The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction
Pages: 161
Published by Tordotcom on April 21, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
A story of secrets, body jumping, and the power of language, The Language of Liars is a poignant, thought-provoking new masterpiece from S. L. Huang, award-winning author of The Water Outlaws
Speak another people's language. Know them. Become them.And discover you've destroyed them.
In his training as a spy, Ro was warned: you will always be living a lie.
Jumping into a Star Eater's mind in the first place requires a moment of perfect psychic connection, and he has studied all his life to comprehend their species. Admires them, respects them, is reverent at the idea of being one of them—the only species physiologically capable of mining the element needed for lightyear-spanning space travel. The species all others crave to know more of, but who have notoriously shared so very little. The species Ro's own small civilization, with its dwindling resources and withering reach, needs to know more about.
It will feel real, his elders impressed upon him. It will never be real.
But Ro's certainty runs deep: he will be different. Ro will not be an imposter hiding the truth of his past, because his heart will be one of them. He will be one of them.
To understand is to become. It never occurs to him that the mere act of understanding can destroy.
My Review:
The opening of this one feels familiar, and it feels familiar in the same way that the opening of A Wall Is Also a Road is familiar. Because it starts as a dark academia story in a science fictional setting. Ro’s educational system feels like ours, because it is in all the worst ways. Ro is one of those students who doesn’t quite fit in. He’s GREAT at the individual language studies, but he’s terrible at the discipline required to go beyond studying to adapt to academia.
But poor Ro believes that he’s there to learn, and the pinnacle of his – and he believes the entire institution’s – vision of learning is to become so familiar with the Star Eaters and their language that he, using the special empathic abilities native to his people, the Orro, will be able to ‘jump’ his consciousness into the body of a Star Eater.
It’s important that the Orro, and all the other races and peoples and political entities of the Conglomerate, understand the Star Eaters because the Star Eaters are the only species that can gather Meridian, the element that literally makes the universe go ‘round. Or at least their universe. All of the technology for interstellar communication and travel is powered by Meridian. Only the Star Eaters are capable of gathering Meridian. And the Star Eaters are dying out as a race because they’ve stopped reproducing.
What Ro doesn’t know about this situation when he literally jumps into it, is that the true purpose of the Orro’s program to train linguists to ‘jump’ into Star Eater bodies is to smuggle Meridian back to Orro. Ro is an idealist – he’s there to learn, to experience life as someone other than himself, to understand the Star Eaters from the inside so that the universe outside gains a better understanding of these people upon whose limbs the universe rests.
He wants to write reports about language drift. His superiors want him to smuggle Meridian. Ro has spent a lifetime avoiding doing what his superiors want him to do in favor of following his own eccentric academic desires. Which means he didn’t pay attention to half the lessons he should have. He’s scared to death that he’s going to screw this up.
Spectacularly. Catastrophically. Calamitously. Necessarily.
Escape Rating A-: I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I picked this one up. Mostly because I picked this up from a friend’s recommendation and didn’t look at the blurb until after I finished. Which was probably a good thing because the blurb needs a damn ‘SPOILER ALERT’ that it doesn’t have because it’s the blurb.
The story is about the power of language, the high-wire act of translation, and the problems inherent in communicating between beings and cultures that do not share frames of reference. On top of all of that – which already makes a pretty tall mountain of issues to handle in a work the size of a novella – the story also has more than a few things to say about colonialism along with an exploration of the effects of cultural misappropriation taken to its furthest extreme.
But on another limb entirely – definitely one of Ro’s own Star Eater limbs – this is a story about disillusionment. Because just as Ro has jumped into a Star Eater body, we’ve jumped into his, and we see this world through his fears, his confusion, his disappointment and his terror.
At first, the story seems a lot like A Wall Is Also a Road but those roads diverge well before the end. Wall is bittersweet but ultimately hopeful. The ending of The Language of Liars is a bit of karmic justice. All the peoples and polities that have been controlling the Star Eaters for millennia reap what they have sown.
Along its way, it picks up elements of Munir Hachemi’s The Mulai and Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain as both are stories about the rather dark academic practice of condescension towards groups that the academics believe are considerably beneath them – especially groups that are consigned to service at birth.
In a completely different way, it’s similar to John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy (The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, The Last Emperox) in that both stories are about the end of the world as THEY know it, with the awareness that the technology that has allowed a vast interstellar network to operate is about to go dark. There’s a lot of grief to go around in both stories, but the end of its story the universe in the Interdependency has known the truth long enough to reach at least a grudging ‘Acceptance’ on the seven stages of grief, while the universe of The Language of Liars is still stuck somewhere between ‘Shock and Disbelief’, ‘Anger’ and ‘Depression’.
In the end, I wasn’t surprised at Ro’s discovery of the truth about the Star Eaters. It was kind of the ultimate “We have met the enemy and he is us” scenario where the powers-that-be in their universe as they know it have brought about their own destruction through condescension and hubris. This is not the kind of story that one enjoys, per se, and I can’t say that joy is the emotion I left it with. It’s a sad ending, but it’s a deserved one. It’s also an extremely thoughtFULL and thought-provoking story, and I am glad I read it.
If you’re interested in a different take on this, one that dives deeper into the linguistic aspects of the story as it was written by a professional translator, see Kathryn Raver’s review in Ancillary Review of Books titled “The Theft of Another’s Self”.
Murder on Threadneedle Street (A Wrexford & Sloane Mystery) by 
It’s often said that “money is the root of all evil”, but that’s a misquote. The complete biblical verse says that “the love of money is the root of all evil”. Very much on the other hand, there’s an often repeated contemporary (contemporary to our era and not Wrex and Charlotte’s era) that “money is the root of all evil, but every woman needs roots!”
A brother who seemed to be the leader of a flamboyant and successful band of counterfeiters. The Lisbon Conspiracy, a grand scheme that defrauded the government of thousands of pounds and poured egg over their faces at the same time, was a decade in the past when Fletcher Campbell was murdered. Long enough ago that the young genius who created the counterfeit documents has grown to manhood. Far enough in the rearview for the government to remember the scandal but with a determination to prevent the next attempt at the same idea – because the stakes are now higher.
But this time around, Wrex and Charlotte are standing in their way. Even if, at the beginning they don’t yet know precisely what they are standing in the way of. Because someone has attacked their family – and that’s one threat that neither of them can let stand.
In this particular story, the plot is incredibly convoluted, AND gets deep into the intersection between art, technology and economics in a complex pattern that makes both the crime and the perpetrators just that much more difficult to discover.
The murder investigation that gets wrapped up and around the technical details is made that much more complicated because the perpetrators use the contest and the technological inventions (and occasional failures) to hide their actions while each part of the problem draws attention from the other and throws up an entire school of herrings.
A Murderer's Guide to Mardi Gras (Vintage Cookbook Mystery, 5) by 
Just the words “Mardi Gras” conjure up all sorts of images of parades and beads and over-the-top decorations and scenes of absolute but also absolutely fun chaos. In the U.S., New Orleans is the unofficial “capital” of Mardi Gras, and probably the first place that people outside the area think of when the phrase is mentioned.
Escape Rating B: So far, this series has been a lot of fun when I’m looking for a cozy mystery. I adore the New Orleans setting, and Ricki’s investigative adventures certainly do bring New Orleans to vibrant life. Even the car-swallowing potholes. It’s all part of the charm. I picked up the audiobook because I’d already read the first and fourth books (
In the best cozy mystery tradition, the victim had it coming. Or, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fellow. One of the great things about cozy mysteries is that while there’s a real murder, it’s not someone the reader – or the characters – mourn overmuch. If at all. In this case, it’s the krewe captain, who seems to have been a serial cheater, a con artist, and just a general, all-around rotten scoundrel with more than enough charm and charisma to get away with everything short of murder until someone decided they’d had enough of him.
Current Giveaways:
Blog Recap:
Coming This Week:
Lost in the Summer of '69 by 
In the summer of 1969, Eleanor Bell Strickland may not remember the phrase – because she’s been having more than a few problems with her memories of her own life these days – but she’s hoping it’s true all the same. And that it’s not too late for her to try, not so much in spite of being 69 herself, but because she’s just learned the reason why her memory has felt like Swiss cheese for longer than she’d care to admit.
So Eleanor, and her precocious little dog, Roxy, put themselves on a plane from New York to the Newport Pop Festival in California. For one, last, bright summer – before the lights go out.
The story seems like Eleanor Bell’s, and it is. But Nora is the person who holds it together, the granddaughter in Eleanor’s summer of ‘69 but the grandmother in Ellie’s request to attend the Woodstock 50 concert that was eventually cancelled.
At the same time, we follow Leanne and Nora’s cross-country road trip chasing after grandma. Leanne knows about Eleanor’s diagnosis, and she’s petrified that her mother is dead in a ditch somewhere. But Leanne is also simply petrified. She’s done entirely too well at being what women were supposed to be, the perfect domestic goddess, always starched, always proper, no identity except as Dean’s wife and Nora’s mother. But Nora is about to go off to college, her husband buries himself in work and treats her like an appliance, and she’s not sure who she’ll be when Nora starts her own life.
Lost in the Summer of ‘69 is one of those stories where it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. And the journey is both “Far Out” and close to the heart.
Death and Glory (Barker & Llewelyn, #15) by 
Usually that title phrase is “Death OR Glory”, a commitment to an undertaking that will result in one OR the other. In other words, a variation on Patrick Henry’s oft-quoted phrase, “Give me liberty or give me death!”.
Escape Rating A: First, this was a right book at the right time situation for me. I read this a month ago, while I was in the middle of a red-eye flight, and I was awake – as usual. Reading remains the best method of being somewhere else when you have to remain physically where you are, and I needed to be elsewhere. Elsewhen if possible. Barker and Llewelyn always deliver. So my body was somewhere over the Rockies (I think) while my brain was in London in the 1890s wondering what the hell a bunch of Confederate officers were doing in London 30 years after Appomattox. So were the brains of both Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn, so I was in excellent company.
The race in this one, or perhaps the cat and mouse game, was to figure out what the old soldiers were really after and to keep them from getting it. The problem that Barker and Llewelyn faced was the way that roles of pursuers and pursuit kept shifting. Barker always intends to be the cat, but in this particular game, the mouse was more than wily enough to keep him and his partner dancing to their tune every bit as often as he made them dance to his.
Holmes Away From Home (An Althea Adler Mystery) by 
Althea Adler is all too aware that she is the daughter – and protegee – of Irene Adler, the woman who literally got away from the ‘Great Detective’ by using his own methods and his own tricks against him, in the case of 
That search needs to go through her own school frenemy, Rosie Watson, an invitation to a country house party, a meeting with one of Mycroft’s secret operatives, and a murder. Not that the victim didn’t have it coming. (The murder reminds me a bit of 
Howsomever, I picked this book up for the Sherlock Holmes angle, and I got a bit teased this time around. I say this time around because there have been several series that reach back to 
Kill All Wizards (The Barbaric Ledgers, #1) by 
There was something about the tone of the storytelling that gave me a bit of déjà vu. It sounded familiar, even though the story was completely new. (And I hadn’t really read the blurb first. I looked at the page length and decided this would be a great palate-cleanser – or at least a quick one.) So I kept reading and that’s when it hit me that the reason the tone felt familiar was because I’d read stuff very similar a LONG time ago. Kill All Wizards is a chip off the old block of good, “old skool”, sword and sorcery. Like Fritz Leiber’s 
The same flamboyance of costume and language is also on display in 
All of which is part of why