Communicating with extraterrestrials isn’t going to be easy, as we’ve learned in science fiction, all the way from John Campbell’s Who Goes There? To Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (and the movie Arrival). Indeed, just imagining the kinds of civilizations that might emerge from life utterly unlike what we have on Earth calls for a rare combination of insight and speculative drive. Michael Chorost has been thinking about the problem for over a decade now, and it’s good to see him back in these pages to follow up on a post he wrote in 2015. As I’ve always been interested in how science fiction writers do their worldbuilding, I’m delighted to publish his take on his own experience at the craft. Michael is also the author of the splendid World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet (Free Press, 2011) and Rebuilt: My Journey Back to the Hearing World (Mariner, 2006).

by Michael Chorost

Ten years ago, Paul Gilster kindly invited me to guest-publish an entry on Centauri Dreams titled, “Can Social Insects Have a Civilization?” At the time I was planning to write a nonfiction book about the linguistic issues of communicating with extraterrestrials. Though actual, face-to-face contact anytime soon is deeply unlikely, the concept is nonetheless theoretically interesting because it casts light on deeply buried assumptions about language and communication. I sold the concept to Yale University Press. The working title was HOW TO TALK TO ALIENS.

I got busy, but I soon began to feel that the project was rather empty. I realized that in an actual First Contact situation, we’ll suddenly find ourselves in a complicated situation with a deeply unfamiliar interlocutor that has an agenda of its own. We’ll inevitably find ourselves winging it. Theory could be irrelevant. Useless.

For a while I tried to finesse the problem by putting scenarios in between the theoretical stuff. I imagined a human and an alien talking—specific humans, specific aliens, concrete settings. I soon realized that the scenarios were the most interesting material in the book.

That’s because positing a concrete situation made the problems, and the possible solutions, stand out clearly. Given a particular situation, what would people actually do?

It dawned on me: It made more sense to write the book as a novel. I withdrew from my contract at Yale and returned the advance. They were kind and understanding about it.

So I committed myself to a novel—but I wanted it to be as content-rich as the book I’d promised to Yale. I decided that the human characters would be scientists: an entomologist, a linguist, a neuroscientist, and a physicist. To succeed they’d have to pool their expertise, educating each other. That would imbue the novel with the scientific content.

But this risked me writing a deadly dull novel larded with exposition. I wanted the characters—both human and alien—to be vivid and unforgettable, and for their actions to drive a propulsive plot. I wanted the reader to be unable to put the book down.

I think I succeeded. I hired an editor to help me, and she made me do rewrites for three years; she was relentless. But at last she said, “You set yourself one of the hardest imaginative problems you could possibly have chosen, especially for a first novel. I think you managed it in a way that feels genuinely convincing. I want to say clearly upfront: this book is worth it. There is no story like this in the world.”

So I’m pretty confident that I now have a publishable novel—but getting there was really hard. I thought it would take about three years to write, which is how long my two nonfiction books took. I was wrong. It took eight.

When I started, I knew I wanted the aliens to be really alien: no pointy-eared, English-speaking Vulcans. I decided to make them sapient social insect colonies. That would make them aliens without contiguous bodies. Without hands as we know them. Without faces.

Therefore, I first had to figure out what a social insect civilization looks like. I didn’t want to take the easy way out by positing (as Orson Scott Card did) that a social insect colony would have a centralized intelligence, e.g. a Queen that gives orders. I felt that was cheating. I wanted the colonies to be genuinely distributed entities in which no individual insect has language or even much in the way of consciousness. Furthermore, I wanted the insects to be no bigger than Earthly ones, which ruled out big brains of any kind.

This gave me some very challenging questions. (From now on I’ll use the word “hive” as shorthand for “social insect colony.”)

• How does a hive pick up a hammer?
• How does a hive store and process the information needed for language?
• What is the physical structure of the hives?
• How does a distributed consciousness behave?
• What does such a civilization’s technology look like?
• What does its language look like? What’s its morphology, grammar, vocabulary?
• What does a society of hives look like?
• What events in the past set this species on the path to language and technology?

It took me two years just to answer the first one about picking up a hammer. I would imagine a bunch of insects clustering around a hammer and completely failing to get any leverage. Then I’d give up, deciding the question was unanswerable.

But finally, I figured it out: the hives parasitize mammals by inserting axons into the motor cortexes of their brains. That way, they can control the mammals as roaming “hands.”

And this was a key insight, because it helped me understand the hives as truly distributed entities. A given hive could have several dozen “hands” roaming the landscape, doing various things. Furthermore, it would have no front or back in any human sense.

This worldbuilding was fun, but it was the least efficient way imaginable to write a novel. I designed the aliens and their world before working out the plot. This led to a big problem.

Which was this: the aliens were so alien that I didn’t know why they would want to interact with humans in any way, nor us with them. What would we want to talk about? Or do together? This meant I didn’t have a plot.

I didn’t want to default to science fiction’s classic reasons for interspecies communication: war and trade. They struck me as stereotypical answers that would lead to a stereotypical novel. Besides, they begged the question. Species that are trading or fighting have to be similar enough to have things to trade, or to fight about. That would vitiate my goal of writing really alien aliens.

So I knew what kind of plots I didn’t want. But that didn’t tell me what kind of plot I did want. I sat down every day and wrote, hoping to figure out an answer.

This was, as I said, a very inefficient way to write a novel. Why didn’t I practice by writing, and publishing, a few short stories? Build up my cred, get my name out there? But I didn’t want to do those things. I wanted to write this novel. I grimly stuck to it, day after day.

After a while I had a bare-bones plot. When Jonah Loeb, a deaf graduate student in entomology, asks how to deal with an intelligent ant colony besieging Washington, D.C., the answer is, “Ask it to stop.” Jonah gathers a team of scientists and travels to a hive civilization in order to learn how.

I gave the other scientists names, figured out their dissertation topics, and worked out some of their characteristics. The neuroscientist was arrogant. The linguist was prickly and defensive. The physicist was socially awkward. Jonah, the protagonist, was deaf, like me, with cochlear implants. He was smart, but neurotic.

But I didn’t know how to make the characters come alive on the page. They all talked the same. Their only motivation was scientific interest. They had scant backstories or inner lives. They were, in short, boring.

I was even more at sea with the alien characters. They had no personality. I mean, really, how do you give a social insect colony a personality?

The plot, too, remained threadbare. I fabricated encounters, goings to-and-fro, arguments. But it just didn’t hold together. Often I’d add a new element only to realize it invalidated another element.

So I had dull characters and a plot made out of cardboard and duct tape. Finally, I admitted I needed help. I hired a freelance editor, and we started fresh.

The editor had me write up descriptions of each character’s goals and motives, and a detailed plot outline. We went through the manuscript one scene at a time, and she often told me to rework it before we went on to the next.

Slowly, the characters came to life on the page. I had made the protagonist, Jonah, deaf because I thought that would underscore the theme of communication. But Jonah only came to life when I thought back to my own feelings in my early twenties. I realized that Jonah was driven by feeling like an outsider. He desperately wants to be included and to prove himself.

This characterization let me set up a key dynamic: an outsider protagonist trying to communicate with aliens—the ultimate outsiders. Clarity for the character led to clarity for the story.

I slowly got better at solving problems by framing them in terms of character and plot. I knew that Tokic, the hives’ language, would have to be exotic—but creating it overwhelmed me. I’m no grammarian, and certainly no inventor of languages.

But then I realized I only had to develop enough of the language to support the plot. I wanted the plot to turn on misunderstandings and mistranslations as the humans struggled to learn the language.

A key source of confusion, I realized, would come from how differently shaped the hives and humans are. Humans have arms and legs that are attached to them. On the other hand, a hive is essentially a giant, stationary head with dozens of “hands” roaming the landscape. Not only that, the “hands,” as parasitized mammals, have minds of their own. Hives give their hands general orders, and the hands work out the details. A hive can disagree with its parts, and its parts can disagree right back.

I realized that the part/whole distinction would be built deeply into Tokic, rather like how human languages build gender deeply into their grammar. (In English, consider how hard it is to talk about a person if you don’t know their gender.) When you’re addressing another entity in Tokic, you have to be very precise, on the level of grammar, about its partness or wholeness.

Now consider: To a hive, is a human being a whole or a part?

A hive would find this question really hard to answer. As a mammal, a human being looks like a “hand”—a part—but it talks like a whole. Yet in Jonah’s team, each member is legitimately a part. In Latin, membrum means “limb” or “part of the body.”

Jonah, as a cochlear implant user, is even trickier for a hive to understand. A cochlear implant is a computer; it runs on code and constantly makes decisions about what’s important for the user to hear. It’s a body part that literally thinks for itself. As such, Jonah is kind of hive-like. When a hive asks what Jonah is and the team gives it an answer it doesn’t understand, the hive attacks the team and they must run for their lives.

I worked out Tokic’s parts/wholes grammar, and that made it possible for me to write the scenes where things went wrong. These were tough scenes to write, because I had to keep track of what a hive said, what the humans thought it said, the humans’ mistaken reply, and so on. I also had to be careful not to let the scenes get bogged down.

I’ve noted how inefficient my writing process was. But I do think it was productive in one way: I spent so much time thinking about the novel that a great deal of information accreted in my mind. I think that led to more richness in the worldbuilding and the story than would have happened if I’d written it faster.

There’s so much more I haven’t mentioned, like how an alien robot reads Wallace Stevens’s poetry and names itself after him; the brutal 1.8-gee gravity of Formicaris and the unexpected solution that lets the human team function there; the superheavy stable element that facilitates interstellar travel; the electromagnetic weapon that gives humans Capgras syndrome; the octopoidal surgeon who operates on Jonah and Daphne to upgrade their cyborg parts; and the illustrations. I had those done by professional science illustrators.

So now you have a sense of what my novel’s about. It’s still titled HOW TO TALK TO ALIENS; I think its unconventionality, and slightly academic air, will help it stand out. I hope you’re now as excited about it as I am. You can see a bit more about it at my website, michaelchorost.com.

If you know of any literary agents who’d be interested—please let me know.