Speech Sounds
Speculating about the future can help us understand our society today. So lets read a sci-fi story about a pandemic! Wait...are we sure this is about a future that hasn't happened yet?
The Facts Text: Speech Sounds Author: Octavia Butler Genre: Science Fiction, dystopian Year: 1983 Available: Free Here The Fiction Its New Years Eve as I write this, and the end of 2021. New Years Eve is a time to reflect back on an the past year and celebrate the coming of the new one. Perhaps more than any other holiday or celebration in the Western world New Years Eve is the day most dedicated to thinking about and celebrating the future.
And so while on the topic of the future lets dive back into the genre most dedicated to speculating about it: science fiction. This week I read Speech Sounds a science fiction story written by Octavia Butler in 1983 that won her the Hugo Award for best short story. Like all great 20th Century sci-fi this story is both imaginative of a future that hasn't happened yet, and still strikingly and almost disturbingly relevant to our present in the 2020's (what would have been the future when the story was written.)
This is another story that makes my unofficial-official Pandemic Reads list because it is about a plague. Speech Sounds starts with protagonist Valerie Rye on a bus in Los Angeles heading to Pasadena. She reflects that it is the loneliness of her isolation that prompted her to finally make the journey and search for her brother. We don't know what has caused her isolation or why she's so worried about this trip although as a fights break out on the bus the circumstances of this world become clear. Humanity has fallen prey to a plague that has robbed people of their ability to communicate, in many victims it also results in a mental impairment, and an increase in violent tempers. This results is a human population that can not communicate with hair trigger tempers turning most survivors into something like beasts.
Rye is a woman who has mostly been able to hold onto herself. We learn the disease is more fatal to men, and impairs them worse leaving the surviving men of this world to typically be very brutish. With no ability to communicate organized human society has fallen apart. There are no governments left, only survivors mostly keeping to themselves. After the fighting on the bus caused by the violent males gets worse the driver stops the bus. Rye escapes while the fighting continues. A car pulls up, something rare to maintain in this world, and a man in a LAPD uniform steps out. The man stops the fighting, and noticing that Rye is not as impaired as the others, he invites her into his car.
After some hesitation Rye accepts noting the man is left handed and that the plague affected the impairment of left handed men less. The two attempt to communicate with each other on their drive. We learn how the plague affected them differently. Rye can not read or write. The man, whose name token is a black rock and so she refers to him as Obsidian, can not speak or understand speech. The two manage to sign and use body language to communicate to each other and they eventually have sex, with Rye reflecting she hasn't connected with another person like this in three years. We learn she has lost her children and husband to the plague.
Rye feels incredibly close to Obsidian and plans to take him home with her. With him she does not have to be lonely, and no longer has to try and leave the city in search of family. Obsidian agrees to stay with her and two travel to Rye's house. On the way a woman being chased by a man with a knife leaps in front of their car. Obsidian, the hero, goes to de-escalate the situation. He shoots the man after he stabs the woman, but before the attacker dies he stabs Obsidian too.
The future Rye had just imagined for herself with this man crumbles in an instant. The woman and man are also dead. Two children run from the house they had come from. Rye takes Obsidian's body to the car planning to leave them, assuming the children are like every other infected person and no better than animals. To her shock she hears them speak to each other. Because of this discovery she guesses that children born after the pandemic may be immune or uninfected. She realizes that they have the ability to speak and just need teachers. Realizing that these children represent the possibility of a future she reveals to them that she can speak as well, and decides to take them home with her revealing to them her name, and speaking it for the first time in three years.
The Feeling So a plague story written in 1983. In many ways this story is very different to the pandemic we are experiencing now with the illness in this story breaking down the very building blocks that make up the foundation of society: the ability to communicate with other's. There are some similarities that are interesting, such as Rye's isolation as a consequence of living in a pandemic being the motivation for her actions in the story. Isolation, what with quarantine and social distancing measures is a theme many people of the 2020's can relate to.
Although the story is about an illness that sweeps through human society, it is not really about sickness at all. It is about the dystopian world that has been made after human's loose the ability to speak and understand each other. It seems like such an innocuous thing, communication, but Butler's story shows us that without our ability to understand each other we turn into animals.
Despite these obstacles to speaking and understanding the story shows protagonists, Rye, and later Obsidian, who endeavor to hold onto their humanity, and the story makes it clear that their connection to that humanity is strongest when they are connecting with each other. Although they have lost different things to the plague (written and spoken language respectively) both make great effort to continue to understand each other when they are together. They both must be patient, put aside jealousy and rage at the other's abilities, and . trust each other. All of these involve effort but we see the reward in their connection.
This is a dark story. Just when Rye thinks she has a future with Obsidian it is taken from her in seconds, but like all good tragedy there is something inevitable about it. Rye likes Obsidian for his compassion, for the fact that he continues to try and help people in the apocalypse. It is this trait that gets him killed, but at the same time he wouldn't be the man she loved if he wasn't the type to try to help others. There is no possibility Obsidian could have left the woman to die, its just not who was, and if he was anyone else Rye would not have liked him. Good tragedy is made of character's like this, character's who make choices that might result in their doom, but who could have made no other choice.
Despite the dark tones to this story there is optimism at the end. The children are the future, the plague does not seem to effect them, and society can rebuild. Rye finds a new future to believe in and live for because of the children. She hears them speak to other, and realizes that she can speak to them too, that she can teach them how to be human and not beasts.
So what does this story tell us about our present? I think the themes of isolation and connections are what our most resonate in this story. How would our pandemic be different without the internet? With zoom, or skype, or social media? Even beyond times of great sickness this story asks us to think about the importance of communication, not just of sound or language but of understanding those sounds, and that this is what makes us human. What does this tell us about our future? That it's important to hold onto each other if we want any kind of future at all.
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