I will first review the narrative, the characters and plot, and then move into the themes.

In terms of narrative, Tender is the Flesh is told in a limited third-person present tense—an unusual choice that generates a dissonance between the apparent proximity to Marcos Tejo’s mind (the narrating character) and the increasing blurring of events in his life.

The author also alternates between presenting dialogue conventionally (using quotation marks) and narrating it in large, dense paragraphs. This choice appears deliberate, as narrated dialogue only surfaces when Marcos ‘spaces out’, disregarding whoever is speaking in favour of his own inner monologue. This works very effectively, particularly because these moments often coincide with gruesome scenes (for instance, Marcos’s tour of a breeding centre of ‘heads’: humans bred for consumption). In these cases, his lack of attention creates a sense of detachment that, by any reasonable moral measure, should not exist—yet it does, because the normalisation of horror is, perhaps, the novel’s central concern.

Which leads us into the plotlines weaving throughout the book:

1. Marcos’s work as the second-hand man to the owner of the Krieg Processing Plant presents the horror of legalised cannibalism, alongside its implications for those dehumanised individuals now designated as ‘products for consumption’. It establishes the setting, but operates as the background of Marcos’s life—the day-job he performs while other, more personally transformative events unfold. This ‘relevance’ says plenty about his character.

2. The death of his child and the departure of his wife, Cecilia, bear down on Marcos. It acts as a catalyst for several narrative developments, including those connected to Jasmine’s storyline.

3. Jasmine’s is arguably the most harrowing, yet also the most relegated. As a high-quality ‘head’ (a human bred for consumption), she is gifted to Marcos... yet despite her market value, he locks her in a barn and tends to her minimally. His disregard culminates in an act of sexual violence, resulting in her pregnancy. I will return to this storyline when discussing the novel’s themes.

4. The central storyline is, in my opinion, the most important: the situation with Don Armando, Marcos’ senile father, now living in an aged care. It shapes much of Marcos’ behaviour, from his line of employment to his visits to an abandoned zoo solely because his father once took him there. Likewise, Armando’s death marks a decisive turning point: the moment when Marcos begins to impose boundaries, sever relationships that burden him, and initiate change.

Thematically, though, this novel is a goldmine.

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It presents extreme horrors through Marcos’ detached, almost bored narrative voice, yet it tempers this detachment with selective ethical concerns—enough ‘morality’ to make him initially relatable, and enough ambiguity to allow it to surface throughout the story. This gradual unveiling of Marcos’ true character can be read as a covert moral test for the reader. What I found particularly effective, is how the author sowed ‘clues’ about Marcos’ ethics from the very beginning, yet hid them in his curated, carefully crafted inner monologue:

No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food. Except for him; he would prefer not to have to call them by any name.

As the story progresses, his language ‘slips’ and becomes blunter—mirroring Marcos’ gradual acceptance of his own feelings towards the ‘heads’. This is especially evident when he bathes Jasmine before naming her:

He cleans her chest, armpits, stomach. Diligently, as though he were cleaning a valuable but inanimate object. He’s nervous, as if the object could break, or come to life.

Her story is uncomfortable and dehumanising. As a ‘head’, her vocal cords have been removed (a practice intended to prevent screaming during slaughter and, likely—though never explicitly stated—to limit communication). She has been branded in the forehead like cattle, and kept in a cage sleeping on hay. When Marcos receives her, she is even wearing a leash and does not attempt to remove it.

Yet the novel uses language effectively to convey Marcos’ discomfort around her: he keeps her out of sight in the barn, tends to her minimally, and considers selling her. It is not until he observes her body that he perceives her differently, going so far as to strip naked in front of her:

He strokes her neck. Now he’s the one who trembles. He removes his jeans and stands there, naked. His breath quickens. He continues to hug her as it rains down. What he wants to do is prohibited. But he does it anyway.

For a book that does not shy away from explicit depictions of extreme horror (which I will not detail here), the scene in which Marcos sexually assaults Jasmine concludes with the passage above. This is particularly striking given that before the novel included two explicit, on-the-page sexual encounters between Marcos and a former lover.

This omission can be read as a reflection of the value Marcos assigns to Jasmine: she is ‘beautiful’, a ‘valuable object’—yet insignificant enough that her rape is excluded not only from the narrative, but from Marcos’ conscience. The text expects the reader to infer what occurs (as well as the subsequent months Marcos spends ‘enjoying’ her), precisely because she is framed as a ‘head’, and nothing more.

The second half of the novel—beginning when Jasmine is eight months pregnant—is harrowing, yet notably restrained in how it exposes her continued dehumanisation. Marcos may sleep with her, fondle her, yet he keeps her locked in a room and monitors her through cameras akin to those commonly used to monitor pets. He still ‘feeds’ Jasmine (rather than ‘serving her food’), and worries about her primarily insofar as she is carrying his child.

His treatment of her as the bearer of his child, rather than as a woman pregnant with his child, opens the door to a broader discussion of objectification, and of the way societies often value a foetus more than the person carrying it.

This brings us back, once again, to language and its role in constructing moral contradiction. At one point, Marcos narrates:

She spends hours watching television, sleeping, drawing, staring at a fixed point. At times, it seems she’s thinking, like she really can.

And yet, only a few pages earlier, he acknowledged that ‘heads’ were, in fact, human:

Before going into the plant, he sits in the car for a few seconds and looks at the complex of buildings. They’re white, compact, and efficient. There’s nothing to indicate that inside them humans are killed.

So is Marcos’s numb detachment a defence mechanism, or an ethical failure? Is he dehumanising because the system is, or because he himself has grown numb?

The novel doesn’t answer these questions. Instead, it presents situations for the reader to craft their own answer—while simultaneously ‘training’ that same reader to accept its language until, by the end, they have learnt to expect the most gruesome crimes against humanity.

It is then when the horror surfaces: when the reader finishes the book and realises that, halfway through, Marcos no longer needed to be subtle with his choice of words.

PS: A podcast episode will be landing soon.

This review was originally shared on Goodreads, on March 2nd, 2026.

It is also, by itself, a very ordinary sentence. Nothing about it compels you to keep reading.

Which brings us to one piece of advice every reader and writer has seen repeated ad nauseum—especially when paired with lines extracted, often without context, from books that are now classical1: “The first line of a book should hook you.”

How many times have you heard this? Hundreds of times, if not thousands. Always from educators, connoisseurs, and even in your average YouTube channel. Yet this advice assumes something strange: that readers fall in love with books because of a single sentence.

I beg to differ. Readers remember the first line because everything that follows makes it meaningful: the voice, the atmosphere, the momentum, the themes—the book itself gives the first line its relevance and staying power.

Why?

Because the first line is not a hook, but a retrospective anchor.

Yet before going further, one clarification is due:

My argument applies to long-form fiction only.

Short forms compress meaning. In flash fiction, drabbles, or micro-fiction, every line carries narrative load, and the shorter the form the more pressure falls on each sentence. Here, a weak opening can genuinely collapse the piece.

Novels, however, work differently. They have room to persuade—to accumulate meaning, establish voice, build atmosphere, and gradually draw the reader into an experience. A novel does not win the reader in a sentence; it reminds them of its meaning once they’ve finished reading.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sceptical? Let’s discuss a few examples.

Because first lines can have different purposes, I have grouped the examples by categories—informed by how it impacts a first-time reader (especially one that goes into the book blind and without knowing its contents), what it reflects about the book, and what makes it memorable. Because of this, the grouping is agnostic to genre.

Shall we?

Category 1: Famous lines that are almost empty alone.

I have used this one already, but it’s worth bringing it back. From Moby Dick by Herman Melville:

“Call me Ishmael”

On its own, this line is… neutral at best. It introduces the character and establishes the narrative style—first-person address to the reader—but it does little else. However, once you’ve finished the book, it becomes an existential positioning, a declaration of how one navigates the vast, chaotic world Melville conjures.

Another example comes from The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

This book was written as a ‘fairy story’ with a tone suited for children, but even then it sounds… simple. Without what follows—“Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms…”—it reveals very little. Yet it is iconic because it teaches us what a hobbit is, and immerses the reader into a secondary world.

Imagine this: you have never heard about these books, and you see this line printed in an otherwise empty card. No cover, no blurb, no title, no genre, no details about the book—just that sentence. Would you keep reading?

Category #2: Lines that only make sense after the book.

Of course, I have to bring some of my favourite books.

From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury2:

It was a pleasure to burn.

At first glance, and without context, this sentence is… edgy. “It was a pleasure to burn.” On its own, it hints at meaning but says almost nothing—what is being burned? Who is doing it?

The next line begins to add detail: “It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists…” It is certainly well written and immediately builds an obsessive tone—yet, again, it is not as powerful as it becomes once you know the full story.

By the end of the novel, though, when you understand that Montag’s pleasure came from burning books, the opening line is chilling—both politically and psychologically. Its impact comes not from the sentence itself, but from everything the book has made you see.

Here’s another dystopia. From 1984 by George Orwell3:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Without context, this is certainly a strange way to start a book. At first, you might notice the clocks striking thirteen—odd, yes, but hardly alarming by itself. It hints that something is off, but you wouldn’t guess how deeply. After finishing the novel, however, that single line compresses everything Big Brother does, including how the Party reshapes reality. What once seemed a small peculiarity becomes a chilling symbol of control.

These two are certainly curious by themselves, but not nearly as powerful as they become once you’ve finished the book.

Category #3: Lines likely to misfire in tone.

Allow me to switch away from dystopias into something else entirely. From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Contrary to the prior categories, this opening does hint at what the book would be about, but it may misfire—quite severely, one may argue—in terms of tone. Why? Because Jane Austen often used parody and burlesque elements for comic effect and to critique the portrayal of women her contemporaneous “sentimental novel.” She critiqued social hypocrisy through irony, using what came to be considered, by some, as a “polemical tone.”

Therefore, the opening line of Pride and Prejudice is famous largely because it is perfect Austenian irony—but that irony is only legible if you recognise the novel’s social satire and the author’s style.

The next opening also belongs to a different genre. From The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Approaching that line without context is likely to cause more confusion than insight. Is it literal or metaphorical? A joke? Satire? A dream, or a waking nightmare?

Just as it happened with the first line of Pride and Prejudice, the opening of The Metamorphosis hints at the central element of the story—but its tone misfires. Many of the questions you might ask at the start remain unresolved even after finishing the book… and that is precisely what makes it iconic: the line’s meaning deepens, and arguably emerges, only once you grasp the social and existential allegory that runs through the novel.

Category #4: Lines just ‘odd’ at first glance.

The two examples I have here are somewhat similar to the case of 1984—there is something odd in them and, even if a reader were to notice the strangeness, its meaning wouldn’t emerge until the end of the book.

From The Road by Cormac McCarthy:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

At first glance... this is quaint. It reads interminable, the cadence is unusual, and it prefers to use “he” and “the child” rather than the characters’ names.

If you read closely, though, you may notice the absolute lack of commas—a trait of McCarthy’s writing. However, if you have not read any of his works, this may come across as a merely stylistic choice, or perhaps the obsession of a quaint writer. In truth, after reading the novel, the effects of his stripped-down grammar is evident in the bleak atmosphere of the book. Therefore, one could argue that McCarthy was ‘easing’ the reader into his style; a warning, of sorts.

Yet there is more because this line, stripped down as it is, summarises the central theme of the novel in its choice of words: waking, dark, cold, touch, child. It implies a father reaching for his son in the dark, the need to protect but at the same time to gather his strength to continue living the next day.

Just like before, the grammatical and thematic implications of this opening sentence only become relevant after finishing the book.

Now allow me one more example, the newest among all of these. From Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer:

The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats.

Another example of a long, breathless, comma-less sentence that seems strange—or even anti-climactic—as a book’s opening. On a first reading, its oddities are obvious, yet it’s impossible to imagine the magnitude of the strangeness just from the line itself.

Consider this: “The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth…” Towers go up, not down, right? Modern readers might dismiss the book for that alone—or at least raise a brow and keep reading. More curious is that the remainder of the sentence quickly abandons the so-called tower to focus, with almost excessive detail, on the environment.

This focus only makes sense once you know that the author is famous for eco-fiction, that the narrator is a biologist studying transitional environments, and that Annihilation’s real ‘main character’ is not the narrator but Area X—a strange environment that dominates the novel.

Just as it happened with The Road, this line ultimately summarises the book—but on a first read, its meaning is impossible to guess.

After all, first lines are not hooks but retrospective anchors.

We do not remember these lines because they begin great books.

We remember them because its significance only emerges in retrospect, after we have ventured through the book and formed our understanding of its meaning and themes. Only after ‘The End’ what seemed ordinary or odd in that first line becomes memorable: when we know the story that gives it meaning.

But as we know, there are no real ‘rules’ in creative writing, only guidelines that may be broken or disregarded when doing so conveys meaning... and “meaning” is the key word here. It is that underlying purpose that makes it possible to steer away from the guidelines, to add more layers to the story without spending words in doing so.

The reason? As I have discussed multiple times here1, grammar and formatting are excellent tools to show and not tell. This is precisely what China Miéville does in Embassytown: he has a thematic reason (identity and individuality in a society that has normalised the erasure of both for a specific demographic), and he breaks two rules in order to convey it:

• (a) capitalisation in names, and

• (b) paragraphing in dialogue, because if one is blurring identity and attempting to create multi-body individuals, that famous rule—“every new speaker must have their own line of dialogue”—suddenly has highly undesirable implications.

In today’s essay, I’ll show you a number of excerpts concerning Miéville’s use of dialogue in Embassytown, from the presentation of the innovation to how the use becomes conventional within the novel. I’ll also do a brief thematic analysis of it. However, if you’re keen on a thorough study of the linguistics behind Embassytown, I recommend my podcast essay:

That’s said, let’s dive in.

What makes Miéville’s rule-breaking work is that he is selective.

Within Embassytown, most characters follow conventional paragraph breaks in dialogue—meaning that every new speaker appears in a new paragraph, like so:

“The constables are coming,” he said. “I heard you playing. I thought it might help him to have a friend with him. You could hold his hand. […] You could tell him you’re here, tell him he’ll be alright.”

“Yohn, it’s me, Avice.” After a silence I patted Yohn on the shoulder. “I’m here. You’ll be alright, Yohn.” My concern was quite real. I looked up for more instructions, and the man shook his head and laughed.

“Just hold his hand then,” he said.

In this excerpt, the spoken words are kept in the same line as the tag—and Miéville is deliberately using the simplest of them all: I/he/she said2. In the second paragraph he’s also adding related non-verbal communication (e.g., Avice looking up and waiting expectant for an answer). But it’s all fairly ordinary, don’t you think?

However, this ordinary structure makes the later rule-breaking stand out. It shows that the formatting is not merely stylistic3, but carries meaning—one reserved for the characters whose dialogue follows an unconventional pattern.

Thus, when the unconventional pattern appears, the reader notices it immediately.

Let me show you one brief excerpt, from one of the first conversations where it appears:

“Honestly?” said EdGar. “They’re all worried.” “To various degrees.” “Some of them think we’re…” “…exaggerating. RanDolph thinks it’ll all be good for us.” “To have a newcomer, to shake us up. But no one’s sanguine.”

“Where’s JoaQuin? And where’s Wyatt?” [Avice said.]

“They’re bringing the new boy along. Together.” “Neither’s been letting the other out of their sight.”

There are a few details to consider here:

• At first glance, this looks an exchange between two people: EdGar, and Avice. The paragraphing seems to confirm this thesis, because the exchange can be abstracted to the following beats: (1) EdGar explains his colleague’s mood, (2) Avice asks about two other people (and also somewhat ignores his commentary), then (3) EdGar answers her questions. Three paragraphs, three dialogue beats: EdGar, Avice, EdGar. But there is more than meets the eye.

• We can also see that while some people have conventional names (i.e., Avice, Wyatt) others have strangely capitalised names (i.e., EdGar, RanDolph, JoaQuin)—names that, if we ignore the second-syllable capitalisation, read as a fairly common names (i.e., Edgar, Randolph, Joaquin).

• But here’s the exception: EdGar’s speech closes the quotes and reopens them immediately after without the intervention of a body beat or dialogue tag. Like so: “They’re all worried.” “To various degrees.” In some cases, there are ellipses trailing at the end and beginning of a segmented dialogue as if to show some sort of pause: “Some of them think we’re…” “…exaggerating. RanDolph thinks it’ll all be good for us.”

To understand the rationale behind this choice, we need to step back and look at the setting of Embassytown, how its naming conventions reinforce the novel’s themes, and why this rule-breaking applies only to a very specific group of characters.

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My job requires it, he thought, scraping bottom. Prestige. We couldn’t go on with the electric sheep any longer; it sapped my morale. Maybe I can tell her that, he decided.

A curious quote revealing one truth: prestige is seldom abstract. It arrives disguised as necessity, as morale, as professional obligation… and it surfaces, in private, as a justification. But this raises two interesting questions: what becomes prestigious, and why? And is wealth really all that backs prestige? It’s too early to answer that. For now, I’ll just say this: the two books we’re about to explore suggest that scarcity doesn’t merely limit resources—it reshapes meaning, status, and even morality.

Let’s get these books undone.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Books Undone. I’m your host, Livia J. Elliot and in today’s episode I want to analyse two unlikely books. Both are considered masterpieces, and have been adapted to movies—but one is arguably not science fiction, and the other is considered proto-cyberpunk. Their plots diverge wildly, but the core of their world-building circles around a triad: scarcity generates demand, and demand transforms possession into prestige.

I’m talking about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (adapted as Blade Runner), and Dune by Frank Herbert.

Yet before we dive in, allow me to make two clarifications:

1. This discussion is spoiler lite. I’m focusing mostly on world-building elements more than in the plot itself. Therefore, you do not need to have read them to enjoy this episode.

2. What follows is an interpretation, not a verdict. You may disagree, and that strengthens the thematic richness of these books—which continue to invite discussions decades after publication.

Let us begin by discussing the books’ settings.

This includes the reasons behind the scarcity, and which commodity is now precious.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick…

—was published in 1968, and it’s a dystopian proto-cyberpunk novel set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco. At some point before the book’s events, World War Terminus affected the entire ecosystem, extinguishing most animal life.

Consider this description, early in the book:

No one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet’s surface had originated in no country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it. First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as they had while alive. […] After the owls, of course, the other birds followed, but by then the mystery had been grasped and understood. A meager colonization program had been underway before the war but now that the sun had ceased to shine on Earth the colonization entered an entirely new phase.

As the excerpt highlights, the conditions for the scarcity are man-made: World War Terminus destroyed the atmosphere. Its ensuing radiation, ‘dust’ contamination, and lack of direct sunlight, led to an ecological collapse that made animals nearly extinct. Although some species, like owls or frogs, were more affected than others, all animals are now at the verge of extinction. This also includes vermin; for example, spiders are pretty rare in this world.

Which… certainly raises a somewhat obvious question: shouldn’t food be the scarce resource? In a world marked by ecological collapse and diminished sunlight, one might expect agriculture itself to be imperilled—yet food shortages are not foregrounded in the novel. The reader is left to assume that synthetic food is easily accessible.

Animals, however, are a different matter because their importance is not merely biological but symbolic. This distinction will become crucial as the episode unfolds. But before elaborating on it, we need to examine a second world structured by environmental extremity.

Dune by Frank Herbert…

—was published in 1965, and it’s considered one of the first cli-fi (climate fiction) books to become mainstream. Much of it centres around Arrakis: a desert world fundamental to the economics of the universe. The reason? It is the sole provider of spice, a multi-faceted product with extreme anti-aging properties, and one that also makes spacefaring possible.

But although spice is scarce and limited, it is not the resource we’ll discuss today.

Water is.

You see? Arrakis has no oceans, no humid patches, not even steppes. It is a sand-filled desert across its expanse, and it is populated by humans… and we humans, as you know, need water to stay alive. This raises the unavoidable problem of a fundamental need that can only be satisfied by a scarce resource.

When House Atreides is sent to rule over Arrakis, the Duke’s son—Paul Atreides—receives the following warning:

“You’ll learn a great concern for water,” Hawat said. “As the Duke’s son you’ll never want for it, but you’ll see the pressures of thirst all around you.” […]
Paul swallowed, suddenly aware of the moisture in his mouth, remembering a dream of thirst. That [Arrakis’] people could want water so much they had to recycle their body moisture struck him with a feeling of desolation. “Water’s precious there,” he said.

What Paul said, “Water is precious in Arrakis” is true. Notice how Hawat framed it: the Duke’s son will never need it, but everyone else will go thirsty—implying Paul would have it in abundance only due to his privileged position and economic standpoint, not because it would be easy to acquire it.

The extreme scarcity is also highlighted when Paul remembers that those living in Arrakis “recycle their body moisture” to have something to drink. This is fundamental because the planet has no natural bodies of water, and the population must reuse their own fluids, drain water from recently deceased bodies, or use so-called ‘windmills’ to collect the air’s scant moisture.

At this point we can raise another obvious question: if Arrakis’ environment is so hostile to humans, why remain there at all? The answer is the second resource: spice—and within Dune’s universe, spice must flow. Given its properties it is politically unavoidable to have troops and harversters there, and for the Fremen—the native population—their presence is less transactional and more existential; the novel offers fragments rather than a single explanation about their arrival, hinting at belief and long ecological ambition.

The politics of Dune are intricate and fascinating, but they are not the focus of this episode. If you want to hear about them, check my previous episode where I discussed the political theory behind it.

For now, we are concerned with scarcity itself.

Both settings share a structure, but not a cause.

In Do Androids… the scarcity is man-made: it’s the result of World War Terminus. In Dune, however, scarcity is natural: a result of the environment itself. The former is a technological catastrophe, the other just planetary extremity.

In both worlds, a single commodity rises above all others: living animals and water, respectively. Yet while the value of water is easy to guess, the relevance of living animals is not as clear.

So let us deconstruct how value is assigned.

When I introduced Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

…I mentioned that the importance of living animals was not merely biological but symbolic. In truth, scarcity changed how people thought about animals—and how people think about a commodity, affects its value. Consider this excerpt following protagonist Rick Deckard:

On his way to work Rick Deckard, as lord knew how many other people, stopped briefly to skulk about in front of one of San Francisco’s larger pet shops, along animal row. In the center of the block-long display window an ostrich, in a heated clear-plastic cage, returned his stare. The bird, according to the info plaque attached to the cage, had just arrived from a zoo in Cleveland. It was the only ostrich on the West Coast. After staring at it, Rick spent a few more minutes staring grimly at the price tag.

There are a few things to notice here:

• Animals are now sold at specialised pet shops—and the street where these stores are located is colloquially referred to as ‘animal row.’

• There is also a collective interest on animals, and a limitation to acquire them. In the quote, Deckard remarked he stopped there before work “as lord knew how many other people”—which implies he’s not the only one coveting them without actually purchasing.

• Now remember the last line: “Rick spent a few more minutes staring grimly at the price tag.” It is clear that living animals are expensive—and some, rarer than others, even more expensive.

As we know from the real world, supply and demand affect a commodity’s price.

In this case, the collapse of the ecosystem had complicated the supply of living animals. However, the demand seems to be quite high, which drives the prices up. Because supply was so limited and there is a need to track prices and understand the market, the pet shops maintained a monthly publication called Sidney’s Animal & Fowl Catalogue. This magazine advertised the pet shop’s stock of living animals, their availability (if any) and their price tag. Here’s a scene of Deckard reading one:

Never in his life had [Deckard] personally seen a raccoon. […] In an automatic response he […] thumbed Sidney’s and looked up raccoon with all the sublistings. The list prices, naturally, appeared in italics; like Percheron horses, none existed on the market for sale at any figure. Sidney’s catalogue simply listed the price at which the last transaction involving a raccoon had taken place. It was astronomical.

As we can see, not every animal is available “in stock”, and the rarest ones command the highest price tags—exactly what happens when desire outpaces availability.

But high demand does more than inflate prices. It creates opportunity: a need that can be profited of.

In Do Androids… that opportunity takes a peculiar form: counterfeit animals. These are meticulously engineered, robotic replicas designed to pass as real. People purchase them not out of pride, but as a way to keep up appearances in a society where ownership signals status. To protect that illusion, the repair shops disguise themselves as ‘veterinaries,’ and help extend the pretense: owners buy synthetic food, perform maintenance routines, and sustain the fiction with surprising devotion.

With this, the book’s title begins to make sense. Rick Deckard, our unfortunate protagonist, owns an electric sheep. This is how he thinks of it:

For a long time he stood gazing at the owl, who dozed on its perch. A thousand thoughts came into his mind […]. He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived.

This begins to look less like survival and more like theatre.

Remember the question we asked before: shouldn’t food be the scarce resource? Clearly, in this setting, living animals are not nutritionally useful and neither economically productive… so why does ownership matter so intensely? At the end of the day, animals are simply displayed.

There is a reason for this, and to understand it, we need to elaborate on one economic and social theory developed by Thorstein Veblen.

He was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. In 1899, he presented the theory of conspicuous consumption which “describes a form of consumer behavior that emerged in its modern form after the Industrial Revolution.”1 In particular, conspicuous consumption “is the practice of acquiring goods or other outward symbols of wealth in order to show others how much wealth one possesses.” Something to note is that the goods acquired in this way are not needed in any meaningful sense—as Todorova said in 20132, they are meant to “inform others of the purchaser’s superiority.”

Can you see where this is going? How it links back to the living animals?

Before we formally use Veblen to explain Do Androids…, let us consider this exchange between Deckard and his neighbour Barbour, who owns a pregnant Percheron mare:

“Ever thought of selling your horse?” Rick asked. He wished to god he had a horse, in fact any animal. Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one.

As you can see, Deckard covets a living animal because he has none, and only wants one to display it—exactly as his neighbour does. In turn, Barbour only sees the prestige of having the animals, but doesn’t seem to care about them as living beings.

This is what Veblen observed: that consumption becomes socially meaningful when it is conspicuous rather than necessary. In PKD’s world, even electric animals participate in this economy of display: the simulation suffices because prestige depends on visibility, not biological authenticity nor utility. If you recall, the opening line I used for this episode makes this link explicit:

My job requires, it he thought, scraping bottom. Prestige. We couldn’t go on with the electric sheep any longer.

But what is utility?

To answer that, we need to pause briefly on the idea itself. Classical economic theory often grounds value in utility: the capacity of a good to satisfy desire. As economist Joan Robinson states, utility is “the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility.”3

Yet as we have seen, the utility of living animals in Do Androids… is dubious. Uncertain, even. Their desirability exceeds their practical function because of the conspicuous consumption—but desire alone is not enough to explain value. There must be something else. Hold on to that idea; we’ll come back to it soon.

What matters now is that this ambiguity around the utility of a scarce resource does not exist on Arrakis. Water is necessary before it is anything else.

So let us return to Dune to assess how people think about water.

Shortly after arriving on Arrakis, Lady Jessica—the Duke’s concubine—speaks with the Fremen housekeeper, Mapes, about stillsuits. The exchange is brief, but revealing:

[Mapes] glanced down at her dress. “Why, you know, my Lady, I don’t even have to wear my stillsuit here?” She cackled. “And me not even dead!"

Mapes’ remark is half-joke and half-astonishment. On Arrakis, survival normally depends on wearing a stillsuit to reclaim the body’s moisture and repurpose it into drinkable water… yet inside the Duke’s residence, the air itself holds enough humidity that one can walk uncovered and live. For Mapes, that fact alone signals status.

This exchange indicates that wealth is more than the possession of water stored in cisterns—it lies in the ability to create living arragements that escape Arrakis’ constant survival pressures. In such an environment, access to water does not merely sustain life, but distinguishes those who can live from those who must survive.

Yet stored water itself is also socially charged, and its use carries specific meanings. To see how, let us consider another excerpt.

Later in the novel, Paul and Jessica are stranded in the desert with minimal supplies. They begin to travel south and soon encounter the Fremen—who promptly discover that the surviving Atreides carry surplus water in their packs. What follows is telling:

Stilgar glanced at Jessica. “Is this true? Is there water in your pack?"

To give you some context, literjons are impact-resistant containers used in Dune. They’re prepared to reduce water wastage and so do not crack or leak, and neither gather moisture when kept under the day’s heat. Each one carries about one litre of water, or a quarter gallon. Therefore, Jessica was carrying two litres.

To put this into perspective, we can remember a common health advice: we, humans, must consume roughly two litres of water (gathered from multiple sources) per day4… yet the Fremen consider that amount wealth because, in Arrakis, sparing a single droplet is a wastage. Any surplus of water above the bare minimum needed to survive is a luxury.

Yet what matters about this exchange is not how much water Jessica was carrying, but how people reacted during the exchange:

• Did you notice how the Fremen whispered after Jessica recalled her homeworld’s rain and rivers? They gasped, fawned over the idea, and repeated it to each other as if it where unimaginable—because to them, natives to Arrakis, it was unimaginable. Remember: Arrakis has no oceans, no oases, no bodies of water. All water has to be reclaimed from the body’s moisture, extracted from a recently deceased person, or captured from the air with windmills.

• In turn, Jessica’s upbringing in a water-rich world made her, by Fremen standards, ‘careless’ with water. She does not instinctively assign it the same relevance they do, and she says as much in the exchange. Her willingness to give it away could therefore be read as naïve generosity… but it is certainly not. By this point she already understands what water signifies on Arrakis, and her decision is calculated: she is buying trust in the only currency the Fremen acknowledge.

• But do you remember how Stilgar responded? He didn’t say “Thank you.” Instead, he said: “Then we accept your blessing.”

That phrasing is culturally relevant, because water in Arrakis is so scarce, that both its possession and its distribution have become ritualised acts.

To the Fremen, water exchanges function symbolically: to offer drinkable water is to bestow a blessing, while shedding tears for the dead is an act of highest respect. Consider what happens when Paul cries over a dead Fremen:

A voice hissed: “He sheds tears!"

There are many more examples of ritualised water exchanges, but here are a few more for consideration:

• Fremen tend to duel to death quite often. In these cases, the corpse’s water belongs to the killer, adding to their wealth. It is extracted soon after death, and the deceased’s family is given nothing.

• The ceremony to raise a new Reverend Mother—the leading religious figure—requires her drinking and purifying the Water of Life before passing it into the crowd to drink.

• To court a woman, a man must offer her ‘water rings’: metallic counters that represented the volume of water released by a body of a dead Fremen processed through a deathstill, and owned by the man.

As we can see, to the Fremen of Arrakis, water is more than just wealth… but why do they ritualise its use? Unlike other beliefs in this world, this was certainly not imposed into them by the Bene Gesserit.

There is a reason for this, and to understand it, we need to discuss the work of another thinker.

French sociologist Émile Durkheim—often mentioned alongside Karl Marx and Max Weber as one of the founders of modern social science—defined sociology as the study of institutions, using the term broadly to mean the “beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity.”5

Durkheim argued that the ‘sacred’ was anything that transcended the humdrum of everyday life. In his view, it is not only ‘gods’ or ‘divinities’ who are ‘divine’, but anything “that it is the subject of a prohibition that sets it radically apart from something else”6. In Durkheim’s view, the sacred and the profane are not absolute categories but relative to each society—which means that ‘sacredness’ is not an inherent quality of an object or commodity in itself, but rather a status imposed upon them through collective designation and social action.

In other words, an object’s ‘sacredness’ is developed by the society that uses it—which is exactly what happens to water in the Fremen society of Arrakis:

• The scenes we analysed demonstrated clear rules governing its use.

• And its scarcity and necessity elevated it beyond a mere resource.

Water, then, is not just a valuable resource—it is sacred. Possessing it signals both wealth and custodianship over something socially sanctified… and we’ll soon see that, as it happened with the living animals of Do Androids…, it’s not only its possession what implies wealth.

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As you can see, in these books, scarcity is more than just a world-building detail.

These settings are socioeconomic thought experiments exploring what happens when the scarce good becomes the axis around which social distinction organises itself. This is why, at the beginning of the episode I asked: is wealth really all that backs prestige?

Water in Dune, and its recognition as sacred within Fremen society, suggests the answer is ’no.’ Yet what sustains its prestige is not belief or doctrine, but conduct: responsibility, restraint, and the moral handling of what is scarce. In a different way, Do Androids… points towards the same idea: prestige involves some degree of social responsibility.

Enter Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

A Genevan philosopher whose political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightment throughout Europe.

In his famous Discourse on Inequality, he argued that humans are naturally compassionate and possess healthy self-love. Social problems arise not from human nature itself, but from inequality and social arrangements that generate comparison, competition, and artificial wants—exactly what scarcity did in these two books.

When resources become scarce and unevenly distributed, Rousseau would argue, people begin measuring their worth against others (what is known as amour-propre), creating status hierarchies that corrupt natural compassion.

Taking this into consideration, we can argue that wealth-derived prestige is not neutral because it carries an ethical weight: how someone uses their wealth reflects their moral alignment with the community. Therefore, genuine prestige may only exist when supported by both wealth and ethics.

Let’s apply this understanding to both books:

• In Dune, controlling water grants political and social power—but the Fremen’s understanding of it as sacred, and the subsequent rituals, show that proper stewardship respects communal norms, embedding morality into resource control.

• In Do Androids… a common theme of the book is empathy—and given that the ecological collapse was caused by humanity (through World War Terminus) we can see animal ownership as performative ethics: it signals, “I care, I empathise, I act morally by caring for the last few living animals”, thereby showing empathy in a society that is morally depleted.

Therefore, living animals and water are not merely commodities for these two fictional societies—they are mirrors of ethical priorities. While water in Dune signals communal survival and care for peers, the living animals of Do Androids… represent empathy, restitution, and moral attentiveness in a damaged world.

In this sense, scarce resources become morality made visible, and prestige functions as a signal of moral alignment with a community’s values. In Arrakis, status attaches to stewardship; in post-apocalyptic Earth, it attaches to compassion.

Wealth without ethical alignment may still confer power, but lacks the community’s moral endorsement that transforms mere possession into genuine prestige. Thus, when wealth accumulation divorces from community values, prestige erodes—and what remains is mere economic power, resented rather than respected.

Both Dune and Do Androids… suggest that sustainable social hierarchies require ethical justification, not just resource control. Strip away the moral dimension, and even the wealthiest risk becoming—like the absent animal owners or the water-hoarding oppressors—powerful but not prestigious, commanding resources but forfeiting respect.

Perhaps this is what both novels ultimately ask us to consider: that prestige is not merely the possession of what’s scarce, but also in stewarding it morally.

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Before I leave you today,

…if you enjoyed my breakdown of scarcity and morality, you could check my episode on the politics of Dune, in which I discussed how religion was used to legitimise political authority. Likewise, consider subscribing to my Substack at liviajelliot.substack.com; I write weekly with in-depth literary and thematic discussions of speculative fiction. You can find it linked below.

Thanks for listening, and happy reading.

Regardless of its reputation, one could argue that nothing happens in this story.

It is just eight pages describing a library.

It has no plot in the traditional sense. No leading character, no dialogue, no discovery. Just eight pages of description of the Library of Babel, its internal curiosities, and the kinds of books it holds.

Yet I couldn’t stop reading—and when we discussed it on my podcast, in the raw recording, we spent over two hours taking it apart piece by piece. Eight pages. Two hours of discussion.

Do you know why?

Because ‘stakes,’ as they’re invoked in writing advice, are not all of the same type. Just as the library of Babel contains an infinite number of books, there are countless ways a story can generate ‘stakes’.

As critical readers, we must discover what type of stakes the story contains, and judge the work accordingly.

Yet readers, and writers, often narrow down into the most common understanding of ‘stakes.’

What writing advice calls ‘stakes’ is usually just the most visible form of narrative pressure: the internal and external tension that drives the narrative forward. All too often, this becomes associated, almost exclusively, with conflict of any sort.

But ‘pressure’ as a mechanism is not limited to a single form. Life-and-death situations are not the only means to create that pressure, because there are multiple types of stories and each of them has a different driver—moral ambiguity, tonal dissonance, psychological fracture, aesthetic intensity, and thematic resonance. Each of these internal drivers will raise ‘stakes’ of a different sort.

So what other types of stakes can you find?

Below, I’m listing five different categories of pressure, each accompanied by a reading recommendation. The graphic below summarises where the category name, where the pressure originates (the source), what does it affect (the domain) and a question as an example of its core instability.

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In short, a masterpiece as only PKD could craft.

In terms of setting, this is what I affectionally call "period scifi"—sci-fi books that are actually set in the past, most likely because it was "near future" when it was written. In here, it is the year 1992, and individuals with psionic powers (e.g., precognition, telepathy) are a threat to the social, economic and political balance. To contain their manifestations, there are "prudential" companies that provide individuals called "inertials" that can neutralise the activity of telepaths and precogs. Prudence organisations also offer their clients security and privacy from the intrusions of psychic spies. Runciter Associates is owned by Glen Runciter and provides "inertial" services, but has lost track of a dangerous telepathic.

That is only part of the setting. A key element is the distinction between full-life (i.e., what we currently consider as "being alive") and half-life. Half-life occurs when someone is recently dead and placed into a cryogenic facility called "cold-pac", known as Moratoriums. While in this cryogeny, the half-lifers cannot move, and their bodies age neither, but they can be "telephoned" by their full-life relatives.

This description is just scratching the surface of what half-life is, since very early in the book it is implied that half-lifers have their own sort of "world", that they mingle with the others that are close, and that perhaps their half-life minds create a different reality.

So that begs the question: what if the world we know is just a half-life world (the product of our minds) and not "true" reality?

Here is where Plato's allegory gets twisted: how would people/characters react to being told they're dead and half-living? Would that be more painful? Can they do anything about it? But then... how many layers to reality are? What if you "awaken" from one reality into another, then "awaken" into another? Maybe there’s no safe layer of reality at all.

I won't answer these questions because the book doesn't; PKD was just exploring them… though I do find those questions core to Ubik's theme.

Now, what is Ubik? It's a product; a spray can, a salve, a balm, powder to be diluted. The most popular definition out there is that Ubik is:

…a stabilizer that can reverse the course of time and protect people and things from decay.

Though while somewhat true, that definition falls short of what Ubik truly is... yet any attempt at defining or explaining it are deeply spoilery. I think a nice attempt at defining Ubik is saying that Ubik is the product of someone's mind, will manifest, the persistence to live, a belief that gives someone resistance to reality. I don't think there is a single answer, but to me, the spray can was certainly not "god", as I've seen reported in some reviews.

TL;DR: It's a great book, but in PKD's style, it cannot be taken lightly as "just" a plot. Thematically, it is incredibly rich.

This review was originally shared on Goodreads, on July 18th, 2025.

If you are interested in hearing more about Ubik, I did a lengthy podcast episode (with transcript included) discussing the book through Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal as applied to Ubik (the spray can, the salve, the… everything Ubik is inside the book). It’s one of my favourite episodes:

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PART I (Basics) | PART II (Pacing) - HERE! | PART III (Meaning)

Paragraphs are one of the most important tools in storytelling. They structure the narrative, but can also enhance or smother pacing. They add meaning to the words in the page, and layer alongside the voice to immerse the reader and let them experience the events alongside the narrator.

Yet some of those uses of paragraphs requires us to break the most commonly shared guidelines for paragraphing—the structure-driven rules we explored in Part 1. These basic principles help us split the story by dialogue (verbal or not), beats (physical movement) and theme (the story’s focus), but may not be enough in certain cases.

That is why, in Part 2, we explored a few rule-breaking approaches to enhance voice and pacing. Today, in the last Part of this series of essays, we’re focusing on less dramatic approaches to deepen and layer meaning.

As before, all the cases will have example excerpts from renown books, analysed in detail. Today’s examples include Iain Banks, Philip K. Dick, Daniel Keyes, and Steven Erikson.

Although this discussion is geared toward writers, critical readers will find it just as valuable. Once you start noticing how paragraphing can steer the reading experience, you realise that much of a story’s thinking happens not just in sentences, but in everything around them.

Guidelines Set #3: Paragraphing to Enhance Meaning

As we saw before, the most commonly taught guidelines for breaking paragraphs were based on the structure of the story itself, and responded to changes in who is speaking, what action is taking place, and where attention (or characters) go. Used well, these produced a structurally sound narrative—one we later learnt to control or disrupt, based on the mental states of a limited narrator.

But what happens when the narrator is not limited? Or when they are, but their mental state is neutral and focused… or invaded?

This is what we are considering today: a style of paragraphing based on value, narrative or reader focus, and temporal connection. These do not necessarily override the usual guidelines for splitting paragraphs, but instead apply them to an extreme.

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PART I (Basics) | PART II (Pacing) - HERE! | PART III (Meaning)

In storytelling, paragraphs are a fundamental structure whose impact extends beyond content organisation and structure. Well-used paragraphing can layer meaning, shape pacing, and influence voice—which is especially useful in limited narrations.

Yet, paradoxically, using paragraphing to do more than just organise content often means purposefully breaking the usual rules.

That is why last week, in Part I, we explored the basics: guidelines based on story structure, and driven by three different elements: by dialogue (extending speech to include body language and non-verbal cues), by beats (physical movement) and by theme (the story’s focus).

Today, in Part 2, we’ll look at how to break those rules deliberately, to enhance voice and pacing. Next week, Part 3, will explore examples of rule-breaking that deepen meaning and strengthen thought-patterns.

Just like we did last week, for all the cases we’ll discuss today, I will present example excerpts from different books so you can see this in action. Today’s examples include Ray Bradbury, Jeff Vandermeer, and T.R. Napper.

Although this discussion is geared toward writers, critical readers will find it just as valuable. Once you start noticing how paragraphing can steer the reading experience, you realise that much of a story’s thinking happens not just in sentences, but in everything around them.

Guidelines Set #2: Rule-Breaking To Enhance Voice & Pacing

As we saw before, the most commonly taught guidelines for breaking paragraphs were based on the structure of the story itself, and responded to changes in who is speaking, what action is taking place, and where attention (or characters) go.

Used well, these rules produce a structurally sound narrative… but everything changes when: (a) your narrator is limited (either in first- or third-person), and (b) you want to leverage paragraphs’ secret “show” power.

This is where the rule-breaking begins.

It is not haphazard, aesthetic-driven rule-breaking. What I will introduce is a purposeful, analytical approach to paragraphing based on how punctuation affects reading speed—even when reading to yourself—and how sentence plus paragraph structure can mirror the narrator’s mental state. This, in turn, has two effects on pacing:

• It may control pacing (which does not imply restraint only), or

• It may disrupt pacing.

Both effects deliberately override the usual guidelines for splitting paragraphs by beats and by theme.

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The story is intentionally narrow: a post-apocalyptic setting, and a nameless father and son travelling south across the United States. There is no clearly defined goal beyond escaping the cold—which seems to follow them—and one message:

You have to carry the fire.

This message is easy to overlook, particularly at the beginning, as McCarthy does not return to it often, and certainly does not explain it—at least not on the page.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Allow me to examine the novel from its setting to its characters, and finally its themes.

The setting is minimalist: an ashen, desolate world, post-apocalyptic (perhaps in the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe), yet scarcely explained. The decay is pervasive, all-encompassing, and overwhelming, eroding everything—especially the remnants of humanity.

What the father and son encounter makes the bleakness unmistakable. This is an “every man for himself” world, where survivors will readily kill one another simply to strip away whatever rags and goods they possess. There are “bloodcults” roaming the roads, pillaging and enslaving others (it is implied that they assault women, keep adolescent boys as sex slaves, and even consume newborns). Some survivors have also resorted to cannibalism, a horror underscored through several encounters along the road.

This is never made explicit, yet the extreme nihilism—which renders even survival seemingly meaningless—is essential to the exploration of the novel’s central question: can moral goodness exist when every external structure that sustains it has collapsed?

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The setting itself appears to suggest that, without such frameworks—no society, no laws, no governing bodies to enforce them—humanity will descend into utmost depravity and moral disintegration.

Here I must pause to analyse the father and son.

Interestingly, McCarthy chose to keep them nameless. At no point are their names revealed, and even when the narration remains closely aligned with the father’s perspective, he refers to his son simply as “the boy”. One might argue that this resists the expectations of readers more used to conventional, commercially-oriented narrative structures; however, the absence of names is consistent with the novel’s thematic axis: if the world is nihilistic, if meaning itself is eroded, what purpose does a name serve?

Ultimately, a name is typically bound to identity, but the road—and the post-apocalyptic landscape it traverses—relentlessly strips both meaning and identity away: first at the societal level, and then from the individuals who endure it.

For this reason, the father and son are not quite characters in the traditional sense, but rather characterised themes—almost akin to literalised metaphors, where abstraction is given narrative form.

Allow me to elaborate.

The father is a remnant of the “old world”: a man who remembers what it was, and who clings to the identity that way of living once allowed him to have. He was raised to be the provider, the protector, the moral centre of the family he was building—but the journey along the road steadily erodes that role.

It begins with a question:

How does the never to be differ from what never was?

From the moment this question surfaces, something in him begins to change. He is forced to confront whether he could kill the boy—if circumstances demanded it—while questioning why they continue to survive at all. And yet, he persists in a fragile, almost reflexive faith in an unnamed god, insisting that they are “the good guys”, that they are still “carrying the fire”.

Yet, as the father’s doubts deepen, an unspecified sickness begins to take hold of him—subtle at first, but progressively more debilitating.

The boy’s age is unspecified, though he cannot be older than four to six years. At first, the father attempts to shield him from the surrounding amorality—covering his eyes when they pass burnt corpses, or withholding explanations when the truth would reveal something too disturbing. He tells the boy:

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever.

Later, when they cross a stretch strewn with charred bodies, the father again tries to protect him—but the boy responds:

What you put in your head is there forever?

Yes.

It’s okay Papa. [...] They’re already there.

Yet somehow, this doesn’t... reach the boy. He remains unchanged—innocent, vulnerable, and in need of protection.

More importantly, the extent of the world’s bleakness seems not to matter (whether it be a man holding a knife to his throat, the discovery of humans imprisoned as livestock, or being shot at by those seeking their supplies): the boy retains his innocence. Whenever they encounter others—someone struck by lightning, a lost child, even a half-blind old man—he insists on sharing their food, or offering help in whatever way he can.

Such behaviour may appear irrational if the boy is read purely as a character. However, if he is understood instead as a characterised theme, his behaviour fits what he embodies: an irreducible moral instinct, a form of pre-cultural goodness that cannot be entirely eroded by the surrounding desolation, and which must, therefore, be protected.

You have to carry the fire.

I don’t know how to.

Yes, you do.

Is the fire real? The fire?

Yes it is.

Where is it? I don’t know where it is.

Yes you do. It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.

Understanding the boy in this way allows us to reinterpret the father’s faith—not as belief in an unspecified god, but as faith in the idea of goodness embodied in the child. The father’s sickness, then, is not merely a loss of the will to live, but a weakening of his ability to remain “one of the good guys” in a world where such a choice can be fatal.

This brings us back to the nihilistic setting, and to the question McCarthy may have been probing: can moral goodness exist when every external structure that sustains it has collapsed?

What the novel hints at is philosophically compelling: morality is a choice, and one that must be continually reasserted through each decision (through every encounter along the road) even when any external justification for it has already fallen away—whether social, religious, rational, or evolutionary. The boy (and the moral instinct he represents) must be protected, and cannot persist entirely on its own (as the ending may suggest), because morality is only meaningful if it can endure despite having no reason to exist.

This, perhaps, is what it means to “carry the fire”. To choose to live nobly despite hardship, and morality not as a principle that can be proven or defended, but as something enacted, again and again.

All in all, The Road resists easy categorisation and offers none of the legibility of modern fiction. For those willing to engage with it on its own terms, this is a work of remarkable philosophical depth.

My guests: K.D. Marchesi, Sarah K. Balstrup, and

An index of themes:

• 00:00 Intro & Disclaimers

• 02:35 Favourites Themes

• 04:40 A faint within a faint...

• 06:25 On Free Will

• 10:50 On the films

• 14:30 Cycles & Circularity

• 19:00 Foreknowledge

• 22:20 On Heroes & Goals

• 28:25 Religion = technology?

• 32:13 Environment & Resources

• 43:20 Worldbuilding

• 47:25 On Irulan

• 53:27 On Leadership

• 59:40 On Alia

• 61:50 Power & Evolution

• 65:20 Outro

PART I (Basics) - HERE! | PART II (Pacing) | PART III (Meaning)

Paragraphs are one of the fundamental structures of a story—and, more often than not, they are invisible to the reader. Just a full stop and a new line, perhaps chosen by some half-remembered grammar rule readers don’t need to perceive.

Yet often, paragraphing isn’t just about order. Sometimes it’s about meaning.

In literary fiction, paragraphs can become a way of showing things the narrator would otherwise have to spell out: the state of mind of a character, the adrenaline of a situation, how fast—or slow—things move in a story. They can mimic the structure of human thought, or layer tension and horror depending on how they’re used.

In those cases, a writer might split the text in a way that feels unconventional or unexpected—not because the rules demand it, but because the story does. Yet to understand the unconventional nuances of paragraph-splitting, we first need to elaborate on the more traditional, structural-based reasons for doing so.

Therefore, today’s essay is the first part of three discussing different ways of breaking a story into paragraphs:

• In Part 1 (today’s post) we’ll be discussing guidelines based on story structure. This includes three specific cases, and some variants.

• In Parts 2 & 3 (next two weeks) I’ll present guidelines based on meaning, voice, and pacing.

For all of the cases we’ll discuss today, I will present example excerpts from different books so you can see this in action. Today’s examples include Jeff VanderMeer, Ray Bradbury, Steven Erikson, and China Miéville.

Although this is written from a craft perspective and with writers in mind, what follows is just as valuable for critical readers. Once you start noticing why paragraphs break where they do, you begin to see how much of a story’s thinking happens not just in sentences—but in everything around them.

Guidelines Set #1: Paragraphing Based on Story Structure

The most commonly taught guidelines for breaking paragraphs are based on the structure of the story itself. They respond to changes in who is speaking, what action is taking place, where attention moves, or where characters go.

This kind of paragraphing aims to reduce ambiguity, introduce pauses in the reading (especially noticeable when read aloud), and add legibility—three things that help the reader orient themselves in a scene.

I will present three basic guidelines:

• Dialogue-driven paragraphing, including interruptions, overlaps, and power-shifts.

• Beats of physical actions—such as entrances, departures, or meaningful gestures.

• Changes of topic or focus, including how to break a paragraph when the attention shifts. This could be in time (namely, flashbacks), from themes (same character, making a mental narration and changing topic), or between characters.

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But there is a trick: it demands that readers be active—simultaneously reading the words to identify the author’s intended meaning, while also reading between the lines to establish deeper meaning.

Developing this skill is particularly important when approaching literary fiction or idea-driven speculative fiction, where meaning often emerges from implication, irony, and narrative tension rather than from explicit moral instruction.

However, one of the most common obstacles to critical reading is the collapse of depiction into endorsement: treating narrative devices (what a text shows) as moral claims (what the text believes). This distinction is not always obvious, and even experienced readers can fall into it. Therefore, today we’re exploring this concept, using three classical works of fiction as examples.

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Let’s get this book undone.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Books Undone. I’m your host, Livia J. Elliot, and today we are discussing the first installment of a classic space-fantasy series: Dune, by Frank Herbert. Long ago—in another century—this was my first formal encounter with speculative fiction; I read it when I was about 12-13 years old, in a translation… and, honestly, I was well-due for a reread in its original language.

Dune is, by no means, a simple book. It examines how an environment shapes a society and its politics, how political and economic power intertwine, and how resources can both provoke or deter war. It speaks about the consequences of scarcity, and how differently we treat abundance when it overflows.

Yet beyond all these themes—or perhaps because of their convergence—one emerges as dominant: Dune is a critique of messianic power as a political system. It is often read as a hero’s journey or a power fantasy, when it is, in fact, a cautionary tale.

With that in mind, this episode will focus on two key threads—details often smoothed in adaptations: the geopolitics of Dune’s universe, and how religion and myth are leveraged to manufacture authority. To explore them, I’ll draw on theory related to the causes of war, economics as deterrence, and the sources of political legitimacy.

• Before we dive in, allow me a few quick notes:

• There are more themes that what I can cover here. Therefore, I’ll cover only what interested me the most.

• Spoilers ahead. I’ll be discussing major elements of Dune, though I will not discuss the sequels. I do plan to re-read them again, and may (or may not) cover them in future episodes.

• This is one interpretation. What follows is my reading of Dune. Herbert may have had other intentions, and every reader certainly brings their own—which is why the book keeps generating arguments sixty years on.

At first glance, Dune appears to offer a familiar political landscape:

A distant future ruled by an Emperor who grants fiefdoms to Noble Houses, with power passed down through inheritance. But beneath this seemingly simple surface lies a far more intricate system—one that blends market-driven economics with feudal traditions. To unpack this unique political web, let us start by further developing the two groups I just mentioned:

• Beginning with the Padishah Emperor: ruler of the known human-populated universe. His authority is inherited, though there are other pressures at play—details we will explore later. The Emperor and his Royal House possess immense wealth, but it ultimately depends on the same resource everyone covets: the spice melange harvested only on the desert planet Arrakis.

• After the Emperor come the Noble Houses, divided into Major and Minor. Each is a dynastic seat of power, with Houses Major holding a planetary fief with one homeworld, and multiple others entrusted to loyal Houses Minor. The two most relevant Houses are Atreides (based on the sea-world of Caladan) and Harkonnen (based on Giedi Prime).

This structure seems straightforward, but everything changes when we introduce three other fundamental organisations:

• The Landsraad is a governing council representing all the Houses. It serves as a forum where they negotiate trade agreements, forge alliances, and conduct kanly—a formalised process of feud and revenge. Think of it as a parliament within a constitutional monarchy: it balances the Emperor’s power, with member Houses voting on various matters. Naturally, the Houses Major hold more votes than the Minors.

• The CHOAM Company, though, brings a new level of complexity. This colossal monopoly controls every trade out there, profiting from the taxes it imposes. It has a board of directors (and directorship isn’t easy to acquire), while every House, including the Emperor, owns shares of the company1. The Imperial House is, of course, the largest minority shareholder. Early on the book, Duke Leto Atreides makes a compelling warning about CHOAM:

“Few products escape the CHOAM touch,” the Duke said. “Logs, donkeys, horses, cows, lumber, dung, sharks, whale fur—the most prosaic and the most exotic… even our poor pundi rice from Caladan. Anything the [Spacing] Guild will transport […] But all fades before melange. […] It cannot be manufactured, it must be mined on Arrakis. It is unique and it has true geriatric properties. […] But the important thing is to consider all the Houses that depend on CHOAM profits. And think of the enormous proportion of those profits dependent upon a single product—the spice. Imagine what would happen if something should reduce spice production.”

Imagine what would happen, indeed…

• But before we dive deeper into the spice, we have to consider the other company the Duke just mentioned: the Spacing Guild. In Dune, space travel is not common or privately owned, and neither the Emperor nor the Noble Houses possess their own ships. Instead, the Guild holds a strict monopoly on all space transport, charging exorbitant fees—particularly high when it comes to moving troops, and placing satellites in orbit around planets.

As you can see, we’re quickly moving away from a traditional feudal structure toward a market-driven economy.

Therefore, it’s time we finally explore the melange spice.

Duke Leto Atreides said spice has “true geriatric properties”—namely, it is a highly effective anti-aging product. It grants extended lifespan, vitality, and heightened awareness… and you can imagine that everyone would want to put their hands on something like this. After all, eternal youth (and the wealth one can accumulate in a longer lifespan) is not a new desire; humanity has craved it long enough.

The other use of spice is space travel. No one knows precisely how the Spacing Guild employs it, but without spice their ships cannot function. Because the Guild is itself a monopoly, its limitations on space travel affect everyone.

However, the most precious resources are always scarce and dangerous to procure. This is the case for the spice.

1. Arrakis, its sole source planet, is a dangerous desert. There, water scarcity is so extreme that inhabitants seek to recover moisture from almost anywhere—sweat, tears, dead bodies, even the wind. Worse, only some regions of the world are deemed habitable during the nights. In this world, someone is considered rich when they have water to spare.

2. Second, harvesting spice can be deadly. Placing a machine in the ground attracts Shai-huluds: gigantic worms that can swallow the harvesting machines and are always, inevitably, attracted to them. The harvesters cannot be shielded either, for shields are an even more compelling to the worms—thus, they need specialised aerial vehicles to lift them on the spot once a worm is detected.

3. Third and last, the desert is the home to the Fremen: a dangerous native population that specialises in desert combat and very much does not like CHOAM harvesting spice. We’ll talk about them later.

As a result, mining spice is costly—the wear and tear on equipment quickly adds up, and repeated clashes with the Fremen can decimate entire troops… but as the saying goes: with great risk comes great reward.

Let’s return to CHOAM, because everything happens around it.

Every few decades, by imperial decree, the Padishah Emperor grants stewardship of Arrakis to one fortunate Great House. This stewardship includes control over spice production, and may include a directorship seat on CHOAM. You can think of stewardship as a fiefdom: one rich with economic benefits, some of which may skirt the edges of legality. After all, where valuable resources exist, so do smugglers… and if managed discreetly, whoever controls the spice can take a cut from smuggling operations to build their own reserves.

If you want to see a handy diagram of CHOAM and all the other factions I’ve named so far (plus a few additional ones), head into my blog at liviajelliot.substack.com; you’ll also find the episodes’ transcript there, alongside additional references.

At the start of the book, the Baron Harkonnen has ruled Arrakis for over 20 years…

…and in that time, he became obscenely rich. Worse still, his control of the planet was enforced through his nephew Rabban, whose brutal governance kept the population firmly in line.

Everything changes when the Emperor, by Imperial Decree, grants Stewardship of Arrakis to House Atreides. At first glance, this may look like a routine political manoeuvre: a simple rotation, or an attempt to redistribute wealth among the Houses Major… but the reality is far less noble. As Duke Leto Atreides himself explains:

“[…] By giving me Arrakis, His Majesty is forced to give us a CHOAM directorship… a subtle gain.”
“CHOAM controls the spice,” Paul said. […] “Whoever had stockpiled melange could make a killing. Others would be out in the cold.”
The Duke permitted himself a moment of grim satisfaction, looking at his son and thinking how penetrating, how truly educated that observation had been. He nodded. “The Harkonnens have been stockpiling for more than twenty years.”
“They mean spice production to fail and you to be blamed.”
“They wish the Atreides name to become unpopular,” the Duke said. “Think of the Landsraad Houses that look to me for a certain amount of leadership—their unofficial spokesman. Think how they’d react if I were responsible for a serious reduction in their income. After all, one’s own profits come first.”

What we are seeing here is the Emperor deliberately sowing unrest through the careful manipulation of the three classical causes of war:

Fear, Honour, and Interest

Long before Dune, the Athenian historian Thucydides argued that wars are rarely fought for a single reason, instead emerging from the interaction of three forces: fear, honour, and interest—which he illustrated through what is often considered the first in-depth study of the Peloponnesian War2. Currently, modern historians continue to apply these three elements when analysing modern warfare.

Herbert’s genius lies in how cleanly these abstractions map onto the politics of Dune:

Interest is the obvious one: spice.

It is the pure material base of power:

• economic (it generates profit),

• military (to pay the Guild for transporting goods and forces), and

• even epistemic (youth and other benefits).

Almost every faction’s strategy circles around who controls spice and for how long. Remember what Duke Leto said: “[…] the important thing is to consider all the Houses that depend on CHOAM profits,” and CHOAM’s main income comes from the spice.

A dangerous dependence, because…

Everyone is afraid of something—and fear drives escalation or paralysis.

So far, based on the quote I read before, we know that the Padishah Emperor fears the Atreides’ rising popularity and thus “[wishes] the Atreides name to become unpopular.” The reason is simple: public support may allow Duke Leto to scheme through the Landsraad and place an Atreides on the throne. Likewise, the Emperor fears the Landsraad as a balancing force, because it could unite the Houses against him. Fear explains why he never acts openly, instead preferring indirection, proxies, and plausible deniability.

Meanwhile, House Atreides dreads what the Harkonnens could do to them; after all, for the right amount of spice (likely taken from the Baron’s secret reserves) the Houses of the Landsraad could conveniently look aside and ignore anything that may happen to the Atreides. Duke Leto explains this:

A harsh smile twisted the Duke’s mouth. “[The Landsraad would] look the other way no matter what was done to me.”
“Even if we were attacked with atomics?”
“Nothing that flagrant. No open defiance of the Convention. But almost anything else short of that… perhaps even dusting and a bit of soil poisoning. […] [But] knowing that the Harkonnens stockpile melange, we ask another question: Who else is stockpiling? That’s the list of our enemies.”

But this cycle of fear doesn’t end there: the Atreides are wary of the Emperor as well, because they know he could release upon their House another faction we have not discussed yet: the Sardaukar. An elite military force renown for its fanatic zeal, superior fighting abilities, and sheer ruthlessness. Every House is terrified of the Sardaukar… and the Emperor promised the Harkonnen to use them against the Atreides.

Again, Duke Leto had surmised how this would happen:

“The Emperor,” Paul said. “That means the Sardaukar.”
“Disguised in Harkonnen livery, no doubt,” the Duke said. “But the soldier fanatics nonetheless.”

Why disguised? I hinted at it before: plausible deniability. The Emperor needed the Atreides extinguished, but couldn’t afford the reputational damage of doing so overtly—so he helped the Harkonnen, aware that their actions could be excused under the Landsraad’s kanly: the legalised feud-revenge system I mentioned before.

At this point, Paul asks the very same thing every reader may be wondering—and the answer, as Duke Leto knows, it is not that simple:

Paul tried to swallow in a throat suddenly dry. “Couldn’t you convene the Landsraad? Expose—”
“And make our enemy aware we know which hand holds the knife? Ah, now, Paul—we see the knife, now. Who knows where it might be shifted next? If we put this before the Landsraad it’d only create a great cloud of confusion. The Emperor would deny it. Who could gainsay him? All we’d gain is a little time while risking chaos. And where would the next attack come from?”

From that answer, we learn that the Houses are also afraid. They fear the Emperor because they can see how he’s deliberately attacking the Atreides by removing the Harkonnen’s Stewardship—all while simultaneously dreading the Baron who (after decades controlling Arrakis) has stockpiled spice and limited its sale, thus increasing its price. Because of these constraints, the Houses often tolerate injustice, simply not to bring it upon themselves.

Finally, the entire move of replacing the Harkonnens, placing and removing the Atreides, and restoring the Harkonnens generates political instability—exactly what the Spacing Guild fears: the uncertainty of who will control the spice, and what will happen to their own shady businesses. Regardless, the Guild cannot act lest CHOAM reduces their ’transportation fees’ (paid in spice).

Therefore, what emerges from here is a political system paralysed by mutual fear. No faction can act openly without risking retaliation from another; no injustice can be corrected without threatening the balance of power. Violence, when it comes, must therefore be indirect, deniable, and outsourced. In Dune, fear does not prevent war—it merely ensures that war is fought through proxies… at least for the time being.

Why proxis? Because…

Honour—the third cause of war—can manifest as legalities, not only as personal virtue.

Historian Donald Kagan explained that: “If, however, we understand [honour’s] significance as deference, esteem, just due, regard, respect we’ll find it […] also has practical importance in the competition for power”3. Understood this way, honour acquires real political weight: it governs how power is recognised, constrained, and exercised. Treaties, accords, and conventions bind faceless organisations just as effectively as they bind individuals—and they need don’t need to be ethical or just to matter. What matters is whether violating them carries consequences.

Remember what Duke Leto said:

“No open defiance of the Convention. But almost anything else short of that… perhaps even dusting and a bit of soil poisoning.”

So even the Harkonnens are forced to honour legalities. The reason is simple: in Dune, this conception of honour materialises as a dense web of institutional counterweights:

• The Landsraad as a formal check on imperial authority,

• kanly as a codified system of vendetta,

• the Convention to limit which weapons can be used,

• the Houses Minor who ‘must obey’ the House Major controlling their fiefdom,

• the share-based structure of the CHOAM Company and its taxes,

• the Imperial Decrees that must be obeyed even when unjust, and

• the Spacing Guild’s tacit agreements with smugglers.

None of these mechanisms are moral in themselves, but all of them are honoured, and that is what grants them power.

Yet by this point, you’re probably asking yourself one question: if the three key causes of war are present in this fictional ecosystem, why don’t we have an open war? In the book all these actors we just reviewed were quite clearly avoiding war at all costs, so what is happening?

The answer is something known as a deterrent:

Something that dissuades factions from conflict or war, often through credible threats of severe retaliation, or the ability to deny them success. Deterrence is about shaping an opponent’s perception and cost-benefit analysis to demonstrate that any attack would be irrational. The problem is that, once the deterrent is nullified, war will likely happen. We will later see how this comes to be.

For now, how does deterrence come to play in Dune?

To answer that question, let me be upfront: the politics of Dune are not merely tactical; Herbert was working at a strategic and systemic levels. His world-building acknowledges that political power is inseparable from economic power—and economic power, in turn, depends on monopoly.

Knowing that, let us reinterpret three key organisations:

• CHOAM is not just a company: it is the economy.

• Likewise, the Spacing Guild isn’t just transport: it is both market access and the enabler of war. After all, if they refuse to transport a House’s goods or troops, then that’s it; that House doesn’t trade, and does not warre. Someone’s military strength is meaningless without their logistical permission.

• Finally, the Imperial House is not just a sovereign, but a regulator with a private army.

Therefore, on the one hand we have a galactic political ecosystem on the verge of war—with fear, interest, and honour tense enough that conflict could arise at any moment… while on the other hand we have the most precious and scarce resource: the spice. And spice’s scarcity is a type of deterrence; one akin to mutually assured destruction.

So let’s elaborate on this concept.

Mutually Assured Destruction (known as MAD) is a military strategy…

…where a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two opposing sides would result in the complete annihilation of both the attacker and defender, creating a stalemate where neither side dares to strike first due to guaranteed, devastating retaliation. Its application first started during the Cold War, and the state that results from it is considered a form of the Nash Equilibrium in which—once armed—neither side has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.

The reason? Simple: escalation risks systemic collapse. A nuclear apocalypse.

Going back to Dune, we know that the Houses cannot attack each other with spice… but they depend so heavily on it that destroying or damaging its sole source—the planet Arrakis—or the means to reach it—the Spacing Guild—would lead to MAD. Remember: the spice is their sole interest. Beside its so-called ‘geriatric properties’, this resource enables space-faring; without it, every world would become isolated, needing resources (such as food or medicine) that, without space travel, are impossible to acquire.

The Spacing Guild is, therefore, the ultimate veto player because it controls movement:

• They are the only ones who can transport goods and prevent isolation, while

• nobody can affront the cost of moving a large number of troops. The Baron has quite an enlightening conversation with his nephew about this topic:

“Have you any idea, Rabban, […] of how much the Guild charges for military transport?” […] The Baron shot a fat arm toward Rabban. “If you squeeze Arrakis for every cent it can give us for sixty years, you’ll just barely repay us!”
Rabban opened his mouth, closed it without speaking.
“Expensive,” the Baron sneered. “The damnable Guild monopoly on space would’ve ruined us if I hadn’t planned for this expense long ago.”

And in a market economy, the loss of income invites collapse. A House cut off from trade would stagnate, unable to maintain its power or fulfill its obligations. This is the fate the Great Houses of the Landsraad are determined to avoid.

Therefore, when the Baron Harkonnen attacks Duke Leto Atreides using undercover Sardaukar—the Emperor’s elite army—the other Houses just look to the other side. They are forced to accept this because spice is their sole interest, and its scarcity the main deterrent. Thus, we reach an apparent stalemate: nobody can move against Arrakis because everyone needs Arrakis, though the tensions for war (fear, interest, and honour) keep building up.

This setting is so much closer to modern geopolitics (with energy markets, shipping lanes, and sanctions) than medieval court drama.

Dune is so close to Thucydides, early game theory, and political theory because Herbert was asking some unforgiving questions: what happens when institutions become more powerful than their rulers? And what does power look like when violence is too costly to use?

The book doesn’t answer these questions, and so I won’t attempt it either. Instead, I’ll move alongside the story to touch on the next point: what happens after Duke Leto Atreides is dead, and how his son, Paul Atreides doesn’t seize power so much as triggers a phase transition.

To unravel this situation, we need to discuss two other factions.

The Bene Gesserit are an all-women order…

…operating behind an almost impenetrable screen of ritual mysticism. In practice, however, they are not ‘witches’ (as some call them) but highly trained political actors. Young girls are taken to specialised schools where they learn extreme bodily control, psychological manipulation, and combat techniques—all skills that allow them to operate undetected within the highest levels of power.

This unique organisation acts as a subtle but persistent partner to CHOAM, and has given the Padishah Emperor a permanent advisor in the form of the Reverend Mother—also known as the Truthsayer due to her abilities to recognise whether someone is lying. The Bene Gesserit are also embedded within nearly every House of the Landsraad, most often as concubines or wives—which grants them influence over two of the most sensitive mechanisms in the Imperium:

1. First, they exert control over inheritance. The Houses are patriarchal: only male heirs can rule. Since a Bene Gesserit can choose to bear a son or daughter, they plan for future marriages, alliances, and—when necessary—create succession crises. For example, the Padishah Emperor’s lack of a male heir for House Corrino is not an accident.

2. Second—and more troubling—is the Bene Gesserit’s long-term eugenics programme, aimed at producing a single individual capable of transcending their own limitations: the Kwisatz Haderach. In paper, this would a man, son of a Bene Gesserit, that would be capable of using their skills. The son of the Duke Leto Atreides, Paul Atreides, is the Kwisatz Haderach.

And here is where matters become complicated—both narratively, and morally.

At this point, we must introduce one of the Bene Gesserit’s covert branches: the Missionaria Protectiva. Its purpose is to sow adaptable systems of superstition across many cultures. This is best understood as a form of ‘religious engineering’: seeding beliefs that can later be harnessed to allow a Bene Gesserit to present herself as a mystical figure and guide a population toward the fulfilment of a manufactured prophecy.

My goal bringing this up is not to cast moral judgement, but to understand why the Missionaria Protectiva works as effectively as it does. The answer lies in political theory. Authority is legitimised through public perception, and faith is a particularly durable source of legitimacy. As Francis Fukuyama explains, “Political power ultimately rests upon recognition—the degree to which a leader […] is regarded as legitimate”4. To him, religion is one of the most stable sources of legitimacy because “it is extremely difficult to prove or falsify any given religious belief.”

Ultimately, legitimacy does not imply truth; it is belief that compels obedience.

The Fremen, then, are only one of many societies the Bene Gesserit had carefully primed through the Missionaria Protectiva.

Fremen are the native population of Arrakis, found mostly in the deep desert. They live in natural underground cave systems known as sietches, and have harnessed what the book calls “desert power”: highly specialised technology and combat skills that are brutally effective in Arrakis. One of these achievements is the famous stillsuit—a full-body outfit that recovers a person’s moisture—from sweat, tears, and exhalations—to keep them hydrated for days. Another achievement is riding the Shai-hulud—the worms that attack spice harvesters.

Fremen are fierce warriors, capable of subduing even the Saudarkar—but thanks to the Missionaria Protectiva, they are also highly superstitious. Princess Irulan, daughter of the Padishah Emperor, wrote the following about them:

With the Lady Jessica and Arrakis, the Bene Gesserit system of sowing implant-legends through the Missionaria Protectiva came to its full fruition. The wisdom of seeding the known universe with a prophecy pattern for the protection of B.G. personnel has long been appreciated, but […] [the] prophetic legends had taken on Arrakis even to the extent of adopted labels […].

Lady Jessica, Duke Leto’s concubine and Paul’s mother, is—crucially—a Bene Gesserit. Therefore, from the moment House Atreides arrives on Arrakis, and well before the Harkonnen attack, Jessica recognises the familiar markers left behind by the Missionaria Protectiva. For example: how to answer to Shadout Mapes when she showed the crysknife, why the word ‘Maker’ was sacred to Fremen, and what strange phrases (like ‘weirding woman’) may truly mean. Thus, drawing on this latent belief system, she begins to subtly reinforce the idea that Paul may be the Lisan al-Gaib: the local expression of the Kwisatz Haderach, a messianic figure long anticipated by the Fremen.

When Duke Leto is killed and Jessica and Paul are driven into the desert, this careful calibration gives way to necessity. Stranded, hunted, and fully aware of the political realities at play, they understand that only one path remains:

“We’ll find a home among the Fremen,” Paul said, “where your Missionaria Protectiva has bought us a bolt hole.”
They’ve prepared a way for us in the desert, Jessica told herself. […] She looked at Paul’s face, his eyes—the inward stare. [..] It’s the look of terrible awareness, she thought, of someone forced to the knowledge of his own mortality.
He was, indeed, no longer a child.

At this point, Paul and Jessica understand something crucial: if they are to retake Arrakis from the Harkonnen and outmanoeuvre the Emperor, they need an army capable of controlling this desert world. The Atreides forces were destroyed by the Harkonnen, and they never possessed true “desert power”… but the Fremen offer another possibility.

The next realisation follows naturally: the Missionaria Protectiva can become their primary weapon in securing the Fremen’s loyalty. After all, as historian Francis Fukuyama observed, “Ideas are extremely important to political order; it is the perceived legitimacy of the government that binds populations together and makes them willing to accept its authority.”

And what better way to win the Fremen over, than by demonstrating that Paul is the Lisan al-Gaib—the messiah sent to liberate them? Such a claim would grant him immediate legitimacy, allowing him to supersede existing political authority within Fremen society.

History, of course, suggests that such legitimacy is rarely without consequenced. But since that reckoning happens on the sequels…

Let’s study how Paul and Jessica harness the Lisan al-Gaib myth.

After the Harkonnen’s attack, and the subsequent assassination of Duke Leto, Paul and Jessica are stranded on the desert. They decide to find the Fremen and begin marching south—until Stilgar, a Fremen leader, encounters them.

Jessica acts decisively. First, she presents herself as a ‘weirding woman’—the local term for a Sayyadina, women with some Bene Gesserit skills—by rapidly subduing Stilgar in combat; then, she draws upon the legends planted by the Missionaria Protectiva to anticipate his expectations and language. Through this careful performance of legitimacy, she secures the Fremen’s acceptance of both herself and Paul into Stilgar’s sietch.

Let me show you some examples of what they do. The first excerpt is when, after defeating Stilgar, she demands they’re taking to his sietch:

Jessica sighed, thinking: So our Missionaria Protectiva even planted religious safety valves all through this hell hole. Ah, well… it’ll help, and that’s what it was meant to do. She said: “The seeress who brought you the legend, she gave it under the binding of karama and ijaz, the miracle and the inimitability of the prophecy—this I know. Do you wish a sign?”
[Stilgar’s] nostrils flared in the moonlight. “We cannot tarry for the rites,” he whispered.
Jessica recalled a chart Kynes had shown her while arranging emergency escape routes. How long ago it seemed. There had been a place called ‘Sietch Tabr’ on the chart and beside the notation: ‘Stilgar.’
“Perhaps when we get to Sietch Tabr,” she said.
The revelation shook him, and Jessica thought: If only he knew the tricks we use! She must’ve been good, that Bene Gesserit of the Missionaria Protectiva. These Fremen are beautifully prepared to believe in us.

As you can see, there is no mysticism to a Bene Gesserit so-called ‘power’—just highly trained recall and observation skills. In addition, she only had to remember what she knew of the Missionaria Protectiva, say the right thing… and Stilgar believed she was a ‘weirding woman’, a priestess.

Here we have another case, in which Stilgar explicitly asks her for evidence that she is a priestess and the mother of the Lisan al-Gaib—and Jessica recognises it, thinking that: “He’s an honorable man. He wants a sign from me, but he’ll not tip fate by telling me the sign.” Thus, she pulls again from the Missionaria Protectiva:

She knew the cant of the Missionaria Protectiva, knew how to adapt the techniques of legend and fear and hope to her emergency needs. […] Stilgar cleared his throat.
“Ibn qirtaiba,” she said, “as far as the spot where the dust ends.” She stretched out an arm from her robe, seeing Stilgar’s eyes go wide. She heard a rustling of many robes in the background. “I see a…Fremen with the book of examples,” she intoned. “He reads to al-Lat, the sun whom he defied and subjugated. He reads to the Sadus of the Trial […]”
Back to her from the inner cave’s shadows came a whispered response of many voices: “Their works have been overturned.”
“The fire of God mount over thy heart,” she said. And she thought: Now, it goes in the proper channel.
“Bi-la kaifa,” they answered.
In the sudden hush, Stilgar bowed to her. “Sayyadina,” he said. “If the Shai-hulud grant, then you may yet pass within to become a Reverend Mother.”

Not only did Jessica leverage the myths engineered by the Bene Gesserit, but she managed to convince a political leader to make her the next Reverend Mother—namely, the leader of the Fremen religious order. There are many more examples of this, including moments in which Paul harnesses myth in the same way… but I gather these two examples were enough for the so-called ‘usefulness’ of the Missionaria Protectiva to become evident.

Now we must return to the spice itself.

We have so far established that spice functions both as a highly effective anti-ageing substance and as a necessity for space travel. The Fremen, however, are well aware of a third property: spice is hallucinogenic and, when consumed in sufficient quantities, grants prescience. Paul—the ‘result’ of the Bene Gesserit’s long-running eugenics programme—appears uniquely predisposed to these prescient effects, an aptitude that neatly reinforces the engineered myth of the Lisan al-Gaib.

This has two central consequences:

1. There are moments in which Paul sees the future consequences of his actions—many of which come to pass, not because of mythology, but because of how he and Jessica leveraged the Missionaria Protectiva. Consider the scene when Stilgar asks Paul to select a name:

“Now, what name of manhood do you choose for us to call you openly?” Stilgar asked.
“How do you call among you the little mouse, the mouse that jumps?” Paul asked, remembering the pop-hop of motion at Tuono Basin. He illustrated with one hand.
“We call that one muad’dib,” Stilgar said.
Paul swallowed. He […] remembered the vision of fanatic legions following the green and black banner of the Atreides, pillaging and burning across the universe in the name of their prophet Muad’Dib.

2. Using that prescience, Paul selects what to do—and, most importantly—he knows what the Fremen need him to do next to demonstrate that he is, in fact, the Lisan al-Gaib.

With these so-called ’tools’ at hand, Paul spends nearly four years following a carefully chosen path, steadily reinforcing the way the Fremen perceive him. Alongside Jessica, he teaches the Weirding Way—the Bene Gesserit’s hand-to-hand combat discipline—turning select Fremen into a so-called ‘death squad’. Then, he then uses his knowledge of Atreides military strategy to lead sustained raids against Harkonnen and smuggler supplies, until, two years on, even Rabban Harkonnen comes to dread the name of Muad’Dib.

The culmination comes a year later, when Paul rides a Shai-hulud—one of the giant sandworms. Among the Fremen, this act marks adulthood and complete inclusion within the tribe; it is a feat no outsider can achieve… and one that Paul-Muad’Dib’s followers were demanding as the ’next step’ for the Lisan al-Gaib. Consider what another Sayyadina tells Jessica—now Reverend Mother of the Fremen:

“What is it?” Jessica demanded.
“There is word from the sand,” Tharthar said. “[Muad’Dib] meets the maker for his test… it is today. The young men say he cannot fail, he will be a sandrider by nightfall. The young men […] say they will raise the cry then. They say they will force him to call out Stilgar and assume command of the tribes.”

Paul, of course, knew this and was prepared to leverage the consequences. When the Fremen soldiers pushed him to challenge Stilgar to death and become the sietch’s leader, Paul refused—and did so while owning the prophecy:

One of Paul’s companions, boulder than the others, glanced across at Stilgar, said: “Are you going to call him out, Maud’Dib? Now’s the time for sure. They’ll think you a coward if you—”
“Who dares call me coward?” Paul demanded. His hand flashed to his crysknife hilt. […] “You think it’s time I called out Stilgar and changed the leadership of the troops!” Before they could respond, Paul hurled his voice at them in anger: “Do you think the Lisan al-Gaib that stupid?”
There was stunned silence.
He’s accepting the religious mantle, Jessica thought.

Paul didn’t want to replace Stilgar because his goals were far more ambitious than simply ruling one sietch: he wanted Arrakis as the rightful fief of the Atreides, and his House to become the Imperial House—effectively displacing the current Padishah Emperor from House Corrino.

Remember what we established before, using Fukuyama’s theory: becoming the Lisan al-Gaib granted Paul immediate legitimacy, allowing him to supersede existing political authority within Fremen society. He was a prophet, not a mere ruler—and fanatics follow prophets almost blindly and without question.

So Paul speech continues, and through it, he uses the Voice—a Bene Gesserit technique that allows the wielder to speak in a way that cannot be disobeyed. By then, the crowd was so overwhelmed that this happened:

“This was my father’s ducal signet,” he said. “I swore never to wear it again until I was ready to lead my troops over all of Arrakis and claim it as my rightful fief.” He put the ring on his finger, clenched his fist.
Utter stillness gripped the cavern.
“Who rules here?” Paul asked. He raised his fist. “I rule here! I rule on every square inch of Arrakis! This is my ducal fief whether the Emperor says yea or nay! He gave it to my father and it comes to me through my father!” Paul lifted himself onto his toes, settled back to his heels. He studied the crowd, feeling their temper. […]
Beside Paul, Stilgar stirred, looked at him questioningly.
“Will I subtract from our strength when we need it most?” Paul asked. “I am your ruler, and I say to you that it is time we stopped killing off our best men and started killing our real enemies—the Harkonnens!”
In one blurred motion, Stilgar had his crysknife out and pointed over the heads of the throng. “Long live Duke Paul-Muad’Dib!” he shouted.
A deafening roar filled the cavern, echoed and re-echoed. They were cheering and chanting: “Ya hya chouhada! Muad’Dib! Muad’Dib! Muad’Dib! Ya hya chouhada!”
Jessica translated it to herself: “Long live the fighters of MuadDib!” The scene she and Paul and Stilgar had cooked up between them had worked as they’d planned.

As you can see, charisma is not improvised but deliberately staged. The speech, like the prophecy itself, was an artefact assembled with care.

Paul was not just receiving fanaticism; alongside Jessica, he manufactured the conditions for it, knowingly and skilfully. Therefore, when he declared his intentions—to reclaim his birthright as Duke of Arrakis and to lead them as the Lisan al-Gaib—the Fremen did not resist or question him. They applauded because, by their own standards, Paul had already become exactly what he claimed to be.

Yet to fulfill all ‘prophecies’ of the Missionaria Protectiva, Paul had one final task:

…he had to survive drinking the Water of Life. This poisonous liquid was produced by drowning a Shai-hulud. Reverend Mothers—and Bene Gesserits like Jessica—possessed the ability to metabolise and neutralise its toxins through mental control of their own chemistry. No man had ever attempted this before, but the Bene Gesserit’s eugenics programme was designed to produce a candidate who’d survive this test.

Consider what Princess Irulan wrote about this:

Paul-Muad’Dib lay alone in the Cave of Birds beneath the kiswa hangings of an inner cell. And he lay as one dead, caught up in the revelation of the Water of Life, his being translated beyond the boundaries of time by the poison that gives life. Thus was the prophecy made true that the Lisan al-Gaib might be both dead and alive.

Yet after neutralising the Water of Life, Paul was overwhelmed by the prescient vision granted by the spice. For three weeks he lay in a deathlike state, while Jessica struggled to revive him. Let us see what happens after Paul wakes up near Jessica and Chani, his concubine:

Chani felt a draft [of air] against her cheek, turned to see the hangings close.
“It was Otheym,” Paul said. “He was listening.”
Accepting the words, Chani was touched by some of the prescience that haunted Paul, and she knew a thing-yet-to-be as though it already had occurred. Otheym would speak of what he had seen and heard. Others would spread the story until it was a fire over the land. Paul-Muad’Dib is not as other men, they would say. There can be no more doubt. He is a man, yet he sees through to the Water of Life in the way of a Reverend Mother. He is indeed the Lisan al-Gaib.

From this point onward, doubt ceases to matter. Paul has done what no man was meant to do, and the distinction between prophecy and proof collapses. To the Fremen, he is no longer merely fulfilling the signs of the Lisan al-Gaib—he is the Lisan al-Gaib, the Kwisatz Haderach. Thus, the book drops all pretense as the characters begin to refer to Paul-Muad’Dib as capitalised ‘Him.’

Yet soon enough, the prescience granted to him through the spice allows him to realise something: a large-scale attack was coming to Arrakis. The reason?

The political tensions in the galaxy have escalated, and the two key deterrents are about to crumble.

After the Harkonnens assasinated Duke Leto Atreides, they believed Paul dead and left Rabban Harkonnen—the Baron’s nephew—in charge. However, due to Paul-Muad’Dib’s constant attacks, Rabban was consistently unable to meet the quota of spice he had to export. To understand the impact of this, we must remember what Duke Leto said:

”[…] think of the enormous proportion of those profits dependent upon a single product—the spice. Imagine what would happen if something should reduce spice production.”

As a result, the name of Muad’Dib—shouted by the Fremen during their raids—reached the CHOAM Company, introducing a new and very specific fear: the possibility that the flow of spice might be disrupted. Since all the Great Houses of the Landsraad—including the Imperial House of the Padishah Emperor—were shareholders in CHOAM, they had a direct interest both in the acquisition of spice and in the consequences its scarcity would have for their income.

At this point, we must also consider the Spacing Guild. Due to Rabban’s inability to meet his quota, and the Fremen’s raids on the smugglers, their spice reserves were considerably reduced—and no spice meant no space travel. No space travel, in turn, meant isolated worlds and generalised scarcity.

This threat on spice—a key galactic interest—forced all these actors to forego the threat of MAD.

As established earlier, the prospect of spice scarcity functioned as the primary deterrent, since its absence assured destruction through:

• (a) a catastrophic loss of income, and

• (b) the inability to trade for off-world necessities.

Once Muad’Dib’s raids made that scarcity a credible threat, the available strategic choices narrowed dramatically. The Great Houses could either accept the gradual disappearance of spice, or attack—despite the risks—in hopes of securing at least some region of Arrakis from which to extract it themselves.

Remember this: deterrence (and particularly mutually assured destruction) depends on a cost–benefit analysis that demonstrate that any act of aggression is clearly irrational. In this case, however, both action and inaction carried catastrophic costs… except the former offered a chance to survive. From that standpoint, war was the rational choice.

However, if you recall, the Spacing Guild provided not just transport, but both market access and troops transportation. It was the enabler of off-world wars, excepts their fares were outrageously expensive—their cost also acted as a deterrent in itself, for few Houses could afford it.

Thus, when details of the spice scarcity spread across the Landsraad, and war became the only rational choice, the Spacing Guild—interested more than anyone else on the spice—simply reduced their troop transport fares to remove that last deterrent. Then, the expected happened: all the Houses rushed to acquire troop transports, and sail towards Arrakis. War, at this point, was inevitable.

Consider this dialogue between Jessica and Paul:

Jessica tried to swallow in a dry throat, said: “For what are they waiting?”
Paul looked at her. “For the Guild’s permission to land. The Guild will strand on Arrakis any force that lands without permission.”
“The Guild’s protecting us?” Jessica asked.
“Protecting us! The Guild itself caused this by spreading tales about what we do here and by reducing troop transport fares to a point where even the poorest Houses are up there now waiting to loot us.”

As you see, the Spacing Guild had control over landing—and allowing only the Harkonnens and the Imperial House to set foot in Arrakis fulfilled two different purposes:

1. First, the Spacing Guild held direct power over everyone else. To those stuck in space, preventing them from landing was a reminder of who was in charge: not the Landsraad, and not the Emperor, but the Guild’s Navigators. Meanwhile, to those on Arrakis’ surface, the orbiting force was a threat of destruction.

2. Second, it sought to minimise the damage—not to the people of Arrakis, but to the planet’s desert, since those were the sole source of spice in the known universe.

At this point, a war for spice seemed unstoppable…

—except that Paul-Muad’Dib knew exactly how to manipulate the Padishah Emperor: by letting him know (through returned Sardaukar prisoners) that Duke Paul Atreides, rightful steward of Arrakis, was actually alive. The book doesn’t show how the Padishah Emperor takes the news, but Paul explains the two possible path of actions he had:

Paul spoke to the [Fremen] at the telescope. “Watch the flagpole atop the Emperor’s ship. If my flag is raised there—”
“It will not be,” Gurney said.
Paul saw the puzzled frown on Stilgar’s face, said: “If the Emperor recognized my claim, he’ll signal by restoring the Atreides flag to Arrakis. We’ll use the second plan then, move only against the Harkonnens. The Sardaukar will stand aside and let us settle the issue between ourselves.”

Remember the third reason for war: honour as legalities. If the Padishah Emperor responded to Paul’s claim by raising the Atreides flag—and thus supporting him—then the laws of kanly (the legalised feud system of the Landsraad) came into play.

The Emperor, however, feared the Atreides even more than before, and so chose something different. I will read the excerpt.

“They’re sending a new flag up on the tall ship,” the watcher said. “The flag is yellow…with a black and red circle in the center.”
“There’s a subtle piece of business,” Paul said. “[It’s] the CHOAM Company flag.”[…]
“A subtle piece of business indeed,” Gurney said. “Had he sent up the Atreides banner, he’d have had to live by what that meant. Too many observers about. He could’ve signaled with the Harkonnen flag on his staff—a flat declaration [of war] that’d have been. But, no—he sends up the CHOAM rag. He’s telling the people up there…” Gurney pointed toward space. “…where the profit is. [The Emperor is] saying he doesn’t care if it’s an Atreides here or not.”

After all, in a market economy, profit is all that matters.

However, there is something the Emperor doesn’t know: Paul knows how to destroy the spice:

“The Water of Death,” he said. “It’d be a chain reaction.” He pointed to the floor. “Spreading death among the little makers, killing a vector of the life cycle that includes the spice and the makers. Arrakis will become a true desolation—without spice or maker. […] He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it,” Paul said. “We can destroy the spice.”

“He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it.” It is a crude reality check, because…

In this universe, destroying the spice would be mutually assured destruction. Quite literally, MADness.

Therefore a battle ensues. The Lisan al-Gaib leads worm-riding Fremen against the Padishah Emperor and crashes his Sardaukar forces.

A small parley is set, and in that conversation Paul reveals his ability to destroy the spice. The Guildsmen immediately understand the peril that Paul’s knowledge poses to the current galactic society. Consider this exchange:

“Let us talk this over privately,” the taller Guildsman said. “I’m sure we can come to some compromise that is—”
“Send the message to your people over Arrakis,” Paul said. “I grow tired of this argument. […] The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it. You’ve agreed I have that power. We are not here to discuss or to negotiate or to compromise. You will obey my orders or suffer the immediate consequences!”

Thanks to Paul, the original deterrence returns in full-force. This time not as scarcity, but as complete disappearance. Paul’s control over the spice is the ultimate form of mutually assured destruction—and it leaves the Guild and the Imperial House without negotiating power. After all, Paul-Muad’Dib not only controls the spice, but also the fanatical legions of Fremen fighting for its protection.

The very same legions that just destroyed the Padishah Emperor’s Sardaukar forces.

This comes near the end of the book, but Herbert is explicit about how matters are resolved. The Emperor is forced to transfer all his CHOAM shares to Paul, formally consolidating his control over the spice. What had previously rested on the threat of destruction is now legalised since Paul becomes the single largest shareholder of the Company. The Emperor then permits him to marry Princess-Royal Irulan, allowing him to claim the Padishah Emperor’s throne through marriage, while simultaneously keeping the fief over Arrakis—where Paul remains the Lisan al-Gaib, wielding absolute authority over the Fremen.

This, in turn, activates the final mechanism of the engineered prophecy: Paul has indeed freed the Fremen from their oppressors, and the Lisan al-Gaib will now lead them. With control of the spice, the knowledge required to destroy it, and a fanatical army at his command, Paul ascends the galactic throne.

It is a full-stack theory of power—and, crucially, none of this requires hatred.

What Paul did is not racism: it is instrumental rationality applied to faith. It is important to stress that the Fremen are never portrayed as inferior.

Their technology is admired, their ecological knowledge of Arrakis is unmatched, their military effectiveness is feared even by the Sardaukar, and their “desert power” is explicitly envied by House Atreides. For example, Duncan Idaho, one of Duke Leto’s lieutenants said that the Fremen “were to be admired,” while Duke Leto wanted them as allies because “Fremen were a deep thorn in the Harkonnen side, that the extent of their ravages was a carefully guarded secret.”

What Paul and Jessica did, then, was not dehumanisation but instrumentalisation. They recognised the Fremen’s strength and agency, and consciously channelled it through a framework of legitimacy that served their own political survival. From his meeting with Stilgar and onwards, both Paul and Jessica dominated the Fremen because they understood their strengths, their social structures, the myths planted by the Missionaria Protectiva… and leveraged them.

That makes Paul’s rise feel less like colonial racism and more like cold realpolitik.

And that brings another chilling realisation: oppression in Dune does not require belief in inferiority—just narrative control, and a willingness to treat meaning itself as a resource.

The truth is that Paul was not a benevolent savior corrupted by power. He was a political actor who discovered that belief was the most efficient legitimisation mechanism available to acquire the so-called “desert power” he needed to retake Arrakis and overthrow the Emperor. In turn, the Fremen were not fooled because they were naïve or lesser—they were mobilised because their existing cosmology had already been engineered for it. Paul simply stepped into a system designed to turn belief into obedience.

Except that such systems have consequences no one can ultimately contain. But I will leave that open, until we can discuss the sequel books.

All in all, Dune is a thematically rich book—so here is a short list of other themes that enable further discussions:

• Herbert himself revealed he modelled CHOAM as the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and the water scarcity of Arrakis as a direct analog to oil scarcity. If you read all the economic conflicts using that perspective, you’ll likely find an environmentalist angle that critiques the resource economy of the ’60s and ’70s.

• Likewise, and staying in the fictional world, you could analyse how an environment’s resources—as seen in Arrakis—affect society to the point of driving its culture, beliefs, technology, and actions. This could lead you to see Dune as cli-fi: namely, climate fiction.

• Dune can also an examination of the pitfalls of absolute prediction, both regarding facts and evolution. To analyse this, you’d need to dive deeper into the Bene Gesserit’s plans.

• The fact that Paul truly becomes the Lisan al-Gaib when he usurps the Reverend Mother’s power does enable a discussion on how patriarchal societies validate male figures by appropriating female power. It is a sharp and uncomfortable angle, but certainly rich for discussion.

• There is also commentary on data science presented through the Mentats: the human computers of this universe. In modern times, there is one particular saying: “garbage in, garbage out.” It implies that biased data (“garbage in”) produces biased results (“garbage out”)… and Hawat’s character arc, the Atreides Mentat, can be read through this lens.

So many themes, so little time to discuss. Who knows, there may be another Dune episode in the works.

For now, if you enjoyed my breakdown of politics and authority, the world of my recently released book—The Omens of War—was also developed using some of the ideas I presented in this podcast. You can find it linked below.

Thanks for listening, and happy reading.

“Let’s be honest, we really don’t care about the plot. All we’re here for is the characters.”

I stopped scrolling.

That sentence… bothered me, but I had so many unpolished ideas about it that I chose not to engage and move on—yet my concerns lingered, nagging at the back of my mind. They resurfaced whenever I saw a Goodreads reviews of the same kind:

• “…characters are more empty and flat than their supposed hypnotic state” (1-star review of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer).

• “He went from retarded to genius yet all he could do was to go on and on about his mommy issues.” (1-star review of Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes).

• “The main character was an empty shell […]” (1-star review of Embassytown, by China Miéville).

• “I legit have no idea what I just read but nice words yknow.” (2-star review of The Garden of Forking Paths, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges).

These reactions are not aberrations; they are symptomatic—pointing to an understandable, yet often incomplete, response.

Truth be told, reading is subjective. For readers who seek emotional immersion, phrases like “I couldn’t care less” or “I can’t relate” represent genuine and honest reactions. For those specific readers, the book in question may have not done its job.

However, “I couldn’t relate” is not synonymous with “this book is bad.” Rather, it reveals more about the reader’s expectations, experiences, or reading habits than about the craft of the book itself. Many great works are intentionally uncomfortable, distant, or centred on lives that particular readers may never share.

Take Philip K. Dicks A Scanner Darkly as an example. This novel explores the lives of drug addicts teetering on the edge of overdose, told from their fractured perspectives. Here, reality is unstable, conversations meander, and events often defy straightforward logic—why would a cop’s head transform into a roach? (That’s precisely the point.) PKD wrote it to convey the experiences of people he knew in real life… but to non-addicts—people with their logic and reasoning intact, with their senses not distorted by drugs—the characters in this book are unrelatable:

• “I didn’t really connect with any of the characters. They felt artificial and shallow.” (1-star review in Goodreads).

• “If Dick was trying to put the reader into the mind of what a drug user thinks and feels, then he succeeded. Unfortunately, this makes for a terrible read.” (1-star review in Goodreads).

• “I didn’t find the characters nor scattered plot compelling […]” (another 1-star review in Goodreads).

It would seem that “relating” is less about true empathy for the character—and more about mirroring oneself.

On the one hand, empathy requires being curious and accepting about someone else’s interiority, even when it is alien, uncomfortable, or opaque. On the other hand, mirroring is a role-playing expectation: readers want characters to react exactly as they would, so that actions—even if unexplained—feel logical and predictable. If that doesn’t happen, then the plot or secondary characters must clearly label and explain everything.

The problem is that if everyone only rated books highly when the characters mirrored themselves, we would lose literature’s ability to expand empathy beyond our own narrow experience. When this expectation becomes dominant, literature collapses into familiar psychologies, known and ‘accepted’ moral arcs, limited and ‘common’ emotional vocabularies.

To further the issue, platforms like Goodreads and BookTube reward an immediate affective response… rather than reflective judgement. A star rating is quick, emotional, and social, so that a review saying “I didn’t connect” becomes a socially safe criticism: it sounds personal rather than not engaged with the text, it doesn’t require analysis, and—worst of all—it cannot be argued with.

This becomes more frustrating when “relatability” is treated as the primary measure of quality.

The truth is that not every book is meant to feel familiar, comfortable, and known. Some books are meant to be a window, or even a confrontation… and “connection” may not always be the point.

When complex or different characters are penalised simply for being unfamiliar, and when “I didn’t connect” replaces any discussion of writing, structure, themes, or intent, then “I can’t relate” polices what’s considered ‘acceptable’ literature. It does so through attrition. Books needing patient, interpretive work, aesthetic distance, and/or curiosity about unfamiliar modes of thought… simply fall into the invisible abyss of books that don’t “rack up” likes and impressions on social media.

That quote that sparked this essay represents the mindset that smooths literature into the limited known. Plot is not just ‘what happens’ in a story; plot is causality, structure, philosophical tensions, the ideas driving the setting—latter being especially true for speculative fiction. To say “we really don’t care about the plot” is really to say “we don’t care about the meaning existing beyond character affect.”

This narrows literature into mere emotional consumption, foregoing the inquiry it enables. A book becomes valuable only insofar as it produces a certain feeling of recognition.

Take Borges, for example.

His work is abstract, cerebral, emotional cool. He didn’t care in psychological intimacy, he didn’t aim for readers to feel mirrored by his characters. He often used his stories to make a covert social criticism (the case of Death & The Compass), or even as a literary response to other authors (e.g., There Are More Things is a critique to Lovecraft).

Borges’ writing defined a new genre. He inspired genre-making authors—yet by the dominant Goodreads metric, much of his work is “confusing”, “unrelatable”, “inexplicable”, “the weirdest dream”, or worse: “Read the Wikipedia first, drop some acid, then attempt this story.” (taken from a 1-star review of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius).

Borges’ value is around the intellectual ‘vertigo’ caused by peeling layers upon layers of philosophical and metaphysical implications. If “relatability” were the sole criterion, then Borges, Kafka, Italo Calvino, Claris Lispector, W.G. Sebald… would all be downgraded as failures.

The danger isn’t that just some books get bad ratings. The danger is what readers are losing because of it.

Curiosity. Tolerance for opacity. Comfort with distance.

Trust in literature that doesn’t immediately please.

Writers, sensing this, write “to market” and preemptively polish down difficulty, abstraction, or strangeness to avoid being labelled as “unrelatable” or “difficult.”

In this way, a society can end up censoring itself—by unlearning how to read beyond immediate recognition.

If you haven’t seen this edition, the table of content looks like this:

Curiously—and quite unlike me—I realised I had never read the Forewords to either collection. Thinking they might offer a hint as to which story to pick up next, I sat down and read them both.

The Foreword to the collection The Garden of Forking Paths—which contains most of the stories I’ve been discussing on the podcast—was rather unamusing: a brief summary of themes and motifs, barely a page long. But the prologue to Artifices opened with a line that left me staring at the wall:

Although less clumsily executed, the stories in this volume are no different from those in the volume that preceded them.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

The Circular Ruins.

The Library of Babel.

The Lottery of Babylon.

The Garden of Forking Paths.

“Clumsily Executed.”

It took me a few moments to recover from the shock—not only because I admire Borges as a writer, but because of what that sentence implied. We are talking about an author whose work helped define an entire mode of fiction, and about short stories that reshaped twentieth-century literature and that, nearly eighty years after their publication, we continue to read with undiminished astonishment.

But don’t take my word for it.

Writing for the BBC1, Jane Ciabattari noted that “Jorge Luis Borges’ mysterious stories broke new ground and transformed literature forever,” adding that “Borges’ influence […] [is] so deep it that has become difficult to name a major contemporary writer who hasn’t been touched by it.”

His reach extended far beyond literary circles. In 1965, John Updike wrote that the belated North American recognition of Borges marked the arrival of an intelligence in fiction more commonly associated with philosophy or physics—a judgment later echoed by critics such as Michel Foucault, George Steiner, and Harold Bloom2.

Even William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and pioneer of the cyberpunk genre, described reading Borges3 as if he were “installing something that exponentially increased what one day would be called bandwidth.” In an interview with Publishers Weekly4, Gibson noted that:

Gibson: I think of [Borges] as one of the first writers I read as a young science fiction reader who suggested to me that there were ways into a much broader field of thoroughly imaginative literature. […]

Interviewer: Do you try to do the same thing in your own work?

Gibson: In some modest way I’ve definitely aspired to it.

And yet this same writer, whose work altered the trajectory of modern fiction, looked back on these stories and described them as “clumsily executed.”

And it wasn’t the first time he did it either.

Borges was actually quite self-deprecating about his work, going as far as to go on record stating that his earlier short stories were “written by someone else.”5

Again, that wasn’t all of it. In On Writing, Borges confessed:

I know very little of my own work by heart, because I don’t like what I write. In fact, […] I know all the chinks and all the padding, I know that a particular line is weak, and so on.

And in an interview with Ronal Christ, in July 19666, Borges took great care on critiquing his own early work, and calling it “the work of a young writer” and even sneering Death & The Compass:

As to the vocabulary, the first thing a young writer, at least in this country, sets out to do is to show his readers that he possesses a dictionary, that he knows all the synonyms; so we get, for example, in one line, red, then we get scarlet, then we get other different words, more or less, for the same color: purple.

Those comments on his own stories… are clinical. No hesitation, no remorse, not even hatred. Borges did not come across as unsure, but as unimpressed about his “younger writer persona.”

And truth be told, that calm is familiar to anyone who has spent time writing. The longer one works on a piece, the more clearly one sees its problems: the compromises, the shortcuts, the places where intention outran execution—and the public seldom sees this; they only note the finished object, without awareness of the intention behind it.

Yet at this point, we must ask ourselves one question:

What can we learn from this?

One truth we may prefer to avoid: that self-judgment and historical value do not share the same scale.

As readers—and especially as writers—we tend to assume that an author is the best judge of their own work… but this anecdote from Borges suggests otherwise. He was a genre-defining writer, admired by critics and by other genre-defining authors alike, referring to his most enduring stories as “clumsily executed.”

If Borges could look at stories that would reshape 20th-century literature and think “clumsily executed” with that clinical, analytic style… then we know that confidence is not a reliable metric, that self-doubt is not a diagnostic, and that internal judgment does not scale with external value.

What we can learn, instead, is this:

1. We must be harsh anyways, because that’s the only way we can grow. If you read the “newer” Borges’ short stories—including The South, which he considered his best work—you may notice a leaner style, a more refined way to present themes. Borges grew as a writer because he learned something from his mistakes: each was a necessary, and unavoidable, “stepping stone.”

2. But harshness can become distorted because perspective erodes over time. How many times we chastise ourselves saying, “I should’ve known better!” … but could we, truly? More often than not we assess our past work with the lens of experience that writing has granted us—and we hold our past selves to standards we had no way of meeting.

3. Self-doubt is not evidence of mediocrity, it often accompanies seriousness. If we are serious about our writing, then “maturing” as writers becomes an implicit goal—and there is no better way of learning that looking at our mistakes. Self-awareness has always been essential to growth. The key is not letting it become deadly.

Keep writing, then. Keep critiquing your own work.

And remember it’s not a measure of quality or impact. Self-critique is just a tool—and one we must keep in check.

So keep trying. Keep writing. No matter what your inner critic says.

Remember: self-judgement and impact do not share the same scale.

Ursula K. Le Guin, a master of idea-driven sci-fi and fantasy, once said in a Guardian review1:

When everything in a story is imaginary and much is unfamiliar, there’s far too much to explain and describe, so one of the virtuosities of SF is the invention of box-words that the reader must open to discover a trove of meaning and implication. The imaginative leaps involved in decoding such inventions and appreciating their wit can give a reader much pleasure.

I have to admit to love her choice of “box-word” as a definition. It emphasises what neology is at its core: a puzzle box the reader has to decipher to fully grasp the themes, the setting, and the novel that contains it… but it also implies complexity. After all, although deciphering a neologism can often be an intuitive process—for example, the famous stormlight from Brandon Sanderson’s series—more often than not, a reader is asked to mull over it until the meaning becomes clear. This ‘mulling’ can lead, in equal parts, to immersion or estrangement.

The reason?

Neology is more than a pretty combination of epic-sounding words—they carry meaning and represent the world the author created. Therefore, their craft must be precise and intentional: enough for the new word to be understandable on its own or—at the very least—inferable from the context.

So how do we craft useful neologisms? How do we introduce them? How much is too much?

Those are great questions, and this essay aims to answer them—or, for the last one, provide guidelines you can apply in your own writing. I’ll explore what makes neologisms such powerful storytelling tools, dive into fascinating examples from specific books, and finish with some guidelines.

Read more

Not long ago, I read Flatlands by Edwin A. Abbott. I spent half of my reading time laughing at its incisive social satire, and the other half pondering how many of its critiques are still valid. Yet after I published y review on GoodReads (here, if you’re interested), I encountered a few angry ones calling the book misogynist, classist, and more… and, honestly, the book’s protagonist—a two-dimensional Square—is, indeed, all of those labels are more because the underlying satire needed him to be so.

Yet encountering those reviews led me to ponder one question: why are satires such double-edged swords?

Today’s essay is a reflection on satires: their difference to parodies, why they are tricky, and how digital and social media complicate satire consumption in modern times.

Read more

Let’s get this book undone.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Season 3 of Books Undone. I’m your host, Livia J. Elliot, and today I’ll be discussing Embassytown by China Miéville. To me, this was an exceptional read, focused on language and communication, and with an underlying socio-political commentary. It is both a meditation on language and an act of linguistic imagination itself; a novel that demonstrates what words can build, and what they can destroy.

This episode focuses on two central threads in Embassytown: language, and the ways it shapes (and is shaped by) society. Before we dive in, allow me a few quick notes:

• Spoilers ahead. I’ll be discussing major elements of Embassytown, though I won’t spoil other Miéville novels.

• This is one interpretation. What follows is my reading of the book’s themes. Miéville may have meant something entirely different, and you may see it differently too—which is, of course, part of the fun.

Now, let us cover some trivia about the author and the book.

After that, I’ll introduce the setting, present my hypothesis, and follow through with the analysis.

China Miéville is a British speculative fiction writer…

—and also a literary critic. He holds the record for the most Arthur C. Clarke Award wins (three), and has—additionally—won the British Fantasy Award, Hugo Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Awards. He was also nominated to the Nebula Awards, Bram Stokers, a Philip K. Dick Award special citation, the Kitschies Award, among others. In 2015, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Curiously, he didn’t start as a writer. In 1994, he graduated as a BA in social anthropology from Clare College (Cambridge), and went to pursue postgraduate education. In 2001, he gained both a master’s degree and PhD in international law from the London School of Economics, continuing with a Frank Knox fellowship at Harvard University.

He first published a non-fiction work based on his own PhD thesis, and then moved to writing fiction—yet his fiction has never deviated too far away from political commentary. In an interview with Long Sunday (2009)1 Miéville stated that:

I grew up reading genre, and though I’ve become really interested in it at a theoretical level, at a gut basis I’m interested in genre because that’s what was formative for me, as a reader. I think that what tends to interest me is the unexamined political assumptions of genre—or to be fair I should say ‘usually’ unexamined, because there’s plenty of self-conscious revisionist genre out there.

During interviews, Miéville has listed M. John Harrison, Michael Moorcook, Gene Wolfe, and Ursula K. Le Guin as his influences. He’s also made references to Russian writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and Andrei Platonov. He is an incredibly prolific writer, publishing novels, novellas, short story collections, comic books, and even one co-written children’s picture book.

Today we are discussing Embassytown, published in 2011

It is a standalone novel oriented towards sci-fi, and including Miéville on-brand new-weirdness. It won both the Locus Award and the Premio Ignotus, and was also nominated to the following awards: Arthur C. Clarke, BSFA, Hugo, John W. Campbell Memorial, The Kitschies (Red Tentacle), the Seuin, and the Nebula.

This book is about language, and so the author relies on fictional language as a way of building the world. These neologisms often hide references to books or authors that may have influenced him. Quite interesting, Ursula K. Le Guin—one of the author’s own inspirations—reviewed Embassytown for The Guardian2, and wrote the following:

When everything in a story is imaginary and much is unfamiliar, there’s far too much to explain and describe, so one of the virtuosities of SF is the invention of box-words that the reader must open to discover a trove of meaning and implication. […] Miéville sets the bar rather high […] but most of his neologisms come clear with a nice shock of revelation.

Let us begin by presenting the setting

The story is a framed narrative, told by a human woman named Avice Benner Cho. She was born in the city of Embassytown—the main human settlement on the planet Arieka, which sits at the far edge of known and travelled space. Although Avice is important to the plot, the setting itself demands just as much attention.

Embassytown, the city, is—and at the same time is not—an independent settlement. It sits on the periphery of the indigenes’ main city and is enclosed within a vast engineered atmosphere bubble known as aeoli breath; within it, humans can breathe normally and without aid.

Throughout the book, the indigenes—the planet’s native species—are referred to in two ways. ‘Hosts’ is the respectful name Embassytowners use; everywhere else, they’re simply called Ariekei or Ariekene. The Hosts are not humanoid, and several aspects of their physiology shaped the development of their native tongue. In particular:

• They have a limb called a fanwing, which serves as their hearing organ. Their other limb, the giftwing, is used for grasping objects.

• They also have two mouths. Each mouth has its own shape and produces a distinct class of sounds.

As a result, when Hosts speak their native tongue—called Language, capitalised—they produce two simultaneous vocal lines: Cut (from the upper mouth) and Turn (from the lower). Language has no written form, but humans represent it using a fractional notation, with Cut as the numerator and Turn as the denominator: ​

Yet this perfectly synchronised duet of voices is more than sound: it is thought made words.

But what does this mean? ‘Thought made words’?

Early on the book, Avice recounts one anecdote of humanity’s first landing in Arieka; that story-within-the-story will lead us to understanding why I described Language as “thought made words.” As Avice tells us, that first mission into Arieka sent a crew called ACL—which stands for Accelerated Contact Linguistics. These people are defined as:

[…] a specialty crossbred from pedagogics, receptivity, programming, and cryptography. It was used by the scholar-explorers of Bremen’s pioneer ships to effect very fast communication with indigenes they encountered, or which encountered them.

Thus, when the ACL arrived to Arieka and encountered the Hosts, they put their machines to use. Quickly, they translated Language—that mix of Cut and Turn sounds—into Anglo-Ubiq: the universal human tongue of the setting, evolved from English. I’ll read the excerpt about what happened:

[…] within a few thousand hours, Terre linguists could understand much of what the Hosts said, and synthetised responses and questions in the one Ariekene Language. The phonetic structure of the sentences they had their machines speak—the tonal shifts, the vowels, and the rhythm of consonants—were precise, accurate to the very limits of testing. The Hosts listened, and did not understand a single sound.

Strange, isn’t it? If you hear me say, “dog,” you’ll immediately think of a canine—regardless of its breed, age, looks, or character. So why, assuming the sounds were correct, did the Host not understand?

That answer is a fundamental premise of the book, so allow me to pause here and share some relevant linguistic concepts:

• At the basics, every word in a language is a combination of sounds (speech), translated into a notation (written word or hand-signals). The famous linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure3, defined these elements as the signifiers. For example, imagine a post-it note with the letters T-E-A written on it; those three letters are the signifier.

• Each signifier is attached to a signified: a concept or mental idea evoked by it. For example, if after I described the post-it you imagined the idea of tea (the drink, its flavour, or even the act of drinking it) that mental image is the signified.

That sum of signifier and signified yields a sign: something that conveys meaning. This is related to what linguists call semantics. As Gudivada et al.4 explain, there are two types of semantics:

• lexical semantics, which deals with the concepts attached to individual words and expressions, and

• compositional semantics, which studies how the lexical ones combine to form phrases and sentences.

Together, they allow us to communicate meaning to others… and they’re also a source of miscommunication. For example, if when I say “tea” you instead hear T-E-E you may have thought of a t-shirt—which reflects something de Saussure argued: that the link between signifier and signified also depends on the differences between signifiers.

However, this type of miscommunication does not seem to have happened to the ACLers. Avice’s anecdote said the machine’s pronunciation was exact, and the words correct. So if we take that at face value, what else could’ve failed?

The answer is a problem we, humans, don’t have: for the Hosts, how they hear the words matters as much as what they hear (namely, the so-called ‘correctness’ of the signifier).

Truth be told, we humans seldom worry about how we hear the words. Whether you hear me say “tea” in person, through this recording, or whether you read it in the script… it doesn’t matter—you can still connect the signifier to the signified and grasp the lexical semantics.

This, however, was not true for the Hosts. The ACLers failed in their communication attempts because the machines producing sounds were the wrong quote-on-quote ‘how’. They didn’t realise this until two researchers, and perhaps due to coincidence, shouted almost in unison: suhaill/jarr​, a key Language greeting. Do you know what happened? Avice plays a recording from one of the researchers, who explains:

[One] Ariekes turned to us. It spoke. We didn’t need our ‘ware to make sense of what it said. It asked us who we were. It asked what we were, and what we had said. […] This time, even though our shouts were much less accurate than any ‘ware renditions, it knew that we had tried to speak.

What was happening here is a reflection of how Language works for the Hosts—of the impact of that ‘how’ in the relationship between signifier and signified. To them, hearing a correct signifier is not enough: the sounds must be spoken thoughtfully and with intention, and the speaker must genuinely believe in each word and avoid any internal contradictions. Without that, the correct sound (the signifiers) is not a signified but merely noise for the Hosts.

Avice reasons this as follows:

Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each [word] is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.

Her explanation is intuitive, philosophical even. In turn, let us hear Scile’s explanation; he’s Avice’s off-worlder husband, and a linguist by profession. When talking to her, he uses the same theory I introduced to explain Language:

“Does it ever occur to you that Language is impossible, Avice?” he said. “[…] It makes no sense. They don’t have polysemy. Words don’t signify, they are their referents.”

Scile adds two new concepts to our linguistic foundations:

• Polysemy is the linguistic phenomenon where a single word has multiple related meanings; for example, ‘bank’ can be the side of a river, the financial institution, or even a bench. When communicating, we infer its correct meaning due to the sentence’s context.

• Referents are the third pillar proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure³—not part of the sign itself, but the actual object or thing in the real world the sign points to. If we return to my example with the “tea,” this would be the precise cup I left on my desk that’s now gone cold.

Scile is basically arguing that every word in Language (every signifier) has a unique and very-well defined signified that corresponds absolutely to the same referent. Let me put it this way:

• For us humans, every word is a triangle where one side is the signifier, another the signified, and the last one the referent; the total of these three elements composes a sign.

• For Hosts, every word in Language is a line: one end is the signifier (the sound-symbol) and the other the referent… and that’s it.

There is a scene in the book in which Avice is trying to understand this:

“So how would I distinguish that glass and that one and that one?” I tallied them with my finger.
“You’d say ’the glass in front of the apple and the glass with a flaw in its base and the glass with a residue of wine left in it.’”

In other words, Language forces Hosts to skip the mental image, and just refer to the actual thing in the world. This is what Scile meant when he said that, to Hosts, “words […] are their referents.” Language does not allow for abstract thought.

This tight correspondence between words (signs), truth (its referent), and thought (the intention behind it) is what I teased you before, when saying that Language is thought made words. Looking at it critically, this ‘fact’ of Language that Miéville created could also be pointing to yet another linguistic theory… but hold on to this point; I’ll come back to it later.

For now, let us stay with this: the Hosts’ literalisation (where each word in Language connects to the thought that originated it, and that to a truthful referent) forces readers to confront how we experience and leverage language. From here on, the psychological consequences of this fused language-thought model will become a lens through which the book explores truth, deception, and the reshaping of the self.

To begin unravelling these themes, let me finish the story of the researchers.

Urich and Becker. Because the Hosts understood them after they shouted together—and since these linguists had no way to infer the link between words and thoughts—they guessed the problem lay with the machines. That, perhaps, if two people spoke at the same time, one as Cut the other as Turn, then the Hosts would recognise who was speaking, making communication possible.

Spoiler alert, it did not work.

Let me to return to Avice’s narration of the events:

Of course [Urich and Becker] tried again, they and their colleagues practising duets, words that meant hello or we would like to speak. We watched their recorded ghosts. We listened to them learn their lines. “Sounds flawless to me,” said Scile [my husband], and even I recognised phrases, but the Ariekei did not. “U and B had no shared mind,” Scile said. “No coherent thoughts behind each word.”

What a conundrum, isn’t it? A machine didn’t work because although the sounds were correct, they had no thoughts behind them. Likewise, duets—two people speaking in tandem—didn’t work either because their thoughts were not perfectly aligned.

Do you know what happened?

Humanity being humanity, it promptly forgot its own ethics and started experimenting on humans to find the perfect candidates to speak Language in duets. First, they tried twins—but that didn’t quite work; their sounds may have been flawless, but the Hosts didn’t hear them. Next came identical twins, trained from babyhood to behave as one person… which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be prohibitively expensive given its low success rate. So, naturally, they moved on to cloning, creating what the book calls Ambassadors.

Here is where Miéville sneaks in a discussion on identity, individuality, and communication.

Ambassadors were two so-called ‘cloned siblings’, created just for the purpose of communicating with Hosts in Language. Each pair was crafted by Embassytown’s staff, and reared since childhood for their future position as Ambassadors. Since their earliest moments, each pair was forced to wear a cochlear link that allowed their thoughts to filter from one to another. Everyday, they had to sit on a machine that ’equalised’ them—erasing any unique marks each individual may have developed so they remained exact copies; if something couldn’t be erased, it was replicated in the other.

Furthermore, Ambassadors had composed names—namely, each quote-on-quote ‘half’ was tagged with a single syllable, and the full name only formed from both together… as if alone they were nothing, and only together they could be a person. Thus, in Anglo-Ubiq their names were read with a pause in the middle: HenRy, MagDa, or CalVin. In Language, each was presented as a fractional notation:

But things get even more complicated. The Embassytowners don’t really see Ambassadors as two separate people. Consider this exchange between Avice and her husband Scile—the off-worlder linguist:

“They’re not twins, love,” I said.
“Whatever. You’re right. Clones. Doppels. The Ariekei think they’re hearing one mind but they’re not.” I raised one eyebrow, and he said, “[…] You have to wonder. Don’t you? What it is they do—Staff, I mean—to make two people think they’re one.”
“Yeah, but they’re not two,” I said. “That’s the point about Ambassadors. […]”
“But they could have been. Should have been. So what did [Staff] do?”

Let’s pause for a moment, because there are a few threads here. This conversation reveals a crucial tension we’ll need for this analysis.

• From Avice’s perspective—which, we must assume, reflects most Embassytowners’—the two clones (or doppels) forming an Ambassador are a single person.

• But Scile, the off-worlder, insists they are distinct individuals. “Twins” in a sense that carries weight: two separate beings who merely look alike.

This subtle but profound misunderstanding is key to everything that follows, because within Embassytown’s society there is one taboo question. Something called the Tallying Mystery. Avice reflects on it as follows:

This was the question that we called the Tallying Mystery: did the Hosts consider each Ambassador one mind, double-bodied people? And if so, did they think the rest of us half-things, irrelevances, machines? A city full of the Ambassadors’ marionettes?

It’s an uncomfortable question, isn’t it? On one level, Avice is suggesting that a human’s inability to speak Language might make us non-sentient in the eyes of the Hosts. At another level, the Tallying Mystery argued that Embassytown’s Staff had successfully erased the doppels’ individual identity to create a double-bodied mind.

There is so much to unpack here, and not enough time (or space) to cover it all—so let us return to the linguistics by asking two more questions: could Ambassadors really speak Language? Were their minds so perfectly tuned? Scile, ever the sceptic (and insisting on the Ambassadors’ individuality) doubles down:

”[…] And Ambassadors are twins, not single people. There’s not one mind behind Language when they speak it… […] It’s like we can only talk to [Hosts] because of a mutual misunderstanding.”

Scile seems determined to scandalise his wife—so why don’t you let me scandalise you a bit?

What if I told you that Avice was part of Language?

That she was enLanguaged?

It is a tricky question, so let me begin with a real-world example. If I tell you: “The Staff were Machiavellian” you’ll probably assume the Staff members of Embassytown were cunning, scheming, or unscrupulous. Why? Because Niccolò Machiavelli’s work The Prince popularised a very specific attitude and usage of power, and now his name has become a shorthand for everything his book implied. Namely, his lastname, Machiavelli is now a signifier attached to the thesis of his book (the signified).

What happened to Avice is somewhat similar: she became part of the Hosts Language, and was quote-on-quote ‘spoken’ just as in the example above… except she’s not one word (as in Machiavelli’s case), but a whole sentence. This sentence describes something she did.

But before I tell you her Language meaning, we need to answer one nagging question: why would Avice be enLanguaged? She thought of it in this way:

For Hosts, speech was thought. It was as nonsensical to them that a speaker could say, could claim, something it knew to be untrue as, to me, that I could believe something I knew to be untrue. Without Language for things that didn’t exist, [Hosts] could hardly think them […].

As Scile said, if in Language words are their referents, then Hosts need very specific words, or they cannot say—or, even worse, think—of that referent. Remember when I mentioned that Miéville might have been speculating about linguistic theories? This is why!

The limitation of Language could be based on a now-debunked idea: the strong Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, also known as linguistic determinism. It posits that “the semantic structure of a particular language determines the structure of mental categories among its speakers.”5 In its strongest form, it implies that if a language lacks a conceptual category—such as one corresponding to ’love’—its speakers may find it difficult or even impossible to think about the concept.

In addition, every natural language—namely, every tongue that evolves organically within a community—is ever expanding. If you think of it, modern words like ‘internet’, or ‘googling’, or ’laptop’ did not exist a century ago: society developed them because speaking without them was becoming cumbersome. Before them, we needed sentences to approximate meaning. To us humans, newly-added words simplify communication; to Hosts, based on the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, those new words made communication and thought possible.

Though in real-life languages evolve in unexpected ways, with words being proposed on the go and becoming widely adopted by the public before they’re accepted by dictionaries, Hosts did so differently. They were aware of Language’s limitation, identified a gap, and did something to create a word—or sentence—so they could speak of its referent.

When Avice was enLanguaged as a child, she was then turned into a simile: a figure of speech comparing two unlike things by using ’like’ or ‘as’6.

It all began when some school teachers and Ambassadors approached her with a request: to help the Hosts create a new word; the book implies that this practice is known to Embassytowners, and regarded as an honour. The teachers argued that first the hosts had decided on the actions they needed performed, and requested Ambassadors for a human girl; then, a former one had recommended Avice.

She agreed to be enLanguaged, and days later, performed the actions that would create the simile. About the experience itself, she reflects:

What occurred in that crumbling once-dining room wasn’t by any means the worst thing I’ve ever suffered, or the most painful, or the most disgusting. It was quite bearable. It was, however, the least comprehensible event that had or has ever happened to me.

What that means is that Avice had to go somewhere and perform a specific act, in order to create a truthful referent that could be spoken. After that, she was brought before the Ambassadors and her school teachers:

The Ambassadors spoke to me in the Language of our Hosts. They spoke me: they said me: “There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a while.”
They warned me that the literal translation of the simile would be inadequate and misleading.
“It’ll be shortened with use,” Bren told me. “Soon, they’ll be saying you’re a girl ate what was given her.”

Having Avice enLanguaged allowed the Hosts to speak her—namely, to use her simile in normal speech to make a comparison, and eventually resolve the book’s main plot… but we cannot discuss that now. We need to understand a few more loose points before we tied them up.

In particular, how the usage of Avice’s simile evolved. Years after her enLanguagement, she returned to Embassytown and Ambassador CalVin introduced her to a Host like so:

[The Hosts] spoke rapidly, craned their eye-corals. […] I do not know, one Host said to CalVin, about me, how I did without her, how I thought what I needed to think.

That’s the key problem of linguistic determinism: your language limits your thoughts. Yet someone could still argue: well, we use similes all the time, and we don’t know for sure they exist. For example, I could write: “The dawn was red like blood pouring from a wound” without having an actual open wound… why couldn’t the Hosts do this? Remember Scile’s theory, and that one fact we introduced before: Hosts cannot speak in hypothetics because they can’t abstract themselves; Hosts can’t lie.

And humanity being humanity, deemed this clearly unacceptable.

We know ourselves: when faced with another culture, our instinctive reaction is somewhere between confusion and immediate violence—just check our first-contact films, where the steps are usually: attack, destroy, and interview the corpses for details. Embassytown didn’t go quite that far, but the Staff and Ambassadors still couldn’t accept a society incapable of lying. Their solution? Why, to generously bestow upon the Hosts the gift of deception.

Psychologically speaking, lying is not that simple. As Mares and Turvey (2018)7 explain,

“Lies generally manifest as [..]: Complete Deception, Half-Truths, Exaggerations, and Pertinent Omissions. Lies are told for one of two reasons: either the deceptive person believes they have more to gain[…], or […] is incapable of discerning what the truth is, either temporarily or owing to some permanent mental defect.”

That means we can lie unwillingly, but also knowingly and to avoid embarrassment, manage expectations, or even omit uncomfortable information. In some cases, lying may not be malicious: for example, prosocial lies are intended to benefit others, because they’re “told in situations in which honesty would cause heightened emotional harm”8.

Now, linguistically speaking, lying is also complex. For example, researcher Erin Bryan determined three main types of lies: real, white, and gray. Unsurprisingly, she discovered that “the use of white lies is so widespread they are often viewed as a form of communication competency that is necessary to successfully negotiate social interactions”9. Curiously, philosophers and linguists seem to consider irony and metaphor also as a type of deception because their “linguistic violations result in covert untruthfulness”10.

All of this is to point that so-called ‘gift’ Ambassadors tried to bestow on Hosts would undoubtedly have long-lasting, unpredictable consequences. We could argue this is the most central plot point in the book.

It all begins with the Festival of Lies.

It happened on the Hosts’ city, and Ambassadors and Staff travelled there wearing breathing masks. The Hosts would present an object—say, a blue box—and one by one the Ambassadors would step in to lie about that object before them. This is what happened on Avice’s first Festival:

The Host spoke. “It says: ‘describe it’,” Scile whispered. MayBel answered, May in the Cut, Bel in the Turn voice.
The Ariekei stepped up and down, a sudden unanimity. A tense excitement. They tottered and chattered.
“What did they say?” I said. “MayBel? What did they—?”
Scile looked as if in disbelief at me. “They’re saying ‘It’s red.’”

Then, during Ambassador LeRoy’s turn, this happened:

LeRoy spoke again and several Ariekei shouted, out of control. “LeRoy says [the box is a bird and it’s] flying away,” Scile said into my helmet. I swear I saw Hosts crane their eye-corals up as if the lifeless [box] might have taken off.

I know: from our perspective, the Hosts’ reactions—shocked, stunned, looking up to actually corroborate if the box was a bird and flying away—they all seem… foolish. Implausible or exaggerated. However, you must remember that Hosts were literally witnessing the impossible.

They could not lie: if the word’s referent did not exist they could not speak it, and they had to do so with absolute certainty backed by ultimate precision. Instead, these Ambassadors—these double-bodied people—said an untruth while actually believing on it. They had the referent before them, and still lied. Without hesitation, without second-guessing.

Imagine the cultural shock. Imagine the mental strain after being limited your whole life.

Yet the Festival of Lies didn’t end there, for some courageous Hosts took to the stage to try to lie. This was physically straining, and Avice relates that some “double-whinned” and “Some made noises that were only noises, clicks and wheezes of failure, not words at all.” Yet there were some successes:

When the object was yellow, the Host trying to lie, […] shuddered and retracted several of its eyes, gathered itself, and in its two voices said […], “yellow-beige.” It was hardly a dramatic untruth, but the crowd were rapturous at it.

After these events, lying (or trying to lie) became something like a sport. There were groups that would try to do so in different ways, finding strategies to bend their minds—and thus, Language—until they could utter a lie. Two virtuoso liers appeared: sultesh echertesh echersul​ and another one Avice referred to as spanishdancerdancerspanish​ due to the markings on its fanwing.

What was happening here is just a consequence of the complexity of lying.

You see? Lying is so fundamental to us humans, that researcher Daniel Dor11 argued that: “Without the lie, language would not be as complex as it is, linguistic communication would be much simpler, and the cognitive requirement of language would not be so heavy.” He argues that our natural languages evolved the ability to lie—namely, to communicate beyond the here-and-now, to express non-facts, abstractions, counterfactuals, and imagined states. Not long ago, I also mentioned that irony and metaphor could be lies—and some researchers¹⁰ have determined that, in certain pragmatic contexts, metaphor can function like a lie because it involves saying this is that rather than this is what it is.

Think of it this way: when you imagine a future promotion or write a story like Lord of the Rings (set in a secondary, fictional world) you are not lying in a malicious or deceitful way, but producing non-actual representations, using the same cognitive machinery that also makes deception possible. For the Hosts in Embassytown, this is revolutionary because Language forces them to only speak factual truths, and has thus denied them this ability.

Yet even then… did Hosts really needed to learn how to lie?

Excellent question. Miéville insisted on not answering it, so I won’t either. Instead, I would do what he did in the book and tell you a bit more of what happened after.

A new Ambassador was appointed…

—and they were not a doppel-pair. In fact, these two men—known as EzRaRaEz​ where two random off-worlders selected by Arieka’s parent nation, Bremen. I won’t discuss the politics of why the Bremenian did this here, since I could write an entire episode just on that. Suffice to say EzRa were quaint: not identical twins and neither clones, just two people who wore the cochlear implant and had passed an empathy test—the only known measure to somewhat estimate whether Hosts would hear them.

Thus, Embassytown’s Staff organised a welcome party for EzRa and invited a handful of Hosts. At a given moment, they set EzRa to introduce themselves. Avice was there to tell us what happened:

[EzRa] spoke well, beautifully. I had heard enough of it to tell that. Their accent was good, their timing good. Their voices were well suited. They said to the Hosts that it was an honour to meet them. suhailshurasuhailshurasuhailsuhail​, they said. Good greetings.
[…] The Hosts [swayed] as if they were at sea. One spasmed its giftwing and its fanwing, another kept them unnaturally still. One opened and closed its membranes several times in neurotic repetition. […] In very slow and unnerving unison, the Ariekei emerged from their trance. Their eye-corals drooped toward us, and at last focused. They straightened and unstiffened their legs, as if coming out of sleep.

Clearly, something happened to the Hosts—yet to understand that, we have to link three of the many concepts we have so far discussed:

• what Ambassadors are,

• how Language words are thoughts (“the words […] are their referents”), and

• the cognitive mechanisms enabling lying.

As we mentioned before, Ambassadors are manufactured twin minds kept in absolute synchrony through equalisation—that neurological conditioning that erased divergences or reproduced them in the other. This perfect unity was essential because, as we discussed, the Ariekei didn’t perceive sounds (signifiers) but intent (the thoughts) associated to an actual truth (the referent). It ensured that, when speaking Language to the Hosts, each doppel (one Cut the other Turn) thought and felt precisely the same about the referent they spoke of.

Yet EzRa introduced a subtle nuance—one likely linked to the cognition required to lie. You see? That empathy test was limited; both Ez and Ra said ‘good greetings’.

• But to what extent can two independent people, two individuals think of ‘good greetings’ with the exact same enthusiasm and respect?

• To what extent can they think of the exact same signified (the abstract concept) when saying those words?

• Or even worse: what if these two individuals’ thoughts were in opposition? What if Ez was bored (and putting a nice face) while Ra was simply neutral? Or what if Ez was repulsed by the Hosts, and Ra intrigued by them?

All my questions can be summarised into another: what if EzRa had a tiny cognitive dissonance while they spoke?

We, humans, wouldn’t notice it—but for the Hosts, this encounter was catastrophic and intoxicating because it exposed a new semantic dimension. Their world had been built on perfect correspondence between word and truth, and EzRa’s speech broke that correspondence by demonstrating that one can say something that isn’t entirely true and yet still be meaningful—or even more meaningful.

EzRa’s fractured unity introduced contradiction into a species that equated language with truth. The Hosts, who required perfect alignment between sound and intention, encountered for the first time a misaligment: a truth that was not quite so, because Ez and Ra felt somewhat differently.

What happens after is a sociopolitical debacle

—and I will have to focus only on the linguistics of it to keep this episode at a sensible length.

In short, the Hosts stopped answering to ‘regular’ Ambassadors and left the meeting in their shocked state. During the following days, Embassytown’s Staff and Ambassadors tried to reach the Hosts’ leaders, but nobody replied—until a cohort of Ariekei marched into Embassytown to demand, in front of a stunned population, to hear EzRa speak. The Staff scrambled to comply, and brought EzRa. Avice was on the street along the people:

Ez came forward, then, grudgingly, Ra. They looked at each other with very different emotions, those two unalike men. They whispered. They spoke Language together, and brought the Hosts to rapture.

That scene is the moment in which Miéville literalises the metaphor “living a lie”—and to the Hosts, it reshapes consciousness itself. It is another layer of the impossible made possible, and it turns them into addicts. What they are addicted to is the key question of the second half of the book, since Staff, Ambassadors, and even Avice and other similes assume Hosts are just hung up to EzRa’s voice—the sound, and the fact their voices are not precisely the same either.

And it upended the Ariekene society

Hosts arrived en masse to Embassytown just to hear EzRa’s speach—like junkies seeking their daily fix. Even their technology faltered because it was bio-engineered and their biological pieces also became addicted to EzRa’s voice. As the days went by the Ariekene needed a higher dosage: longer sentences, more frequent speeches because the trance lasted less and less.

Relationships between both cities rapidly deteriorated, and Embassytown’s Staff were forced to put up speakers in the Hosts’ city so they could have their repeated fixes during the day. The Ariekene began to camp near these devices, waiting for their fix of cognitive dissonance. Desperate, some Ambassadors ventured to the city to find some reasonable Hosts and speak to them… but these efforts were futile.

Then something happened: some Ariekei began to self-mutilate, tearing their fanwings apart. Remember when I told you about their physical characteristics? The fanwing was a limb that served as a hearing organ. Therefore, in human terms, these Ariekene were literally bursting their tympanic membranes.

Yet again, humans being humans and self-absorbed in their own political conundrums, didn’t seek to understand the reasons behind this self-mutilation. They only saw one thing: violence, and themselves as victims. The mutilated Arieke would attack the addicts and rip their fanwings before dragging them off; to make matters worse, they also attacked unsuspecting humans—patrols, farmers, civilians living in the periphery of Embassytown.

The city began to shrink. Refugees filtered in until Staff had to turn the embassy’s central building into a communal living space. Meanwhile in the Hosts’ city, the addicts demanded longer, more frequent speeches, while the mutilated ravaged the farms to endeafen more Ariekene and build an army.

An army that soon began marching towards Embassytown.

But up to here, I did something intentionally mean: I only gave you the human perspective.

The violence, the deaths, the destruction of Embassytown by a mob that seemed out of their minds—capable of self-mutilation, and of inflicting violence on their own kind when, until that moment, they had been absolutely peaceful.

But there was more to it: EzRa’s voice was a drug, and humans were its providers. If we assume that the Arieke failed to create noise-cancelling devices, then the only quote-on-quote ‘cure’ to their addiction was to be completely unable to hear EzRa’s voice. Therefore:

• By ripping their fanwings, they were willingly becoming deaf in a desperate attempt to escape the junkie trap.

• By mutilating others, these deaf-Ariekene were trying to cure their own in the only way that had worked so far.

• By attacking humans, they were trying to destroy the drug-dealers upending Ariekene society and culture.

It was a cry of resistance and self-determination.

If that shocked you: good. That’s the intention of the book, though Miéville is far more subtle than I was—he left it to the reader to make the connection. I couldn’t do that, though. We need this understanding to finally round up our linguistic analysis. The point where semiotics, Avice’s enLanguaged simile, the Ambassadors’ identity, EzRa’s cognitive dissonance, and the ability to lie and think abstractly finally link.

It is the final arc in the book.

The moment when some Ariekes learn to lie…

—although it’s a bit more complex than that.

While all the mayhem happened, some ex-Ambassadors found the group of liars from before, now led by the Host Avice had referred to as Spanish Dancer. These group, five in total, were trying to fight against their addiction, suffering through deprivation to remain conscious. Avice, helped by others, drew the following hypothesis:

Hosts were not addicted to EzRa’s sound, but to the ambiguity it introduced as a consequence of their tiny cognitive dissonances; to them, EzRa’s speech was the drug of contradiction. It wasn’t about the voice itself, but the link between the signifiers, the referents, and how each ‘half’ of that Ambassador was able to think of minimally different mental concepts.

Based on this, Avice and the others assumed that the only way to quote-on-quote ‘cure’ the Ariekei from Ezra’s effect was to teach them abstract thought—which, in turn, required Hosts to rapidly alter their language until it allowed the linguistic nuance that makes lying possible. The reason? As I told you before, lying isn’t just deception: it’s a broad spectrum, and it relies on the same cognitive mechanisms.

But how did Avice pulled this off? Basically, she used herself: her own simile. Like this:

“You’re trying to change things,” I said. YlSib repeated in Language. “You want change like the girl who ate what was given her. So you’re like me. Those who aren’t trying to change anything are like the girl who didn’t eat what she wanted but what was given to her: they are like me. You are like the girl who ate. You are the girl who ate. You’re like the girl. You are the girl. And so are the others, who aren’t like you.”

Did you catch what Avice was doing? She’s bending Anglo-Ubiq—or English—to its maximum extent to sneak in a lie. Let us walk that text line by line.

• If you recall, Avice’s simile is: “the girl who, in the dark and in pain, ate what was given to her.”

• The first sentence is: “You want change like the girl who ate what was given her”. There are a few nuances here to discuss:

  • First, Avice is using her simile to replace the noun ‘me’. The reason? Because of the Tallying Mystery, she’s not sure whether Hosts perceived single-bodied humans as sentient.

  • At the same time, she’s using the simile as it is intended: to imply that Spanish Dancer “ate what was given to it”. This is not to be read literally, but as the simile. The mental concept behind it is: “listened what was spoken to it.” Namely: EzRa’s drug-voice.

• The next sentence is: “So you’re like me”—she introduces the noun to refer to herself.

• Now, read both sentences together: “You want change like the girl who ate what was given her. So you’re like me.” We could translate it as: “You want change like me. So you’re like me” by replacing the full simile for the noun.

• Now is where it gets linguistically spicy. The next sentence uses the simile as intended: “Those who aren’t trying to change anything are like the girl who didn’t eat what she wanted but what was given to her: they are like me.” Let’s break it down:

  • The first half: “Those who aren’t trying to change anything” refers to the addicts who are not trying to free themselves; therefore, it excludes the mutilated ones.

  • At the same time, “Those who aren’t trying to change anything” means “those who are not Spanish Dancer”; if you recall, the opening sentence is: “You[, Spanish Dancer,] are trying to change things. You want change.”

  • Next, “Those who aren’t trying to change anything are like the girl who didn’t eat what she wanted but what was given to her”. The abstraction, “eat what she wanted” cannot be taken literally; Avice is introducing a metaphor where ’eating what she wanted’ refers to ’listened what she understoood’ or ‘spoke as she wanted and understood’.

  • Likewise, “but [ate] what was given to her” continues the ’eating’ metaphor: the Hosts were forced to hear EzRa’s voice and thus become addicts.

  • The linguistic spice: “they are like me”. She’s turning the tables here, and using the noun “me” to refer to the simile.

• At this point, you have one level of contradiction. For different, nuanced reasons, both Spanish Dancer—who is trying to cure itself from the addiction—and the addicts (content to remain as they are) are both like Avice The Simile. It’s not a wordplay itself, but perhaps a meaning-play. This is the power of metaphor. What researcher Marta Dynel¹⁰ referred to as “[linguistic] violations [that] result in covert untruthfulness.” She even added these violations can be explicit or implicit “what is said/made as if to say, or what is implicated.” Basically, to use a metaphor is a way of deception.

• The next two sentences are linked: “You are like the girl who ate. You are the girl who ate.” The first one is using ‘herself’ as the simile, the second as a metaphor… but at the same time, that second sentence is an untruth. If we take this literally, we know that Spanish Dancer is not Avice; he is Avice’s simile, but she’s squeezing English to move past the literal and into the abstract.

  • The first works within the Hosts’ existing system—it’s the simile, the literal comparison they can understand because a simile (like Avice) has enacted that event.

  • The second sentence, though, is complex. If we read it at face value, we know the individual known as Spanish Dancer is not the human known as Avice. It is an untruth… but also a truth: Spanish Dancer is like the simile Avice represents: it is a new version of her simile. However, by using English in this way, Avice is pushing the Ariekes past the confines of simile, and into the abstract space of metaphor. Something Language wasn’t built to handle until this moment.

• The last three sentences reinforce the two key contradictions: “You’re like the girl. You are the girl. And so are the others, who aren’t like you.”

Yet after hours and hours of training, Spanish Dancer still shuddered and stuttered, unable to utter the lies.

Until Avice remembered the Tallying Mystery.

If you recall, the Tallying Mystery was that uncomfortable question relating Ambassadors and single-bodied humans: did Hosts perceive Ambassadors—the cloned doppels artificially equalised—as one or two individuals? Furthermore, did that mean they perceived normal, single-bodied humans as non-sentient?

Ambassador YlSib tries to explains this to Spanish Dancer; I will not re-narrate the scene here but, when the Host finally grasps what humans had done with Ambassadors, the meaning of the metaphor finally sinks in. The reason? It’s not explained in the book, but I have a theory: solving the Tallying Mystery allowed Spanish Dancer to understand ‘me’ as a noun to refer to Avice, therefore enabling the distinction between Avice as a simile and Avice as an individual. “You are like the girl who ate. You are the girl who ate.” That linguistic difference revealed that meaning-play Avice was trying to teach them.

And the moment that happens is the moment Spanish Dancer and its crew are free from EzRa’s drug-voice. Avice plays a recording, and the freed-Hosts simply hear it, no longer shuddering like addicts. The reason? Understanding the nuance behind the metaphor and the abstraction needed to use it in contradictory ways, allowed Ariekei to perceive EzRa’s cognitive dissonance and accept it as possible. By teaching them how to leverage metaphor, Avice changed Ariekene society.

Let me read you the scene:

The Ariekei sifted the datchips, listening with disbelief at how they heard what they heard. […] Spanish Dancer remained bent, but its eyes looked up to me.[…]
“Yes,” I said, “yes,” and Spanish Dancer cooed and, harmonising with itself, said: “yes/yes​.”

Spanish Dancer spoke English because it now had the cognitive mechanisms allowing it to express non-facts, abstractions, counterfactuals, and imagined states, therefore producing non-actual representations by using the same cognitive machinery that also makes deception possible.

I’ll summarise what happens after.

Avice, YlSib and a few more rush Spanish Dancer and its crew of liers towards the army of self-mutilated Ariekene. She plays recordings of the drug-voice, and two non-mutilated Arieke begin to shudder as they always did—while the liars, Spanish Dancer and others, remained healthy. This showed the deaf that a non-violent cure to the drug was possible, effectively removing their need to attack humans.

However, let me confess something: there is so much more to this. From here, the book goes on to explore some of the sociopolitical consequences of this change in society, how Hosts handled the addicts that couldn’t learn to lie, how their relationships with humans changed, how Embassytown itself changed, among many other things. I could write a whole episode about it, so let me know if you want to hear me talk about it; reach out to me through my Substack at liviajelliot.substack.com; if there is interest, I’ll gladly make a second episode.

However, let me close off with one more scene of the book.

As time went by, Spanish Dancer learnt that it could speak two different human tongues at the same time—one with each mouth. It could also say different words, not necessarily that yes/yes​ it had first said. It is after Spanish Dancer has learnt this, that the following unfolds:

When I asked Spanish if it regretted learning to lie, it paused and said, “I regret nothing/I regret”​. A performance, perhaps, but I envy that precision. I wonder if Spanish Dancer ever mourns itself.

“If it ever mourns itself.” Because learning to use metaphor meant breaking through linguistic determinism to effectively change how Spanish thought—and because we are our thoughts, for Spanish Dancer, that also meant changing who it was. What walked away wasn’t the same mind that began that lesson, but whatever remained after metaphor rewrote it. But remember that this wasn’t a willing transformation—far from it. Spanish wanted a cure, and the only choices were self-mutilation or reshaping its own mind so profoundly it could no longer be the being it had been.

And it leaves us wondering: when language reshapes a mind so completely, is the one who remains a continuation, or a replacement? Had EzRa not appeared: did humans really needed to teach Hosts how to lie? Was that change in the Ariekene society evolution or corruption?

Food for thought, most certainly.

If you enjoy conversations like this, my own novel also explores alien intelligences and the redefinition of the self, though it does so from a different lens. You can find it linked below.

Thanks for listening, and happy reading.

As the year winds down—and before I disappear into the holiday season—I wanted to look back at what I read.

January: Walking on Glass (Iain Banks)

Rating/Review: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Goodreads review.

Why: I found it because a friend recommended this book, and gifted me an old (and signed) second-hand edition. At a very surface level, it follows three seemingly unconnected storylines… but if you only read what’s written, then you’re reading only a 10% of what this book can offer. It is the type of reading that the more time passes, the more you’ll begin to appreciate it.

Central Themes: It is most of all, nihilistic. It wonders about the purpose of existence, and how easily we can make someone (or something) our sole purpose to live, thus forgetting that we are the main characters of our lives. It is a cautionary tale, but also a bringer of grim hope: that life continues after being broken and that we can, nonetheless, find a new purpose.

What the hell was the point of trying to rationally to analyse what was fundamentally irrational? [...] [L]ife was basically absurd, unfair and–ultimately—pointless

March: A Scanner Darkly (PKD)

Rating/Review: ⭐⭐⭐ Goodreads review.

Why: Technically, this is a masterpiece; subjectively, it’s boring.

It discusses identity in a subtle, quiet yet powerful way. Likewise, the ending note reveals that he actually based these characters on real-life people that were his friends—then lists them; most were deceased or with severe brain damage.

Why Not: Because the main characters are drug-addicts, the book relies heavily on meandering, incoherent conversations that are there to make you feel the brain fog drugs causes. It is presented in an incredibly realistic way because PKD was involved in the drug scene in his time… but it’s also meandering and difficult to read.

It is truly up to you, and whether you’ll withstand the intended meandering prose in lieu of reaching the rich thematic discussion.

Central Themes: There is a rich discussion on consciousness, following the masses, and defining oneself. This is also a cautionary tale about how little governments respect undercover officers and everything they go through, and how far a government is willing to disregard humanity and the individual effort.

Knowing what I know, I still stepped across into that freaked-out paranoid space with them, viewed it as they viewed it—muddled, he thought. Murky again, the same murk that covers them covers me.

May: Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer)

Rating/Review: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Goodreads review.

Why: It is a cautionary tale where VanderMeer was (perhaps!) pointing out that humanity’s need to comprehend (and thus to bend reality to our frameworks of knowledge) is a symptom of our arrogance—one that blinds us as to how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things.

Annihilation is the ‘show-don’t-tell’ advice taken to the extreme. Instead of telling the reader about how incomprehensible Area X is, VanderMeer forced its readers to experiment this place through the eyes of the biologist.

Central Themes: It criticises humanity’s intrinsic need to understand, and how we cannot accept there are things beyond our limited comprehension of reality. It twists existential horror to drop the readers—alongside the biology—in a setting where making meaning is outright impossible.

With the tower, we [...] had no sense of its purpose. And now that we had begun to descend into it, the tower still failed to reveal any hint of these things.

July: Ubik (PKD)

Rating/Review: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Goodreads review.

Why: In my subjective opinion, this was a masterpiece. The kind only Philip K. Dick would dare writing.

It challenges reality in a multi-layered, facetted take of Plato’s allegory of the cave. The setting is unique, the world dissolves as the plot advances (or moves backwards, maybe), and nothing in this book can be taken at face value. There are layers of themes—from capitalism taken to the extreme, to the demiurge and the noumenal/phonomental words—and a fast-paced narrative that twists the plot as much of the world where it happens.

Central Themes: This is a play on Plato’s allegory of the cave… except that, for PKD, there is no ‘out of the cave’, just another cave, perhaps different. He consistently asks: how many layers of reality are? What if you “awaken” from one reality into another, then “awaken” into another? But, maybe, there’s no safe layer of reality at all.

He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from the outside.

November: Embassytown (China Miéville)

Rating/Review: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Goodreads review. (Though, if I’m honest, I’d give it 10/5 because this is another masterpiece).

Why: This is an idea-driven, frame narrative about the importance of language to every culture, and what language can do for our ability to think and express those thoughts. It both a meditation on language and an act of linguistic imagination itself. A novel that demonstrates what words can build, and what they can destroy.

If there is anything I would critique of this novel is the sheer amount of themes that were hinted at but not focused on. I’d love a sequel in the same universe, but I fear it may detract from this story.

Central Themes: The focus is on linguistics and, perhaps, the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; Miéville seems to also be playing with the semiotic triangle, and De Saussure’s concept of sign. There is also considerations on what deception, and the cognitive mechanisms behind it, allow us to think. Beyond that, the book also includes a subtle but clear political commentary around colonisation and cultural invasion, as well as unanswered questions around identity, and the ethics of cloning. Truly, this is a rich work.

[The Hosts] spoke rapidly, craned their eye-corals. [...] I do not know, one Host said to CalVin, about me, how I did without her, how I thought what I needed to think.

PS: The podcast episode on Embassytown will be the opener of Season 3. Can’t wait to share it with you.

November: Flatlands (Edwin A. Abbott)

Rating/Review: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Goodreads review.

Why: I found this book in the most unexpected of ways, searched it, and found it on the Gutenberg Project. It is a work of imagination, sheer mathematical speculation blended with an satire of Victorian society. A satire mocking elements that we—unfortunately—can still see in modern times.

Central Themes: This is an epistolary narrative told by none other than a Square—yes, the geometrical figure—living in Flatlands: a realm of two dimensions. The first half of the book is Square’s attempt to explain how Flatlands works, dimensionally and socially; this part is a social critique wrapped in a satire. The second part recounts Square’s visit to Lineland (the realm of one dimension) and his encounter with a Sphere from Spaceland (the realm of three) to speculate on the existence of other dimensions that we can neither perceive nor explain.

Overall, the mathematical speculation is equally compelling. Abott asks whether other dimensions or realms of being do exist and whether we have the capacity to perceive them. He imagines what those dimensions would be, and how would they affect the 3D forms we take for granted. Socially, he also captures the intrinsic resistance such discoveries provoke—the denial, the accusations of heresy, and the institutional mechanisms that suppress inquiry.

Warning: The satire is sharp but easy to miss, and if you don’t recognise it, the book may come across as deeply offensive. Read with that lens, though, Flatland becomes not only a mathematical curiosity, but a surprisingly incisive critique of its time.

That’s the shape of my reading this year. I’m stepping back for a little while, so this will be my last post of the season. Wishing you a peaceful start to the new year—and I’ll be back in 2026.

Until then, happy reading.

Livia~

Writing collaboratively under a single pen-name allows writers to combine strengths, share workloads, and bounce ideas off each other… though it’s not without its challenges. It can lead to disagreements and challenges—such as maintaining a coherent voice and tone, developing plot-points to everyone’s satisfaction, as well as exercising creative control.

Today’s essay focuses on collaborative writing—and I have the pleasure to cede the spotlight to , from J.A.J. Minton: authors of Discovery. She will dive in into the specifics of one particular scene of their book, and how they combined their talents to craft it; she’ll touch on inspirations, discuss key elements, and showcase an excerpt.

Ready? Let’s get this scene undone.

The “Rosie” Scene: The Collaborative Writing Techniques in J.A.J. Minton’s Discovery (2025)

We get the question all the time: how did three family members write a story together? One fellow writer said, “My family can’t decide what to eat for dinner without an argument. How did you manage a novel?”

Since Discovery was released earlier this year, many have wanted to know how group writing worked for the novel format. We know about group writing for a television series, for a movie, for a play. But how did it apply to what’s considered a solo art form? How did we communicate our visions? How did those visions eventually unify? How did you, as family, not kill each other in the process?

To address that last question, we were used to collaborating as a family.

“J.A.J. Minton” is the pen name for three family members: Jakob (the son), Amy (me, the mother), and John (the father) Minton. In the past, John and I have run a theatre company. We were used to communicating in an artistic setting. And now, Jakob and John co-host the YouTube channel, Talking Story. Jakob, being the youngest, had some catching up to do in the shorthand communication style I had with John. (In short, it’s this: honesty over emotion. Everyone wants a great story—same goal, all for one and one for all.)

As far as the writing itself, we all made the agreement to stick to our strengths and know when to let someone else take the lead. Sometimes that didn’t go well. One of us had to be prodded to get off the stage to allow someone else to take over. But when we did cede the workflow to the better-experienced person, we quickly saw the rewards for doing so. Eventually, like training a dog with positive reinforcement, we trained ourselves to enjoy when it was time for another of us to show off their talents.

This is how those talents broke down:

• Jakob: the visual guy. Trained in film, knows how to make a scene cinematic.

• Amy: the word girl. Trained in literary creative writing, knew how to squeeze words for all they were worth.

• John: the genre guy. Brought extensive knowledge of horror/sci-fi/fantasy in multiple story mediums. Knew story shape well—what worked, what didn’t, what had been done before, and what was new. He especially knew the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, whose monster pantheon would inform our own story.

To give a specific example of how we worked together, I’ll go through how we wrote a fantastical segment, what we eventually called ‘Griff’s Approach to the Rosie.’

This scene occurs about halfway through Act I. In it, Griff Tran, a hardened television journalist, has chartered a boat with a television crew to investigate a mayday call from the Rosie, a ship stranded in the South Pacific. When Griff arrives, he finds the Rosie crew exposed to a toxic fungus that impels them to violence and hallucinations.

It was an intimidating scene to write, so we left it until late in the process. Moreover, we didn’t want a standard horror scene. We wanted something new, something fun to read, something tense. It was the first time in our series the reader would see our theme at work in the most literal sense: what is the human reaction to an alien presence? We needed a crown jewel of a sequence. No problem, right?

First, John weighed in with what we call his “30,000 foot view.” Like Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg) and The Thing (1982, John Carpenter), the reader wasn’t going to get a glimpse of the headlining antagonist quite yet. He said we would want to show the alien’s effects before anyone even laid eyes on it.

John is the most widely read in the horror genre and knows best what the scene needs to do to make the story work. How far is too far? How literary could I get without boring genre readers? The tone should be creepy, John said, and the body horror on full parade. For someone who reads literary work, this task felt insurmountable. I had to do some research.

And who better to consult than the king?

Stephen King lays the groundwork for the different levels of writing a scary scene in Danse Macabre (1980):

• On the first level, one has terror. That’s where suspense and dread live. Uncanniness also lives here.

• On the next level, one has horror. That’s the reader’s reaction to fright, and usually it’s revulsion.

• Finally, one has body horror. (Stephen King says it’s the easiest, but that’s subjective. I found it difficult to go far enough.) Body horror is an appeal to the gag reflex. It should be used sparingly, to signify the stakes if our protagonist makes a wrong decision.

Now that I knew all the different elements that would need to go into our scene, I looked for role models. For that, I turned to the cinema.

A classic scene of another boat approaching a frightening situation occurs in Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola). In it, the antagonist Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, was being hidden in a similar fashion: everyone talked about Kurtz, but not many had seen him yet. When our heroes in the River Patrol Boat finally approach Kurtz’s compound, the viewer gets a good look at what effect Kurtz has on people. It’s terrifying, horrific, and gross.

Check, check, and check.

Fascinatingly, both Apocalypse Now and its source material, the novella Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad, inject a bit of comedy in their final approaches to Kurtz. In the text, an animated character known only as The Harlequin becomes the model for Dennis Hopper’s cameraman in Apocalypse Now. Both characters fill the role of a court jester to the unseen king of the scene, while amplifying the control the antagonist has over their minds. Both characters also provide comic relief in otherwise tense scenes, but the comedy heightens tension instead of lessening it.

That interested me.

Both characters are unstable and unpredictable. Both offer an opportunity to laugh and might make the viewer/reader wonder at why they’re laughing at such terror. I loved what those characters did for the scenes. I especially loved how Dennis Hopper’s character gave Captain Willard a tour of the compound, saying,

“There’s mines over there, there’s mines over there…”

—like a host pointing out where the bathrooms are to his guests, all the while neglecting to mention the naked corpses hanging from the trees. This, I knew, was a perfect model for how to spotlight a human reaction to terror and madness. We humans love to whistle in the dark and shove our heads in the sand. This character trope did both. That’s how I came to invent a similar tour guide in our scene. Peni Palu, a Tongan crewman on the Rosie, would be Griff Tran’s tour guide of Hell. And like his forebears, Peni is chipper as hell about it.

[Our] cameraman shone a flickering light deep into the cabin where the bunks were. One was covered in massive blood stains. Two belts were looped around the side rails, as if to restrain someone.

“Oh, crackers! I should have cleaned up.” Peni dodged my gaze as if embarrassed.

I asked, “What happened there?”

“That’s where our captain crossed into the twilight kingdom. Pardon the mess.”

(Discovery, Chapter 4, 2025)

Ever the academic, I wanted to leave a citation for these ideas in my own story. I call them ‘footprints’ in the text that allude to other works. They’re ‘Easter eggs,’ if you will. Just as Dennis Hopper does in Apocalypse Now, Peni asks the arriving crew for cigarettes. He also trumpets his crewmen’s nationalities similarly to how Dennis Hopper blurts, “I’m an American!” I also left a footprint for Joseph Conrad. Before that scene, Griff dreams of horrible creatures calling to him:

“‘Come and see,’ they beckoned me. ‘Come and find out.’” (Chapter 4)

Marlow says something similar when he contemplates the African continent from the water. This is also a reference to the originating story that gives us our creature, “The Call of Cthulhu” by H.P. Lovecraft.

It was time to share my tone and character choices with Jakob.

He was surprised by them; he did not see the scene in the same way. He viewed the Apocalypse Now clip, and what stuck out to him was the silence. A tense, thudding bass line, like a heartbeat, escorts the crew into the compound while stoic figures look on. He liked how the water played a lively character role in the scene—reflecting the fires and ushering the crew on the current. And all of that gave him an idea.

Jakob turned to the Battle of Blackwater scene in season two of Game of Thrones (2012, Neil Marshall).

This is a sea battle based loosely on a siege of Constantinople in 717 A.D., in which enemy ships were destroyed using fire on water. In the television show, the lead-up to the battle is quiet and tense. Ser Davos is on the black water. All around him, the water itself is a living presence, dark and menacing as death. With pinpricks of light, the water taunts Ser Davos’s obscured vision just as the enemy obscures their tactics. When the water finally ignites, the green fire is reflected in Ser Davos’s eyes. That directorial decision gave Jakob the idea to place an eerie light in our scene to warp the faces of the characters onboard the Rosie.

From there, Jakob got to work creating storyboards of our scene. We had used storyboards before and knew them to be helpful when our director, Jakob, had a specific action sequence to convey. In this scene, we knew the blocking would be simple: it was a tour of Hell, from the top of the Rosie to the dark secret in her hold.

From our research, we knew what kind of boat Rosie was—her measurements, her layout. We knew she had two decks and how the cabins on each would be divided according to use. Jakob drew all her cabins, indicating how Griff Tran and his camera crew would move through the Rosie on a tour. On these drawings, he indicated which characters were in which sections of the boat, estimating how Peni Palu would escort the arriving crew through the horrors. Most importantly to Jakob, he noted how the supernatural glow from the water would play on the characters’ faces as they moved through the cabins.

Here is a passage showing how all these elements came together from the first person point of view of Griff Tran:

I made sure our camera recorded everything on the bridge before allowing Peni to lead us to a side door accessing the cabin.

The acidic smell of vomit was intense there. The unearthly shimmer from Yuna II reflected on the water, casting rolling shadows like murky waves through the cabin windows. This, and the softly strobing camera light, was the interior’s only source of illumination. The ceiling twisted and rolled with the reflected waves. My knees buckled and my stomach lurched.

Inside was a small galley kitchen and a dining area with two booths and a table. I was startled when I saw a crewman laying on the dining table. Another two lay on the bench seats. They were out cold. Peni shifted from one foot to another. “That’s Chuckie, that’s Filipe. And that’s Gavin on the table. He’s American!”

(Discovery, Chapter 4, 2025)

As John and I used to say in our acting days: “And scene.”

As internet streaming changes the way we consume story, the three of us feel that writers also need to adapt to how we generate stories. Research and writing can bring together multiple media, multiple visions, and multiple stories that echo each other throughout storytelling history. Just as Peni Palu echoes two famous works, and just as Game of Thrones echoes real-life military tactics, our stories build on each other to contribute to a fantastical tapestry. It has been our immense pleasure to become a part of that tapestry.

To Close Off…

In the end, the Rosie’s approach became a snapshot of how three imaginations can merge into one coherent voice. Collaborative writing isn’t about losing individuality, but about playing into each author’s strengths.

That said, if you want to learn more about Discovery, you are in for a ride: I interviewed the three of them—Jakob, Amy, and John—on my podcast. The first half of the episode dives a bit more into the collaborative writing element, and the second half is a thematic analysis of their book:

Also, if you want to hear more from Amy, we did a 1:1 discussion about her MFA’s thesis: the interplay between character, narrator, and author in framed narratives. If you are writing in first person, this episode is a must and full of hands-on writing advice:

That said, Discovery by J.A.J. Minton is available in paperback and e-book through Amazon (on sale now), and in audiobook from Audible (on sale Dec 9, 2025).

Thank you so much for reading, and let’s continue the discussion on the comments. Happy writing,

Livia~

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