The Steerswoman & the Wood Gnome

The Steerswoman is the first of what is currently a four-book series by Rosemary Kirstein, with more entries apparently planned. It was originally published in 1989, with the latest book so far, The Language of Power, coming out in 2004. (See also my reviews of books 2, 3, and 4.)

The setting is what appears to be a low-fantasy world slowly making its way to a scientific revolution via the actions of the eponymous Steerswomen to collect knowledge and explore the world. Several items and events seen by the characters as "magical" are easily (or less than easily) identifiable to an attentive reader as entirely mundane and technological in nature, which gives the story a somewhat similar feeling to other stories like the earlier Dragonriders of Pern, or the more contemporaneous Black Trillium. As of the end of the first book, however, it is not entirely clear whether this will turn out to be a full-on sci-fi in disguise, like Pern, or if some of the magic will remain unexplained and fundamentally magical. (As an aside, all three of these series happen to be written by women and have female main characters--which is unfortunately notable when it comes to "classic" sci-fi and fantasy!)

The plot threads dealing with physics and chemistry make it feel almost like a mystery novel at times, as the characters investigate mysterious events, although there is an extra level of dramatic irony present given that we, the readers, exist in a post-Isaac-Newton society which allows for solving these mysteries must faster than the characters can! And I think the author is to be commended for not falling victim to presentism and allowing the characters to realistically struggle with their existing physical preconceptions, rather than having genius-level flashes of insight about things that are only obvious to us because we have been taught the answers.

The Steerswoman has very little surface-level linguistic content, which puts it outside the realm of things I would usually review and analyze, but there is a great deal of recognition of linguistic knowledge; while the Steerswoman's world seems to have a single universal human oral language, that fact is not entirely taken for granted by the Steerswomen, and several characters do in fact comment on the dialectal and accent variations that exist throughout the world, and how they can be used to identify someone's origins and social affiliations. And it turns out that there is some surface-level linguistic content... exhibiting a sign language!

I have been looking for examples of books with sign language representation, so finding this entirely by accident in a book I was reading for other reasons was kind of nice! In particular, while they appear only incidentally in this first book, the Steerswoman's world contains multiple seemingly-intelligent non-human cultures, the most salient of which are the Wood Gnomes--small humanoid creatures who communicate via sign language with humans. (It is unclear if they also have their own oral language or not.)

In my initial research on how sign language might be represented in print, I came across this article specifically about ASL language and culture for writers; while the central focus of that article is not about portraying the language itself, it does have one very straightforward bit of advice: whatever you do, don't gloss. To quote:

Glossing, a tool that is often used in ASL textbooks and courses to help students remember ASL syntax, uses the words that most closely align to ASL signs and puts them in ASL order.  Words in gloss are always written in the present tense and in capital letters.  For example, the gloss of the ASL translation of the English sentence, “Where is your car?” would look like this:

YOUR CAR WHERE?

Glossing can be a valuable tool, but it is extremely limited because it does not show use of space or nonmanual signals (for example, eyebrow and mouth movements and body shifts, all of which serve a grammatical function in ASL).

Worse, when glossing appears in fiction, it gives an incomplete picture of the language and makes deaf characters sound primitive and limited in communication.  What’s wrong with using standard dialogue conventions and replacing “said” with “signed”?:

“Where is your car?” she signed.

And you know what? That seems like pretty darn good advice. Almost obvious advice. I certainly wouldn't recommend word-for-word translations of oral languages, either--and I have yet to ever come across that as a secondary-language incorporation technique in the wild, which suggest to me that most-if-not-all authors also see that as an obviously bad idea. Yet there does seem to be a temptation to do it with signed languages, as that is the only exposure to sign language examples in print that many people have ever had. So what else are you gonna do? In the absence of standard sign orthographies, it doesn't seem like there are really any good options other than not actually showing the sign language at all, and relying entirely on free translation with language-specific dialog tags as suggested above.

So, what does The Steerswoman do?

A typical example of Wood Gnome conversation can be seen in this excerpt from the beginning of chapter 9:

    Rowan turned back to the wood gnome and addressed him in the language of hand signals that his people shared with humans. "Where woman?" she gestured.
    "Woman in bed," he replied, obviously meaning Rowan.
    "No. Other woman." She pointed to the bed with Bel's clothing.
    "Fur-woman. Noisy woman gone. Throw rock at me."

This isn't quite free translation, and it's not entirely clear what the broken-English representation is really meant to represent. Is it effectively word-for-word gloss? I don't know, but at least it is easy to read, not-all-caps block text!

Later on, Rowan encounters a deaf man who appears to communicate through some combination of iconic gestures and home sign. We are introduced to him and his communication style as follows:

    [The woman] tapped her assistant on the shoulder as he made to unload another crate. Pausing in his work, he watched intently as she indicated Bel and Rowan and pointed from the boxes to the door; then he nodded pleasantly at the pair; he was deaf.
    [...]
    Attracting the disheveled man's attention again, she attempted to give him a more difficult, complicated instruction. Eventually comprehending, he led the way.

And a little later, we get some Wood Gnome Sign Language again:

    At the top was a second landing, and there the man put down his crate, indicated those carried by the women, then indicated the floor. When they complied, he pointed at Rowan and Bell, back down the stairs, pointed at himself, and made a motion toward a short corridor behind him.
    Without thinking, Rowan replied in the wood gnome language of gestures. "I understand. We go down now."
    These particular phrases were simple and obvious, easily comprehensible to an intelligent person; but the formality of the gestures, and the fluid naturalness of their use, surprised him. It was more than pantomime, it was language, and he seemed to recognize something of this. 
    With a look of surprise and concentration, he repeated a phrase, pointing at himself, then extending his index finger near his right temple. "I understand." He said it twice, testing the moves.

Notably, although the signs cannot be directly written, there is some attempt in this passage to represent the actual diagetic language through partial descriptions of the forms of the signs. The last paragraph could even be analyzed as a classic example of appositive subtitling. And on general principle, I appreciate the explicit acknowledgment than sign language is language, at the same level as oral language, and distinct from non-linguistic gesturing. This deaf man has no real significance to the larger plot (although the context of this interaction with him does provide some additional clues for the reader in solving some scientific mysteries), so I can only assume that he was included specifically to allow the author to make this point!

Our final narrative exposure to him is as follows:

    When Rowan delivered [the crate], she could not help speaking to the man again. "Work finished." Those signals were more abstract, and she amplified them with gestures indicating the stairs, the box, herself, and the man, and a negative shake of her head.
    He watched in fascination. Then, with the crate precariously tucked under one arm, he replied, "I understand." He paused, thinking, the hesitantly added, "You go down now."

Although it is rather limited, I was also quite pleased by the representation of sign language, and it should provide a decent basis for comparison with other works.

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Living in a Hyperbolic Universe

 A few years ago, there was a question on the Worldbuilding StackExchange site about living on a hyperbolic plane. This turns out to be a pretty fascinating setting, but it runs into all the same sorts of problems as infinite flat Euclidean worlds do--how does the sun work? If there's gravity, why don't mountains destabilize the whole thing and fragment it into ball-worlds? Etc.

So, I started thinking; what if you just had a planet in a hyperbolic space?

It turns out, the surfaces of spheres in hyperbolic spaces are not themselves hyperbolic manifolds; just like Euclidean spheres, they end up having positive curvature all over. So, you don't get all the interesting features of living on a hyperbolic plane, like the entire surface area of the Earth being within walking distance and the navigational problems that that implies--but there are other interesting features of such worlds!

First, let's talk about exactly how we're going to construct a hyperbolic universe. It turns out, you can do this in General Relativity, but a relativistic universe with hyperbolic space turns out to also be an exponentially expanding universe as well. The reason for this is that parallel lines in a hyperbolic space diverge, and in a relativistic universe you can't distinguish objects in motion from objects at rest--which means that parallel world lines of some collection of objects that are at relative rest to each other must diverge, no matter how that collection is moving relative to anything else. Since geodesics diverge in space, they must diverge in time as well, and the result is an expanding universe. If the curvature is strong enough to be interesting on human scales, that means the universe blows up before anything interesting can happen, so we won't be putting out planet in a relativistic universe after all!

Instead, we'll use a 3-dimensional hyperbolic space with Newtonian absolute time. Now, in a Euclidean Newtonian world, we still have Galilean relativity; any object moving inertially can be declared to be at rest, and physics is unchanged. But in this hyperbolic universe, that is no longer true; motion implies geodesic divergence, which means moving objects will feel strain from pseudoforces trying to blow them apart perpendicular to their direction of motion, so it's easy to determine a universal absolute state of rest, and absolute measurement of velocity. Travel speeds won't be limited by the speed of light, but they will be limited by the tensile strength of materials--move too fast, and you will blow up!

This also applies to a planet orbiting a sun. At different parts of its orbit, a planet will have different absolute velocities, producing seasonally-varying strains trying to distort it, and the orientation of those strains relative to the surface features will vary as the planet rotates throughout its day--meaning that there will be tides with no need for a moon! Incidentally, this also puts limits on where planets can exist and how big they can be, lest the divergence forces of orbital motion tear them apart! Fortunately, gravitational force drops much more rapidly with distance in hyperbolic space than it does in Euclidean space (exponentially, in fact), so orbits can be rather slow, which will keep our planet from blowing up even if it orbits very close to a star--which it will need to do to get enough exponentially-decaying light!

Now, the characteristics of the planet itself: we want the hyperbolic curvature to be strong enough to be interesting and noticeable, but not so strong that it makes human life impossible. Suppose we choose a hyperbolic scale of 10km. On that scale, a planet with about 55 thousand square kilometers less surface area than Earth would have a radius of a mere 71.4998km. Why am I using so many decimal places? Because if you increase the radius by a mere 10cm, to 71.4999km, the surface area jumps to 9,695 square kilometers bigger than the Earth! Fortunately, the circumference of the world changes by only about 0.02% over the 2-meter height of a tall human, so you can in fact walk on such a world without your feet leaving your head behind!

So, humans can certainly walk around on that kind of world; but what if we make the curvature more extreme? At a hyperbolic scale of 1km, a planet with a radius of a mere 9.45257km exceeds Earth in surface area, and the variation in arc lengths over a 2-meter height is still only about 0.2%. Meanwhile, if you dig down 50 meters (a typical subway tunnel depth), all distances contract by 5%. And if you travel upwards by even 150m (not even quite meeting FAA requirements for minimum flight altitudes), distances expand by 16%. So, unlike living on a hyperbolic plane, the entire surface of the world is not within walking distance over that surface, and navigation on the surface isn't too different from navigation on Earth... but flying is significantly disincentivized, and everything is within 20 km if you are willing to take the most direct route tunneling through the interior of the planet! So, subways rather than airlines turn out to be the way to go for fast travel!

And don't forget, the core of the planet is only 9 kilometers down. The deepest mines on Earth are not-quite-4km deep--a significant fraction of that distance. Which means this hyperbolic planet is much easier to mine than Earth--almost all of it is extremely close to the surface. Precious (and mundane) metals won't all be inaccessible in a deep core.

And you know what that means: hyperbolic space is pretty much made for dwarfs!