ABSTRACT
It is unsurprising that a genre concerned with imagining alternative societies and encounters with nonhuman others should frequently involve questions of language and communication: the “presentation of new worlds involves new words, new syntactic structures, new semantic connections and new methods of understanding” (Stockwell 2000: 113). However, sf tends to privilege other sciences and often neglects linguistics, resulting in a “striking contrast between the wealth of language problems in science fiction and the relative poverty of linguistic explanation” (Meyers 1980: 1; see also Barnes 1975; Conley and Cain 2006). This chapter will consider two recurring sf scenarios – human–alien communication, linguistic relativism – before turning to the ways in which sf has been theorized as using language in unique and specific ways.
