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”.
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