Show Notes for Ep. 6 "Jed Hartman, Pt. 1: Conversational Cultures"
In his first appearance on the show, Jed Hartman converses with Mary Anne and Ben about the complexities of communication, which include everything from social mobility to ask/guess culture. As is their tendency, Mary Anne and Ben take these topics into the realm of science fiction and fantasy, asking what a realistic encounter with aliens would look like.
Recorded 30 August 2020 / Published 26 April 2021
Contents
- 0:30: Introducing Jed: former Strange Horizons fiction editor; Mary Anne’s sweetie; edited Ben’s first story.
- 3:15: Conversational dynamics, cultural protocols, and interruptions.
- 7:00: Swiss and Sri Lankan conversational cultures.
- 9:55: Conversational dynamics in Ben’s family.
- 12:15: Making sure everyone in the conversation is enjoying themselves.
- 13:55: Hospitality and asking for food.
- 14:50: Ask culture vs guess culture.
- 18:35: Geographical mobility in America and Switzerland.
- 22:00: The constant-surveillance aspect of Sri Lankan culture.
- 22:45: Ritualized manners and hierarchical relationships built into language.
- 26:00: Whether to thank family or not.
- 29:25: “Tentifying”: making phrasing more tentative.
- 32:05: Women in positions of power get pushback about how much time they have; women aren’t supposed to say no.
- 37:35: Politeness rituals are in the eye of the beholder.
- 41:50: Love languages.
- 45:00: Brief intermission, featuring an ad for the Speculative Literature Foundation.
- 45:40: If you’re from ask culture, guess culture can chafe.
- 46:15: Erotica writing and having conversations about sex.
- 47:40: Ben’s early interactions with his now-wife Esther, in a context that wasn’t home for either of them.
- 49:50: Women aren’t supposed to admit they like sex.
- 50:20: Worldbuilding, linguistic patterns, and First Contact miscommunication.
- 51:40: Several examples of humans interacting with aliens in sf books and movies.
- 55:55: Mary Anne’s aliens tend to start out too human.
- 56:55: Aliens as portrayed in sf tend not to be even as different from the writer’s culture as other human cultures are. “We don’t have a universal translator between ask culture and guess culture.”
- 1:01:45: “Higher-order” beings, and complexity.
- 1:06:15: The “Alien Sex” slideshow at sf conventions, which consists of information about real-world insect sex.
- 1:08:05: Star Trek, Star Wars, inherent racial traits in aliens, and lazy worldbuilding.
- 1:11:50: Mary Anne and Ben have complementary problems coming up with, respectively, worldbuilding and story.
- 1:13:05: Alien furniture, and ways to suggest deeper alienness than is immediately evident.
- 1:14:50: Universal translators in sf, and real-world automated language translation.
- 1:19:45: When we’re creating stories, sometimes the first ideas that come to mind include cliches and clumps of received knowledge, crusted with prejudices.
- 1:25:10: Jed’s closing notes; especially mentioning Juliette Wade’s “Darmok”-like story “Let the Word Take Me.”
- 1:26:15: Mary Anne’s closing notes: Sometimes it’s OK to not pay attention to boring stuff. Also, getting worldbuilding help from your community.
- 1:33:30: Women in a mostly-male math department.
- 1:34:55: The tension between maintaining a talking-with-friends feel on this podcast and awareness of a potentially worldwide audience.
- 1:37:50: Credits.
Works Mentioned
Alphabetically by author surname, or by title of work in cases where authorship isn’t simple.
- Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
- Arrival.
- C.J. Cherryh: Foreigner.
- Ted Chiang: “Story of Your Life.”
- Samuel R. Delany:
- J.M. DeMatteis et al: Moonshadow.
- Diane Duane:
- Doctor’s Orders.
- The Wounded Sky. (Possibly the book featuring Uhura collecting recordings.)
- Suzette Haden Elgin: Native Tongue.
- A Fish Called Wanda.
- Robert E. Howard: “Queen of the Black Coast.” (Conan story.)
- Maggie Shen King: An Excess Male. (Sf book about polyandry as a result of China’s one-child policy.)
- Ursula K. Le Guin: “Solitude,” reprinted in her collection The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, which I highly recommend.
- Mary Anne Mohanraj:
- The Stars Change.
- “Plea.”
- Rebecca Ore: Becoming Alien.
- Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct.
- Ben Rosenbaum: The Unraveling.
- Edmond Rostand: Cyrano de Bergerac (translated by Brian Hooker). Free ebook; text is in the public domain.
- Charles Saunders: Imaro.
- Nisi Shawl, ed.: The WisCon Chronicles (Vol 5): Writing and Racial Identity.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Darmok.”
- Juliette Wade: “Let the Word Take Me” (reworking aspects of the premise of “Darmok” in a way that makes more linguistic sense); not available online—published in Analog in 2008. Audio recording available in a 2010 StarShipSofa episode.
Other Clarifying or Explanatory Links
- Constellation Press.
- WisCon.
- Geographical mobility:
- “The typical [US] adult lives only 18 miles from his or her mother,” and “Americans have become less mobile” in recent decades than they used to be.
- But Americans move more than Europeans. (Note: Article leads off with a gratuitous insult to three beloved 1980s movies.)
- And “Across the European Union[…], nearly half of 18- to 34-year-olds were living with their parents in 2014.”
- Ask culture vs. guess culture. (I had no idea until now that the terms were coined in a 2007 MetaFilter comment.)
- Miss Manners.
- Familiar vs formal language, especially in pronouns: see the Wikipedia articles about the T–V distinction and thou.
- One example of inventing a male assistant.
- Politeness and linguistics:
- “New York Jewish Conversational Style,” by Deborah Tannen. Includes Robin Lakoff’s three “rules of politeness,” and their associated conversational styles: distance, deference, and camaraderie.
- Politeness theory.
- “Linguistic Politeness Theory,” by Endang Fauziati. Goes into more detail about Lakoff’s rules.
- “Linguistic Approaches to Politeness,” by Athenia Barouni.
- “Indirectness in Discourse: Ethnicity as Conversational Style,” by Deborah Tannen.
- Love languages: see my post extending the idea beyond the original five.
- First Contact.
- More about Mary Anne’s erotica writing (along with some non-erotica) is on her Mainstream Lit page.
- Universal translators.
- Dolphins and name-like signature whistles. See also dolphin vocalization.
- Linguistic prosody: “Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations.” (That article doesn’t say quite the same thing Ben said, but it’s related.)
- Mycelium network.
- Handwavium.
- Algorithmic bias.
- Linguistics in sf, including Tolkien’s linguistic worldbuilding. See also Science Fiction using Languages or Linguistics as a Plot Device and the Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry on linguistics. A few specific famous works:
- Delany: Babel-17.
- Heinlein: “Gulf.”
- Le Guin: “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from The Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics.”
- …But there are many many many more.