The probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched by NASA in 1977. The purpose of the probes was to gather scientific information about the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, but both probes exceeded their expectations and have continued to transmit data as they have left our solar system to explore interstellar space. They are the only human-made objects to have left the solar system, and Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth.  2027 will mark fifty years since the Voyager probes were launched, and they have continued to provide us with fascinating scientific information, and will continue to do so until their power runs out some time in the 2030s.

Because their trajectory would take them out of the Solar System, the Voyager probes were both equipped with a Golden Record, which contain images and sounds representing the diversity of life on Earth and are intended for any form of extraterrestrial life that may find them. The contents were selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan, and include greetings in various human languages, images and sounds of humans and nature, and music from various cultures. Using items housed in the University of Liverpool’s Science Fiction Collections, this exhibition will look at how science fiction has imagined the problems that could arise when trying to communicate with aliens, and how we might overcome these problems, particularly in the context of the Voyager missions. 

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Why do we want to communicate with aliens?

Humanity’s natural curiosity has led us to explore our own world and send probes to nearby planets. We have always been interested in the possibility of encountering other forms of life. If there is intelligent life out there, of course we would be excited to meet these aliens and learn what we can from them.

Science fiction often imagines these scenarios, and it is part of the utopian drive that powers Star Trek, with its famous mission ‘to seek out new life, and new civilisations’. This souvenir programme is from the film Star Trek: First Contact (1996), where fans first got to witness the historic meeting of humanity with the Vulcans that propels our species to maturity.

PX20.S733 - Star Trek: First Contact (Official Movie Souvenir Magazine) 

Might communicating with aliens be dangerous?

If aliens do find and decode the Golden Record, we have told them how to find us. This assumes that aliens will be benevolent, but what if they are a threat to us, or we are a threat to them?

H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1897) started a long tradition of violent alien encounters, with the warlike Martians invading Earth with their tripods and laying waste to our cities, their victory over Earth only thwarted by their susceptibility to our bacteria. This image comes from the original serialized publication in Pearson’s Magazine.

But given humanity’s history of violence, conquest and colonization on our own planet, the aliens may come off worse from meeting us. In Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicle (originally published as The Sliver Locusts) (1951), humans colonize Mars, the diseases we bring psychically wiping out the indigenous Martian peoples in a tragic allegory for colonization. Many works of science fiction have drawn from these texts to imagine meetings between humans and aliens ending in tragedy for one or both of us. 

PX1000.P41 - Pearson's Magazine, Vol. 3 & 4

PS3503.R167.S58 1951 - The Silver Locusts

First contact before science fiction

Humans have been imagining how we might communicate with others long before the codification of science fiction as a genre. Before we imagined travelling to different planets, these stories took place in the Fantastic Voyage genre, in which the protagonist would visit imaginary distant lands and interact with alien cultures.

In Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the most well-known of these texts today, Lemuel Gulliver is marooned on the island of the Houyhnhnms, horse people who use their language as part of their programme to brainwash Gulliver to believe in Houyhnhnm superiority. This attitude of superiority is reflected in the Houyhnhnm language itself, as Gulliver explains: 'The word Houyhnhnm, in their Tongue, signifies a Horse, and in its Etymology, the Perfection of Nature.' 

This illustration, from an edition annotated by Isaac Asimov, shows Gulliver talking with the Houyhnhnm.

PR3724.G7 1980b O/S - The Annotated Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver’s Travels was not the only novel to imagine communications with alien cultures. In the context of the Fantastic Voyage novel, this was a recurring theme.

Across the Zodiac (1880) by Percy Greg, imagines its protagonist journeying to Mars in an anti-gravity powered spaceship, where he encounters Martians who speak a thoroughly imagined alien language. The novel contains the first recorded use of the word ‘astronaut’ – here the name of the spaceship. And Godfrey Sweven’s Riallaro (1901-03), written while the author lived in New Zealand, sends its protagonist on a voyage to unknown archipelagos that satirically portray various dystopian societies that have different invented languages and cultures. 

PR9639.B76.R48 1901 - Riallaro

PR4728.G4.A18 1978 - Across the Zodiac

Voyager in Fiction

Given the utopian and science fictional aims of the Voyager project, it’s not surprising that since their launch the probes themselves have had a constant underlying presence in science fiction.

Most famously, in Star Trek’s big screen debut, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), released two years after the probes were launched, the crew of the Enterprise must confront the massive sentient alien superstructure V’ger when it comes to threaten the Earth. V’ger turns out to be a returned Voyager probe – the fictional Voyager 6 – which has merged with an alien machine intelligence and has returned home to meet its creators, humanity.

This slide shows a souvenir programme from the original screening. The movie also features the first time the Klingon language is heard onscreen in Star Trek’s history. It is thoroughly appropriate that one of the most famous fictional languages should debut in a film about alien communication. 

PN1997.S694.S79 1979 - Star Trek: the motion picture

Science fiction’s fascination with the Voyager probes and their attempt to communicate with aliens remains strong to this day.

Martin McInnes’ In Ascension (2023), which won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, tells the story of a marine scientist who explores deep sea anomalies and eventually an alien presence at the edge of the solar system. The novel features an entire chapter that recounts the contents of Voyager’s Golden Record as part of its interrogation of human conceptions of communicating with the alien. 

PR6113.A2628.I31 2024 - In ascension

Aliens as Animals

What would an alien look like? Many authors have looked to other animals on Earth as a realistic model to base their aliens’ biology on.

While the selective pressures on another planet would likely be wildly different to those on Earth, from what we know of convergent evolution on our own planet, it’s not impossible that different evolutionary pathways could evolve similar solutions to biological challenges, leading to alien life that reminds us of creatures we know from Earth. Insects and sea creatures, which look sufficiently different to humans, are favourites of science fiction writers.

Alien biology could pose its own challenges for cross-species communication. For example, in Evelyn E. Smith’s short story ‘Once a Greech’ (1957), chaos ensues when the Earthmen bring a Greech back in their spaceship, unaware that it is merely the larval form of the insectile aliens.

PX1000.G36 - Galaxy Science Fiction [1st sequence]

Other authors have used animal biology as a springboard to think about how aliens may think differently from us.

In Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), Scottish author Naomi Mitchison writes about Mary, a telepathic communications expert who travels to various worlds and has relationships, some intellectual and some romantic, with various non-human aliens, many of whom have forms similar to Earth sea creatures like octopuses and starfish.

More recently, Ray Naylor’s The Mountain in the Sea (2022) relocates first contact to our terrestrial oceans, with humans struggling to communicate with sentient octopuses who have their own written language.

PR6025.I85.M5 1985 - Memoirs of a Spacewoman

PS3614.A946.M92 2024 - The mountain in the sea

Language Acquisition

Could the techniques we use to acquire languages on Earth to help us understand alien languages?

US anthropologist Chad Oliver imagines such a situation in The Winds of Time (1957), when aliens are awakened from centuries-long suspended animation and must communicate with Wes Chase, an everyday man who discovers them on a fishing trip in Colorado. The aliens use field linguistic techniques to learn English so that they can communicate with Wes.

But what concepts would we have difficulty translating from an alien context? In Hortense Calisher’s Journal From Ellipsia (1965), a genderless alien travels to Earth and must learn not only English but concepts of male and female and the idea of individuality, all of which are alien to them.

PS3565.L458.W76 1957 - The Winds of Time

PS3553.A4.J68 1966 - Journal from Ellipsia

One of the most complex and nuanced explorations of language in science fiction occurs in Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue (1984). This feminist novel is set in a future dystopia in which women’s rights have been stripped away, leading to the creation of a women’s language Láadan as an act of rebellion.

But Elgin’s exploration of language extends to the extraterrestrial as well. This is a world in which linguists occupy a privileged but despised position in society because they are able to acquire the alien languages that the Earth government needs to trade and negotiate with aliens. As babies’ neural plasticity makes it easier for them to pick up languages, the linguists acquire new alien languages by placing babies in the Interface, a machine that allows the babies and aliens to interact while keeping both safe, and letting them naturally pick it up. This works for humanoid alien languages, but Interfacing babies with non-humanoid aliens causes permanent brain damage or death, as the concepts that the non-humanoid aliens are coding for are so radically different from those in human languages it destroys the babies’ brains.

PS3555.L42.N27 1985 - Native Tongue

The Language of Láadan 

This Appendix, printed at the end of the UK first edition of Native Tongue, shows an excerpt of Elgin’s A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan, which compiled the invented language’s words.

You can also listen to a recording of Elgin reading Láadan by clicking on the following link: Excerpt from 'A First Dictionary of Laadan' - Suzette Haden Elgin. The excerpt is taken from an instructional tape of how to speak the language and used with kind permission of the University of Oregon Special Collections and Archives. 

PS3555.L42.N27 1985 - Native Tongue

Academic papers and interviews can shed light on how particular texts explore their major themes. This can be especially insightful for texts as rich and complex as Native Tongue.

Elgin was a researcher in experimental linguistics, and created the language of Láadan in 1982 before writing Native Tongue. Láadan was conceived as a language that centred women’s experiences rather than men’s as a revolutionary act.

This paper by Karen Bruce, published in Extrapolation, explores the original linguistic premises that Elgin used to create Láadan. And this interview with Elgin, conducted by Lyda Morehouse in Science Fiction Chronicles in 2001, shows the author’s disappointment that Láadan did not become a language used by women in the real world. While Elgin may have viewed Láadan as a failed experiment, Native Tongue’s stature as an underrated science fiction masterpiece continues to grow.

PX20.E97 - Extrapolation

PX20.S3356 - Science Fiction Chronicle

Linguistics

Linguistics is the study of language. Just as works of hard science fiction draw on and extrapolate from physics, linguistic science fiction draws on and extrapolates from linguistics.

One of science fiction’s most daring and in-depth explorations of linguistics occurs in The Embedding (1973) by Ian Watson. This complex and ambitious novel involves linguistic experimentation on children to expand human consciousness and an endangered Brazilian tribe whose language alters the user’s perception of reality, both of which prove vital when alien visitors with an incomprehensible language are discovered en route to Earth.

Ian Watson’s archives are housed in the Liverpool Special Collections and Archives department, and include this draft manuscript of The Embedding. This is draft d, the penultimate draft before the completed manuscript for publication, and these pages show how much time Watson spent reworking and rewriting his explanation of the linguistics of the novel, with extensive edits and paragraphs to be inserted even at this late stage.

IW - The Ian Watson Papers

This paper by Ian Watson was published in the science fiction journal Vector two years after The Embedding’s publication and offers insight into Watson’s linguistic research and thinking behind the novel.

It demonstrates the seriousness and the depth with which Watson and other science fiction writers engage with the science at play in their fiction. It also shows the extent to which science fiction writers tend to be aware of how their themes have been explored throughout the history of science fiction, which is part of how the genre is always in conversation with itself. 

PX20.V42 - Vector

David I. Masson was the Special Collections Librarian at Liverpool from 1945 to 1956. Between 1965 and 1967, he published a series of remarkable short stories in New Worlds magazine. All were inventive and original and fit into the then-current New Wave which challenged the strictures of Golden Age science fiction by experimenting with theme and form.

Masson’s short story ‘Not So Certain’ explores a situation in which humans’ attempts to communicate with aliens break down because of our inability to parse their language’s tricky and complex grammar. This is the original issue of New Worlds that contained the story; its juxtaposition with a piece on the art of M.C. Escher demonstrates the New Wave’s commitment to expanding the boundaries of what science fiction could engage with.

P10000.N48 - New Worlds SF

This is a proof copy of The Caltraps of Time (1967), the collection which contains all of Masson’s published stories. It was donated to the Science Fiction Collections on behalf of Masson’s widow by science fiction author Christopher Priest, Masson’s friend and a great supporter of his work.

This page from ‘Not So Certain’ shows the proofreader’s marks indicating that one of the words from the alien language has been misspelled and needs to be corrected – a problem unique to authors of science fiction.

PR6063.A82.C16 1967 - The caltraps of time 

Sapir-Whorf

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, formulated by linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf in 1929, argues that the structure of a language determines the speaker’s perception of reality. While difficult or impossible to test in reality, it has proved an irresistible thought experiment for science fiction authors interested in linguistics.

One of the most famous and successful explorations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis occurs in Samuel R. Delany’s Hugo Award winning novel Babel-17 (1966). The eponymous Babel-17 is a weaponized language being used in an interstellar war. Captain, poet, and linguist Rydra Wong is sent to investigate it and discovers it has the power to turn the user into a sleeper agent.

PS3554.E437.B11 1968 - Babel-17

Delany has also contributed significantly to the field of science fiction criticism from the field’s infancy. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977) is a book-length exploration of the idea of science fiction as its own kind of language, mirroring the weaponized language of Babel-17.

This section shows both Delany’s dizzying intellectualism and his playfulness, as he uses an invented alien language to talk about language itself. 

PX322.D4.J48 1977 - The jewel-hinged jaw

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has a longer history in science fiction than Delany’s novel. It is behind the idea common in dystopias that thought can be controlled by controlling language, as in Newspeak in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). This is a thread that has recurred in subsequent dystopias.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is used for social engineering in Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao (1958), in which Palafox the wizard creates warriors out of the passive people of Pao by indoctrinating them with three new languages – Valiant for the warrior class, Technicant for the technical class, and Cogitant for the mercantile class, each of which is designed to reinforce the qualities needed to turn the passive Paonese into people who can compete with their galactic neighbours. 

PR6029.R8.N71 1948 - Nineteen eighty-four

PS3572.A437.L28 1974 - The Languages of Pao

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis continues to inspire great science fiction. C.J. Cherryh’s Hunter of Worlds (1977) explores the interaction between three species whose different cultures are delineated by their radically different languages, each of which is structured very differently, leading to difficulty communicating between the three peoples.

In Ted Chiang’s brilliant novella ‘Story of Your Life’ first published in the anthology Starlight 2 (1998) and adapted into the film Arrival (2016) by Denis Villeneuve, Dr Louise Banks learns the language of the alien heptapods, and so begins to experience her life from the perspective of the heptapods, who experience time profoundly differently from humans. Works like these help us imagine the ways in which alien language might shape how aliens experience the universe radically differently from us. 

PS3553.H358.H94 1990 - Hunter of Worlds

PX14000.S794v.2 1998 - Starlight 2

Dictionaries

The concepts that a language has words to describe can tell us a lot about a culture. Perhaps this is the reason we find ourselves fascinated by dictionaries of alien languages.

Brian Aldiss’ short story ‘Confluence’ (1967) inventively uses the format of a dictionary to tell an entire story – the definitions of selected words of the Confluent language from the planet Myrin tell the reader about the Myrinian culture and how it differs from human cultures. But Aldiss’ own choices as a creator – for example, ‘UBI - A girl who lifts her skirts at the very moment you wish she would’ – inadvertently tell us something about the gendered assumptions he has made while inventing the language. 

PX1400.B5618.V12 1970 - The Best of Sci-Fi 12

Ursula K. Le Guin takes this a step further with Always Coming Home (1985), which inventively combines elements of narrative and fictionalised textbook and anthropologist’s records to tell the story of the Kesh, a people who live in the far future in northern California. Le Guin shows the reader what Kesh society is like through narratives but also by sharing their folk tales, folk songs, language, maps and poetry, each of which reveal more to us about how the Kesh live and experience the world.

This is the first edition of the novel, which additionally came with a cassette of the Kesh’s music, composed and performed by Le Guin and composer Todd Barton, which added another aspect of realism to the Kesh culture. You can listen to an extract of the music here. 

PS3562.E42.A6AL 1985 - Always coming home

Language Change Over Time

Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 lightyears of the star Gliese 445 in about 40,000 years. If the Voyager probes are picked up by alien species it will not be for a very long time. If the human race still exists by this stage, the English language of Carl Sagan’s team will have changed into something unrecognizable – consider the difficulty modern readers have trying to understand the Old English of Beowulf, a work from a thousand years ago.

The Time Traveler in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) experiences this when he travels to the year 802,701 and is unable to communicate with humanity's descendants who have split into two distinct species, the Eloi and the Morlocks.

PR5774.T58 1926 - The Time Machine: an invention

Linguistic drift can sometimes be overlooked by science fiction writers, but others have found inventive or humorous ways to explore this idea.

In Robert Sheckley’s short story ‘Shall We Have a Little Talk’ (1965), published in this issue of Galaxy, a human attempt to colonise an alien world by buying up their land is thwarted because the alien language changes so quickly that from one day to the next the human protagonist is unable to understand it.

David I. Masson’s ‘A Two-Timer’, published in New Worlds, is told in Shakespearean English and imagines a character from 1683 stealing a time machine to travel to the present day, and the linguistic confusion he would experience as a result.

PX1000.G36 - Galaxy Science Fiction [2nd Sequence]

PX1000.N48 - New Worlds SF

Mathematics as Language

One of the ways we could sidestep the issue of linguistic drift is by resorting to mathematical constants. The Golden Records contain information in binary notation explaining the speed the record should be played, expressed in time units derived from the fundamental transition of a hydrogen atom.

Carl Sagan himself imagines aliens communicating this way in Contact (1985), his film story eventually realized by Robert Zemeckis in 1997. In the film, SETI detects the presence of alien intelligence who are communicating by transmitting a series of prime numbers. More malevolently, in Roland Emerich’s blockbuster hit Independence Day (1996), humans discover the aggressive aliens’ invasion plan of Earth encoded in a global satellite signal. 

PX3200.C667 - Contact

PX3200.I52 - Independence Day

Science fiction’s love of physics means that its enthusiasm for mathematics as a universal language transcends cultures.

In Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanfuturist Binti novella series, beginning with Binti (2015), the eponymous Himba protagonist’s command of mathematics allows her to communicate with the jellyfish-like alien Meduse and put a stop to an intergalactic war. The novella brilliantly explores how Binti’s Himba culture and her curiosity and insight allow her to overcome others’ prejudices against the Meduse to find common ground across different cultures. 

PS3615.K67.B56 2015 - Binti

Human Arrogance

Any attempt to communicate with aliens could be stymied by our own human arrogance, as the assumptions we bring to interacting with an alien culture will inevitably shape the outcome. Science fiction has given us numerous warnings about this eventuality.

In Michael Bishop’s ‘Death and Designation Among the Asadi’ (1973), published in this issue of If, human anthropologists visiting the planet Bosk’veld wrongly assume the Asadi, the humanoid people indigenous to the planet, are unable to communicate, leading to tragedy.

In Sydney J Van Scyoc’s ‘Deathsong’ (1974), published in this issue of Galaxy, the arrogance of the human anthropologists leads to them becoming the medium through which an extinct malevolent race of aliens achieve immortality. 

PX1000.I32 - Worlds of If Science Fiction

PX1000.G36 - Galaxy Science Fiction [U.K. Reprints, 4th Series]

The theme of human arrogance has continued to provide inspiration for adventurous science fiction authors.

Ruth Nestvold’s ‘Looking Through Lace’ (2003), seen here in the magazine Asimov’s Science Fiction, was included on the Otherwise Award’s Honor List for works of science fiction and fantasy that explore gender. In the story, xenolinguist Toni Donato visits the planet Christmas, where the team of human linguists have failed to understand that the planet’s women have a secret language encoded in their knitting. The story is a powerful piece of feminist science fiction which is very much in dialogue with Elgin’s Native Tongue. 

PX1000.I82 - Asimov's Science Fiction

How Does it Feel to Decode an Alien Language?

How would it feel to be confronted by an alien language? The closest we might get to understanding that feeling is by looking at the Codex Seraphinianus (1981).

The project of Italian artist Luigi Serafini, the Codex Seraphinianus is designed to mimic an encyclopedia of an imaginary world. All the text is written in an imaginary language using an imaginary alphabet, which has never successfully been decoded. Because the format resembles an encyclopedia, the reader can look through the book and the beautifully surreal illustrations. It feels like it ought to make sense, but because we can never grasp the context needed to make sense of the writing and images it generates a powerful sense of estrangement. 

PN6381.54 1983 - Codex Seraphinianus

Beyond Language

Maybe alien communication will take place on a level beyond what we understand as language, making communication between humans and aliens difficult or impossible.

This scenario is memorably explored in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961). In the novel, Kris Kelvin arrives on board a space station orbiting the planet Solaris, which is covered by a sentient ocean. The ocean and Kelvin’s attempts to communicate with each other are doomed to failure, both remaining intrinsically alien to each other.

Solaris was written in Lem’s native Polish. Ironically, when it first appeared in English in 1971, Solaris was translated from a French translation rather than the original Polish, resulting in this text about the impossibility of communication itself being poorly communicated. All English editions, including the 1981 edition shown here, used this flawed translation, until a translation directly from the Polish was made available as audiobook and ebook in 2014. 

PG7158.L39.S68 1973b - Solaris

Human imagination often restricts what we imagine language might look like, but what if aliens communication occurs in ways we haven’t thought of?

In Sheri S. Tepper’s After Long Silence (1987), human arrogance yet again places humanity in jeopardy from the massive sentient crystals of the planet Jubal, until it is discovered that we can communicate with them through music.

In Amy Thomson’s The Color of Distance (1995), xenobiologist Dr. Juna Saari is stranded on the planet of the Tendu, an amphibious species who communicate by changing the colour of their skin. Saari must undergo transformative surgery so that she can learn and speak the Tendu’s “skin speech”.

As long as humans have imagined the problems that could arise from alien communication, they have been imagining possible solutions.

PS3570.E66.A37 1993 - After long silence

PS3570.H64648.C65 1995 - The color of distance