Drunk on All Your Strange New Words is not your standard locked-room mystery. First, it takes place in a future New York City after First Contact. The Logi communicate telepathically with the aid of human translators. Lydia is someone whose world opened up to opportunity when she tested into an academy to learn to translate. When the story opens, she is attending an opera with the Logi cultural attache, Fritz. The opera ran long and telepathic translating can make a person feel drunk. Lydia stands up too fast, falls off the balcony and is snatched from disaster by Fritz. Of course, someone recorded it and it went viral.

Society has progressed on its current trajectory with increased economic inequality. Social media is a constant, people wear headsets that record what they are doing, wearable computers connecting them to the net. AI is used to rate news on its trustworthiness, though, just as today, it proves unreliable. In many ways, it’s a surveillance/police state made possible by addicting people to social media.

Fritz is murdered and Lydia is the prime suspect. She saw and heard nothing of the murder even though she lived in the same house. She doesn’t remember anything, she was passed out and can’t prove it because she took off her recording headset. She must prove her innocence and her ally is a surprise, Madison, a logi who disliked her and the feeling was mutual.

And when Fritz starts speaking to her from beyond…oh my!

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words is a fantastic read. It feels like it’s happening just ten to twenty years down the road, a realistic trajectory of our propensity to give up our liberty for security and entertainment. The logi are fascinating aliens and I love the idea of special translators with a gift. I love that translating makes them drunk. I liked the characters who were complex enough to be interesting. The mystery was fair and sufficiently complex with a few twists to surprise us.

This was such a fresh take on the alien invaders story. I was caught up from the first and read it straight through. I want to read it again.

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words at Tor Publishing | Macmillan
Eddie Robson – Link Tree ( )

The end of this felt a little hectic, but overall I liked the story!
Started out as a basic slice-of-life sci-fi story of a translator working for an alien race that turns into a diplomatic conspiratorial murder mystery.
The stuff about truthiness and conspiracies online was prescient.
The story made sense when I read that the author has written for Dr. Who, because even when it was dark or scary at times, it was mostly a very funny, tongue-in-cheek book. ( )

I got halfway through this then skipped to the last chapter. The premise was interesting but the world-building was thin and the story just not interesting enough to hold my attention. Good characterization and the writing is engaging. I also liked the ending, despite my not knowing what happened after page 142. ( )

I love the set up for this story. In a future Earth, an alien race has a tenuous relationship with humans. Lydia is a translator for a cultural attache which involves communicating mind-to-mind and then expressing Fitz's thoughts to humans. But dark forces are at work and Lydia and Fitz have to piece together the clues to uncover, and hopefully stop, whatever is being plotted.

Lydia is sharp and likable. Her relationship with Fitz is younger sister/older brother funny. The world-building is interesting and seamless and the story touches on the role of technology in our lives and its potentially damaging effect on our future. The plot is complicated but works well.

Love the British accent of audiobook narrator Amy Scanlon but she takes on an odd accent for female American characters. ( )

This was so boring, overly complicate for no good reason. Unsatisfying as science fiction or mystery. ( )