Triad

Xenolinguist Guild

by Sheila Finch

There was something strange about Ann Bonney's mission to the unexplored world called Chameleon. Though only women were judged fit for space, Earth's Central Computer had for some reason placed a man among them ... an artist who was not docile like other men. For Language Specialist Gia Kennedy, the answer lay in the baffling rituals of the planet's primitive natives -- an answer that hovered just out of reach. There, in the heart of an alien wilderness, Gia would defy her culture and discover an ancient truth.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Language, Science Fiction Fantasy

240 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1986

About the author

Sheila Finch was born in London, England, and attended Bishop Otter College before coming to the United States in 1957, where she did graduate work in medieval literature and linguistics at Indiana University. She has lived in California since 1962, and teaches Creative Writing, and the Literature of Science Fiction at El Camino College in Torrance. She also runs workshops in fiction writing each summer at Idyllwild Arts Academy in the San Jacinto Mountains. She has three daughters, six grandchildren, and two cats, all of whom supply enough ideas to keep a writer busy. She has published seven science fiction novels. The first one, "Infinity's Web," won the Compton Crook Award, and the most recent, "Tiger in the Sky," won the San Diego Book Award for best juvenile fiction. She has published short stories in F&SF, Amazing Stories, Asimov's, Fantasy Book, and a number of anthologies, as well as several articles about science fiction. "Reading the Bones," won the Nebula Award for best novella of 1998.

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Reviews

[Kevin Phyland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sheila Finch shows us an Earth now dominated and ruled by women. Children are artificially designed to be female but some males still exist from natural births in societies which follow Dow - what were once known as primitives. The Ann Bonny is on a commercial mission to the newly discovered world which would become known as Chameleon, to try to initiate a trade as mandated by alien Sagittans who guide the major decisions on Earth along side the global computer mind CenComp. From the start odd things are evident about the mission - a male artist assigned to the ship, a number of dissident, aggressive anti-males, and the incredible luck of finding a planet worth claiming for Earth - complete with indigenes who may or may not be sentient. The puzzles of the book are neatly wrapped up but this book is about many things: the value of diversity, the sanctity of life, and the meaning of intelligence are just three. Reads like a first novel and has a number of exotic moments and rewards a careful read.

[Joseph Gagnon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was more interesting than entertaining. Even still, I was sucked in by the final chapter which satisfied most of the plot in the story. I found none of the characters particularly memorable, but the Omareemeeans were a cool species. I loved that the human society was matriarchal AND that had little bearing on the plot. It made the whole tale a very interesting thought experiment.

I picked this book up looking for a strange scifi tale, and that is what I got. I loved that language was a focus of the story. It could have explored Zion’s character a little more, and the whole rebellion. It feels like there might be more to that.

If you read a lot and need something different, then this is it.

[Cory Baxter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another book I read years ago. It was a very interesting story involving interplanetary exploration. The ship was crewed solely by women because the ship's star drive dynamics adversely affected men. The stories first contact was quite interesting.

[Science and Fiction · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, there is something unsatisfying about this story that I can’t quite put my finger on. First off, I had no inkling of where this was headed until page 75, which turns out wasn’t really where it was headed after all. Professor Finch taught writing at a college in California and I suspect she thought of a concept and decided to see how it would evolve in a novel. This is her only science fiction novel and in it she coins the terms xenobiologist and xenolinguist, which are now commonly used. The concept of the human population being 99% women (because genetics allow choice of gender in utero) and men being a rarity reserved only for breeding and menial jobs is already a bit of a stretch for an assumed societal framework for the story.

I couldn’t decide if it was the manner of writing that I couldn’t sync with, or the fact that there is a near-complete focus on female perspective, but about page forty, I began to get irritated with the overly-indulgent details of the main character’s (Sheila) daily diary and her depressive self-doubt. For me, just too cringe-worthy to warrant such prominence in the story. Anyhow, the idea of an alien race of pre-sentient creatures who bond into groups of three and whose language is based on three levels of meaning, is certainly interesting. But despite much linguistic analysis, this is never satisfactorily explained. What happens is that by eating alien fruit a female xenolinguist and the one male on the ship discover - through some weird drug-induced communal delirium under a rare triple full moons - a long dormant biological urge for coupling. Lots of fanciful poetic prose during this crazed finale, but I sort of glossed over all this because I never fully identified with any of the characters or understood what was going on. Just interesting enough to keep me going along but by the end I’m scratching my head and certainly don’t feel enriched or edified for having read this. Put it in the donation box.

[Miki · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel about the encounter of a freighter human crew with a fascinating alien species on a mysterious planet, that leads to deep changes of perspective for many of the humans, to dramatic events and eventually to a possibly profound evolution of life on that planet and of the closely interconnected human-AI culture. A big part of the story is told from the point of view of the Linguist expert of the spaceship, and focuses on ber work of analysing and learning the alien language. A peculiar and interesting novel.

[James]

There was something strange about Ann Bonney's mission to the unexplored world called Chameleon. Though only women were judged fit for space, Earth's Central Computer had for some reason placed a man among them ... an artist who was not docile like other men. For Language Specialist Gia Kennedy, the answer lay in the baffling rituals of the planet's primitive natives -- an answer that hovered just out of reach. There, in the heart of an alien wilderness, Gia would defy her culture and discover an ancient truth.

[Victoria Gaile · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barely three stars. A bit heavy-handed on the author's-message, and a bit light on explanations of the planet's biome. The gender theme, which prompted me to pick up the book in the first place, turned out not to be very important to the story after all. The aliens were not quite plausible enough to be really engaging (see above re: light on explanations).

But the handling of language and linguistics was interesting. I'll give it another try when I'm in a better mood.