How to Talk to Aliens (A Novel)
Overview
HOW TO TALK TO ALIENS is about four graduate students who journey to Formicaris, a high-gravity planet, to learn how to negotiate with a rogue ant colony threatening humanity on Earth. They must learn to think and speak like the hives of Formicaris, or suffer extinction.
The team consists of a deaf entomologist who smarts at being overlooked, a linguist who is frustrated because her fieldwork has been curtailed by the loss of her right arm, a literal-minded physicist with uncanny intutition, and an arrogant neuroscientist who thinks he can sense the presence of God.
Their guide is an enigmatic, poetry-loving aggregate of nanobots that has named itself “Wallace Stevens.ˮ Their language teacher is the hive Antho, whose disability by hive standards renders it well-suited for communicating with humans.
As the team struggles to learn the language, the neuroscientist grows increasingly skeptical that humanity will ever accept coexistence with sapient insect colonies, and resorts to sabotage. Thus the leader must contend with a team that is alienated from itself, even as it tries communicate with aliens...
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