Answerable

ANSIBLE, n. I was reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and came across this word—it means a faster-than-light communication device, and I’ve only seen it in sci-fi novels—and said to my beloved, a longtime sci-fi reader, “What do you think of when you think of the word ‘ansible’? What do you picture?”

He knew what the word meant, and could name a few novels where he’d encountered it, but didn’t picture anything. More on that in a minute.

Le Guin invented this word and first used it in her novel Rocannon’s World (1966). It’s in the OED now, and their etymology cites a post in a Usenet group:

I asked her...Turns out that she derived ‘ansible’ from ‘answerable’.

You can’t get much better than that for word origins.

I was struck, while reading The Left Hand of Darkness, by how good Le Guin is at conlanging—making up languages—and how generous she is in her usage of alien vocabulary. The setting is absolutely saturated with these invented words. They feel strange and mysterious, but also inevitable and natural, because of course an alien culture on an alien world with alien biology would have words that we don’t. I got used to kemmer and kemmering and all the food and month names quickly, which I credit to Le Guin having such an ear for sounds.

“Ansible” isn’t in the same category as “kemmer,” though. It’s a shortening of “answerable,” a word we already know. This is such a brilliant way to create a plausible-sounding future English word—one so plausible that it in fact becomes a present-day English word, since other sci-fi writers picked it up.

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction has a great list of citations, and it’s clear that while the word always refers to faster-than-light communication, authors envisioned ansibles in many different forms.

For her part, Le Guin specifies that the ansible has two parts: one fixed “on a planet of a certain mass” and one portable. The narrator explains the communication in this really excellent moment of science fiction:

It doesn't involve radio waves, or any form of energy. The principle it works on, the constant of simultaneity, is analogous in some ways to gravity—

Naturally he interrupts himself, as his interlocutor, a bored king, has no interest in the constant of simultaneity. Perfect. This is such a classic technique and I love it every time.

The bored king is interested in sending a message, though, so the narrator helps with that. He mentions a keyboard “set to Karhidish characters,” implying the configuration can be changed, and a small screen where letters “burn” and then “fade.” A message comes through and the narrator says

When the tape was recorded I pulled it out and gave it to Argaven. He dropped it on the table
(page 41 in my library book, 2019 mass market from Ace)

So the portable component of the ansible is kind of like a typewriter with a little screen. “Tape” and “record” suggest that the text of the message is printed on a scroll of some kind of material, with no mention of what. Paper, perhaps. But magnetic tape seems possible. The message initially appears as text on a screen, and might be recorded visually, but it could be transformed into audio; we know it has already been translated from one language to another. Karhide has a thriving oral tradition, and the narrator tells us in a previous passage that “Karhiders do not read much as a rule,” books are less common than radios, and newspaper don’t exist, so it might be smart diplomacy to provide a recording of sound. This is all speculation on my part, since the text provides only “tape” and “record.” All we know is that the message becomes a physical object that can be dropped on a table. Of course we can’t picture the ansible exactly; it hasn’t been invented yet.

This detail hardly matters, but it’s so elegantly done, using what is said and not said to evoke something familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Taking a familiar word like “tape” and imbuing it with uncertainty is the complement to inventing a new word, the left hand to the right. The central work of The Left Hand of Darkness is to unmoor some of our most fundamental words, “man” and “he,” from our usual understanding of them, letting them drift toward a vastness we haven’t yet mapped.

Also, I read so much romance that I sort of forgot novels can have sad endings. What the fuck. Why did I let Ursula K. Le Guin do this to me?

(I would let her do it again.)

Should you find yourself in need of a novel with a guaranteed Happily Ever After, here's what I've read lately in small-r romance:

Ravishing the Heiress (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Sherry Thomas. I love a romance character who just cannot catch a clue, and Fitz goes eight years without a glimmer of recognition that he is in love with his funny, clever, hardworking, highly competent and extremely guarded wife. In his defense, Millie doesn’t help him at all, keeping her feelings locked up tight. This is so brilliantly executed that it’s like four tropes on top of each other—marriage of convenience, friends to lovers, marriage in trouble, sex pact—and still manages to be magnetically compelling and not quite like anything else. Thomas is such an expert at weaving the past storyline into the present. I have a slight personal preference for her work with a secondary action or espionage plot (His At Night or My Beautiful Enemy), as opposed to these romances that are entirely focused on heartbreak and healing, but this one is impeccably gorgeous—and she did manage to put a fraught and urgent journey in there, just for me. Lastly, here is the warning I must always issue to my past self: the sex they’re having is ostensibly to create an heir, but no pregnancy happens in the book. There is a pregnant supporting character. Library ebook.

A Dance in Moonlight (m/f, both cis and het, historical, novella) by Sherry Thomas. This is a companion novella to the above novel. It’s good—it’s Sherry Thomas!—and all I want to say is that I love when a character who is an obstacle to someone else’s happiness in one book gets to find their own happiness in another part of the series. Library ebook.

Make Room for Love (cis lesbian f/bi trans f, contemporary) by Darcy Liao. This was wonderful and refreshing from start to finish. A contemporary romance that is real about money? And that celebrates union organizing? And it’s queer and trans and emotionally intimate and deliciously sexy? Perfection. Mira is an overworked, underpaid grad student in classics who just broke up with her terrible controlling boyfriend and desperately needs a place to live. Isabel is a union electrician whose longterm girlfriend left her over how withdrawn she became in her grief for her sister. Isabel rescues Mira from an altercation with her terrible ex and spontaneously offers her a room. They’re both just getting by and not looking to fall in love, and besides, Mira only dates men. Her bisexual awakening is written so well and it’s so beautifully specific to her experience as a trans woman—all her previous experiences with women happened before her transition, and none were good, so she assumes she isn’t attracted to women. Watching her slowly reevaluate that is a delight. Isabel’s grief and the resulting friction with her family is handled so sensitively, and like the money and labor organizing issues in this book, it feels very real. I also want to mention that Isabel is Chinese-American and Mira is Jewish and South Indian, and the two of them sharing their traditions and food and idiosyncratic family stuff with each other as they gradually grow closer is great. Also, they discuss Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which I took as a sign that it was time for me to read it. Indie published; purchased in print and donated to a local trans org.

In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I also read and highly recommend Tawfiq Da’adli’s devastating short story—almost a piece of flash fiction, really, or even a prose poem—“On the Squeezing,” translated from Hebrew by Dikla Taylor-Sheinman and published bilingually in Jewish Currents. I always love a good translator’s note and Taylor-Sheinman’s is excellent.

And perhaps relevant to the interests of Word Suitcase readers, here’s Strong Language on “smut” and Tom Lehrer.

That's all for this time. I'll be back in your inbox on May 4.