When learning other languages, do they teach you what kind of personal space native speakers are comfortable with? For example, Asians don't like to have a conversation with others with the Same proximity that westerners are accustomed to. What about mannerisms and facial expressions? These are known as proximics and kinesics, and they include how a speaker shows impatience, thoughtfulness, agreement, disagreement, etc, without speech. I know when I learned Spanish, I was not taught kinesics to go along with the learning. Now take Humans on the autism spectrum--they struggle to read facial expressions and body language that accompanies spoken language. Do those not on the spectrum give them the same courtesy and learn to"read" them? Sadly, very few. All animals, in fact, have actions and vocalizations that communicate, if we would only take the time to learn it from them.

Kagan's book uses these ideas and takes them to another level: the way multiple universal races of humans and a native of a planet being surveyed, try successfully or not, to communicate. More than that: this author takes a computer and puts it through the same paces as the natives are, to prove sapience, and save them and their planet from being exploited.

A wonderful book that is not only delightfully inventive and entertaining, but extremely educational and thought-provoking. This artist's marvelous talent may be gone from the world, but it's owner has generously left her gifts behind. ( )

This is one of my very favorite SF novels. Fans of language or linguistic oriented stories will find much to like here; likewise fans of stories that center on the question of sentience. And, on top of all that, it's a science fiction mystery in the best sense of that cross genre: the science fictional elements are crucial to the solution of the mystery.
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Wonderful as usual. I've read and reread this, in both editions (the original, and this one where Kagan was allowed to correct some things she noticed after the original was printed). Small things - the casual use of spectacles and 2nd skin, which are VR and wearables in their finished form. Bigger things - Maggy's existence and development. And the real story of the book - not the focus, exactly, but why the main story can happen - the interaction of the multiple human cultures, and how they mix and clash. I love that each of the cultures is "based" on a simple, English, phrase or thought or (American, mostly) habit - the term "my foot" for disbelief flowers here into a culture where feet are taboo areas, and one character swears by saying "Foot. Heel! Toe! Toenails, with green toenail polish!" The characters are very real - (as they keep saying) their cultures inform them, but do not define them. The main character, Tocohl Susumo, is a translator/polyglot, from a culture focused on that - on speaking the language, including the body language, of every human culture. She comes to an expedition exploring a new planet, that have found a non-human race which may or may not be sentient. The puzzle of the new race gets tangled with the clashes between the cultures of the various humans on the expedition, and Tocohl's presence both helps and exacerbates this. It's an utterly fantastic universe, and I really wish she'd been able to write (and publish) more here - I want to know more about Hellsparks! But rereading this book remains rewarding - every time I read it, I find something else I've missed, or something I forgot about that I noticed in an earlier reading. Wonderful book, and I will doubtless reread it many more times. I own three (four) copies - two of the original, one of the edited version (this one), and an ebook that most closely matches the edited (Meisha Merlin) version. The spare original is for lending out! ( )

Finally, an author who pays proper attention to communication! Unlike Star Trek or any of the other sf that uses a "universal translator," Hellspark makes great use of the importance of body language, personal space, and other unmentionable things that no one ever thinks about when conversing with aliens. A great deal of this novel is taken up with emphasizing the differences between various cultures, while at the same time asking, "so with all these differences...what exactly defines us as sentient?" Very good, although again, I felt it fell apart a little by the end and moreover, didn't identify with the characters that much. ( )

I enjoyed this incredible ride of a story. Set in a future world and space, with most of the time spent on an alien planet with different biology and social animals, the story was about how we communicate.

The strongest theme and and storyline is about how language divides us and bridges gaps between us. This aspect of the book is fascinating to me.

This has one of the most impressive heroines in fiction. Her preferred approach to hostility is to prevent a fight with words and cultural knowledge. That is what I'm talking about. I believe the most powerful weapon humans have is language, this author wrote about that idea.

We live the story with the characters. There is a naive narrator, who contributes to us learning through her questions.

One of my favorite reads of all time. If you like hard science fiction and like to think during your reads, this is a book for you. ( )