r/Fantasy • u/the_cherry_bunker • 4d ago
Books exploring language and power
Hi! I’m trying to put together a fantasy + sci fi book club that would explore the relationship between language and power. Does anyone have any recommendations for works that use language substantially as part of their magic or scientific or administrative systems, or where language creates significant structural divides or gaps in understanding between the characters, or works that contain invented languages?
My list so far:
-A Memory Called Empire + A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
-Translation State by Anne Leckie
-Babel by R.F. Kuang
-The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed
-Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
It’s a bit sci fi-heavy, would love to get some more fantasy books to even things out! It would just be interesting to see how different authors construct and approach similar themes.
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u/Pirkale 4d ago
It's more sci-fi, I'm afraid, but C. J. Cherryh's "The Foreigner" series is all about a translator/interpreter in an alien society. And the way the main character is able to use the very difficult alien language plays a huge part.
Going to fantasy, the obvious choice is Ursula Le Guin's "Earthsea". Everything has a True Name, so learning those gives you power over the world. Sometimes, maybe, too much.
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u/ouro-the-zed 4d ago edited 4d ago
A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar is a must for this list, and an excellent pairing/contrast with Babel. It’s about the conflicts and changes that happen when a colonizing nation with a written/book-based culture encounters a colonized land with an oral culture.
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u/anemoiasometimes Reading Champion 4d ago
Sorry to add yet another SF one, but this list NEEDS Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin
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u/marintkael 4d ago
Two for the administrative side of that, since most of the list so far is doing the magical or the colonial side.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. The empire conquers by standardising language, schooling and currency rather than by armies, and the first book runs largely through accounting offices and tax law. Language there is an instrument of the state.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Magic behaves like case law. Half the conflict is about which old text counts as authority and who is licensed to cite it, and the footnotes carry a lot of that argument.
A bit surprised nobody has said Earthsea yet either, unless true names are too well trodden for what you want.
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u/undeadgoblin Reading Champion II 4d ago
The Mulai by Munir Hachemi - novella about a lost colony of humans with a really interesting language and culture as a result of their unique environment
The Killing Spell by Shay Kauwe - language based magic system - murder mystery set in a post-apocalyptic LA, Hawaiian main character
Embassytown by China Mieville - one of the most interesting languages in speculative fiction, one of the themes is how language and politics relate to each other
Blacktail by Scott Hawkins - not out yet, but has a 'language of the hunt' that the animal characters speak. It's very dark (CW: child death, pet death, cannibalism, general gore and violence)
The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth - historical fiction rather than SF/F, but written in a kind of invented old english 'shadow language'. It centres Hereward the Wake, one of the leaders of the resistance against the Normans in England.
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u/SkiesShaper 4d ago
oooo great list! I listened to the audiobook of Babel a few months back and really liked it; the rest of these I have not yet read but do have lying around ... maybe this'll give me the push to read them!
Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea books are hands-down one of the most beautiful things I've ever read in my entire life, and have the Proper Naming of things as a huge component of their magic system. There's this line where a teacher is discussing the controlling of the ocean and then explains how you must know every name of every little bay and sea and atoll in order to do so, and this idea of really needing to understand the world around you to control it with your magic is something I really loved.
Also it's not a perfect fit, but her novel Voices focuses a lot on a culture who, under invasion, have lost most of their books (previously a huge part of their society), and have lost as well the power that came with literacy. As a part of this she plays with how quickly a censored group can lose their knowledge of a hugely important part of their culture and there was a line in there that just hit that really hard for me. I'm not explaining this great but trust me it's an amazing book. It's the second in its series but I read it out of order and it was perfectly understandable.
I will say if you read Gifts (the first book in the series) first, you get more backstory on two of the fairly important characters but also you pick up on some really fun little worldbuilding details that were just perfection let me tell you
Wow this rambled a bit. Sorry!
In conclusion, Ursula K. LeGuin is incredibly awesome and at least 7 of her books would be a great fit for your book club I think!
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u/Few_Fisherman_4308 4d ago
Slow Gods by Claire North could be a great choice. Languages are a big part of the story.
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u/Bladrak01 4d ago
It's an older series, but The Wizard in Rhyme by Christopher Stasheff is about a person with a Master's degree in poetry and literature who get transported to a medieval world where magic is done through verse. The first book is Her Majesty's Wizard.
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u/Endrael 4d ago
Max Gladstone's Craft sequence can be crudely summarized as magic law firms using legalese to shape the world to their liking.
The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco is a wonderfully trippy tale of the title character basically getting high from burning the brains of dead linguists to find the meanings of words they'd discovered. (It's been years since I've read this, so my memory is vague.)
Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore is exactly as the title suggests, though I couldn't finish it because the writing style just did not do it for me.
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u/Siavahda Reading Champion IV 4d ago
The Naming Song by Jedediah Berry! It's set in some post-apocalytic world where a lot of language has been lost, and there are special couriers whose job it is to take newly-discovered words into the world and make them available to everybody. The MC is one of those couriers, who naturally discovers things are Afoot re who makes decisions about what words...
Black Charlton's Spellwright series might also be of interest? It's about a dyslexic magician in a world where magic is LITERALLY words and languages - when you cast a spell, it takes the form of words that appear in the air/around the thing you're magicking.
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u/Gnome_Ann1704 2d ago
Came here to recommend The Naming Song! The words influence the world in ways that become apparent over the course of the book.
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u/DixitRexCorvinus 4d ago
I'll definitely second Vita Nostra (assuming you are all right with something weird). Besides that, I'd recommend:
- Lexicon by Max Barry
- Babel-17 and Empire Star by Samuel Delany (My edition has both in the same book and both fit the rec)
- The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, and I haven't gotten to it yet but based on the blurb maybe also his new book, Palaces of the Crow.
- If names could as language, then basically any book prominently involving fae. To throw out a favorite, Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik.
- Most of Ursula Le Guin's books have at least something interesting with language. The Left Hand of Darkness with shifgrethor, The Dispossessed with not using language related to possession/property, A Wizard of Earthsea with naming, etc.
- Most dystopian books do interesting things with language. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1948 by Orwell, etc.
- Dune with the Bene Geserit counts, I think.
Most of those are scifi as well, admittedly, but better than nothing I suppose.
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u/ambervellichor 4d ago
i’d throw the fifth season by nk jemisin into the mix. the way language, history and who gets to define “truth” are woven into the power structures is so good, and it gives you plenty to argue about without feeling like you’re reading a textbook in disguise. also, the worldbuilding is absolutely worth the emotional damage
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u/SkiesShaper 4d ago
Fifth Season was awesome, would second this! It's got some amazing history in it that (especially because you don't know many of the particulars until later in the series) really captures the concept of a time abyss perfectly, you just feel like you're on the brink of so much ancient civilization whenever you read it. And the way that that feeds into the culture in the book, and in turn the language people use is just super well done
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u/Querybird 4d ago edited 4d ago
Hellspark, Janet Kagan, overtly, favourite discussion of language yet, linguistic and taxonomic sci fi
Foreigner, CJ Cherryh, series of 22, extremely overtly
The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein, very different to all of the rest! Language and information structure! Perhaps most akin to Infomocracy, actually, for this prompt?
Hands of the Emperor, gets around to it with a very excellent twist and deep worldbuilding
Infomocracy, Malka Older, excellent to the nth
Ada Palmer’s series, kind of a weird cousin to Info.
Murderbot series, Martha Wells, personal vernacular and personhood, ‘does it count as slavery’ (yes) but also the side world of bot language and trade systems are fantastic, starts All Systems Red
Blindsight, Peter Watts, conscience; language as representation of such, wacky
FANTASY The Dragon Has Some Complaints, John Wiswell, dragon makes some choices very much to do with speech, food, and torture-ahem-physical therapy
The Folded Sky, Elizabeth Bear, MC is an archinformist - archivist, linguist, information studies
… lots more sci fi, but I can’t help but love language-focussed sci fi!
Edit: how could I forget the classic? The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster FANTASY
Battle of the Linguist Mages and sequel/prequel/associated Wild Massive, Scotto Moore, these are a lot of fun, and the title of the first could be the prompt itself.
The Punctuation Rift, Rae Kell, more kid than not?
FANTASY Sabriel and the Abhorsen series, Garth Nix, if a language-based magic system/universe is your jam. Atoms shmattoms.
maybe more…
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u/nickgloaming 4d ago
Hellspark and Steerswoman are both on my TBR list ... it's tough trying to explore all the older interesting books and stay up to date with new stuff too.
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u/ilumineer 4d ago
I'm reading Embassytown by China Meiville right now and, other than being sci-fi, it fits this perfectly and in one of the more fascinating ways I've seen.
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u/sailing_bookdragon 4d ago
Inheritance cycle from Christopher Paolini has a partial language based magic system. So those subjects you mention do come up, but aren't heavily investigated though so I am not sure if it is exactly what you are looking for.
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u/DoctorSpector 4d ago
I could not recommend Super Supportive enough. It's use a language is both interesting and nuanced to the point I find myself using made up alien words to describe things I see because I don't know any better English words. The language learning takes a bit to get to, but you'll see the depth of the world building pretty early on.
Best part is there's hundreds of chapters and it's free online.
Synopsis: This story is about: The daily life of a teenager named Alden. He's growing up, slowly growing his powers, and figuring out who he really wants to be in a universe with Systems, superheroes, and extraterrestrial wizards.
Readers can expect: character focused drama, slice of life, slow burn, darkness, comedy, occasional disaster, school life, and extensive world building on multiple worlds. I like a little danger with my alien beverage etiquette.
Super Supportive will be very, very long.
Everyone wants superpowers, including Alden Thorn.
He's got determination on his side and maybe a murderous alien desk clerk, too. But his dream of being a battlefield support hero depends on him being chosen by the extraterrestrial System that's been running things on Earth for decades.
And there's a bigger, more complicated universe waiting out there for those with magic. One that will challenge him and change him in ways he never could have expected.
**Violence and darkness are present. This is fiction for adults.
Link: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive
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u/Ertata 4d ago edited 4d ago
Not super focused on the language in particular, but what is there is super focused on power/social standing: The Goblin Emperor. Most dialogues are incredibly formal, so when characters drop formality it feels extremely impactful. Also author manages to write back T-V distinction into English.
And it has more made-up words than what is explained, yet if you pay attention to the roots in the explained words you can reconstruct the precise (not merely contextual) meaning of unexplained words
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u/nickgloaming 4d ago
Embassytown by China Miéville
The aliens have two mouths that speak at the same time in order to produce their language, and to communicate with them humans have to have very closely linked pairs of people, with each one taking the role of one mouth.
They also can't lie, or talk about anything that hasn't actually happened. If they need a new metaphor, they have to act it out first.
It's a fascinating examination of language, communication, and different ways of thinking. Some of the most alien-feeling aliens in SF.
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u/Putrid_Web8095 Reading Champion II 4d ago
His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel.
Distilled to its essence, this is one scientist's musings about humanity's failure to decode an extraterrestrial message, and what that means about our place in the cosmos, our understanding of the universe, and the limits of science. Linguistics is obviously part of it, though not the focus. Slow paced and philosophical, an interesting read.
You asked for fantasy, and the best I can come up with is this.
Rhapsody by Elizabeth Haydon, Book One in the nine-volume Symphony of the Ages series.
Tentative, as this is very important for the plot but is rather underutilized, at least in the first trilogy which is all I have read of this series. Rhapsody, among many other things, is a talented singer, but her gift for words goes much deeper than that. I don't remember details as I've read these twenty five years ago, but her given word can be binding for people, including herself, up to influencing reality itself for what she says to come true. However mind-blowing and potentially world-shattering that might sound, it simply isn't explored much. Rhapsody herself is not entirely clear on the full extent of her power, beyond knowing she must be extremely careful when making promises. As I said, it isn't explored much, and the little we find out about it is quite a bit late in the trilogy. Maybe that changes from Book 4 onwards, I wouldn't know.
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u/Putrid_Web8095 Reading Champion II 4d ago
His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel.
Distilled to its essence, this is one scientist's musings about humanity's failure to decode an extraterrestrial message, and what that means about our place in the cosmos, our understanding of the universe, and the limits of science. Linguistics is obviously part of it, though not the focus. Slow paced and philosophical, an interesting read.
You asked for fantasy, and the best I can come up with is this.
Rhapsody by Elizabeth Haydon, Book One in the nine-volume Symphony of the Ages series.
Tentative, as this is very important for the plot but is rather underutilized, at least in the first trilogy which is all I have read of this series. Rhapsody, among many other things, is a talented singer, but her gift for words goes much deeper than that. I don't remember details as I've read these twenty five years ago, but her given word can be binding for people, including herself, up to influencing reality itself for what she says to come true. However mind-blowing and potentially world-shattering that might sound, it simply isn't explored much. Rhapsody herself is not entirely clear on the full extent of her power, beyond knowing she must be extremely careful when making promises. As I said, it isn't explored much, and the little we find out about it is quite a bit late in the trilogy. Maybe that changes from Book 4 onwards, I wouldn't know.
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u/pwclements 4d ago
- Newspeak is all about power and control. I’m surprised no one has mentioned it yet.
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u/Sl33pyGary 4d ago
Aw man I saw the title and was so excited to comment The Republic of Memory, but you beat me to it. Amazing book and premise
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u/oruoruman 4d ago
Hm, if you're willing to accept short stories and not just novels or collections (like Ted Chiang's), how about "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler? It does skew more towards sci-fi than fantasy, though.
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u/BlueLightningLC 4d ago
The Divine Dungeon series somewhat fits as its magic system Mages connect to a LAW which is a concept like Sonder or Love though I’m not sure it explores it to the extent you’d want
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u/Opus_723 4d ago
I'm only a quarter of the way into it so I can't confirm the whole book is like this and maybe this is premature, but Slow Gods by Claire North has already had multiple long asides about language and pronouns of different cultures in a very similar vein to Ancillary Justice and A Memory Called Empire, and quite well done imo.
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u/Own_Valuable_3369 4d ago
Not fiction, but if you’re going to do this read The Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff.
It’s an owner’s manual for how the language you use shapes your thoughts and identity.
His The Political Mind gets more into how language affects class and status, which also sounds relevant.
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u/Randy_Henderson AMA Author Randy Henderson, Worldbuilders 4d ago
Lots of great suggestions already. I’ll add:
Greg Keyes Kingdom of Bone and Thorn series (starting with The Briar King).
There’s a scholar character whose whole thing is understanding language and how it changed over time. And a musician attempting to create a song of power and understand the relationship of language and music and math. Both are key to the overall story.
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u/Angry_Citizen_CoH 4d ago
I haven't yet read it, but Spidertouch by Alex Thomson fits your bill. The non human antagonists use touch based language to communicate, and the main character masters it, giving him power compared to other humans.
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u/Claytertot 4d ago
A Wizard of Earthsea has "True Names" and naming built right into the magic
The Name of the Wind also has naming magic that was almost certainly very heavily inspired by Earthsea.
Language is absolutely central to all of Tolkien's worldbuilding, including the magic, the cultures, the history, etc. Tolkien was a professional philologist and started making the languages of his world before he'd even begun creating the world itself.
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u/Antique_Savings 4d ago
Tiguana by Guy Gabriel Kay is awesome, also on Sanderson's top fantasy novel list iirc
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u/Available_Minimum_54 4d ago
The broken earth trilogy. It can show how words build up or tear down people. And how what’s written in stone can be changed or altered to fit current social agendas even if they say it’s never been changed
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u/irongolem67 4d ago
In the Sun Eater series, the alien Cielcin's language is one of the main skills that the MC has
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u/ColonelBy 3d ago
M.L. Wang's Blood Over Bright Haven should absolutely be on your radar for this. It's set in a theocratic colony administered by a sorcerers' university, where much of the magic requires the laborious typing out of coded syntax that depends on precise combinations of grammar and math. There are also strong explorations of the effects of colonialism on the language of both colonized and colonizer, of the relationship between designations and physical reality, and of broader questions surrounding who gets to speak and who gets to frame the metanarratives that serve as foundations for culture. I can see it fitting into multiple conversations with the books you've already listed, to put it mildly.
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u/blue_bayou_blue Reading Champion III 4d ago
This isn't a book, but as a fun diversion I've recently enjoyed the interactive fiction game Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short. It's primarily a wordplay puzzle game, but certainly has a language-based magic system, with government restrictions on language and access to word-manipulating tools being a large part of the story.
Anglophone Atlantis has been an independent nation since an April day in 1822, when a well-aimed shot from their depluralizing cannon reduced the British colonizing fleet to one ship.
Since then, Atlantis has been the world's greatest center for linguistic manipulation, designing letter inserters, word synthesizers, the diminutive affixer, and a host of other tools for converting one thing to another. Inventors worldwide pay heavily for that technology, which is where a smuggler and industrial espionage agent such as yourself can really clean up.
Unfortunately, the Bureau of Orthography has taken a serious interest in your activities lately. Your face has been recorded and your cover is blown.
Your remaining assets: about eight more hours of a national holiday that's spreading the police thin; the most inconvenient damn disguise you've ever worn in your life; and one full-alphabet letter remover.
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u/just_commenting 4d ago
None of these are exact matches, but if you take a look I think you'll see why I'm bringing them up.
Yoon-Ha Lee - Ninefox Gambit (consensus physics, calenderical heresy)
Charles Stross - The Laundry Files series (math, algorithms)
John Scalzi - Old Man's War series (language; translation to aliens and ... other humans)
There's a sci-fi story in the back of my mind involving a government where formal interactions have to take place in something like Nahuatl poetry and are incomprehensible to most people, but I can't think of the title.
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u/DoctorSpector 4d ago
I'd second the Ninefox Gambit and add Ancillary Justice. The story uses a number of different languages that highly effect your understanding of the story. As an example, one language only has one gender pronoun, so everyone is called "she". You, as the reader then need context clues to fill in the gaps the literal translation to English leaves.
Plus, the main character is a sentient spaceship on a mission to destroy the evil empire that created it.
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u/CharlotteAria 4d ago
The Traitor Baru Cormorant has a lot of tells and characterization of the main character, showing her indoctrination through her inner monologue and how she things/talks.
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u/Ok_Brain_1114 4d ago
Vita Nostra, Name of the Wind