The Embedding

More linguistic scifi, dealing with concepts of universal grammar and recursive center-embedding that were extraordinary and cutting-edge in the early 1970s.

The story begins with a setup built on the idea of the ‘forbidden experiment’. At a secret research lab in a UK hospital, scientists are isolating orphaned refugee children, dosing them with drugs and communicating with them only in specially designed artificial languages to probe the limits of human cognition and language development. The main character Chris Sole is a morally conflicted experimenter at the facility whose role is to construct a language and world for the children based on recursive embeddings designed to push the human mind close to its limits.

Sole’s work routine is interrupted by a letter from an old friend Pierre, an anthropologist living with the Xemahoa, an Amazonian tribe whose ceremonial language also leverages special aspects of grammatical embedding to induce trance states to break out of everyday reality. The Xemahoa’s homelands are threatened by a colossal engineering project to dam and flood large swathes of the Amazon—a collaboration between the violent Brazilian government and an outwardly colonial American establishment.

All this comes crashing together when an alien ship arrives in near earth orbit. The Russian and American governments cover this up by faking a satellite launch, while they scramble to investigate. They soon learn that the aliens are capable of communicating in Earth languages. They call themselves ‘signal traders’ and share details of their long-term quest to collect and archive biological languages from different planets across the galaxy. Intrigued by the center embedding of the Xemahoa language and the linguistic engineering potential it holds, they attempt to strike a deal with horrifying consequences involving brains in vats.

A fascinating and compelling scenario filled in by a sprawling, vivid and well-realised narrative if a little rough and loose, but certain aspects haven’t aged well.

A recurring theme is the threatening, interfering American govt-industrial complex as a colonial power. This is an early example of post-hippie disillusionment with the American dream amplified by the suspicion and mistrust of American motives within other English-speaking cultures. It’s clear and convincing, but it brushes over the fact the British government here—largely invisible to the story—are backing up the Americans every step of the way, absent their own history as a great global colonial power. A scattering of Vietnam War rape flashbacks tries to reinforce this overtly while adding very little to the plot itself.

The depiction and discussion of the Xemahoa—with the emphasis on the detail of their culture and their vast intelligence presumably intended to be somewhat sympathetic and progressive—comes across as if constructed from a grab bag of paternally racist anthropology tropes. The violent drug-fuelled conclusion to the story’s dealings with the tribe is grotesque and vomit inducing, and plays into the worst of othering tropes.

Ultimately, basic human flaws, transactional politics and the threat of a global working class uprising leads the Cold War governments of the story into epic self-destruction rather than realising the potential of communicating with an advanced alien species.

The bleak and cynical conclusion may have been transgressive and dramatic in its time, but again, doesn’t really hold up today where there’s a vast surplus of Hobbsean mania and grim conclusions about the human race, both in fiction and in daily political reality. The one thing that might be achieved through its ending is a symbolic reflection of colonial stupidity on the ground in the management of first contact with intelligent aliens, but this isn’t resolved in a narratively coherent way, it merely reinforces a sense of powerlessness and the inevitability of human destruction.

The best thing about this story is its quirkiness. The linguistic weirdness is well constructed—if implausible—but it’s really made by its string of bizarrely unique characterisations—the linguistically obsessed aliens who trade in information theory and language systems; the sinister CIA agent with gleaming ruby cufflinks; the psychotic Marxist revolutionaries in the jungle with no time for Western bullshit; the 1970s British institutional culture sadistically experimenting on children, ‘Clockwork Orange’ style. There’s immense creativity and ingenuity on display here, with unabashed high concept experimentation that’s rare to find.