By author Lora Beth Johnson
As an only child, Lora Beth Johnson grew up telling herself stories and reading past her bedtime. She spent her adulthood collecting degrees, careers, and stamps in her passport before realizing her passion for creating fictional worlds. When she’s not writing, she’s teaching college English and learning new languages. She lives in Davidson, NC with her little roommate, Colocataire the Yorki-poo. Goddess in the Machine is her first book. Find Lora Beth on Twitter @LoraBethWrites
There are a lot of things I love about language.
It’s so weird and almost inexplicable that we can make scratches on a page or noises with our mouths or signs with our hands and transport ideas into someone else’s head. That we can create an infinite amount of messages from a finite amount of resources. That we can derive meaning from inexplicit language based on context, cognition, and inference.
The thing I love most about language, though, is that it actively creates and recreates reality.
I started writing Goddess in the Machine in grad school, so it was heavily influenced by my studies, especially my linguistics course. So the very first thing I thought of when I started to create the world of a book set in the far future was language. Because language is not only constructed by culture, but constructs culture in return.
In Goddess, Andromeda—a self-described underachieving teenager—wakes up from cryonic stasis a thousand years in the future. Not only is she unfamiliar with her new surroundings, but she struggles to understand the language of the people she meets. It sounds like a completely new language. But it’s not. It’s English. So why is it almost unrecognizable?
Because language evolves. It’s constantly recreating itself to meet the needs of society. That’s why it’s difficult for baby boomers to understand the language millennials use on the internet, or why my gen z students always have to explain new slang to me. It’s also why we have so much trouble reading Beowulf in Old English. To us, it’s a foreign language. Likewise, a thousand years from now, English will be completely unrecognizable.
Because language is born out of shared experiences. Our colloquialisms, jargon, idioms, metaphors, the names we give things, are all tied to our shared culture. That’s why internet memes work. They use common experiences and familiar images to create a single message. But they can only be understood by people “on the inside,” those who are familiar with the experience the meme references. Those outside of internet culture don’t have the shared knowledge to understand the message. Likewise, as culture shifts, so does language. But the weird thing is: as language shifts, so does culture.
Because language creates reality.
When I was in grad school, one of my professors pointed at a table and said, “that table wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have a name for it.” Of course, I thought that was nonsense. Doesn’t the table exist irrelative to human acknowledgement? But that’s the funny thing about reality. We can only know it as it is known. So, until we know something, until we can name it, it doesn’t exist in our reality. And our reality is the only one we have access to.
Names are powerful things, as any fae will tell you. A name gives identity by separating the named from “thisness” and giving it a “thatness.” We can understand this by thinking about everything as existing on a spectrum, like colors. As we travel the color spectrum, minute variances shift one color to the next. Blue slowly becomes purple slowly becomes red, etc. The question is: when exactly does blue become purple? The answer is: language. We have decided as a society that everything between one spot and another on the spectrum is called blue and everything between one spot and another on the spectrum is called purple. By naming them, we have separated that part of the spectrum into two distinct colors, giving them “thatness.” Giving them names. And once something has a “thatness”—a name—it exists.
There are two main characters in Goddess in the Machine, and depending on which point of view you’re reading from, you’re either reading a sci-fi story or a fantasy. The only difference between the two is language. What Andra calls technology, Zhade calls magic. This simple shift in terms changes everything about how each perceives reality. For Andra, technology is something created and controlled by humans. A tool. For Zhade, magic is something mystical and sacred. Something to be borrowed, but never fully controlled. They may be occupying the same story, but they’re living in alternate realities because of the language they use.
A sentiment echoed throughout Goddess in the Machine is “decide your fate.” It is a wish to control your own destiny. To decide who and what you want to be. The way we decide our fates—and the fates of those around us—is through language. We carry an awful lot of responsibility whenever we speak or write or sign or type, because every utterance is an action that shapes the world around us. Decide your fates wisely. Choose your words with care. Every time you use language, you speak a new reality into existence.
