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Alien Tongue | Rating | |
| B | |||
| Stephen Leigh | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
Humanity discovered the wormhole (and quickly nicknamed it Wormy) at the edge of our solar system at the beginning of the twenty-first century. One expedition to explore it has already been lost, but not before the single occupant of the ship sent back a probe and a message showing that there is a planetary system on the other side - and that it is occupied. Now humanity is sending a second, and likely final, expedition to find out what happened to her and perhaps take a look at these aliens. Are they the ones who built Wormy?
The book is a little confusing at the beginning. The narration is in first person in the "present" but will often turn to third-person as it shows readers a flashback for a chapter. Later it is more consistently first person, but by then we have multiple viewpoints for it to be first-person in. It can get confusing, and definitely took some time to get used to.
The author made a pretty good stab at creating an alien language - which shouldn't be much of a surprise, given the title. By no means is it a complete language, but certain usages are consistent throughout which helps give that impression. The aliens do not, in other words, just speak weird sounds and made-up words. The worst thing about the language is that it includes a sound humans cannot easily make, and it is depicted by something looking like a bullet point, a solid dot or filled-in letter O. This is okay, except in those pages where we see things from the alien point of view, at which point the page seems to turn black with the things. Trying to read this book aloud would be a nightmare.
Still, the good and bad aspects of the language balance out, more or less, and the plot itself is quite absorbing. I really did wonder what had happened to the previous explorer, especially as it became more and more clear that the alien Avia were hiding something. That one of the current crop of explorers was once her lover is a very large, well thought-out hook, too. The Avia have an interesting culture, one that I enjoyed exploring with the characters, though it did strike me rather hard that the technology was impossibly uneven. Imagine ancient Romans, except they have a spaceship and sonic weapons, and you'll know what I mean. It doesn't really work.
Though there are some gaping holes and the language is occassionally irritating, it is still a good story, one well worth taking a look at. The characters are believable, the actions of at least the human side seem plausible. It's a nice, almost-hard look at a possible First Contact scenario.
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