The Embedding

By Ian Watson

I read The Embedding, in a single three-hour period in the evening of the 23rd of November, 2023.

It’s unlike anything I’ve read before. Dominated by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it’s about linguistic embeddings and speculation about how they alter thought, as told through three framings:

• a scientist who is raising children isolated, and teaching them languages fundamentally different to other human ones
• a tribe in the Amazon rainforest who use a drug to access altered mind-states, and who keep their collective memory in a highly nested self-referential form only understandable while on this drug
• contact with an alien species which is collecting sentient languages in an effort to overlay them and gain access to an external objective perception of reality, and thus to escape it

Think [Stories of your Life and Others], but extended and more in depth. Definitely a product of the 1900s, but heady, and it left me blinking and altered, trying to shake its effects off like a strong cocktail.