My head is stuffed.
Finished Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, and am halfway through The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson.
The novel--novella? it felt short -- was a trip, literally, across a curious universe with a fascinating but relatable character, Binti. She's a teenager who can "tree" fractal equations in her head, a common enough skill that she and her friends compete playfully, but Binti is also a harmonizer. I loved the peoples of her universe, even the few we only see for a sentence or two in a crowded academic scene from across a room. I would love to see more of this world.
Binti is more of a straightforward plot story that other recent reads, so those who dislike parsing complicated layers of worlds and reams of description might prefer this to, say, Jemisin's novel. This reads more like a young adult book, albeit a powerful one.
Despite the lighter touch, Okorafor manages to create the sense of a vast, many-peopled universe. She both directly addresses and evokes that sense of "being the only one of my kind" in a new unfamiliar place (Binti's people do not travel or leave their planet, as she has chosen to do, but she keeps to her traditional ways, which aids her), as well as the terror and rage that come from being judged and ruled by those who deem you inferior. Binti's solution is a powerful one.
Okorafor also does a good job creating that sense of desperately wanting to stretch and learn and be more, and the wall one hits when you've been stretched too far and there is no relief in sight. The novel left me feeling a little sad but good, and wondering if there would be a sequel.
Shifting gears...
Today I'm working with my own aliens and my own universe, back to revising the space opera. I turned to Peterson for advice on how to make my dialogue feel more alien, a trick when my primary characters are in fact aliens. I plan to write their dialogue in English with the occasional alien word, but in order to do that I need to think a a bit about their language, how they'd sound to humans, what sounds they could and couldn't make and how that would affect their language.
In other words, I'm geeking out in my own little universe and it's kinda fun, but there's a whole language to discussing language (who knew? Linguistics geeks feel free to laugh now) and my head is stuffed with new words like velar and phonotactics and register tone and anapest (never was a poet).
It feels like a dozen different areas of study and all the jargon associated with them are crammed in this little tome, and my head hurts, in a good way, but it's still overwhelming. Pronunciation guide should help me with my French studies, however, an overlap aid I wasn't expecting. I'll take it.
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