Drunk On All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson
All the intoxication with none of the calories!
I had a fun time with gun, with occasional music, and I went in search of something that would match that silly, chaotic energy. Drunk On All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson was suggested as fitting the bill. It’s about a human-alien translator who gets drunk on extraterrestrial language trying to solve a murder with interstellar political ramifications so….sounds about right.
How did it stack up? Keep reading and I’ll let you know!
Quick Take
Drunk On All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson
My rating: ★★★+(★/☆) (3.5/5)
Length: 243 pp. • Published: June 28, 2022. •Tone: Science-fiction mystery
In one line: A fun and creative romp with limited staying power
Spoiler-Free Summary
In the not-so-distant future, humans co-exist with an inter-stellar race known as the Logi. The Logi are tall, thin, and mute, communicating telepathically. They also have an appetite for Earth culture, which is both lucrative for the human race and places extra importance on the Logi’s cultural attache to Earth, who decides which bits of Earth culture are most worth the Logi’s time. Lydia, a human, works as the Logi’s cultural attache’s translator. A murder in Lydia’s orbit will send her hurtling into the center of a potential intergalactic war, and/or jail. And the unemployment line.
What Worked
Drunk On All Your Strange New Words (hereafter shortened to Drunk) is just plain silly fun. Its got action, its got creativity, it’s funny. All of this rests on the strength of Drunk’s characters, who are all idiosyncratic enough to be interesting while remaining relatable. To wit:
Lydia leads the kind of messy, unfocused life to which we can all relate. She stumbles through her casual and intermittent love life, her dismissive family, and the job she’s certain she’ll lose at any moment.
Fitzwilliam (“Fitz”), the Logi’s cultural attache to whom Lydia is assigned, is the placid and quietly encouraging boss we all wish we had, and just slightly oblivious enough to human quirks to be endearing.
Along the way we meet self-aggrandizing wanna-be artists, Logi political/personal rivals who’s aggressive nature covers a decent heart, and basement-dwelling fedora-donning over-confident incels who have nuggets of truth and worth if you can somehow stand everything else about them.
They’re a great roster of characters who are real…characters.1 It’s so enjoyable to spend some time in their universe and watch them bounce off one another.
The plot itself is relatively straightforward, as far as one can be in a novel about telepathic aliens. If you visualized it all on one whiteboard after you finished the novel, you’d find it fairly simple. However, there was at least one twist that actually made me audibly gasp, which is no easy feat. So, while the structure may be basic(ish), the execution is skillfully employed.
It moves fast and will make you laugh and gasp. What’s wrong with that?
What Didn’t Work
Well, I’ll tell you.
Usually I write these reviews pretty soon after finishing the book. In this case, due to that pesky thing called “the rest of my life”, a week or so passed between the last page and starting to write. In that time, I forgot quite a bit about this book. I couldn’t name anyone, and to be completely honest, I kind of forgot who even committed the murder2. Drunk just didn’t stick with me. I’ll maybe remember the feeling the book gave off (fun, adventurous, wry), but I imagine that in a few weeks, I’ll have to re-read my own review just to remember what it was about.
In the same kind of vein, if you’re coming to this as a sci-fi fan who wants some intense world-building, you’ll likely want to look elsewhere. There’s good stuff here, but not a ton of depth to it. For example, if there was a mention of how the Logi get to Earth, I missed it entirely. Lydia day-dreams at one point of living out her days on the Logi homeworld, but its just surface level thoughts of how it would be hard to communicate with them and live a normal life. You’re not going to get Dune or Handmaid’s Tale levels of fleshed out universes.
In fairness, this is very possibly purposeful. Drunk is loose and agile, and not looking to get bogged down in detail. Perfectly legitimate choice by the author, but the trade off is a literary world that’s not as rich as some sci-fi fans might enjoy.
Memorable Quotes
<Lydia is explaining to Fitz how conspiracy theories have emerged among humans about his alien race. Fitz speaks first:>
So people think we were invented by your authorities as an all-purpose scapegoat.
It sort of makes sense.
Does it?
Well, not really, but I can see why people think it. Things were really falling apart before your lot turned up, y’know. Major countries descending into chaos, wars breaking out like forest fires. And also, actual forest fires. Then you got here and it was all about pulling together to take the opportunities on offer, and that dictated a lot of what we could and couldn’t do, and politicians do kind of use that as a way of passing the buck.
Ah, I think I see. So people believe it was a play to deflect criticism and create unity.
Yeah, some people believe that. But some people just don’t want the world to be bigger than it is. Freaks them out. It’s easier to believe it’s an elaborate conspiracy.
Is it?
For some people it is, yeah.
I kind of wish Drunk had more exchanges like this. I love how Lydia is forming her thoughts about her own species by explaining it to another one.
Fitz perceives time very differently than she does because he doesn’t have access to the constant updates humans take for granted: he absorbs events in larger packages, not the data plankton she’s used to. Time isn’t a constant, and for some reason humans have worked hard to make it feel like it’s passing faster - but to Lydia, today seems to have lasted an eternity.
“Data plankton” is a great turn of phrase, and this passage reminds me of that Einstein quote when asked to explain his theory of relativity in layman terms (paraphrased): An hour sitting on a park bench with the girl of your dreams passes in a moment, an hour in the dentist’s chair lasts forever.
Final Thoughts
Sometimes you want to watch The Sopranos, The Wire, or The Crown. Sometimes you want to watch trashy game shows and reality TV. Is one better than the other? Depends on your tastes and aims. If you’re looking to turn your brain off for an hour, maybe Chopped is better in that moment than Boardwalk Empire.
Drunk finds a middle ground between the two, though it still has one foot in popcorn and fluff land. I enjoyed it. I think you will too, if you’re not looking for something intellectually meaty to chew on.
5 Star / 1 Star
Lilibet Bombshell gives 5 stars:
Oh how I love books that heavily embed linguistics not only the culture of the people in the book but also so deeply into the very plot of the book! I may not be a linguist (that title falls to my baby sister), but both she and I grew up with a love of languages and how language evolves over time. This book made me so very happy in my linguistics pants just because it was so clever and almost effortless in how it took the English language and showed how much it could have shifted and then been embedded into the social fabric in the future. I won’t give any examples, because I really don’t want to ruin the fun. Some of the changes are just so downright spot-on they become hilarious. I found myself saying, “Of course that’s what we’d end up calling that in the future!” This book also relies heavily on how technology has changed language on a global scale, with American English, fragmented sentences, and emojis being the most common languages spoken when the digital world is involved.
“Linguistics pants”
Johnny gives 1 star:
JOHN LENNON WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!
Johnny are you…ok?
Who Should Read This?
Rating
Drunk On All Your Strange New Words is fun and adventurous. It’s got sci-fi elements and some light political intrigue. If you want a treatise on human fallibility, look elsewhere. If you want a fun distraction for a few hours, you could do much worse. Thus, Drunk has been bestowed 3.5/5 flying saucers.
I do words good
After a few minutes of thoughts I remembered the guilty party’s role in the story, but I still can’t recall their name.
Although I am not a great lover of science fiction , I do keep an open mind on the subject. Your critiques are excellent and entertaining. Sounds like a fun book.