're called the star eaters, and they're the only species in the known universe, I think, that's capable of mining an element called meridian that is a major source of power for things like intergalactic travel.

5:32Yes, yes. How would you describe, first, the outward physiology of the star eaters, and then their inner nature? I've seen reviews that call Roe, our main character, his species, a space otter or a space ferret. People come up with the funnest metaphors for that. I was picturing more a sloth, I think. Yeah, that works too. So we have our space sloth on the one hand, and then he kind of turns into a space squid, one might say. So they're kind of radially symmetric with tentacle-like appendages, and because they live in the vacuum of space, their language is entirely gestural.

6:11It's a sign language because there is no sound in space, so they have evolved in this vacuum between stars, and they speak to each other entirely in gesture, which they can see because they live in nebulae and places where there is enough light for this, but they also have a large variety of senses beyond the visible light spectrum as well. So I will give a shout-out here if anybody in the audience has read Ed Young's In Events World, which is an incredible book about Earth. It's a science book. It's a nonfiction book. And it's about all the different species on Earth and their sensory organs and how they perceive the world.

6:46It is fascinating. And that was a huge inspiration for me in how I formed and built these aliens, just working from the weirdness of how Earth species in the real world perceive and interact with each other, trying to build my aliens from that springboard.

Language as an invasion conduit

7:02There's a plot device that you encounter throughout science fiction, right, of one intelligent species or people inhabiting the body of another. I'm thinking of the classic Robert Heinlein novel, The Puppet Masters, or the book and movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This also happens in various ways throughout the Star Trek universe. You take this plot device and put what I think is a really clever twist on it. The mechanism, which you've already sort of hinted at, by which Roe is attempting to jump into a Star Reader, is what you describe.

7:39And I'm not sure if you use this phrase exactly. It's a kind of linguistic empathy. Yeah. I don't think I do use that phrase, but that's a very good way of putting it, and I love it. Thank you. I wonder why did you choose language as the conduit for what can only be called an invasion, right? Yeah. So I love this question. I have long had a very strong interest in learning other languages and cultures and in the structure of languages. I've learned to speak a number of other languages, at least to a conversational level, and I've had readers come to me and say,

8:13wow, you really nailed that feeling, which I feel so gratified by because I was really writing from my own experience of living in places where I perhaps am not quite fluent and trying to really internalize and feel those linguistic differences. And sometimes when I'm trying to convey another language, I'm kind of aiming at something, but it feels like a little bit in the dark and I'm a little bit off. So I'm just aiming at something like a little bit nearby to what I'm trying to say and maybe use a synonym that's not quite right. You know, usually people can get what I'm talking about and if it's somewhere like a class, the teacher might say, oh, this is perhaps a better way of putting it and they'll correct me.

8:49And it really is a common, I think, feeling for people who are speaking in a language that's not perhaps their L1 native language. So this was something that has been on my mind a lot and using it as the basis for sort of the magic of the book was something that just kind of felt very right to me. But the sort of deeper side of the question you asked was about using this as a type of invasion. And that gets into, I think, a lot of the themes that were incredibly important to me in writing this in that there's this intersection whenever we learn other languages, whenever we're studying another people, I guess you could say.

9:25There's a very long and ugly history of that desire and curiosity for bridge building and friendship making to tilt into oppression, sometimes by accident, you know, oftentimes on purpose, but sometimes just by that enthusiasm of saying, I understand these people. Well, I'm going to explain them to you and that turning into, in a way, overwriting their voices and trying to speak for them. I really wanted to kind of dig into that aspect of language learning as well, because it's something that I certainly grapple with as somebody who loves language learning, loves traveling to and living in other countries, learning about other people, and also somebody who's, you know, a first generation immigrant to the United States.

10:12And there's a lot of politics that has affected my family and our ancestral languages as well. These were topics that are very close to my heart, and I'd been kind of looking for an angle to write a linguistics book for quite a while, and it kind of all came together in this one.

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12:24Yeah, sure. And for those who don't know, that is the notion that language determines thought or determines the way you experience the world, and it can differ and sometimes differ greatly depending on which language you speak. This is something you come across sometimes in science fiction, the movie and story on which it's based, Arrival, for example. Sapir-Whorf is kind of a sexy name for a sexy theory, one that I'm deeply skeptical of, and it's tempting to search for Sapir-Whorf in your book, but correct me if I'm wrong, it's not there.

13:00That's not what you're suggesting with these jumps into the Star Eaters. You're absolutely correct. It is not at all. And I didn't actually realize that this was a bit of a unique approach to language and science fiction because, you know, there have been a variety of science fiction books that have been written about language, and a lot of them revolve around some sort of first contact, meeting a new species, which this one also doesn't do. But a linguist friend of mine who's also a science fiction author, I was expressing surprise at the reception that the book was getting. And she said, I don't think you realize how unusual it is to write a linguistic sci-fi book that does not somehow revolve around Sapir-Whorf.

13:39I thought about it, and I was kind of thinking, ah, it never occurred to me to write about Sapir-Whorf, partly because I am also skeptical of it, as you are, and also partly because Ted Chiang did it so well in the novella that Arrival is based on, and I love that novella so much. He did it magnificently, and I feel like... He's ended the conversation. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you'd have to do something, like, really profound with Sapir-Whorf to stand apart from what's come before, but, you know, I wasn't even really thinking about that.

It's not what interests me about linguistics, I would say, because I feel like it's a little bit obvious to me that the larger claims in Sapir-Whorf are a little bit nonsensical, and that the smaller claims within it are just sort of, like, commonsensical, which, you know, if you use different words, you're thinking a little bit differently, but, you know, in very minor ways.

14:24And it was not what excited my imagination, let's put it that way. Well, relatedly, there's this idea, sometimes apocryphal, sometimes not, that a certain, often indigenous somehow in our imagination, language has, say, 20 words for this or that thing. It's usually some part of the natural world, like ice or snow.

Taxonomy of lying and translation

14:46Now, again, you take this familiar trope and put a really clever twist on it, because the Ponto, the species that Roe is a member of, they have many, many words for the various nuances and shades of lying, right? Of telling untruths. Yes. Give me some of the taxonomy of lying. Oh, gosh. Let's see. So I did the clever cop-out author thing, where in the book it's revealed that there are 19 different ways of saying lying in the Ponto language, and I reveal many less than 19 in the book, so that readers can sort of fill that in, and I wasn't painting myself into a corner.

15:28So when I introduced this, I actually was not thinking about what you mentioned about what people say about, oh, this language has this many words for snow or this many words for green. Instead, I was thinking about the way, so I'm a mathematician by training, and in math we have this concept of functions being one-to-one, where you can go from one set of data to another set of data in one single way, and you can go from that second set of data back to the first, again, in one single way. And it's always the same. You go, what, there, and there.

And a lot of people, I think, think of translation this way, where you have a word in one language, and you can go to that word in the other language, and then you can go back, and you'll get the same word in the first language, which, as anybody who's done translation knows, this is very much not the case.

16:12And especially when you expand from words to full sentences, full paragraphs, metaphorical text, humor, this becomes incredibly complicated, and there's a lot of artistry in translation. And if you read two different translations of the same work, you can see how different they are sometimes. I wanted to dig into this idea of languages not being one-to-one, and sometimes you have this way of describing things in one language that does not easily map, and you can still express it. You know, I'm not saying it's not expressible in the other language, but sometimes it might take more words, or it might take more explanation, or using examples, or something like that.

16:47There might be something that gives the same general feeling, for example, small talk types of phrases, stock phrases, but actually has a completely different literal denotative meaning. And I find all this stuff very, very interesting. So when I talked about having 19 words for lies, and I kind of threw shade on the sort of linguistic, anthropological judgment of other languages, where apparently academics from other lands think that this means they cannot lie, which is entirely untrue, right? They lie all the time. They just call it by different names for all the different circumstances.

17:19I don't use the word gaslighting, but that's one of the lies described, where you're trying to convince somebody of something that is not real and not the real world. And it's, you know, one of the most severe and consequential types of lies, and is considered extremely terrible to do to somebody, versus what we might call white lies, which we do have, you know, a phrase for that, right? Or, you know, lies that people use to, like, protect their privacy, or, oh, one that I used was a lie that is repeated so often that it becomes true. We see this a lot in things like politics, misinformation, urban legends, and stuff.

17:53Sometimes it doesn't literally become true, it just becomes believed. Sometimes something is repeated so much and is subjective enough that it does become the truth of the matter. We get drifted in meaning in some regard, hopefully not in a consequentially harmful way. But, yeah, this was definitely a way of me kind of exploring different linguistic concepts in language learning that I tend to think about and find very interesting. And what role would you say this idea plays in the story? Again, without giving away.

18:26You know, one might notice that the title, The Language of Liars, right? There's a lot in the book about misrepresentation, right? You know, we have these people who are becoming spies, and they're literally speaking another language and trying to represent themselves in that language without being quite fluent in it. But then there's also the lies we tell to ourselves. So, for example, at the beginning, our protagonist convincing himself that this is a justified and purely academic and wonderful thing to do. And then I'm trying to frame this without spoiling the end of the book.

19:00There's also another layer here of how governments lie to people and the way people lie to themselves as a society and becoming these very harmful forces in history and these bases for oppression as they build up into these very large pieces of political misinformation or belief systems.

Building a galaxy without humans

19:21This universe that you've conjured up here is populated, I think you say, by quadrillions of beings across millions of inhabited planets. And one thing that struck me only after I had finished the book is that none of these beings that we know of are human. Did you leave us out of the book intentionally? Did you just forget to include us? Where are we? Oh, very intentional.

19:52Very intentional. So, first of all, the numbers of species. I did all that math, right? Math is my background. I love math. If there's any sort of numbers in my books, I have always done the math on it. I can't really help it. So I had a lot of math to do on this one because there's, as you find out very early in the book, there are issues with, like, the star-eater reproductive cycle and, you know, different, like, lengths of lifespans and stuff. And I kind of had to figure out that my numerical populations and the populations of the galaxy and, you know, who knew what at what time, that it all would make sense. And I didn't put all of this in the book, but just so that you don't read it going like, well, this doesn't seem right, you know?

20:26So I was very careful to do all that math. Well, also because I enjoy it. Let's be real. But the lack of humans. I didn't realize that this was so unusual. So many people have asked me about this. To me, it was very natural to leave humans out of this story, partly because I didn't want our baggage. You know, a lot of the themes I talk about in the book, you could find parallels in many different places in our societies, in our histories, among different peoples on Earth.

20:58I've had a lot of people, you know, write to me and say this was very profound to me as, you know, somebody whose family has experienced this type of linguistic oppression or assimilation or something like that. And that's incredibly meaningful to me. I didn't want to paint this book as being about a particular historical piece. Very clearly, it was inspired by a lot of my own personal and my own familial history and feelings. But there's so many complexities that happen in our own real world that are quite hard to address without, first of all, being an expert in the subject, but then also just trying to do it right.

21:41Whenever I talk about something real world, I always really want to handle it sensitively and carefully and try to do it right. The wonderful thing about science fiction, I think, and the reason I love it so much is that it allows us to look at something through kind of a refracted lens from a little bit of a distance and a little bit metaphorical. And to sit with that in a way maybe we haven't experienced before and to have that layers of critical thinking where we're connecting it ourselves to what's meaningful to us.

22:15I firmly believe that the reader brings so much to the reader experience as well as the writer, which is another way language interacts, right? The writer's trying to form this experience and the reader comes in with all of their context and is interfacing with this experience and intersecting with it. So I really wanted it to have that sense. It never occurred to me even to think about including humans because I knew what I was trying to do here. Well, I will say that I was assuming, it wasn't a conscious assumption, but I was assuming that Roe was human because that's what I always assume when I read about a character starting from the first page.

22:54Then I started to learn that he had fur and four stomachs and I was like, oh, okay, he's not human. And then, of course, as the book progressed and there were no humans, as I said, I didn't really think about it until after I'd finished the book. So I didn't miss them. Oh, that's good to hear. It wasn't like I was like, hey, where are the humans? You know, I'm afraid if we talk too much longer, I'm going to end up giving away some spoilers. But I do want to ask you one more thing.

Writing style and poetry

23:20Yeah, of course. There's a sub stack called Women in Science Fiction and the woman who runs it, Maria Christensen, reviewed your book. First of all, the subtitle of her post was A New Book by S.L. Huang That Kept Me Up Late. That's an auspicious start to any book review, of course, right? But she said something else that really stuck with me, and I'll quote her exactly. She said, Huang's world building and storytelling in this book is like poetry, sparse explanations in places, but vivid enough that with just a little mental work on your part, you understand.

23:57And I thought that was spot on because it really captured your writing style. And I wonder if you could talk about that, about your writing style and your own use of language and how you approach writing. Sure. First of all, thank you for telling me about that review and that quote itself is phrased so beautifully. Wow, kind of gave me chills and I'm so flattered that somebody is writing that about my work. I had mentioned a couple of minutes ago about how I feel the writer and reader are both bringing to the experience.

24:29I read this amazing essay by a Japanese author once. He was talking about how, as a writer, he's trying to make this sculpture, and he kind of described it as building and massaging with his hands this shape. And it was very beautiful. I was reading it in the Japanese. It was very beautifully phrased. And he's trying to pass this shape to the reader, into the reader's hands. And you all can't see me. I'm making all these gestures. I hope it's coming through. I can see it. So that the reader is feeling this same shape.

25:02It's not dissimilar to what happens in something like translation, where it's not going to be exact, but we're trying to kind of build this shaped feeling and pass it to the next person where they're sort of taking it in their own hands and their own mind and feel this same shape of feeling. That is certainly how I approach writing. I know everybody's going to be coming with their own pieces of the world. I try to lean into that, honestly, as we say in computer science, it's a feature, not a bug. I think there's a trend, actually, in modern commercial literature where a lot of authors are feeling pushed to be very blunt in their intentions and their messages, either because they don't want to be misunderstood or they think people are doing other things and distracted.

25:45There's an instinct that a lot of people have noticed, actually, where a number of authors are becoming more heavy-handed with, like, this is what I mean on this page. And, like, if you don't take this away from it, then you're reading it incorrectly. You know, that kind of heavy-handedness of messaging, which I am very live and live with writing styles. But I, myself, very much prefer to do that meeting with the reader and have people take different things from it, maybe, and that that can be quite wonderful. Sometimes they take something from it that I didn't even necessarily think about.

26:16It kind of becomes this living text in a way, and I love that. I love trying to build that in. I love trying to have those layers of meaning, and I love open questions as a writer because, to be honest, when I'm writing, I often don't know the answers to the things I'm writing about. I view it more like a journey. I'm saying, come with me and dig into these questions, and let's think about this together, rather than me saying, I have the answer to this, and I'm going to tell you what the answer is. Certainly, I have my own opinions that go into a work and my own messages, one of which might be that these are important questions, right, and that sitting and viewing them and chewing on them is a valuable and important thing.

26:55I love writing as a conversation. I love writing as a way of examining the world and thinking. Thinking is just like such a wonderful kind of thing, and I know that sounds like very strange to say, But, you know, some of my best memories are, you know, in life are me getting together with friends and just talking about what we got out of a book or a movie or some other piece of media, exchanging opinions on some piece of culture together.

27:27It's quite wonderful. That's kind of the conversation I aspire to be a part of. I would not necessarily classify myself as a poet now. I still do write poetry, but I did write a lot of poetry when I was younger, most of which was very bad. We all did. I know, right? But the comment of that reviewer about poetry, I find that so lovely because poetry is exactly that, right? Except maybe even a step more where we are painting this image and we're allowing the reader to come in and inhabit those spaces in between those negative spaces.

27:59And I think that's beautiful. SL, thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you so much for having me. This was an incredibly interesting conversation. I love the podcast and this was quite a lovely experience. Thank you very much. SL Huang is a Hugo Award-winning author of speculative and science fiction, most recently the novella, The Language of Liars, which we'll link to in the description for this episode. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram, who texted me in a panic when, while reading the book, realized that she left it at the office on a Friday and wouldn't have it to finish over the weekend.

28:41I didn't have that problem because I believe I finished it in one sitting. We'll be back next week. Until then. We'll be back next week.

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