#hellspark

[allthingslinguistic]

This is my Jam

1 book from my shelves thematically paired with each day's jam from the Bonne Maman jamvent calendar.

Day 1

Maple blueberry, a classic Canadian flavour combo (featuring the France French name "myrtille" instead of the Canadian French "bluet" for the fruit) paired with Linguaphile: A life of language love by Julie Sedivy, about the author's childhood in Montreal and subsequent psycholinguistics research into language and the mind.

Day 2

Fig cardamom paired with Talking Hands, in which journalist Margalit Fox goes along with linguists documenting Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language and writes up a history of sign language linguistic research (and eats a few figs and dates) along the way.

Day 3

I had to look up two words from the name of this jam, both of which turned out to be familiar foods viewed differently (Quetsches et Poires à la Badiane: prune plum and pear with anise), so I've paired it with Hellspark, Janet Kagen's sf book of translation and cultural miscommunication, which several @lingthusiasm listeners told us to read and they were EXTREMELY RIGHT.

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 116: Cross-cultural communication (in space!)

Sometimes, you're talking with someone and you just seem to click. Other times, you just can't seem to get comfortable: they're standing too close or too far away for comfort, making too much or too little eye contact, touching or not touching you in a way that just doesn't quite feel right. But where do our senses of what feels comfortable in a conversation come from, and how can they be so different from each other?

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about understanding aliens, fantastical creatures, and perhaps the trickiest group of all, other human cultures. We talk about a science fiction book called Hellspark by Janet Kagan (which was recommended by a listener!) which is a murder mystery set on a planet of cross-cultural communication gone wrong, and which sent us on a whole deep dive into the world of proxemics, aka the linguistics of personal space. We also talk about how these early roots of cross-cultural communication studies have shifted in modern-day linguistic anthropology, and compare several newer speculative fiction books about alternative structures for human societies (plus aliens and/or dragons), including What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed and To Shape A Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

Check our our updated topics page! It's a great resource if you're not sure what episode to listen to next or what to recommend to someone. We've added some new topics that let you browse, for example, which episodes analyze the linguistic elements of all the science fiction and fantasy that we've been reading! And we've kept the ability to browse episodes by linguistic structural features, which is perfect for when you're looking for an episode to pair with a topic you're teaching or studying.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about idioms! We talk about some of our favourite idioms, the interplay between idioms and metaphors, why linguists are so excited about breaking idioms by changing one word slightly, and in particular why "the shit hit the fan" was responsible for multi-hour-long discussions that Gretchen participated in during grad school. (Swear warning, because there's really not another idiom that uh, hits the fan in the same way.)

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 110+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Hellspark by Janet Kagan on Amazon

What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed on Amazon and Bookshop

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose on Amazon and Bookshop

The Bluesky post from Trish B that started it all

Wikipedia entry for 'Edward T. Hall'

Wikipedia entry for 'Proxemics'

Wikipedia entry for 'Mosuo'

'Moniquill Blackgoose: Also There Are Dragons' on LocusMag

'An Indies Introduce Q&A with Moniquill Blackgoose' on BookWeb.org

'A wish for something different at the frontier' by Jo Walton for Reactor

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @gretchenmcculloch.com, on instagram @gretchen.mcculloch and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[remnantglow]

trying to remember how to draw - here's a quick sketch of maggy and tocohl from hellspark by janet kagan!

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read Hellspark by Janet Kagan (1988)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onNov 26, 2025

[murderbot-moodboard]

I hadn't read a lot of scifi until after I read The Murderbot Diaries (which kind of introduced me to the contemporary scifi lit scene), but I'm currently rereading what was my favorite scifi book before I read Murderbot, and it's still in my top 10. It's a standalone novel that came out in 1988 called Hellspark, written by Janet Kagan. Martha Wells has said in one or two places that Janet Kagan is one of her scifi inspirations (and has mentioned one of Kagan's other novels, Mirabile, specifically), but I wouldn't be surprised if Wells drew some inspiration from Hellspark as well, because I was reminded of it when I read certain parts of TMBD.

Hellspark features a main character named Tocohl who is confident, pragmatic, and within the first few pages of Chapter 1 uses her fighting skills and responsive armor suit skin to take down a group of bad guys armed with knives who are kidnapping a woman who turns out to be an important character in the story. Tocohl is assisted by her extrapolative computer Maggie, who lives in Tocohl's ship but uses a remote to interact with characters on planet part of the time. Tocohl usually speaks to Maggie by subvocalizing—this book was where I first heard that term, though I didn't quite understand what it meant until I read TMBD.

The main story takes place on a planet where a survey team has gone to assess if one of the life forms there, the sprookjes, are sapient, because that will determine whether the planet can be developed by outside forces or not. But there's been a mysterious death, the planet is prone to frequent lightning storms, and the survey team are all humans from different planets, leading to cultural and language differences that add to the tension. Tocohl, however, is from a culture of traveling merchants, and she uses her understanding of the languages and the nonverbal movements of the different cultures to work through the group's communication challenges as she helps them try to determine if the sprookjes are sapient before their time runs out.

I absolutely love the cultural worldbuilding behind each of the fictional human cultures that is evident from page 1. The way Janet Kagan emphasizes the body language and movements of each culture isn't quite like anything else I've ever read outside of the class I once took on intercultural communication. If you're looking for a scifi story with a bit of mystery, intercultural dynamics, and analysis of the timeless question "how do you define, much less determine, sapience?," I'm fairly confident you will not regret picking up this book. :)

[takaraphoenix]

How do you feel about Jordan Parrish? And more specifically, how do you feel about stiles/parrish being shipped together?

It has been seven years since I last saw the show so my memories of everything post season 2 was very hazy (because I saw seasons 1 and 2 four times more often than the rest, I still had good memory of those), so I didn't have many memories of Jordan. And me and my Cupcake only just wrapped season 3 on our rewatch. There isn't a whole lot of Jordan in season 3.

That is the preface to say that I don't have too many feelings about him yet? He's kind of a marshmallow but there hasn't really been meat around his story yet and we haven't reached the Creature Reveal yet either. I do remember overall liking him though.

Due to not having a whole lotta memories of him, I don't have an overall feeling on the ship yet either. Generally, I think there is something very juicy about the deputy falling in love with the sheriff's son. Though I will admit, I am scewering toward older boyfriends for Stiles nowadays, so Jordan's a bit young.

But generally, I'm all in for the majority of Stiles ships - there is only a handful that actively make me feel icky about them and wouldn't want to engage with personally. And, let me be clear, even those I think have a right to exist. I just need to be given the opportunity to avoid them. So, even if I don't end up on board of a ship, the most of my feelings would be "I really don't need to see this and don't want to engage with it, but everyone is free to ship what they want".

[coquelicoq]

tocohl susumo takes not checking your messages to a new level. sure maybe i read texts and then immediately forget about them, and perhaps it's impossible to leave me a message because my voicemail is always full, but at least i am accessible enough that no one has ever felt the need to sue me just to be assured of the opportunity to speak to me when i show up to court. happened to my buddy tocohl though.

[hereisdan]