Ars speaks with a linguist about the ease with which Grace and Rocky communicate.
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Project Hail Mary is in theaters—but do the linguistics work?
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Really fascinating piece. I loved how you broke down the communication aspect. In the book take more to stablish the communication. For an movie I think was great the way they did. Really great article.
Really fascinating piece. I loved how you broke down the communication aspect. In the book take more to stablish the communication. For an movie I think was great the way they did. Really great article.
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Speaking of miscommunication, can we all please just review the very important difference between discreet and discrete?
I think it would help a lot of us – including the author.
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Remember that Eridians have perfect memory. I assumed Rocky was altering his "real" language to make it easy for Grace since it's basically no problem for him to adopt an alien syntax once he's heard it once. It reminded me of Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood where the main character learns the alien language quickly once their memory is adjusted to never forget.
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While the language acquisition in the book was pretty quick, this was after the Astrophage turned out to be a perfect mass/energy converter, so I was already aware that we were playing it a little fast and loose. Still a good story, and a good article. Definitely going to see the movie.
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Linguistics is such a fascinating field at every level, but it demands an understanding that anthropological factors underlie whatever concepts of "objectivity" you may think govern communication.
My linguistics professor in college noted constantly that "linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive", and that's really stuck with me through the years whenever the subject of accents, dialects, and metaphors come up. And as the article discusses at length, that's within the bounds of a species that shares certain biological and environmental concepts that help frame all communication.
Given the Eridians don't have any sense of sight, for example, did they ever develop some sense of what a "sky" is? Did they have any need to? To get to space, they'd have to know up from down and atmosphere from vacuum-- but the idea of "sky"?
It's all so very interesting and it's an incredible underscoring of the importance of the social sciences if we expect to find life out there-- particularly if we have to engage with it in any kind of equal manner.
My linguistics professor in college noted constantly that "linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive", and that's really stuck with me through the years whenever the subject of accents, dialects, and metaphors come up. And as the article discusses at length, that's within the bounds of a species that shares certain biological and environmental concepts that help frame all communication.
Given the Eridians don't have any sense of sight, for example, did they ever develop some sense of what a "sky" is? Did they have any need to? To get to space, they'd have to know up from down and atmosphere from vacuum-- but the idea of "sky"?
It's all so very interesting and it's an incredible underscoring of the importance of the social sciences if we expect to find life out there-- particularly if we have to engage with it in any kind of equal manner.
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I'm so grateful I read the book completely cold when it first came out, just on the strength of it being by Andy Weir. The best way to experience this story is starting from the same point as Grace and not even knowing you're in space, let alone about to meet an alien.
Anybody new to it now will essentially have had the whole plot spoilt before the movie even starts.
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The language stuff was done very quickly in the movie, but I seem to remember it taking a lot longer for them to be able to communicate in the book.
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A linguistics deep dive! What's not to love!!! And yes, I was a bit bothered how unbelievably quickly they managed to communicate even in the book. Guess I'll have to just ignore that part in the film...
Incidentally, if we are talking sci‑fi films, I'd love to see a good adaptation of China Miéville's Embassytown. Their book literally (pun not intended) revolves around language and linguistics and alien minds.
Incidentally, if we are talking sci‑fi films, I'd love to see a good adaptation of China Miéville's Embassytown. Their book literally (pun not intended) revolves around language and linguistics and alien minds.
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I think the most important aspect about this that got ignored in this article to my disappointment is the role that Rocky's perfect memory and incredible hearing play. He can perfectly distinguish and recognize the sounds Grace is making, and remember their meaning forever.
Rocky always uses numbers in Grace's units because he can instantly remember and perform those calculations. I kind of took it for granted he was doing similar with language. It doesn't matter how different the languages are, it just matters how well Rocky can pick up English. All Grace would need to do is track the sounds, which he starts with a computer helping.
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Great article on a topic that's very often a weak point of sci-fi. Establishing communication with aliens would be extremely fraught under the best of circumstances and assumptions. But as the article notes, you can't really move a story about collaboration forward without at least some rudimentary ability to convey and understand, so it's most often just conveniently waved off.
I think the best I've encountered at depicting some of these difficulties is Adrian Tchikovsky's "Children of..." series, where communication is possible between various species, but remains an often distant or even completely wrong approximation at best in many cases owing to differing sensory systems, processing equipment, and evolutionary historical accident. But this makes some of the most interesting bits of his books pretty much impossible to film effectively. Jeff VanderMeer likewise explores this realm in his Southern Reach series - and the film adaptation of Annihilation stumbled badly because it was difficult or impossible to convey the disparity of not just (presumably) alien and human communication but their fundamental underlying perception..
I think the best I've encountered at depicting some of these difficulties is Adrian Tchikovsky's "Children of..." series, where communication is possible between various species, but remains an often distant or even completely wrong approximation at best in many cases owing to differing sensory systems, processing equipment, and evolutionary historical accident. But this makes some of the most interesting bits of his books pretty much impossible to film effectively. Jeff VanderMeer likewise explores this realm in his Southern Reach series - and the film adaptation of Annihilation stumbled badly because it was difficult or impossible to convey the disparity of not just (presumably) alien and human communication but their fundamental underlying perception..
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I actually like that their reduced knowledge of, and interest in EM radiation and the nature of their home environment led to some interesting gaps in their scientific knowledge.
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What is spoiled? For me, the merit of a story doesn't lie in its factual details at all. I'm in it for how the story is told, not what it's about. Good storytelling is the reward I'm after, and no second-hand account of the work can convey - let alone spoil - that.
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Agree. Also, I recall Grace (the character in the book) mentioning he was lucky that Eridians and humans shared similar concepts. This helps but does not completely explain why they were able to establish communication quickly. It is a story after all.
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The eidetic memory bit is orthogonal to the point I'm making, which is that perfect memory or no, finding the bedrock upon which to build a shared vocabulary would be vastly more difficult than portrayed on-screen (or in the book—this is kind of the second time I've done this piece!).
Rocky's eidetic memory solves a problem, but it doesn't do anything at all to help Grace and Rocky build equivalencies or establish a shared baseline of meaning. That's the far more interesting problem, IMO.
The idea that linguistic acquisition is literally just a process of assigning sounds to values is the thing that's on shaky ground, not the mechanics of the assignments. If you're talking to another human, you always have some basics to fall back on—there are certain knowns about the other human's cognition and intentions that you can take as givens. With an alien, there are none of those things, and the danger would be in basing equivalencies on assumptions that don't hold true. The real danger is three or four steps farther down the line, when you think you have equivalencies in place, and your alien conversational partner reacts to something in a way that is unexpected because your definition of, let's say, the word "friend" happened to include a whole bunch of assumptions that the alien's definition of the word "friend" doesn't.
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I read an interesting story where there was a universal translator which "by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." Interesting angle as we I believe the default assumption is that with perfect communication comes perfect understanding.
There are various reasons to experience a story. Many people wish to experience major plot twists firsthand ("unspoilt"). Re-experiencing whilst knowing the twists is a different experience.
Common scene:
Older person: Oh, you're a lad of 4 or so. Have you watched Star Wars yet?
Child: No.
Older person: Did you know Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father?
Child: I do now. T_T
Ah, a reference to the hit film!
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thelongdarkteatimeof
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Science FICTION, it's right there in the name... 99% of the science in Science FICTION is baloney... It's FICTION...
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The rapid language acquisition was one of my concerns when reading the book. And yeah, the whole mass/energy conversion thing.
Too many Macguffins, at least for me.
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While I don’t fully share the viewpoint, I admit that this is the most cogent argument of not caring about spoilers I’ve heard.
Thank you. You’ve changed my perception.
I could not previously understand why anyone would ever not care about spoilers. Now, though I do not share the viewpoint, I can understand, agree with, and respect it.
I appreciate your sharing.
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chateauarusi
Ars Centurion
Thanks for a fun, thought-provoking article.
I want to comment on just one minor point, because I think it serves as a good example of the assumptions — unrecognized, unexamined — that underlie our beliefs about how and why people communicate. Plus, it shows up in a section header.
There's a brief discussion on the "thumbs up" gesture in which it's mentioned that the concept of "up-ness," for lack of a better word, connoting happiness and maturity and such, informs our interpretation of the gesture as being positive. In this discussion, it's fairly strongly implied that this positivity is culturally universal.
Well — my wife is Persian. And if you went to Iran and stuck out your fist with your thumb raised, you'd be likely to get punched, or at least yelled at. Because, in that culture, "thumb up" is the equivalent of an American showing the middle finger.
Yes, it conveys a form of "up-ness" — but in the sense of "shove it up your ass." And in a version of the story where Ryland Grace is replaced by, say, Mahmoud Malamzadeh, he's going to have a completely different gestural language.
Otherwise, I really enjoyed the article.
I want to comment on just one minor point, because I think it serves as a good example of the assumptions — unrecognized, unexamined — that underlie our beliefs about how and why people communicate. Plus, it shows up in a section header.
There's a brief discussion on the "thumbs up" gesture in which it's mentioned that the concept of "up-ness," for lack of a better word, connoting happiness and maturity and such, informs our interpretation of the gesture as being positive. In this discussion, it's fairly strongly implied that this positivity is culturally universal.
Well — my wife is Persian. And if you went to Iran and stuck out your fist with your thumb raised, you'd be likely to get punched, or at least yelled at. Because, in that culture, "thumb up" is the equivalent of an American showing the middle finger.
Yes, it conveys a form of "up-ness" — but in the sense of "shove it up your ass." And in a version of the story where Ryland Grace is replaced by, say, Mahmoud Malamzadeh, he's going to have a completely different gestural language.
Otherwise, I really enjoyed the article.
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Also that some of the problems the hero/heroes are facing in both of Weir's books seem to happen just for the sake of upping the stakes and adding another problem that the clever scientists can solve in clever ways. A few times it just felt a bit too constructed, if you get my meaning.
Though I still quite enjoyed both books, of course! Really looking forward to seeing the film, especially as my city has a true IMAX cinema
Incidentally, anybody knows what type of IMAX projection the film uses, i.e. a 35mm film transfer, a 70mm film transfer, or just plain old digital 4K?
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That's fascinating, @chateauarusi!
Somewhat similar, I guess, to how signaling "I'd like two drinks" in a UK pub by holding up the index and middle fingers could get you punched in the face if you do the gesture with the back of your hand facing the bartender—a totally innocuous gesture in the US, but a highly offensive one across the pond.
Somewhat similar, I guess, to how signaling "I'd like two drinks" in a UK pub by holding up the index and middle fingers could get you punched in the face if you do the gesture with the back of your hand facing the bartender—a totally innocuous gesture in the US, but a highly offensive one across the pond.
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Filmed in IMAX for both 70mm film projection and IMAX Dual Laser projection. The latter will have at least some of the space scenes expanded to use the 1.43:1 aspect ratio.
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I'm reasonably certain that you don't need compassion or empathy, and that's a load of feel-good horseshit.
All you need is cooperation. Is that "tribal"?
Going out on a limb, I'm going to say no. Cooperation is situational, and in a dire situation, humans will generally cooperate regardless of the tribal differences. Exceptions abound, though. Straight-up cooperation is very common within a human tribe. But outside of it, not so much.
In the case of an alien you meet in space, I think it's safe to assume they're at least cooperative on SOME level. But tribal? That's an accident of evolution. To be tribal means there's MORE THAN ONE TRIBE, otherwise there's no defining cooperative. It would be all about survival, and non-cooperative parts would be discarded (parse that as you will).
In their strictest senses, living cooperatively means readily working with dissimilar things. Tribal is all about maintaining and working within similarities, not differences. With cooperation, dissimilarities don't matter, is not an impediment to a good outcome. With a tribe, dissimilarities ARE an impediment to a good outcome.
So, narrowing the definitions between cooperative and tribal to the consistency of behavior, a cooperative individual will always cooperate if such is deemed necessary by both parties. A tribal individual may not, even if both believe it to be necessary, if what is needed to be done violates some tribal taboo.
That's why Rocky's people are cooperative, but probably not tribal. Tribal isn't needed. Cooperation is. And the rest of the emotional feel goods in it are bullshit, too. The survival instinct is necessary. But from a survival point of view, emotions really play no role in that.
In their strictest senses, living cooperatively means readily working with dissimilar things. Tribal is all about maintaining and working within similarities, not differences. With cooperation, dissimilarities don't matter, is not an impediment to a good outcome. With a tribe, dissimilarities ARE an impediment to a good outcome.
So, narrowing the definitions between cooperative and tribal to the consistency of behavior, a cooperative individual will always cooperate if such is deemed necessary by both parties. A tribal individual may not, even if both believe it to be necessary, if what is needed to be done violates some tribal taboo.
That's why Rocky's people are cooperative, but probably not tribal. Tribal isn't needed. Cooperation is. And the rest of the emotional feel goods in it are bullshit, too. The survival instinct is necessary. But from a survival point of view, emotions really play no role in that.
As a writer, I know the challenges of creating other worlds in a believable manner. Most of what I write is for entertainment. I don't generally do hard sci-fi (though I have). But for all that my hard sci-fi writing credits is only a couple of books, one thing is in common with all of them: The need to relate to others on a meaningful level. That's using the language I know to speak to others who know the same language. Translations usually lose a lot of context.
This offering certainly has that potential to be very entertaining. The mechanics of linguistics are fun to play with, and alien linguistics may be based on real science as a field of study. That whole alien language thing is a deep, deep pit into which one may fall endlessly without ever hitting any conclusions, or even truth, on the way down. But at its heart, language is simply relaying information in a way something else understands. So that's going to be on a huge learning curve for humans when aliens show up (which will never happen for the human race, but that's a whole other rant...).
So I'd take this as it was intended to be - as entertainment. Don't overanalyze it. Don't quibble about the deets. Just enjoy the ride. That's what every author hopes for their reader. And if one insists on using this to hold up a mirror to the whole human race, I'd say they'll do much better if they just look into that mirror instead.
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I do think there are absolutely some stories where being surprised is a big chunk of the fun, and on a subsequent rewatch the new knowledge can re-contextualize the way you enjoy the story. Something like the a murder mystery or a film like The Sixth Sense would be ideal to go into without spoilers. Or Cabin in the Woods was fun to see completely blind. Sometimes the twist or mystery in itself is part of the fun.
But a good story should also be enjoyable and emotionally impactful even if you know what's coming. There's a line at the end of Hadestown (a rock opera based on the story of Orpheus) that we all know it's going to end in tragedy, but the story still works because you hope that just maybe this time it will turn out alright, but of course it never does. Similarly, it's not a spoiler to say that the heroes of Project Hail Mary are going to save the day. You knew that going in. But the story will still be a fun experience.
I do think there's a reasonable middle ground between keeping some story details secret for the sake of the mystery, and also acknowledging that the idea a movie like this can even be spoiled is a bit silly.
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Have we actually reached a point where saying one of the characters in a science fiction movie is an alien is a spoiler?
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In the real universe, if you have two species that can make spaceships, you probably have a substantial common ground available in terms of objects, materials, machines with a purpose, and so forth. Math too. The zero symbol is not universal, but the natural numbers are.
And maybe some things common to species that can communicate at all. I haven't seen the film but I assume Rocky eats, or maybe he has to plug into a machine or sit for hours under a bright light. We could understand that just as we would understand the same for an Earthly animal, and Rocky would understand eating.
And maybe some things common to species that can communicate at all. I haven't seen the film but I assume Rocky eats, or maybe he has to plug into a machine or sit for hours under a bright light. We could understand that just as we would understand the same for an Earthly animal, and Rocky would understand eating.
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It's a weird case, but it feels like talking about Rocky in the book would have been a spoiler, but in the context of the movie it's not?
None of the marketing around the book mentioned it was going to be a buddy story, even if that revelation comes pretty early on. But the film is being overtly marketed with Rocky in mind, so it really can't be considered a spoiler anymore.
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That would depend.
Are we talking Star Wars or X Files? (or Highlander 2, where it was actually the movie that spoiled the movie)
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I mean i grabbed the book based on the last article here, Im more then halfway through the book. And i enjoyed the beginning of the book.
Im hopeful i can go see this movie in the theatre soonish.
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In the trailer for The Odyssey, they show some kind of huge wooden horse, and it looks like there might be people hiding inside. I hope they haven't given anything away.
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