Semiosis is a 2018 science fiction novel by Sue Burke about the human colonization of an alien world (Pax) where life is a billion years older than it is on Earth. While there are several very bright species of animals on Pax (including some who have mastered the use of fire for hunting and cooking), the principle native intelligences are plants. What need might plants have for intelligence? Well, to more effectively wage chemical warfare with other plants, and, of course, to control useful animals! While mutualistic relationships between animals and plants on Earth are the result of millions of years of co-evolution, producing pairs of bees pollinating flowers or ants sheltering in, being fed by, and defending acacia trees, such relationships on Pax are the result of much faster processes of plants noticing useful animals in their environments and intentionally producing fruits, medicines, and poisons to encourage certain beneficial behaviors by those animals and discourage others.
And humans, being intelligent ourselves, turn out to be both easier to train and much more broadly useful than most native animals.
The novel has a rather unconventional structure, with each chapter switching viewpoints to a new human character in a different generation of colonists (and alternating male and female points of view). This allows for numerous timeskips between "interesting times", which is mostly OK... except for where it skips from the initial human realization that a plant is trying to get their attention and establish linguistic communication right to a time when such communication has been entirely figured out and made routine. This is probably for the best as far as acceptance by a general audience is concerned, but I for one was seriously looking forward to a proper depiction of monolingual fieldwork with an alien plant, and I didn't get it!
In light of my previous post on speech in a weird modality, however, it is worth pointing out that linguistic communication with Stevland (the human name for the primary vegetative character) is carried out, at least initially, entirely though writing; Stevland has chromatophores that can be used to change the coloration of his stalks and write out messages. And as it turns out, the limitations of this medium end up being quite significant to the plot.
Things get more interesting, however, when the humans finally encounter another group of interstellar colonists, dubbed "Glassmakers", who had beaten them to Pax, and communicated with Stevland themselves before losing their technological base and reverting to nomadic barbarism. While Stevland is able to teach the humans the written form of the Glassmaker language (with assistance from a collection of archeological artifacts they had left behind), mastering their spoken language turns out to present some difficulties, and not merely because human vocal tracts are the wrong shape--rather, because the Glassmakers' spoken language is multi-modal--like Donald Boozer's Dritok... but using a different pair of simultaneous modes.
Specifically, the Glassmaker language uses both the acoustic channel and scent, with the Glassmakers being able to produce a large number of different volatile organic compounds at will. Now, there are some significant problems with using odor alone to encode language--notably, that it is rather difficult to keep odors separated and control the order in which they will be perceived on short time scales, making the encoding of syntactic structure close to impossible. Burke seems to be well aware of this, however, not only providing the acoustic channel as a second modality for the language parallel and complementary to scent, but also ensuring that the glosses for odoremes all convey complete useful, common utterances without need for additional syntactic support (although they may require deictic support), making them comparable to human interjections or ideophones; the full list of explicitly-identified odoremes is as follows:
ethanol - welcome / relax
methanol - come
eugenol - what do you see?
2-heptanone - alert
limonene - attack
citronellol - defend
beta-pinene - flee
The acoustic portion of the language is represented in the text through approximate English translation, with distorted grammar. Intriguingly, many-but-not-all Glassmaker sentences are presented as having extra pronouns suffixed to the main verbs, but it is not at all obvious what role these are supposed to play; when they are used and what they coreference lacks any pattern that I was able to identify (and in one case, a proper noun is compounded with the verb instead!)
If this summary interest you, you can get your own copy of Semiosis here. Trigger warning: there is a brief depiction of rape in the second chapter. Also, note that, as an Amazon affiliate, I will get a cut of qualifying purchases made through that link.
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Great post. I don't remember seeing a list of pheromones and their meanings in those books. Did you compile the list yourself?
ReplyDeleteYes, the verb-pronoun combinations were odd. Perhaps Burke was trying to indicate conjugation? But what do you think about that technique in general of translating an utterance oddly, so that readers know that the characters are speaking a non-English language? Another example of Clavell's use of "thee" and "thou" when his characters spoke Spanish.
I did indeed compile the list myself. There is a partial list in the text at one point, but several other pheromone meanings are given one at a time.
DeleteI thought at first the pronoun combinations could indicate agreement / conjugation, but I could not identify any consistent pattern to it. Maybe there was intended to be one, but if so, it's not obvious.
On the more general subject of "translating oddly", I think it depends on exactly what variety of "oddness" is employed, and what you are translating. I haven't seen enough examples of this to feel really confidant giving advice, but it seems to me you've got a lot more flexibility with a fictional language or conlang than you would when translating a natural language, where oddness in the representation could easily be seen as offensive. In most cases, though, I would imagine there is some level of "L1 transfer" that could be appropriate, where you can identify structures that are *possible* in English (or whatever the primary language is) but which are much more common in the secondary language (of which the use of singular second-person pronouns is an example).