RIP Suzette Haden Elgin: High Priestess of Sci-Fi Poetry

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as science fiction poetry. Suzette Haden Elgin was one such poetess. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association AND authored the quite popular The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense. We are sad that she is already gone. From io9:

Suzette Haden Elgin, who died last week, was a pioneer of using linguistics in science fiction, creating a whole constructed language in her novel Native Tongue. She was a giant of feminist SF. And she helped bring SF poetry to prominence, while also teaching us to defend ourselves with wit rather than bile.

Elgin had a PhD in linguistics, so it's no surprise that her Native Tongue book trilogy is all about language. The book takes place in a dystopian future, where women have been stripped of all rights when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was repealed in 1996. A group of women, who work as part of a corps of linguists who help to communicate with alien races, develop a new secret language for women to use as part of their resistance to their oppression. This language is called Láadan, and Elgin has a whole vocabulary and syntax on her website.

She also wrote several other SF novels, including the Coyote Jones series, which started with The Communipaths in 1970, and the Planet Ozark series, which started with 1981's Twelve Fair Kingdoms. And a standalone novel, Peacetalk 101. She was working on a new novel when she died, about a linguist from the U.S. Corps of Linguists who fails her finals and is thus sent to do fieldwork on an alien planet, studying four languages spoken there. [...]

Continue reading about Suzette Haden Elgin at io9. We can't wait to crack open the books. See you in outer space!