(SFF Bingo): Hellspark, by Janet Kagan

Another one from the Yuletide rec list. This is heavily anthropology porn. I may be being unfairly hard on it, but there were parts of it that rubbed me the wrong way for possibly-flimsy reasons.

Premise: a survey team, comprised of people from many diverse planets, is researching the planet Lassti ("Flashfever"), where everything can and will give you electric shocks. In particular, they want to determine if the local species, the "sprookjes," are sapient--if they have language and culture, the humans aren't going to colonize the planet. Unfortunately, it is difficult to determine whether the sprookjes have language; they echo human words, but so far haven't given any indication that they understand what it means. Also unfortunately, one of the team members dies in mysterious circumstances. So another crew member sends for Tocohl Susumo, from the "Hellspark" culture of interplanetary researchers/translators, in the hopes that she can solve the mysteries.

So in terms of "first contact is hard because we don't know if this species has language, and therefore, we don't really know if we can relate to them," it's reminiscent of "A Desolation Called Peace." And if you like the kind of SF books that don't necessarily explain all the worldbuilding details, just throw you in, there's plenty to keep you busy--garbage plants, lightning rods, golden scoffers, zap-mes--and that's just on Flashfever! All of the survey team have very different cultural traditions because they come from very different planets: they represent worlds where women have all the power and men aren't allowed to read or write, where the average height is four feet tall and people love ritual duels, where the language has "reliability" markings which make it extremely difficult and stressful to lie or even commit to uncertain hypotheses, where bare feet are taboo...Lots of culture. There is, at least, a common "GalLing" language that they can speak to each other, though this doesn't remove all issues. But by the time Tocohl shows up, these people have been living together and researching the sprookjes for three years.

Tocohl walks in and basically solves everyone's problems with the power of...body language. Because behaviors like gestures, or how close someone stands to you, or what side of you they sit on, are all culturally dependent; if you can't get those right, you may be able to speak the same vocabulary as someone else, but you don't "really" know their language. Hellsparks, however, are completely fluent in every language, including their unwritten aspects, so Tocohl speaks to everyone like a native without them being consciously aware why or how. Then she engages in lots of "noble lies" to get the crew to get along--misleading one person to believe that a new kind of boot is fashionable on her homeworld so she'll cover her feet and not freak out the foot-taboo culture, lying to another when two cultures both clash over "which side of your conversational partner is more honorable to approach on." Some people learn after-the-fact that she was lying and just applaud her for the chutzpah; others never catch on.

And, like, I think this is supposed to be uplifting! Even well-intentioned people will have culture clashes, but don't worry, with the right background information the hero can come in and save them from themselves! Instead, it hit me as fatalistic. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get anywhere unless you can miraculously master the unwritten rules which nobody will teach you, because nobody thinks they're actually that important. It hits me hard as an autistic person in a world full of neurotypicals; in this setting, the Hellsparks who actually know the unwritten rules are a small minority. We're supposed to believe that none of the interplanetary survey crew, not even the polyglot who's supposed to be the mission's language expert, knew this. The crew mentions that the cultural liaison who got them set up as a team but didn't stick around was a moron, but how often does that happen? The way it comes across is that the Hellsparks are superpowered individuals in a galaxy full of mundanes; either everyone should be wanting to learn what the Hellsparks can do, or the Hellsparks should come across as more condescending and patronizing to everyone else.

At one point, Tocohl puts forward the theory that one character subconsciously put too much trust in another character when he shouldn't have (and this is subsequently backed up by later evidence), because the second character's given name ends with an ee sound, and in the first character's culture, long e at the end of a name or title is associated with power. Her robot friend (more on whom in a moment) points out that this is silly. Tocohl: "I never said human beings were logical, or reasonable, or even sane." Except that everything Tocohl does, even when it's impulsive or spur-of-the-moment, is logical and reasonable and sane and works out in the end. And that's what frustrates me.

Okay, now the robot. The ship's name is Margaret Lord Lynn, aka Maggy, and she has a bigger memory than most computers. She also gets lots of input streams, through Tocohl's implants (so they can have "subvocal" conversations pretty much whenever) as well as radio handhelds and a freeform "arachne" body that walks around and gets input on its own. Other characters get used to addressing the arachne, understanding its "controller" is physically elsewhere, but get weirded out by the concept that Maggy can really be in "two places at once" (or more) including the audio input.

Because there aren't other computers in the galaxy that can do what Maggy can do, people tend to default to thinking the unseen "controller" is a bright child, based on her curiosity and intelligence but also lack of adult-typical maturity in some ways. Tocohl tends to let this assumption go uncorrected, and even admits that Maggy learns like a child--but I don't think that's really true. In the "language acquisition" unit of linguistics, it's usually pointed out that children learn their first language just by listening to "correct" examples of adult speech; no one will ever say something ungrammatical, then point out, "hey, kid, don't do that, it's bad syntax." Likewise, when a kid starts to generate sentences, some of them will be adult-grammatical and some will not; even if you try to "correct" a kid, they will ignore you until they figure the rule out on their own. In contrast, Maggy is more like...combining the perfect memory of a computer with the rule-following ability of an adult. On the other hand, she can have a childlike attitude at times:

 

“You’re sweet, Maggy.”
“Am I? Tocohl says I’m a pain in the butt.”

“It is possible to be both.”

 

And she's a very fun character:

 

(Now, Maggy,) she said, (in answer to your question: Alfvaen finds swift-Kalat sexually attractive—judging from the way Kejesli spoke, that’s no secret. She wants to learn his language in order to be more attractive to him. She’s now afraid that she’ll do it badly and ruin her chances of a relationship, or of learning that he doesn’t return her feeling.)

(Oh,) said Maggy. (—So Alfvaen will tell him she loves him and fight a duel with her closest friend and win and be cruelly wounded?)

(Wait, wait!—Veschke’s sparks, Maggy, what have you been reading?!)

Maggy’s recital of what she had been displaying for Alfvaen lasted through planetfall. (Maggy,) said Tocohl, firmly, (we’re going to have to have a long talk about fiction. I think you still misunderstand its purposes: fiction is a lie for entertainment, it’s a lie the listener willingly accepts for the sake of something else.)

This conversation happened early enough in the story that I was able to flag it as potential foreshadowing, which it is, even if in not quite the way Maggy envisioned :D

Of course, the existence of a computer with unique learning abilities and individuality is also relevant in a story about "how do we test whether this species is sapient," and I enjoyed the Maggy parts much more than "Tocohl fixes everything for the humans." (Perhaps it's because, since Maggy doesn't have a human body, pretty much her only way of communicating with the others is through verbal language.)

As I was writing this, I thought more about examples of "noble lies" I've read about, good or bad. And it occurs to me there may be some symbolism with Alfvaen's ailment. Early on, it's mentioned that Alfvaen contracted a parasitical infestation on a previous survey mission, which converts sugar into alcohol; when she's under stress, she physically gets drunk even if she hasn't actually consumed alcohol. This is known as "Cana's disease." Of course, I caught the allusion--Cana was the site of the Bible story where Jesus turned water into wine, get it?

But there's another detail to the story I hadn't remembered until just now, which is that Jesus doesn't tell the hosts that that's what he's doing. He just has the servants fill the jars up with water, then serve some to the host, who says, "oh, wow, this is great wine!" A lie at the right moment becomes the truth.

Bingo: I'm gonna say that Maggy, although she is technically an "extrapolative computer," is definitely within the spirit of the "Robot" square!