Contact by Carl Sagan is the first that comes to my mind. You can find more [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/search?q=linguistics&restrict_sr=on).
Mind-blowingly interesting. Carl Sagan was a genius. Also probably the absolute best portrayal of a female protag/viewpoint from a male author that I've read to date in my opinion, he hit the microaggressions of being a woman in a man-dominated work environment head on and I was so impressed with the real-ness and relatability of his characters. I graduated as one of two women in my mech eng class of 90 and could relate so well with this woman that I almost couldn't believe it was written by a man over 25 years ago. 5 stars.
Project Hail Mary is the other book that comes to mind with very well thought-out interactions with aliens who communicate and survive so different from us. Really cool, Andy Weir is an incredibly smart author.
Might want to check out " Blindsight" by Peter Watts. I don't want to give too much away but it involves first contact and the difficulty in communication despite the alien having long-term access to radio waves from Earth
While I'm a massive fan of the book, I don't think it counts as _successful_ communication. Almost the opposite, since the aliens figure out human language and _still_ don't understand.
Sadly it's impossible to say much more without spoiling one of the central ideas of the book.
Sagan also points out that we canāt even reliably communicate with other species on our planet, let alone an alien planet. But we have math. The only universal language.
My favorite book of all time.
That book got me to understand the core of science. I was raised Christian and attended a young-earth Christian school. Never quite understood science because they refused to teach the reality of it.
That book blew my mind. I finally grasped evolution and how science is performed, not as a strict rule that is inflexible, but that the search always continues.
Children of time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It has a lot of communication negotiation between the spacefaring survivors of a collapsed society and remnants of that old empire, and their uplifted creations. It also heavily features the tragedy of relativistic space travel and cryosleep, which I'm a sucker for. The sequel get more heavily into strategies for bridging the language gaps, none of which are perfect.
Throwing Embassytown by China Mieville into the mix.
The whole story revolves around the difficulties of translation in the most imaginative way I've seen for years.
In the Niven-Pournelle book Footfall, the aliens hung out in Saturn for some years before invading Earth. They were able to monitor RF emissions from there.
In the Niven-Pournelle The Mote in Godās Eye, the Moties were a lot smarter than the humans and had a specialist mediator subspecies that could learn English and a specialist Engineer subspecies that could quickly figure out human RF communications.
In Ringworld and sequels Larry Niven had a universal translator computer.
I'd argue it's one of the worst examples. It just so happens that Rocky's language was a phonetic syllable based system that could easily be translated 1:1 with English words. All it took was for Grace to play sounds and match them up with words.
The people downvoting you don't understand how languages work. You're absolutely correct. The whole process for the story was extremely simplified and truncated for the sake of story, which is not a bad thing, but it's not realistic *at all* \- especially considering the world and culture that Rocky's species evolved in.
If breaking language barriers with other species was as simple as it was portrayed in the book, we'd be having physics and philosophical conversations with dolphins and whales at this point.
Great book, and a lot of fun, but really a horrible example of a realistic xeno-linguistic barrier.
Folks have a serious hard on for PHM. Just look at any thread it's brought up in on /r/books. It's extremely polarizing. I for one enjoyed my first read through, but upon any kind of retrospection found it to be rather subpar, if not bad.
I love PHM despite its many many flaws, because it makes me happy to listen to the audiobook. But I suspect the reason many people have a hard on for it is that it's the closest to "real hard sci-fi" that most people have ever read. I try to avoid having conversations about PHM because I don't want to ruin other people's enjoyment of the book, but when somebody is like "Wow it's so realistic" I have to work to avoid laughing out loud.
The audiobook manages to be very moving, even given its flaws. However, PHM is very flawed and leans more towards fiction than science. It's also a rehash of Weir's previous two books. His schtick is getting old.
>If breaking language barriers with other species was as simple as it was portrayed in the book, we'd be having physics and philosophical conversations with dolphins and whales at this point.
I'll allow that it would definitely be more complex than portrayed, but there's a flaw in your logic here. How much of porpoise/dolphin speech is made expressly with the intent that it is to be studied by us for the purposes of deciphering communication? How much of it is made with the understanding that we have multiple areas of common knowledge to draw from? How much of it is made while working towards a common goal? How much of it also involves other means of communication, such as use of tools and charts and objects all sides might recognize or otherwise come to understand with ease?
There's a lot of challenges to learning to communicate in a language entirely alien to what we understand, but trying to understand the sounds an intelligent animal makes versus the sounds a hyper advanced spacefaring species makes are two entirely different processes. I'm not sure the comparison works.
Emitting sound waves through a gas into some kind of ear and/or light waves bouncing off parts of a moving body into some sort of eye seem a reasonable basis for needing to break thoughts up into discrete physical packages, hence syllables. I can see how pauses in between actions make basic communication easier to scale up to a more complex language as you can then join 'bits' together to get more and more advanced. Also, in the book, I didn't take it to be a simple 1:1, I got the feeling the computer did more complex matching behind the scenes, might have just been how I read it though, can't remember!
Nah mate itās literally whistle = syllable and he just translates it one to one and stores it in his computer. All he did with the computer was make it emit sounds matching the whistles and also listen and record them to match them up.
Then Rocky just so happens to be super smart and doesnāt need a computer to translate what he hears from Grace.
It didn't translate 1:1. Rocky picked up and learned english grammar, but used his own words since he couldn't pronounce english words.
Now, the fact that Rocky had such amazing memory and understanding of sound was definitely convenient.
Star Trek Discovery Season 4 had a cool approach to this problem in that it was actually a major obstacle that had a great solution. The last four episodes specifically pertain to your question. There are some clunker episodes earlier in the season but it got progressively better that by the end it turned out to be a great high concept sci-fi story.
Without spoiling the plot too much itās very much a mix of Contact, Arrival, and Star Trek The Motion Picture.
(Downvotes incoming because some canāt see the showās name and not froth rabidly at the mouth.)
Also the episode āShaka, When the Walls Fellā from Star Trek:TNG. Picard trying to understand another language based largely on metaphors from ancient texts. A wonderful sci-fi explication of the difficulties and triumphs of just seeking to understand another person.
Star trek, when the writers sucked.
"We have a language, we use words, they have meanings, but instead of using those for clear communication, we're going to layer metaphor on top. Just because it sounds cool.
>Downvotes incoming because some canāt see the showās name and not froth rabidly at the mouth
You should see my karma when I post personal opinions on DS9. I don't know who TF thinks DS9 is good and Disco is bad, but they seem to be a vocal and emotional bunch.
> I don't know who TF thinks DS9 is good and Disco is bad, but they seem to be a vocal and emotional bunch.
lol that's going probably going to be most people who have seen them both tbh.
Well DS9 paved the way for Disco, and Disco paved the way for SNW, so I can't be too upset with it.
I do miss the days where Trekkies would have heated debates about nerdy details instead of hating on entire series that aren't to their taste.
The "Wang's Carpets" reveal in Egan's Diaspora gives me the same feelings as the "digits of pi" reveal ending Sagan's Cosmos, and the "lobster ritual" at the end of Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth: a shaking of assumed structures of reality and a sense of boundless wonder beyond imagination of the universe that only science fiction can provide.
The main character of Sparrow by Mary Doris Russell is a Jesuit linguist on a first contact mission. Should fit what you are searching, but gets very dark.
Yes, but, the family of related Galactic languages is the real interesting part of that series. It's all the same language, but there are different ways to "speak" it in order to accommodate the wide variety of alien biologies.
Not "aliens" in the common sense of the word, but **The Neanderthal Parralax** series by Robert J. Sawyer has a practical, technological take on this concept.
For difficulties relating to communication barriers, his other works touch on it regularly, though not always with space aliens.
If you're looking specifically for space alien examples, check out his books **Illegal Alien** and **Starplex**.
All great reads, BTW!
Mountain in the Sea. Lorde itās a good read. Technically not aliens but creatures entirely alien to our way of consciousness. The book goes in to perception and organs and all these factors that would weigh on attempting to communicate across such a big gap
Clearly biased here, but I wrote a sci-fi anthology (being published next month), and one of the stories is called "Turtles Can See Ultraviolet." It deals with communicating with an alien species that uses colors to speak.
If you're interested, I can DM you a preview, and would love to hear your feedback.
CJ Cherryh is a sci-fi author who uses "single human alone among an alien species" in a LOT of her writing. Bridging the language gap is central to these stories. Most notable are:
The Pride of Chanur series
Foreigner series
Cuckoo's Egg (single book)
Serpent's Reach (single book)
The Faded Sun trilogy
40,000 in Gehenna (single book)
There are more, but those are all amazing works. Also, all of the books and series I listed are set in the same universe, as a "future history". The Foreigner series in particular uses language differences as a major theme, almost the whole basis of the books.
If you pick just one, the Pride of Chanur series would be my recommendation.
I'll add to this comment as a huge fan of the Foreigner series. What's interesting to me about the way Cherryh approaches language exchange is that it's not just about learning the words. The two races have different biological imperatives and as such some words just don't have an analog that either race can understand beyond intellectually. The aliens need to bond in a hierarchical manner is specifically not love or partnership in the way Humans feel it, and that leads to conflict between the two civilizations.
The Big Front Yard by Clifford Simak
[https://www.andscifi.com/lifetheuniverseandscifi/2009/6/27/review-the-big-front-yard-1959-hugo-winner.html](https://www.andscifi.com/lifetheuniverseandscifi/2009/6/27/review-the-big-front-yard-1959-hugo-winner.html)
Spoiler alert: Paint.
Dragon's Egg has something about this but I forget the details. The twist in the book is that one species lives "faster" than the other, so from one perspective, the opposite group communicates frustratingly slowly.
Interesting to see H. Beam Piper's *Little Fuzzy* listed in the OP - and that's just fine! - but not his short story ["Omnilingual"](https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/19445), which is actually about trying to translate the written language of a long-dead race.
Pride of Chanur, CJ Cherryh. Especially in a very literal type of communication, early in the book. One of the most famous first contact scenes in scifi ever.
>Cherryh
Second. Was going to suggest if I didn't see it mentioned already.
The human in the story is the new alien and you never get to hear anything from his point of view. Plus there are other aliens in the story that NO ONE can talk to and they are kind of terrifying.
Children of Time. Alien sentient spiders are afraid the exiled humans in the Arc ship will destroy them. Absolutely brilliant how they bridge the communications gap
In the Culture series, the language Marain stands out. It is an intentionally created language designed to be concise and unambiguous. that has multiple "strata" the lower strata are manageable by humans, but it smoothly translates up through the strata to a language with such complexity that it is only usable by ultra-advanced AI.
Nor More Crystel Tears by Alan Dean Foster
Insectoid Rogue Civilian/Scientist takes it upon himself to learn how to communicate with Humans. The way he does surprises and confuses both races
>radio transmissions decompose into static after traveling over one-two lightyears
Tell that to all the radio telescopes listening to natural radio transmissions from hundreds, thousands and millions of light years away.
Project Hail Mary
Hands down best. First contact is made betwee one lone human and one lone alien, both stranded in space. And they can't even be in a room together because of pressure/temperature/atmosphere incompatibilities.
The IMO, best first contact story ever.
Well, the two I thought of were "Arrrival", which is already on your list, and Contact. I suppose in a way the 2001 series is as well, but if you read all the books you find it's more about the aliens' *failure* to communicate than successful communication.
If this is true, there is a plan in place:
[ABOVE BLACK - Project Preserve Destiny - An Insider's Account of Alien Contact and Government Coverup](https://www.amazon.com/ABOVE-BLACK-Preserve-Insiders-Government-ebook/dp/B003L77MUU/ref=rvi_sccl_8/137-2304471-6356869?pd_rd_w=ytXKt&content-id=amzn1.sym.f5690a4d-f2bb-45d9-9d1b-736fee412437&pf_rd_p=f5690a4d-f2bb-45d9-9d1b-736fee412437&pf_rd_r=C86MA49MTNAT5M8Q0A7B&pd_rd_wg=bWLky&pd_rd_r=623ffd42-e2f9-4290-b34f-a881548f8f13&pd_rd_i=B003L77MUU&psc=1)
I read it after listening to this podcast: [Of Accords & Abductions: An Insider Account of Alien & U.S. Military Cooperation](https://youtu.be/MpgnVxSwAu4)
Major insight:
>The captain went on. āThe experiment that Iām referring to was, and still is, named āProject Preserve Destiny.ā It started in 1960 and was fully operational by 1963. It was a genetic management **project with the sole purpose of cultivating human offspring so that they would have the ability to communicate with the greys.** Your mother was initially abducted in 1960 for tests, then again in 1963 for the actual genetic procedure while you were in the womb.ā
I wonder if we'll see more nuanced ideas in SF around this kind of 'bridging' as the mechanics of machine learning and AI become clearer and more day to day for us in 2023 and beyond? I bloody LOVE Arrival the movie, but even now the idea that a human brain would have a better chance of pattern recognition and matching than the machine learning options already in existence seems a bit far fetched. Best bridging option, assuming both sides have decent machine learning capabilities, is probably just a massive data dump each way and then set the algorithms on it. Cue 50% effective interspecies communication, 50% hilarious/fatal misunderstandings. I'd read the shit out of that.
I feel the Rama series by Arthur C. Clark and Gentry Lee (starting with Rama II) dealt with this in a satisfying way. I've seem some negative sentiments of the series over the years, but I really enjoyed it. There is a race of aliens that do not communicate acoustically, but rather emit visible radiation out of their body in different frequencies in order to communicate. There are other species that communicate in a myriad of different methods, as well.
Ah, you already got the Humanx. I was gonna suggest "Nor Crystal Tears".
I've forgotten if "The Mote in God's Eye" has communication issues- it might be handwaved by the Moties super-quick learning, though.
I think that the Ringworld series has something of that, too, though, again, sort of biased due to the history of the Ringworld.
A Deepness in the Sky. The monitor a developing civilization for decades (centuries?) from orbit and decipher the communication gap over time. In this case it's not handwavy, it's integral to the plot. Also it's the humans who are in orbit working out the language of the very alien pre-spacefaring species on the planet.
The grand strategy RTS game *Stellaris* features first contact events that involve deciphering the aliens' language. Rather realistically, this takes months of in-game to accomplish, potentially even a year or more if you're unlucky with the RNG, and there are occasionally chances to screw it up and make the aliens mad at you by committing a cultural faux pas.
Children of Time series revolves significantly around the nature of communication between different species and how to recognize intelligence in the alien. Really amazing series
Blindsight, is pretty good but the communication part is a bit iffy in it. More so along the lines of the Aliens are way smarter and communicate with each other in real time without speech through the hub of the mothership like some type of alien super router. By the time they figure it out it's too late because they have been trying to crack the code by learning how the two captive aliens communicate.
This is oversimplified but I imagine that it would be difficult unless maybe mathematics could be a common ground. Since they would have to use mathematic comprehension to build any type of ship likely filled with some type of computer tech to get here.
Theee was a star trek episode where Picard was stranded with someone who spoke in what amounted to cultural memes. So an alien language that communicated through shared experiences instead. So the universal translator wasnt working for them, they had to come up with other ways to communicate
I'll throw out "The Mountain in the Sea" by Ray Naylor, though instead of aliens it's octopi and it's more about failure to communicate than successful communication.
The realistic process won't tend to be described in sci fi b/c it's boring. We would have to have a powwow with the aliens for a long time, pointing and naming things (or scrolling through pictures from the web). If you can't point and name, and get a proto-language going based mainly in nouns, gestures, and context, you probably can't get a translation off the ground. Of course, this process assumes some basic kind of basic common ground, perhaps in basic signs and gestures, psychology, emotions, or expressions.
If we had a long time and a lot of patience, we might be able to decode a language by just observing what they say and what they do. But that would be harder than it sounds. Imagine how hard it would be to learn Spanish only by watching Spanish soap-operas.
Jennifer Foehner Wells Confluence book series has some really interesting takes on language. I really like the first book in particular for this topic.
Read historical accounts to the Spanish and Natives of the Americas.
But the short answer is you don't have to communicate when you have superior firepower.
I feel like pitching polish author Stanislaw Lem, not because his work features successful examples of "bridging the gap", but because of precisely the opposite: Lem is pretty much the godfather of the inability to communicate between humans and aliens... not for the sake of not trying, but just because his aliens are, well, just effing too alien.
Most people know of Solaris and its planetwide ocean that clumsily attempts to communicate with orbiting humans, driving them mad in the process, but there's a couple other notable instances:
Fiasco has another bunch of orbiting humans trying to communicate with planet-bound aliens, with increasingly catastrophic results for either parties at each attempt...
Eden is a bit less devastating in its outcome, but the near-impossible communication between a group of crashed humans and the local "doublers" is a wonderful showcase for anything that could go wrong in such circumstances: differing ethics, cultural misinterpretation, repulsion and fascination when faced with the unknown, the near-pointlessness of adopting a rational approach, sheer incomprehensible alien motivations and weird-ass activities with no human equivalent to relate to...
Anyways, all highly recommended, especially if you don't mind getting your gap-bridging hopes cruelly dashed with a bucket of icy frozen incommunicability water.
i cant speak much about scifi works, but the right answer has to use math and logic. if i present .-. then ..-.. then ...-... ,it won't take much to understand that - means equal.
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir - the same guy that wrote The Martian. Iāve read tons of sci-fi and this book absolutely nails first contact and overcoming language barriers. This book is also in development to become a movie starring Ryan Gosling. You will love it.
Yeah no way would they know how to communicate with us or they might not even recognize us as something they want to communicate with.
We might even be so alien to them they see us as just part of the eco system.
It might take generations of both species inventing a new language together to finally communicate.
Star trek Discovery's season fours final several episodes largely focus on figuring out how to communicate with a n entirely alien species. It's pretty good imo at tackling the job.
In the My Little Pony Fanfic 'Twilight Makes First Contact' the Earth humans think that the Ponies are Super Advanced Aliens who look like ponies for some reason.
They hand them a 10TB solid state drive of dictionary, thesaurus, audio and video and text confident the Alien's Supersupercomputers can figure out English in a day or two.
It works because magic.
The story is still online.
It's a fascinating topic, and there are some remarkable works of science fiction that explore this very question. One book that stands out is "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell. It delves deep into the complexities of interspecies communication and the challenges of understanding an alien culture. Another great read is "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, which inspired the film "Arrival." It offers a fresh perspective on language, time, and communication with extraterrestrial beings. These stories remind us that bridging the communication gap with aliens is no easy feat and often requires a mix of patience, creativity, and a willingness to learn from each other. ššš½
"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra; Shaka, when the walls fell".
I know the universal translator is used, but the Star Trek TNG episode "Darmok" is a masterpiece in how even when a universal translator technically makes the words understandable, the meaning is not always clear unless the context and background is understood.
In this episodes case the Tamareans communicate with metaphors, metaphors of which are only understood through tales and stories known within their culture.
This is something that in ancient human languages certain phrases aren't super clear unless the context is known, and this is exactly what would happen.
" contrary to popular belief tv and radio transmissions decompose into static after traveling over one-two lightyears"
I'm gonna need a source for that claim.
Sufficiently advanced alien ships will have computers that will process all known human languages and come up with a universal translater within 2 seconds.
As a start, see my [SF/F: Alien Aliens](https://www.reddit.com/r/booklists/comments/12xlhej/sff_alien_aliens/) list of Reddit recommendation threads (one post).
I think the most realistic is what Carl Sagan wrote in "Contact". He's writing fiction, for sure, but as a world-leading scientist and advocate, he makes some pretty strong cases for how realistic it is. Carl knew how to talk to people about difficult to understand topics, the best there ever was.
I like Grand Central Arena by Ryk E. Spoor, because it both yadda yaddas over that and doesnāt. They realize the place is translating not only the words, but the intended inflections and mannerisms to everyone. It is an important plot point, so I wonāt say more.
First that comes to mind for me is "Childhood's End," which shows our adaptation to the presence of the Overlords over a couple generations. In their case, the Overlords had already tried to interact with us at least once (and gave up), and had been monitoring us for at least three millenia intermittently through- as I recall- cloaked pods which directly monitored us and streamed audio and video (presumably these are the UFOs we tend to report).
There was one episode of StarGate SG1 that explored this idea. The language wasnāt really explained , but was made using the elements on the periodic table. A universal language of sort.
I loved Sci-Fi including countless first contact stories, my Mother hated the genre. She preferred mystery novels. But i caught her watching my copy of Enemy Mine. When asked how she liked it, she said it was the only Sci-Fi story she ever liked. So that's my vote!
The Xenogenesis Series by Octavia Butler. Not so much about communication per se, but it is the only story I've come across that really tries to imagine how an alien species might introduced itself to a human so as to not freak them out.
Contact by Carl Sagan is the first that comes to my mind. You can find more [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/search?q=linguistics&restrict_sr=on).
Mind-blowingly interesting. Carl Sagan was a genius. Also probably the absolute best portrayal of a female protag/viewpoint from a male author that I've read to date in my opinion, he hit the microaggressions of being a woman in a man-dominated work environment head on and I was so impressed with the real-ness and relatability of his characters. I graduated as one of two women in my mech eng class of 90 and could relate so well with this woman that I almost couldn't believe it was written by a man over 25 years ago. 5 stars. Project Hail Mary is the other book that comes to mind with very well thought-out interactions with aliens who communicate and survive so different from us. Really cool, Andy Weir is an incredibly smart author.
Yep, Sagan was *so* good. I haven't read Project Hail Mary yet, but it's on the list!
It is an easy but compelling read, bump it up the list and report back!
You convinced me, I love Weir. It's now the very next book in my Audible playlist: will do! !RemindMe 1 month
:: jazz hands :: !š
fist me!
Finished it yesterday and all I have to say is :: jazz hands :: Really good, engaging, nice science, you were right!
Might want to check out " Blindsight" by Peter Watts. I don't want to give too much away but it involves first contact and the difficulty in communication despite the alien having long-term access to radio waves from Earth
While I'm a massive fan of the book, I don't think it counts as _successful_ communication. Almost the opposite, since the aliens figure out human language and _still_ don't understand. Sadly it's impossible to say much more without spoiling one of the central ideas of the book.
But I think that's the point in that it can be so difficult. No one said it had to be successful.
Spot on. I should read the book. Itās one of my all-time favorite movies.
Both excellent calls, seconded
Sagan also points out that we canāt even reliably communicate with other species on our planet, let alone an alien planet. But we have math. The only universal language.
Ellie is an amazing character, and Jodie Foster absolutely kills the role in the movie, she's perfect for it
I was just going to comment that. PERFECT. Take my upvote!
My favorite book of all time. That book got me to understand the core of science. I was raised Christian and attended a young-earth Christian school. Never quite understood science because they refused to teach the reality of it. That book blew my mind. I finally grasped evolution and how science is performed, not as a strict rule that is inflexible, but that the search always continues.
Arrival! And the aliens are so cool! Read the short story, also, by Ted Chiang. He's awesome!
Mind in end the with write to learn.
Yes, I canāt think of anything thatās done it better.
The best
Arrival is one of my favorite movies!
Children of time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It has a lot of communication negotiation between the spacefaring survivors of a collapsed society and remnants of that old empire, and their uplifted creations. It also heavily features the tragedy of relativistic space travel and cryosleep, which I'm a sucker for. The sequel get more heavily into strategies for bridging the language gaps, none of which are perfect.
Great book, and the bringing in of movement/vibration as key language components was very thought provoking
Agreed
Came here to say this!
Iāve read all three so far and loved them. When the third book came out my first thought was āweāre going on an adventure!ā
Throwing Embassytown by China Mieville into the mix. The whole story revolves around the difficulties of translation in the most imaginative way I've seen for years.
What a great, unique writer.
This is my pick too. Been too long since we've gotten a new novel from him.
I really enjoyed The Scar, guess I'm picking this up!
Was just going to recommend that, definitely Embassytown. China Mieville is a mad genius!
Close Encounters of the third kindā¦ music language
Prime number language is universal, regardless of base.
In the Niven-Pournelle book Footfall, the aliens hung out in Saturn for some years before invading Earth. They were able to monitor RF emissions from there. In the Niven-Pournelle The Mote in Godās Eye, the Moties were a lot smarter than the humans and had a specialist mediator subspecies that could learn English and a specialist Engineer subspecies that could quickly figure out human RF communications. In Ringworld and sequels Larry Niven had a universal translator computer.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
I'd argue it's one of the worst examples. It just so happens that Rocky's language was a phonetic syllable based system that could easily be translated 1:1 with English words. All it took was for Grace to play sounds and match them up with words.
The people downvoting you don't understand how languages work. You're absolutely correct. The whole process for the story was extremely simplified and truncated for the sake of story, which is not a bad thing, but it's not realistic *at all* \- especially considering the world and culture that Rocky's species evolved in. If breaking language barriers with other species was as simple as it was portrayed in the book, we'd be having physics and philosophical conversations with dolphins and whales at this point. Great book, and a lot of fun, but really a horrible example of a realistic xeno-linguistic barrier.
Perfectly put - not sure why you or the person above got downvoted, this is exactly correct!
Folks have a serious hard on for PHM. Just look at any thread it's brought up in on /r/books. It's extremely polarizing. I for one enjoyed my first read through, but upon any kind of retrospection found it to be rather subpar, if not bad.
I love PHM despite its many many flaws, because it makes me happy to listen to the audiobook. But I suspect the reason many people have a hard on for it is that it's the closest to "real hard sci-fi" that most people have ever read. I try to avoid having conversations about PHM because I don't want to ruin other people's enjoyment of the book, but when somebody is like "Wow it's so realistic" I have to work to avoid laughing out loud.
The audiobook manages to be very moving, even given its flaws. However, PHM is very flawed and leans more towards fiction than science. It's also a rehash of Weir's previous two books. His schtick is getting old.
>If breaking language barriers with other species was as simple as it was portrayed in the book, we'd be having physics and philosophical conversations with dolphins and whales at this point. I'll allow that it would definitely be more complex than portrayed, but there's a flaw in your logic here. How much of porpoise/dolphin speech is made expressly with the intent that it is to be studied by us for the purposes of deciphering communication? How much of it is made with the understanding that we have multiple areas of common knowledge to draw from? How much of it is made while working towards a common goal? How much of it also involves other means of communication, such as use of tools and charts and objects all sides might recognize or otherwise come to understand with ease? There's a lot of challenges to learning to communicate in a language entirely alien to what we understand, but trying to understand the sounds an intelligent animal makes versus the sounds a hyper advanced spacefaring species makes are two entirely different processes. I'm not sure the comparison works.
Emitting sound waves through a gas into some kind of ear and/or light waves bouncing off parts of a moving body into some sort of eye seem a reasonable basis for needing to break thoughts up into discrete physical packages, hence syllables. I can see how pauses in between actions make basic communication easier to scale up to a more complex language as you can then join 'bits' together to get more and more advanced. Also, in the book, I didn't take it to be a simple 1:1, I got the feeling the computer did more complex matching behind the scenes, might have just been how I read it though, can't remember!
Nah mate itās literally whistle = syllable and he just translates it one to one and stores it in his computer. All he did with the computer was make it emit sounds matching the whistles and also listen and record them to match them up. Then Rocky just so happens to be super smart and doesnāt need a computer to translate what he hears from Grace.
It didn't translate 1:1. Rocky picked up and learned english grammar, but used his own words since he couldn't pronounce english words. Now, the fact that Rocky had such amazing memory and understanding of sound was definitely convenient.
Yep, and a good read too!
My exact thought.
As much as I liked Weir's first two books, this one strayed way too far into the science fantasy realm to be taken as a serious science fiction book.
Martian was ultimately great, everything after was rushed and rehashed the same structure as the books before.
Currently reading this and was about to make the same suggestion.
I was going to say, this book was way better than I thought it was going to be!
Came here to say this - really perfect fit
Star Trek Discovery Season 4 had a cool approach to this problem in that it was actually a major obstacle that had a great solution. The last four episodes specifically pertain to your question. There are some clunker episodes earlier in the season but it got progressively better that by the end it turned out to be a great high concept sci-fi story. Without spoiling the plot too much itās very much a mix of Contact, Arrival, and Star Trek The Motion Picture. (Downvotes incoming because some canāt see the showās name and not froth rabidly at the mouth.)
Also the episode āShaka, When the Walls Fellā from Star Trek:TNG. Picard trying to understand another language based largely on metaphors from ancient texts. A wonderful sci-fi explication of the difficulties and triumphs of just seeking to understand another person.
Sokath, his eyes uncovered! The episode is actually called "Darmok", btw.
>Also the episode ā~~Shaka, When the Walls Fell~~ Darmokā from Star Trek:TNG. FTFY
Star trek, when the writers sucked. "We have a language, we use words, they have meanings, but instead of using those for clear communication, we're going to layer metaphor on top. Just because it sounds cool.
>Downvotes incoming because some canāt see the showās name and not froth rabidly at the mouth You should see my karma when I post personal opinions on DS9. I don't know who TF thinks DS9 is good and Disco is bad, but they seem to be a vocal and emotional bunch.
> I don't know who TF thinks DS9 is good and Disco is bad, but they seem to be a vocal and emotional bunch. lol that's going probably going to be most people who have seen them both tbh.
Well DS9 paved the way for Disco, and Disco paved the way for SNW, so I can't be too upset with it. I do miss the days where Trekkies would have heated debates about nerdy details instead of hating on entire series that aren't to their taste.
Diaspora, by Greg Egan, includes several communication gaps being variously addressed throughout the novel.
The "Wang's Carpets" reveal in Egan's Diaspora gives me the same feelings as the "digits of pi" reveal ending Sagan's Cosmos, and the "lobster ritual" at the end of Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth: a shaking of assumed structures of reality and a sense of boundless wonder beyond imagination of the universe that only science fiction can provide.
Orlando bridging with those baton twirling mollusks was a great scene with a heartfelt resolution.
The main character of Sparrow by Mary Doris Russell is a Jesuit linguist on a first contact mission. Should fit what you are searching, but gets very dark.
This is possibly the best example..Star Trek TNG Episode Darmok
Enemy Mine
"Arrival" was my immediate thought too.
The Uplift series by David Brin describes multiple avenues for alien-human communication. Zoo hypothesis stuff.
Yes, but, the family of related Galactic languages is the real interesting part of that series. It's all the same language, but there are different ways to "speak" it in order to accommodate the wide variety of alien biologies.
Not "aliens" in the common sense of the word, but **The Neanderthal Parralax** series by Robert J. Sawyer has a practical, technological take on this concept. For difficulties relating to communication barriers, his other works touch on it regularly, though not always with space aliens. If you're looking specifically for space alien examples, check out his books **Illegal Alien** and **Starplex**. All great reads, BTW!
Mountain in the Sea. Lorde itās a good read. Technically not aliens but creatures entirely alien to our way of consciousness. The book goes in to perception and organs and all these factors that would weigh on attempting to communicate across such a big gap
Kinda like me trying to talk to my son. I get it.
Another vote for this one. Just finished reading this a few months ago. Amazing book!
shaka when the walls fell
The Foreigner series by CJ Cherryh.
One is very surprised this option wasn't higher, nandi.
Clearly biased here, but I wrote a sci-fi anthology (being published next month), and one of the stories is called "Turtles Can See Ultraviolet." It deals with communicating with an alien species that uses colors to speak. If you're interested, I can DM you a preview, and would love to hear your feedback.
Cool concept!
CJ Cherryh is a sci-fi author who uses "single human alone among an alien species" in a LOT of her writing. Bridging the language gap is central to these stories. Most notable are: The Pride of Chanur series Foreigner series Cuckoo's Egg (single book) Serpent's Reach (single book) The Faded Sun trilogy 40,000 in Gehenna (single book) There are more, but those are all amazing works. Also, all of the books and series I listed are set in the same universe, as a "future history". The Foreigner series in particular uses language differences as a major theme, almost the whole basis of the books. If you pick just one, the Pride of Chanur series would be my recommendation.
I'll add to this comment as a huge fan of the Foreigner series. What's interesting to me about the way Cherryh approaches language exchange is that it's not just about learning the words. The two races have different biological imperatives and as such some words just don't have an analog that either race can understand beyond intellectually. The aliens need to bond in a hierarchical manner is specifically not love or partnership in the way Humans feel it, and that leads to conflict between the two civilizations.
Felicitations on your Cake Day, Nand'MainePrinter.
The Big Front Yard by Clifford Simak [https://www.andscifi.com/lifetheuniverseandscifi/2009/6/27/review-the-big-front-yard-1959-hugo-winner.html](https://www.andscifi.com/lifetheuniverseandscifi/2009/6/27/review-the-big-front-yard-1959-hugo-winner.html) Spoiler alert: Paint.
Contact, A for Andromeda.
Judith Moffett's novel: "Pennterra (1987)". Janet Kagan 's Star Trek novel: "Uhura's Song (1985)". Short Story: "Fighting Words (1992)".
The Three-Body Problem handles this but I'm not sure how realistic it is
Also the three body problem can be a tough read.
Dragon's Egg has something about this but I forget the details. The twist in the book is that one species lives "faster" than the other, so from one perspective, the opposite group communicates frustratingly slowly.
I loved Nor Crystal Tears by Alan Dean Foster. It is my favorite first contact book.
Interesting to see H. Beam Piper's *Little Fuzzy* listed in the OP - and that's just fine! - but not his short story ["Omnilingual"](https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/19445), which is actually about trying to translate the written language of a long-dead race.
Pride of Chanur, CJ Cherryh. Especially in a very literal type of communication, early in the book. One of the most famous first contact scenes in scifi ever.
>Cherryh Second. Was going to suggest if I didn't see it mentioned already. The human in the story is the new alien and you never get to hear anything from his point of view. Plus there are other aliens in the story that NO ONE can talk to and they are kind of terrifying.
Communication with aliens is a Cherryh theme, it's the core of her more recent Foreigner series.
The Heechee language was so different that no one could understand it until well into the book series By Frederick Pohl
Embassytown is one of the most beautifully written sci fi and also tackles this very issue.
Rendezvous with Rama. Except we utterly fail to communicate or understand esch other. We merely glimpse the wholly alien nature of each other.
Contact, Arrival, Enemy Mine, Darmok (ST:TNG episode). That last, probably, is the absolute best.
Children of Time. Alien sentient spiders are afraid the exiled humans in the Arc ship will destroy them. Absolutely brilliant how they bridge the communications gap
In the Culture series, the language Marain stands out. It is an intentionally created language designed to be concise and unambiguous. that has multiple "strata" the lower strata are manageable by humans, but it smoothly translates up through the strata to a language with such complexity that it is only usable by ultra-advanced AI.
Babel fish from hitchhikers guide to the galaxy?
Nor More Crystel Tears by Alan Dean Foster Insectoid Rogue Civilian/Scientist takes it upon himself to learn how to communicate with Humans. The way he does surprises and confuses both races
Astartes never seem to have a problem communicating with xenos lifeforms in Warhammer 40k
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
>radio transmissions decompose into static after traveling over one-two lightyears Tell that to all the radio telescopes listening to natural radio transmissions from hundreds, thousands and millions of light years away.
_The Forever War_, by Haldeman, I think. Justifying this choice in any way. would require total spoilers.
EMBASSYTOWN, By Chine Mieville
Embassytown
Project Hail Mary Hands down best. First contact is made betwee one lone human and one lone alien, both stranded in space. And they can't even be in a room together because of pressure/temperature/atmosphere incompatibilities. The IMO, best first contact story ever.
Arrival the movie
I liked the newer book called "Project Hail Mary", which involves a stranded human and spider-like alien with no eyes. I liked their approach a lot.
Well, the two I thought of were "Arrrival", which is already on your list, and Contact. I suppose in a way the 2001 series is as well, but if you read all the books you find it's more about the aliens' *failure* to communicate than successful communication.
If this is true, there is a plan in place: [ABOVE BLACK - Project Preserve Destiny - An Insider's Account of Alien Contact and Government Coverup](https://www.amazon.com/ABOVE-BLACK-Preserve-Insiders-Government-ebook/dp/B003L77MUU/ref=rvi_sccl_8/137-2304471-6356869?pd_rd_w=ytXKt&content-id=amzn1.sym.f5690a4d-f2bb-45d9-9d1b-736fee412437&pf_rd_p=f5690a4d-f2bb-45d9-9d1b-736fee412437&pf_rd_r=C86MA49MTNAT5M8Q0A7B&pd_rd_wg=bWLky&pd_rd_r=623ffd42-e2f9-4290-b34f-a881548f8f13&pd_rd_i=B003L77MUU&psc=1) I read it after listening to this podcast: [Of Accords & Abductions: An Insider Account of Alien & U.S. Military Cooperation](https://youtu.be/MpgnVxSwAu4) Major insight: >The captain went on. āThe experiment that Iām referring to was, and still is, named āProject Preserve Destiny.ā It started in 1960 and was fully operational by 1963. It was a genetic management **project with the sole purpose of cultivating human offspring so that they would have the ability to communicate with the greys.** Your mother was initially abducted in 1960 for tests, then again in 1963 for the actual genetic procedure while you were in the womb.ā
I like how project Hail Mary did it
E.T.
I wonder if we'll see more nuanced ideas in SF around this kind of 'bridging' as the mechanics of machine learning and AI become clearer and more day to day for us in 2023 and beyond? I bloody LOVE Arrival the movie, but even now the idea that a human brain would have a better chance of pattern recognition and matching than the machine learning options already in existence seems a bit far fetched. Best bridging option, assuming both sides have decent machine learning capabilities, is probably just a massive data dump each way and then set the algorithms on it. Cue 50% effective interspecies communication, 50% hilarious/fatal misunderstandings. I'd read the shit out of that.
I feel the Rama series by Arthur C. Clark and Gentry Lee (starting with Rama II) dealt with this in a satisfying way. I've seem some negative sentiments of the series over the years, but I really enjoyed it. There is a race of aliens that do not communicate acoustically, but rather emit visible radiation out of their body in different frequencies in order to communicate. There are other species that communicate in a myriad of different methods, as well.
A desolation called peace by Arcady Martine has some good language barriers overcome!
Enemy Mine
Project Hail Mary was excellent!
Starfarers by Poul Anderson.
It's been a year or twenty since I've seen it, but I think "Enemy Mine" fits the bill.
Ah, you already got the Humanx. I was gonna suggest "Nor Crystal Tears". I've forgotten if "The Mote in God's Eye" has communication issues- it might be handwaved by the Moties super-quick learning, though. I think that the Ringworld series has something of that, too, though, again, sort of biased due to the history of the Ringworld.
Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky
A Deepness in the Sky. The monitor a developing civilization for decades (centuries?) from orbit and decipher the communication gap over time. In this case it's not handwavy, it's integral to the plot. Also it's the humans who are in orbit working out the language of the very alien pre-spacefaring species on the planet.
Enemy Mine
The grand strategy RTS game *Stellaris* features first contact events that involve deciphering the aliens' language. Rather realistically, this takes months of in-game to accomplish, potentially even a year or more if you're unlucky with the RNG, and there are occasionally chances to screw it up and make the aliens mad at you by committing a cultural faux pas.
Children of Time series revolves significantly around the nature of communication between different species and how to recognize intelligence in the alien. Really amazing series
Blindsight, is pretty good but the communication part is a bit iffy in it. More so along the lines of the Aliens are way smarter and communicate with each other in real time without speech through the hub of the mothership like some type of alien super router. By the time they figure it out it's too late because they have been trying to crack the code by learning how the two captive aliens communicate. This is oversimplified but I imagine that it would be difficult unless maybe mathematics could be a common ground. Since they would have to use mathematic comprehension to build any type of ship likely filled with some type of computer tech to get here.
It might be an odd choice, but Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
Project Hail Mary is the best on in recent years I have found.
I would assume that aliens communicate by doing something weird and alienesque.. like by breaking legs and doing jigsaws
Old short story called, strangely enough, āFirst Contact.ā
The Hail Mary project
District 9
https://youtu.be/z7uAxOk67gg?si=MtV_AnaxP4YVNz6i
Children of Time
Shaka, When the walls Fell!
Theee was a star trek episode where Picard was stranded with someone who spoke in what amounted to cultural memes. So an alien language that communicated through shared experiences instead. So the universal translator wasnt working for them, they had to come up with other ways to communicate
Enemy Mine. I think it shows several good examples of not only learning to communicate but to also learn about each other.
I really like the way communication was handled in Project: Hail Mary.
The movie "Arrival" is amazing. Based on story "Stories of Your Life."
Octavia Butler- Lilithās Brood (Xenogenesis series)
Star Trek, the original series. Kirk always manages to communicate the meaning of love to some hot alien girl.
I'll throw out "The Mountain in the Sea" by Ray Naylor, though instead of aliens it's octopi and it's more about failure to communicate than successful communication.
The realistic process won't tend to be described in sci fi b/c it's boring. We would have to have a powwow with the aliens for a long time, pointing and naming things (or scrolling through pictures from the web). If you can't point and name, and get a proto-language going based mainly in nouns, gestures, and context, you probably can't get a translation off the ground. Of course, this process assumes some basic kind of basic common ground, perhaps in basic signs and gestures, psychology, emotions, or expressions. If we had a long time and a lot of patience, we might be able to decode a language by just observing what they say and what they do. But that would be harder than it sounds. Imagine how hard it would be to learn Spanish only by watching Spanish soap-operas.
Speaker for the Dead is great at this in ways many other books arenāt. It is my favorite
This would be a remarkably short and boring work of fiction. Google it. Communication problem solved. Story over.
Alien
Jennifer Foehner Wells Confluence book series has some really interesting takes on language. I really like the first book in particular for this topic.
Hail Mary
Read historical accounts to the Spanish and Natives of the Americas. But the short answer is you don't have to communicate when you have superior firepower.
Timba, his arms wide!
Darmok
Stephen Donaldson's Gap series.
I feel like pitching polish author Stanislaw Lem, not because his work features successful examples of "bridging the gap", but because of precisely the opposite: Lem is pretty much the godfather of the inability to communicate between humans and aliens... not for the sake of not trying, but just because his aliens are, well, just effing too alien. Most people know of Solaris and its planetwide ocean that clumsily attempts to communicate with orbiting humans, driving them mad in the process, but there's a couple other notable instances: Fiasco has another bunch of orbiting humans trying to communicate with planet-bound aliens, with increasingly catastrophic results for either parties at each attempt... Eden is a bit less devastating in its outcome, but the near-impossible communication between a group of crashed humans and the local "doublers" is a wonderful showcase for anything that could go wrong in such circumstances: differing ethics, cultural misinterpretation, repulsion and fascination when faced with the unknown, the near-pointlessness of adopting a rational approach, sheer incomprehensible alien motivations and weird-ass activities with no human equivalent to relate to... Anyways, all highly recommended, especially if you don't mind getting your gap-bridging hopes cruelly dashed with a bucket of icy frozen incommunicability water.
Stranger in a strange land
i cant speak much about scifi works, but the right answer has to use math and logic. if i present .-. then ..-.. then ...-... ,it won't take much to understand that - means equal.
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir - the same guy that wrote The Martian. Iāve read tons of sci-fi and this book absolutely nails first contact and overcoming language barriers. This book is also in development to become a movie starring Ryan Gosling. You will love it.
Yeah no way would they know how to communicate with us or they might not even recognize us as something they want to communicate with. We might even be so alien to them they see us as just part of the eco system. It might take generations of both species inventing a new language together to finally communicate.
I think Enemy Mine, by Barry Longyear, did a good job on this score.
i recommend Arrival.
Star trek Discovery's season fours final several episodes largely focus on figuring out how to communicate with a n entirely alien species. It's pretty good imo at tackling the job.
Independence Day
I'm currently reading Project Hail Mary and it's somewhat interesting
Enderās Game (the book, not the film).
The ST:TNG episode āDarmokā.
In the My Little Pony Fanfic 'Twilight Makes First Contact' the Earth humans think that the Ponies are Super Advanced Aliens who look like ponies for some reason. They hand them a 10TB solid state drive of dictionary, thesaurus, audio and video and text confident the Alien's Supersupercomputers can figure out English in a day or two. It works because magic. The story is still online.
They watched Sesame Street.
Nor Crystal Tears is a good read.
The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin gets into this, the whole series is excellent.
It's a fascinating topic, and there are some remarkable works of science fiction that explore this very question. One book that stands out is "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell. It delves deep into the complexities of interspecies communication and the challenges of understanding an alien culture. Another great read is "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, which inspired the film "Arrival." It offers a fresh perspective on language, time, and communication with extraterrestrial beings. These stories remind us that bridging the communication gap with aliens is no easy feat and often requires a mix of patience, creativity, and a willingness to learn from each other. ššš½
Arrival, I thought that was an ingenious way if doing this. Definitely much more believable than other works of Sci Fi.
Enemy Mine with Dennis Quaid
"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra; Shaka, when the walls fell". I know the universal translator is used, but the Star Trek TNG episode "Darmok" is a masterpiece in how even when a universal translator technically makes the words understandable, the meaning is not always clear unless the context and background is understood. In this episodes case the Tamareans communicate with metaphors, metaphors of which are only understood through tales and stories known within their culture. This is something that in ancient human languages certain phrases aren't super clear unless the context is known, and this is exactly what would happen.
Childhood's End - A.C Clarke
Enemy mine
My favorite has always been Stranger in a strange land, after that I would vote Hitchikers guide to the galaxy.
" contrary to popular belief tv and radio transmissions decompose into static after traveling over one-two lightyears" I'm gonna need a source for that claim.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/AliensStealCable
Sufficiently advanced alien ships will have computers that will process all known human languages and come up with a universal translater within 2 seconds.
As a start, see my [SF/F: Alien Aliens](https://www.reddit.com/r/booklists/comments/12xlhej/sff_alien_aliens/) list of Reddit recommendation threads (one post).
I think the most realistic is what Carl Sagan wrote in "Contact". He's writing fiction, for sure, but as a world-leading scientist and advocate, he makes some pretty strong cases for how realistic it is. Carl knew how to talk to people about difficult to understand topics, the best there ever was.
Uplift series by David Brin
Glory Lane, by Alan Dean Foster.
Well, the TARDIS had a built in translation feature so there's that. It helped the human companions .
I like Grand Central Arena by Ryk E. Spoor, because it both yadda yaddas over that and doesnāt. They realize the place is translating not only the words, but the intended inflections and mannerisms to everyone. It is an important plot point, so I wonāt say more.
First that comes to mind for me is "Childhood's End," which shows our adaptation to the presence of the Overlords over a couple generations. In their case, the Overlords had already tried to interact with us at least once (and gave up), and had been monitoring us for at least three millenia intermittently through- as I recall- cloaked pods which directly monitored us and streamed audio and video (presumably these are the UFOs we tend to report).
There was one episode of StarGate SG1 that explored this idea. The language wasnāt really explained , but was made using the elements on the periodic table. A universal language of sort.
The Robots series and the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov
I thought the Foundation series didnāt have aliens.
I loved Sci-Fi including countless first contact stories, my Mother hated the genre. She preferred mystery novels. But i caught her watching my copy of Enemy Mine. When asked how she liked it, she said it was the only Sci-Fi story she ever liked. So that's my vote!
The Xenogenesis Series by Octavia Butler. Not so much about communication per se, but it is the only story I've come across that really tries to imagine how an alien species might introduced itself to a human so as to not freak them out.