The problem is that the extraterrestrials that xenolinguists claim to seek are often beings imagined to have technologies, minds or languages similar to ours. They are projections of ourselves. This anthropomorphism risks blinding us to truly alien communicators, who are radically unlike us. If there are linguistic beings on planets such as TOI-700 d or Kepler-186f, or elsewhere in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?
True beauty in literature isn’t ornamental. It isn’t a lyrical flourish on the surface of pain, or a reward for rendering trauma with the right degree of humility. It’s what Sarah Lewis, in The Rise, calls “aesthetic force”—a quality that stuns, alters, destabilizes, and lodges itself in our memory not because it comforts us, but because it insists that we see something differently than before. In writing, as in life, the beautiful often travels with its opposite.
There were times reading this book when I was genuinely scared. It was more than the faint idea that someone could be behind me, more than walking faster through the house in the dark. This collection reminds us that what is most frightening is outside of our control. Random chance events could haunt us and we’d be unable to stop them. These stories will stay with me.
Remember When chronicles, with illuminating candour, the changes that culminated in Phillips’s diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2022, at the age of 61. Billed as a memoir by Phillips herself, owing to her decline during the three-year writing process, it’s really a co-production between her, her ghostwriter Alison Phillips (no relation) and Frizell, who provides fitful interjections. As such, it offers a rare account of the impact of Alzheimer’s not just from the person who has it, but from their primary carer too.