Short Book Reviews: A Smart Alien Murder Mystery

 Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson (Tordotcom)

 I loved this fresh and wonderful take on human-alien cultural clashes! This alien race, the Logi, are approximately humanoid in appearance and possess valuable technology. They’re fascinated by human culture, especially the arts and printed books. The catch is that they communicate telepathically through specially trained “Thought Language” translators. One such is our heroine, Lydia, from a poor British background. She loves her work, the only thing she’s ever been really good at, not to mention her generous salary and her sensitive, thoughtful boss, the Logi cultural attaché. All this makes it worth feeling drunk from translating between Thought Language and English. It all goes to hell when her boss is murdered and she’s the prime suspect. Both her freedom and her ability to solve the mystery depend on her remaining at the Embassy, and the Logi is charge has never liked her.

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words combines alien contact science fiction, a sympathetic heroine, weird maybe-supernatural stuff, and a highly complex mystery filled with surprises and reversals. I found Lydia, with all her insecurities, bravura, and gullibility, deeply sympathetic. I fell for the same deceptions and cheered her on as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. This is a smart science fictional mystery and a wonderful take on how even truly weird aliens and humans can find understanding and common ground. Best of all, a deeply flawed character prevails at the end.

Short Book Reviews: Combat Linguistics Rules!

 Battle of the Linguist Mages, by Scotto Moore (Tordotcom)

 This is a deliciously psychedelic romp through the virtual worlds of gamers, linguists, philosophers, cultists, and political power players. Isobel is the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon, a medieval rave-themed VR game. Her prowess makes her an ideal candidate to learn the secrets of "power morphemes"—dense units of meaning that can warp reality when skillfully pronounced. As she masters level after level of power morphemes, she realizes the driving force behind them—and her beloved game—is a shadowy faction led by the Governor of California, bent on developing the arcane art of combat linguistics to create a totalitarian empire. This faction is out to recruit Isobel, but so is the resistance movement of spellcasting anarchists. Unfortunately for everyone, the faction has attracted much bigger and weirder enemies than the resistance, emerging from dark and vicious dimensions of reality.

The story is jam-packed with ideas, action, and just plain fun. I mean, really, combat linguistics? I loved the characters, even the evil, scheming governor. I’m not a gamer, although many of my friends are, so I’m sure some of the hilarious Easter eggs and in-jokes went by me. If there’s a fault in the book, that is its length. There’s a limit to how many didn’t-see-it-coming twists one storyline can sustain and even whimsy falters after so many pages. Still, I enjoyed the linguistic mages enough to look forward with anticipation to Moore’s next book.