Suzette Haden ElginAnmeldelser

Der zweite Teil hat mich leider so gar nicht mitgenommen. Viele Leute, viele Orte, teils ohne erkennbaren Zusammenhang... :(

Minu jaoks mitmel moel väga raputav raamat, ja just eriti pärast Kuangi "Babeli" lugemist, kuna temaatika on sama, aga hoopis teise nurga alt. Keele väest, maagiast ja sellest, kuidas keel loob maailma, milles me elame.

Oh, goodness, where to start? There are so many problems with this book.

Firstly, it's so boring. I was recommended this because I like the movie Arrival and linguistics. But honestly, this book doesn't say a whole lot about linguistics, or even aliens.

It was definitely too long, and it strangely had 3 different main plots going on that never successfully came together. The ending was abrupt and unsatisfying.

It's super feminist, which was the author's point. She definitely preferred to hit readers over the head with her personal moral convictions at the expense of the actual story. I was confused about why she chose to make her world a "men are powerful jerks, women are disempowered but strong rebels" scenario. Especially with the way her world was set up (women can't vote, they can't go places without their male escort, etc.), a historical novel (or one set in the Muslim world) honestly could have communicated all that. I think it would have been vastly more interesting to read about a society in which women were the power-hungry abusers and men the victims.

There is a ton of profanity, which I found very strange for a linguist author - you'd think a linguist would enjoy using words more creatively. And, profanity is offensive in general.

On that same note, this book is very anti-religion - and specifically, anti-Christian. The author makes the "evil" men the ones who are "Christian" (though I use that term loosely, because the author doesn't understand the difference between nominal and devout Christians, apparently).

The author made sure to work in the fact that the "smart, brave women" had secret abortions.

There are several sexual references, though no explicit content.

This is my all-time go-to feminist sc-fi read

Quirky and fun; what a lovely trilogy! it's too bad more people don't know about these books.

This is a feminist dystopia written in the 1980s, set in a future in which women's rights have been taken away and they are completely subservient to men. In this future, linguists are very important as they communicate with the many, many alien species that have been encountered to negotiating trading contracts and space colonies. The main events of the story take place 200 years in the future and follow the household of one of the 13 linguist families, whose children are trained from birth to acquire alien languages.

I had such mixed feelings about this book. For one thing, it took me so long to get into it, for two reasons. First, I didn't think it was plausible that all of women's rights would be taken away in the 1990s by constitutional amendments just because one paper was published positing that women were biologically not as intelligent as men. As someone who was alive in the 1990s, this just does not seem feasible. I can't imagine that even if 38 states had ratified these amendments, that our country would have remained whole after that.

Second, everyone talks like someone in a parody of a stiff 1950s television show. Sometimes, it was laughable. And the men are so ridiculous. I kept getting angry every time I picked this up to read and had to take breaks. Granted, there certainly are men who think this way about women, but in this book, it's ALL of them. And there is no romantic love, or even lust. Really? I get tired of misogyny too, but this goes against everything I know and have experienced of male-female relationships.

But I started getting more into it as I read. The baby-exploding caught my attention. That was a bit of horror I wasn't expecting. Too bad that plot line wasn't developed much more, but I gather that was probably left for the sequels. Then the character of Michaela, the one woman who's mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore. I really liked her and all the bits of the book she was in. This story required an outsider character to give it some perspective, and she was it.

Overall, the writing was stiff and awkward and aggressively feminist, of its day. It did remind me a lot of The Female Man, in that sense. But it has interesting ideas to present in the guise of science fiction. Overall, I'm glad I read this, if not for the plot or characterization, but rather for the ideas and for it being a kind of artifact of a very particular time in the feminist movement (again, like The Female Man).½

agree and disagree

Kind of interesting but I got to a point where I couldn't be bothered to finish it.

Too Many Unanswered Questions.

I read Elgin's Native Tongue because it was touted as on par with Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale. While it treats similar topics, it is not as good as either of those classics.

A major flaw for me is that the book's main premises are unexplained. First, the novel begins with excerpts from (fictional) constitutional amendments which repeal women's right to vote, and transform them into legal minors. While a similar premise is carefully and plausibly explained in The Handmaid's Tale, here in Native Tongue, the whole legal maneuver rests on one scientific paper which is never explained or even alluded to again. Why did this paper, which claimed to prove that women are the intellectual inferiors of men, carry so much weight? What was the proof? Were there protests? We'll never know.

Secondly, the plot revolves around the linguistic Households, or Lines, thirteen families which have cornered a monopoly on translation, crucial to Earth's rapid exploration and colonization of the galaxy. The Linguists claim to possess a genetic difference that justifies their monopoly; the government suspects that's a fabrication. We never find out if either option is true.

Elgin is also skeptical of "test tube" babies. Hers are not quite human, while we know now that babies conceived in vitro are indistinguishable from the more traditional kind. However, one must keep in mind that her "tubies" are more like Huxley's, spending the entire gestation in vitro and "decanted" instead of born, something we have (fortunately) not yet attempted.

Finally, the book ends with the separation of men and women, physically and linguistically. Is this the solution Elgin advocates? If so, it is an incredibly cynical one. It is true that in a world where men and women play segregated roles, they can't "speak each other's language," but if they are able to interact in a more egalitarian fashion, they should grow in understanding. "Separate but equal" was debunked decades before Elgin penned this tome, and I am surprised and disappointed to see her wind up at that lame conclusion.

This is my first book by Louis Trimble. It is a short SF novel from the 1970. It is full of spies and gadgets. No one is who they say they are.

Trimble was a prolific pulp novelist who specialized in Detective/Mystery and Westerns. He published at least 50 novels with 4 or 5 Sci-Fi books in the mix.

This is an example of good writing but a below average story. I'm not sure if I will try another book by this author.

Suzette Haden Elgin, an experienced grandmother of ten, covers all aspects of grandmothering, including mediating family arguments; learning the art of growing old gracefully; saying no without feeling guilty; coping with emergencies; managing resources - money, time, and energy; being a long-distance grandmother; keeping the family history; and teaching crafts to grandchildren. Dozens of sidebars provide invaluable tips on topics as diverse as traveling with kids, wonderful gifts that can be made on a copying machine, and the best grandparenting sites on the Internet.

I seriously tried with this. Again and again. There were some great parts but overall it felt like a requirement, a slog, not a pleasure.

This is my first book by Elgin. It is pretty average 1970s SF. I am told it is not her best work and I found it to be good but with a disappointing ending.

I will try others by this author.

Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin is a highly recommended classic dystopian novel which was originally published in 1984 and is currently being re-released. This is the first book in a three book series.

In 2205 the Nineteenth Amendment has long been repealed. Men hold absolute power. Women are treated as children who must always be supervised by men and any of their actions require male approval. The only value women hold is to provide children. The current world-wide economy depends upon trade with other cultures, including alien. The Chornyak family is a powerful family of translators who raise their children, daughters included, to be linguists. All their members speak multiple languages and are used as translators in sensitive negotiations.

Nazareth Adiness is a brilliant linguist and the most talented of the Chornyak family. As with all translators she has been working since she was young and is a valuable asset to the family, yet she still has to endure an arranged marriage as a teen and the expectation that she will have a large number of children (while still working). Once women are past child bearing years or deemed infertile, they are moved to Barren House, to keep the older women from causing any drama in the main house.

Unknown to any man is that the useless older women of Barren house have been working together to make up a secret language of their own, a language that will only be taught to women and one they can use to communicate with each other without the men's interference. The women are preparing for a coming revolution where they will remove themselves from the control of men.

It's rather surprising to me that I never came across Native Tongue before this reissued edition. The world building depicts a misogynistic society in a realistic manner. We currently have cultures/societies where women have no rights and men are in control. It is an interesting concept, but certainly Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is over all a better novel with more depth and clarity of characters. The society is too divided here, too bad versus good, with men versus women, and all men bad. It is interesting, certainly the discussion of languages was interesting, but it also was a bit too simplistic.

First, I was engrossed in the narrative and found the whole concept fascinating, but I can't say it was especially well written as a novel. The character development is superficial. Perhaps the main issue I had was the implausibility that the Nineteenth Amendment would ever be repealed and all women would just submit. Even today there are women who fight back against certain societies that have patriarchal cultural expectations to control women. Not all women will submit; there will always be some women who will fight for their freedom and rights. I'm highly recommending it for some of the science fiction concepts presented.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of The Feminist Press at CUNY.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2019/07/native-tongue.html½

The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense teaches a number of techniques to redirect conversations when you are being verbally abused. It mentions ways in which a person can respond to a provocation or other type of communication with skill and poise. The book also doubles as a workbook of sorts since you are expected to write supposed scenarios that you could encounter in your life. The book gives little prompts here and there and the reader is expected to write in the book to complete it. Since it was a Library Book, I can't exactly do that. Though I suppose I could always read with a notebook and write down stuff in that.

An interesting set up, but her agenda got in the way of what could have been a good story

Elgin was determined to get her message across - oppression of women is bad for everyone, men and women alike. Okay, we got it. I was hoping for more interesting world building and I don't believe that the women's clever plot would have worked. Also, I got really tired of the unrelenting negative portrayal of all the male characters.

An odd reading experience - the world building was good, lots of originality and interesting settings. But the plot had me puzzled. I never could figure out why Responsible went on her quest, what her actual role was, (some kind of leader) and how she got so good at magic when women aren't supposed to.

Suzette Haden Elgin published Native Tongue, the first book in this eponymous trilogy, in 1984. I was 22 in 1984.

I remember Reagan’s election and how many of us on the left (I was already quite at home way over on the left wing) were frightened by the possibilities, many of which have come to pass. I also remember the beginnings of the backlash on feminism, a backlash that just keeps growing 30 years later. So, I get where Haden’s coming from with her story of a dystopian future USA where women have lost all their rights and are now the property of men in worse ways then they were before the second wave of feminism. My 22 year-old self would have eaten this book up and looked for more.

I’m sad to report, however, that the book didn’t really do much for my 51 year-old self. The story immediately irked me with the premise that the constitutional amendments revoking the 19th amendment and turning women into minors under the law would have happened by 1991. I mean, okay, Reagan and his ilk scared me, too, but 1991? That seems awfully premature.

That’s always a risk writers take, putting events in the super-near future. I’m still miffed that 2001 came and it was nothing like the movie. There was a 33-year gap there. To predict something this cataclysmic happening less than 10 years from when you’re publishing? Might have wanted to think that through a little more.

So, I had to try to push that aside as I read further. Fortunately the rest of the book takes place centuries in the future, the 22nd to be exact. There we discover that not only do women still not have any rights, but society has been divided up into two antagonistic groups: the Linguists and everyone else. The Linguists are the only people capable of communicating with all the alien societies humans have met, so they’re necessary as translators to make all the treaties and do all the negotiating. Regular people hate them, so the Linguist families (the Lines) live in large communal houses buried in the earth away from prying eyes and violent reaction.

One of the reasons that regular folk hate the Linguists is that Linguist women are allowed to work outside the home as translators because, apparently, there’s so much translating that needs to be done, they have to. Then we have all the stuff happening with babies blowing up because they can’t fathom non-humanoid alien languages (no, really). I haven’t even gotten to the Linguist women’s work on creating a language that allows women to express their thoughts better than standard English, French, German, whatever. This, one might argue, is really the point of the book, but it gets lost, to me, amidst all the other stuff.

Oh, and there’s a serial killer. (Who’s actually my favorite part of the novel; her first murder? That chapter would make a great Tales from the Crypt of something.)

I hate to say this, because Elgin’s short story “Old Rocking Chair’s Got Me” remains one of my favorite short stories (Top 10, no question. It’s awesome. And hard to find. I have it in Dick Allen’s Science Fiction: The Future (1983 edition).), but I found Native Tongue to be too bloated and ponderous, too preachy and heavyhanded. While not all the women are saints, by any means (see: serial killer), most of them are and there isn’t one kind man in the whole thing. They’re all stupid, misogynistic assholes, every one of them, which is just bullshit. Even in 1984, I had allies. Still do.

None of the characters are really developed at all; they’re all just game pieces for Elgin’s philosophical/linguistic chess board. And there are so many plot holes. What do the aliens in the Interface do all day when they’re not communicating with (and occasionally destroying) the babies? And what happened to all the kids who’d been fed hallucinogens in an attempt to keep them from blowing up after they were taken to the orphanage? The list goes on.

Things I liked? The serial killer character, as I said. She’s really the only person whose character evolved (however slightly) over the course of the novel. I also enjoyed Elgin’s discussions of language and the linguistic “tricks” that one male linguist in particular would use to win arguments. Those were interesting. And I liked the notion that an academic field such as linguistics would become so powerful. But the negative outweighs the positive for me.

Biggest disappointment? The cover of the edition I read. Nothing like that image happens in the book. I wanted my motherly alien! (2.625/5)

A few weeks back a good friend and I got into a disagreement, the details of which irrelevant. It lasted maybe five minutes then the day went on as usual, no hard feelings or underlying grumpiness. But there was something about the way we interacted that made be wish it had been different. I generally don’t like disagreeing with a couple of my friends who seem extraordinarily confident that their opinions are fact because I end up feeling a bit off. I don’t agree, but I’m not entirely sure how to get that across without being an ass.

I did a little research into how to disagree with someone without acting and sounding like a jerk, and this book repeatedly rose to the top. It’s a bit academic but very easy to read; the three star rating is more a function of the fact that this book is nearly 20 years old and could definitely benefit from an update that addresses internet interactions. Unfortunately Dr. Elgin passed away about a year ago, so any update would need to be done by another author.

Dr. Elgin is probably better known to folks as a science fiction author, but she’s also an expert in language studies. The main premise of this book is that people aren’t (usually) jerks to be jerks. She suggests that there are instead different ways of viewing discussions, including discussion as combat, life as a football game and life as a schoolroom. It’s sort of fascinating, and allegedly backed up by research. She offers different scenarios and ways to go about both diffusing them and avoiding getting into them in the first place.

She also calls b.s. on a lot of the common thinking about differences in the way genders communicate, and instead suggests those differences are more about who is in (or attempting to demonstrate) power. I found that to be a fairly spot-on commentary, although it opens up a whole other line of questioning around the expectations of women when they speak, including the desire that we should be agreeable. Are men out there buying books like this?

I do wish she’d spent a bit of time looking at how language is used in intentionally hostile ways, which she suggests is rare. I’m guessing that any woman on Twitter (especially women of color) would beg to differ, and it’s possible that the suggestions in this book aren’t helpful in those instances.

Of course, as I say that, I just checked amazon and apparently she did issue an updated version in 2009 that looks at how to handle ‘casual racist and sexist language;’ unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be in print still. I’m going to guess that if you’re interested and can find it, the 2009 version would be better.

This is a great book, but it's a little outdated.

I wish I still had a copy to reread. This is a keeper. This book could make one's life a lot easier.

The sequel to [b:Native Tongue|13065|Native Tongue|Carl Hiaasen|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166535999s/13065.jpg|923380], which I loved. It is quite good, and I can't wait to read the last part in the trilogy, but Native Tongue was definitely better. I really liked and empathized with the main characters in Native Tongue, whereas I can't even remember a character from The Judas Rose. And the men seem to have gotten dumber--it's much easier to trick them. In Native Tongue, I was always convinced that disaster lay only two pages ahead. The linguist women are so well-organized and enlightened (free of all the pesky jealousies and behavioral quirks that nearly led to their destruction in the last book) in the Judas Rose that I never doubted their success.

Absolutely excellent. I know The Handmaid's Tale gets more press and praise, but this is a far more realistic and chilling misogynist future. There's really so much meaty stuff, and I'm so far from eloquent, that I'll just say read it and leave it at that.

I picked up this 1972 paperback because, from the back cover, it purported to be an early feminist SF novel, with comparisons made to Delaney and Zelazny. Sounded interesting.

However, as far as the feminism went – I had a hard time believing that this book was even written by a woman. I looked up Elgin online, and yes, she is a real woman, and known as a feminist. She wrote this book as one of several to make money to put herself through grad school as a linguist. Not only has she published quite a few science-fiction novels, she's invented an artificial feminist ‘women's language' and written many self-help type books on communication. Huh.
I can only guess (and hope) that Elgin became more proficient at communicating her ideas herself as time went on, because this short book (only 142 pages) has a surprising number of problems crammed into its brief length.

First, if you're going to call yourself a feminist, how about having at least one female character who is shown as admirable or resilient in any way? The women we meet are: an intelligent woman (with my name!) who submits herself fully to her husband's will (we never see her again). A woman who aspired to be a Poet, and for failing, was condemned to permanent solitary confinement, who went crazy (we never see her again). A woman who aspired to be a Poet, succeeded brilliantly, and then, because there was no place for her in society, went crazy. (Later, she begs the off-worlder man to deflower her as she has no hope of love and therefore fulfillment with men of her planet. Of course he accedes. Sigh.) Two submissive sex slaves/servants who are content and have no desire to change their society ("otherwise, how would anyone know what to do!?"). Not to mention an offhand comment that men of the more enlightened Federation of planets (where women are not subjugated) no longer have balls. Everything remains in stasis for the whole book.
OK, so a book doesn't have to be feminist. I'm OK with that.
The main problem with the book is that it jumps around, never finishing ideas, leaving loose ends everywhere.

There's an elderly female poet who is Jacinth (the main character)'s inspiration. But, after a brief appearance. we never find out anything more about her. Did she die? We don't know. We spend some time with the interpersonal relations of Jacinth's family. Then she leaves, and we never see them again. Then, big time jump, and the story switches totally to the point of view of the interplanetary agent who is summoned to deal with the problem of Jacinth being the victim of a mysterious attack. He falls victim to attack himself, and that whole part of the book is about the registered criminal underworld and his troubles with them. Then, we forget about all that, and in the last DOZEN (literally) pages of the book, we suddenly find out about a huge food crisis and a difficulty of communication with aliens that is inhibiting trade for food. Can we solve this in 12 pages? Yes!

I really wonder who thought that publishing this was a good idea.