I recently read Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary and as soon as I found out they had just released a movie adaptation I went and watched it on the big screen. Since alien communication happens to be one of the themes in the story, I figured out I had to say something about it, and oh boy I have things to say about it! But before I get into my thoughts on the linguistics and alienistics—for lack of a better word—of the story, I have to say that I really liked it overall and I would recommend it, both the book and the movie.
To provide some brief context, Project Hail Mary tells the story of Ryland Grace, the sole survivor of a crew sent far into space to save Earth from a dying sun. In his mission he meets a charismatic alien, Rocky, who happens to be there in space for the same reason: saving his planet (Erid) and his people (Eridians) from a dying star. I am not going to say more about the plot than that, and I won’t include any spoilers other than those regarding how Rocky and Eridianese are portrayed, since that’s the whole point of this blog.
Now, let’s get into it. I want to comment on three aspects of the story: how aliens (Rocky) are represented physically and psychologically, how alien communication (Eridianese) is represented, and how the process of bridging the communication gap is explained (how Grace deciphers Eridianese to communicate with Rocky).
The alien
One of the things I loved the most about Rocky is the fact that it is not humanoid. If you have read my past entries in this blog, you would know that, while I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with humanoid aliens, I am all for alien representations that are not anthropocentric (not inspired on humans) because they encourage us (creators and audience) to think of different ways life somewhere outside could look like. It is refreshing to meet an alien whose physical appearance resembles more a spider-rock than a human. Weir did a great job not only at designing Rocky’s physicality, but at coming up with reasons that motivate these decisions from a scientific standpoint such as his carcass being adapted to a very high atmospheric pressure or Rocky not having eyes since his environment lacks light, which brings me to another aspect that I loved about Rocky: its perception. Eridians do not perceive the world as humans do; their experience of the world is more comparable to that of a bat than a human. There is one scene in which Rocky, who is an engineer, devices a machine to transform visual data (light waves) into sound data that he can perceive; I cannot stress how much I LOVED this scene. It may pass as a little background thing in the movie, and it is certainly not a big deal in the novel, but exploring how technology allows a being to expand its capacity to understand reality beyond its senses is an exciting idea that I have been thinking about for months and has way more to do with communication than it seems.1
So, overall, Rocky’s depiction as an alien left me on a high note. There is one aspect, though, that I have mixed feelings about: Rocky’s psychology. We learn about Rocky’s traits and emotions based on the descriptions (or visuals) of its behavior and the way he talks in English. In terms of traits, Rocky can be described as a charismatic, curious, funny, intelligent, brave, innocent, and loyal character. When he meets Grace he imitates his movements (a depiction of intelligence); he moves around Grace’s spaceship eagerly trying to study everything (a depiction of curiosity); he is willing to make sacrifices to help Grace (a depiction of bravery and loyalty); and so on and so forth. In terms of emotions, we learn that Rocky feels happiness, sadness, excitement, and confusion, among others. We learn about Rocky’s emotions in one of three ways: first, his behavior, which follows conventional depictions of emotion in humans (and possibly in other animals) such as more body movement being a sign of excitement or anxiety; second, his explicit expression in speech, as when he utters his famous catch-phrase ‘amaze, amaze, amaze’ to show excitement; and finally, the tone of his voice, which matches changes in emotion with changes in pitch—lower octaves correspond to sadness, higher octaves correspond to happiness. Assigning a psychology to Rocky allows him to act in more predictable and relatable ways, which is a standard requirement to be a character of a story; however, why would an alien psychology be so familiar to humans? Why would a creature from a far place in space behave in such a conventional way?
As I was watching how Rocky behaves on the movie, I couldn’t stop thinking on how similar it was to characters from other movies that touch on a similar human-to-nonhuman dynamic: I thought about Toothless, the dragon in How to Train your Dragon, who befriends a viking; I thought about E.T. from E.T. the Extraterrestrial, an alien who befriends a group of kids after accidentally landing on Earth; and I thought about Stitch from Lilo & Stitch, an alien who befriends a girl in Hawaii. While all these characters are fundamentally different beings that come from very different stories, they share a surprisingly similar psychology: you can describe each of them as a charismatic, curious, funny, intelligent, brave, and loyal character that feels and expresses emotions familiar to any human.
From a commercial standpoint of course this should not be surprising: people love characters that fit this description and they love the human-to-nonhuman dynamic that stems from this psychology. Because I am an overthinker I wondered why; why is it that we love this dynamic? Why is it that we love watching a character that is curious, and brave, and smart, and loyal? I came up with a cool hypothesis (at this point I had already gone on a big tangent): we love this type of character because it plays a role that is familiar to most audiences: the role of a pet. Since I love dogs, I will use dogs to explain my point, but other pets could play the same role. Dogs are charismatic, curious, funny, intelligent, brave, innocent, and loyal creatures that let us know how they feel. Dogs are believed to be the first domesticated animal, so whenever I pet a dog I think that the same soothing feeling I experience has been experienced by billions of humans over millenia. I think that that is exactly why it feels so comforting to meet a character in a story that plays the dog character. Naturally, I am not saying that Rocky plays the role of a pet; Rocky is a very intelligent being and his dynamic with Grace is presented as equal (they are both playing the hero role for each of their planets) but the way Rocky acts follows the stereotype of an intelligent dog who is excited about helping the human, who is loyal and willing to make sacrifices for his human, who struggles to communicate something important he has just found out, who can figure out how to get what he wants because he is smart, who is inherently good in nature, who finds a way to express when he is happy, sad, or worried… the stereotype of an intelligent dog who is our best friend. I thought that this hypothesis was cool, and I needed to share it.
However, as much as I love watching a character like Rocky with the smart dog psychology, I regret that embracing this stereotype of an alien can hinder stories from exploring alien psychology and the alien-to-human dynamic in novel ways.2 What if aliens feel different from humans? What if they don’t experience feelings? What if things that we consider evil are acceptable or trivial for aliens? What if the main alien figure can betray their human? What if aliens behave unpredictably? I believe that, while it may be commercially risky, future stories could benefit from a more novel exploration of the alien psychology that encourages the audience to think, not only of different ways life could look like, but of different ways life could feel and interact with us.3
The language
Rocky’s language, Eridianese, is a sound-based language consisting of chords (multiple notes playing at once). Different combinations of chords correspond to different words. Changing the chords of an utterance by an octave (doubling or halving the frequencies) conveys emotion, as explained above. In terms of its form, the language is compared to a whale song, though seen as more complex because it involves multiple notes. In this regard, Eridianese falls into my list of exceptional representations of alien communication systems (see this post) because it does not contain sounds from human language 🙂.
Eridianese vocabulary is not an exact one-to-one match to English words—inevitably, many words are human-specific or Eridian-specific—but it overlaps significantly enough to allow Grace and Rocky to talk about a range of themes ranging from chitchating to a science discussion. Here is where my excitement to find an exceptional alien language representation dispelled. Stating that an alien language’s vocabulary significantly overlaps with a human language like English already implies that Eridianese conceptualizes information in the same fashion that human languages do and it implies that the concepts that both languages developed correspond to similar experiences of the world. This implication seems contradictory since we have been told that Eridians and humans perceive and know the world quite differently, but we can accept it on the basis that both characters are very intelligent and they share an important background (their mission). However, why would an alien have words for ‘good morning’ or ‘thank you’? The existence of these words in Eridianese suggests that Eridians have politeness and their politeness works very closely to how it does for humans, which feels too coincidental to me. Another possibility is that Rocky acquired the concept of politeness through Grace and mastered it so well that it made up words in his language to provide a more culturally-aware message to his friend. In any case, when most words in a language have direct translations to another language, we can infer that, while on the surface they might appear completely different, both languages build meaning alike.
Unfortunately, Eridianese is only a hypothetical language. Once Grace builds his automatic translator, the only thing that remains from Eridianese is the occasional rare word whose translation has not been yet found, or the quirky grammatical feature that sneaks in the English translation. Designing this eridian English is a neat choice, linguistically speaking, because it gives language enthusiasts like me an opportunity to guess what properties underlie the translated language.4 Anyone who has read or watched the film would agree that a phrase like “Human know star, question?” sounds like Rocky, even if this phrase never appeared in the story. Rocky’s talk has a few distinctive features like the absence of articles (i.e., ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘an’), absence of wh-movement in questions (e.g., ‘You come from where?’ instead of ‘Where do you come from?’), word repetition to augment degree (e.g., ‘amaze amaze amaze’, ‘sad sad sad’), absence of verbal inflection (i.e., no conjugations marked), and, of course, asking questions using the word ‘question’ at the end of the question. The proper English grammar in Rocky’s speech is also very revealing: since Rocky masters the use of pronouns, conjunctions, adpositions, and question words in English, it is a fair assumption to say that all these parts of speech have correspondents in Eridianese. All of these elements of eridian grammar happen to exist in human languages, so, while the representation of an alien speaking English is captivating and linguistically sound, Rocky’s language is not very alien.
Bridging the communication gap
The aspect of Project Hail Mary that got me most excited is that it is one of those few sci-fi stories in which the human character doesn’t have an easy solution to the communication gap problem with aliens. Storywise, it would’ve been much easier to say that Rocky, being a very intelligent character, simply had figured out human language: maybe he designed an automatic translator or maybe he had a magic pill that allows the human to understand him. However, Weir deliberately included the deciphering process as a crucial part of the story because it feels much more realistic and it provides a good excuse to explore the dynamic between the two main characters. I say it is crucial in the story because, without communication, the two main characters cannot cooperate to accomplish their mission. The theme plays such an important role that it is the main topic of an entire chapter. I was really glad to find that out 😀.
Here are some things I liked about the way Grace deciphers Eridianese:
- The role of imitation in showing acknowledgement: Grace (and us) infer that Rocky sees Grace because he can replicate Grace’s movements. This seems trivial, but it sets the stage for communication to happen.
- The little inner-monologues that Grace runs into when realizing some of the challenges that could come in the process of deciphering Eridianese: What if Rocky takes years to reply? Do Eridians take turns? What pronoun should he use to refer to Rocky? I am really glad the story acknowledged these challenges.
- Using numbers to break the code. The idea that numbers could be a universal that we could use to decipher a communication system is not new to the genre:5 If we assume that aliens develop the concept of counting—a fair assumption—, we can use numbers as a Rosetta Stone—this is, numbers can be the shared language that bridges two other languages.
- Acknowledging cultural and perceptual differences: this should come without saying, but it is nice that the story discusses the inherent communication limitation that comes when some concept simply does not exist for the speaker of another language.
And here are some things I think could’ve been better:
- The pointing problem: pretty much everything on the logic that Grace uses to break the code relies on the lucky fact that Eridians understand pointing. That aliens would understand the concept of pointing seems a little too coincidental to me, but even then, with pointing comes a problem that is not so alien: the Gavagai problem. It goes like this, imagine you arrive at a place with people that speak a completely unfamiliar language; the strangers point to a rabbit and say the word: ‘gavagai’. You could, as Grace would do, assume that gavagai translates to ‘rabbit’… but, how can you be sure this is the case? What if the strangers are pointing to a part of the rabbit and gavagai actually means ‘rabbit head’? What if the strangers eat rabbits and gavagai means ‘food’? What if it means ‘fluffy’ or ‘cute’ or ‘dangerous’ (maybe the strangers are scared or rabbits)? Even if gavagai refers to the rabbit, how would you know if it means simply ‘rabbit’ and not ‘the small rabbit we love so dearly’? This is a famous thought experiment used to illustrate the indeterminacy of translation and it has been entertaining philosophers and linguists for decades, so I would not expect a sci-fi character to come up with the solution… but it would be nice that sci-fi stories acknowledged the problem and tried to come up with inventive workarounds.
- The dictionary trap. I just made up this term, but I will use it to illustrate a common misconception about language: that one could learn a language by simply matching every word in the language with its translation in one’s native language, using a dictionary. This is the logic that underlies Grace’s translation device: understanding Eridianese is mainly a matter of finding the translations of every English word that exists in Eridianese. Unfortunately—but fortunately for linguists—, understanding a language involves much more than matching words. First, even when words have correspondents in other languages, the translations are often not as crystal-clear as we like to think: maybe the concept for ‘spaceship’ in Eridianese involves multiple words; maybe one single word in Eridianese corresponds to many words in English. Second, without grammar, a language would be more like a random word salad. The story acknowledges this fact (by surfacing some grammatical differences in Rocky’s speech), but it downplays it. I think it is a mistake to downplay the role of grammar because a translating device that works like a dictionary would not be able to produce the long coherent English sentences that Rocky utters.
- The learning curve. For a novel that tries to be scientifically accurate, it is very inaccurate how fast Grace decodes Eridianese. The novel states that in several hours Grace and Rocky go from zero to thousands of decoded words and that, just after a week, they can have conversations. I understand the urgency of the matter and the need to move on from linguistic discussions to action sequences, but even the most intensive language courses under the most ideal earthly circumstances struggle to achieve such an achievement. While the story tries to make the argument that learning a language follows an exponential curve—the more words you acquire, the easier it becomes to explain yourself and learn new words—, I believe it misses how much effort and time it can take for the curve to set off.
The bottom line
I feel it would be impolite to finish this entry pointing out those linguistic aspects that let me down on Project Hail Mary. I found out about this novel right when I was starting writing this blog; a very lucky coincidence! As I said at the start, I really liked this story and that is precisely why I invested an unnecessary amount of time thinking about the linguistics of the story and coming up with theories and analyses that, hopefully, will spark challenges for future sci-fi stories; after all, loving something is choosing to invest time in it.
- Yes, this is a cliff hanger for my upcoming entries on alien perception and communication! ↩︎
- I am using the term alien psychology more freely here, to convey how the alien character behaves externally and/or internally in relation to the story. ↩︎
- It is worth acknowledging that Rocky is not the only alien depicted in the story. Astrophage is an alien microorganism that plays a central role in the story (though not a character role) and a gentle reminder that the category alien encompasses a vast array of possibilities. ↩︎
- Language transfer is a very cool phenomenon in which one language interferes with another, so it is very much appreciated that it is featured in the way Rocky talks. ↩︎
- Carl Sagan explored this idea more extensively in his novel Contact (1985). ↩︎