The world is broken…
Inspector Maddox Dawes of Kyper Central has one more month until retirement. One more month, that is, until a group of rebellious dissidents to the Republic start painting a mysterious message across the screens:
Nehrun tai hanen
No one knows what it means, and the computers have been hacked by the rebels, erasing any trace of their doings. Dawes must work with the only language expert in the Republic to determine just what these rebels are saying and why.
The answers lie shrouded behind layers of politics, an influx of the drug Dreamscape, and the leader of the rebels, Ske’toa, who always seems two-steps ahead.
The world is broken. But how do you go about fixing the world if the words to express its wrongs don’t exist?
Inspector Maddox Dawes of Kyper Central has one more month until retirement. One more month, that is, until a group of rebellious dissidents to the Republic start painting a mysterious message across the screens:
Nehrun tai hanen
No one knows what it means, and the computers have been hacked by the rebels, erasing any trace of their doings. Dawes must work with the only language expert in the Republic to determine just what these rebels are saying and why.
The answers lie shrouded behind layers of politics, an influx of the drug Dreamscape, and the leader of the rebels, Ske’toa, who always seems two-steps ahead.
The world is broken. But how do you go about fixing the world if the words to express its wrongs don’t exist?
>>>>>>>>>>>
My Review:
I love words. That's why I love books so much. If I hadn't discovered how much I loved teaching elementary students and academic tutoring, I probably would have gone into linguistics. (Who else had the audacity to invent an entire fictional language for a novel that was originally a fanfiction--or even bothered, while writing said fanfiction in the first place, to Google-search the heck out of the original fictional language--in the late noughties, no less--in order to translate lines of original dialogue into that language? Seriously... sound off if you did!)
But I digress... Speaker of Words starts out very intriguing--a well-ordered future society suddenly comes to a screeching halt when dissidents attack with a very distinctive slogan: three words in a language nobody knows, a message nobody understands--but the fear is there, all the same.
Inspector Maddox Dawes is so close to retirement, he doesn't want to do anything that would get him discharged (or "Decommissioned") instead--so he's forced to go after these troublemakers, conspirators... these terrorists? Whoever they are, they seem to have a lot of control over the city's systems, and every attempt to continue as before and ignore what happened is met with resistance and a new type of infiltration that lets everyone know: the Republic is no longer regulated and monitored by the Konsulars. The "rebels" have the true control. If only people could understand the message they bring.
That's where the brilliance of E. G. Stone really shines. Maddox isn't keen on words, but when all signs point to the strange message as the key to uncovering the identity of these dissenters, he teams up with the Republic's only linguist--and the story takes a deep dive into the concept of language, verbal and nonverbal, as Maddox and the linguist take apart the words segment by segment to try and discern their meaning. As a writer, I appreciate the notion of finding just the right words to communicate one's thoughts and emotions. Some words are too strong, others are not strong enough for the particular feeling I'm trying to express--and picking the wrong words will result in evoking the wrong emotions, and the message is lost.
I can confirm that Speaker of Words has all the right words, and all the thought-provoking weight of dystopian classics like Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, and even carries shades of a show like The Expanse (of which I've only seen the first season, but the similarities are there, including an inspector/detective character--who isn't named Dawes--and a character who is named Dawes... but is not a lawman...)
I would give Speaker of Words a hearty *****4.5 STAR***** rating, and couple that with an Upstream Writer Certified DEFINITELY RECOMMENDED endorsement. The premise was good, the world-building on point, I liked the characters, the plot was superbly-executed and paced very well, the dialogue was very precise without dragging conversations or jumping through exposition too fast... The one thing that I'm a little bit "iffy" on was the way it resolved, but it's one of those things where it didn't go "where I expected", but at the same time... I don't think it could have ended satisfactorily any other way. E. G. Stone really knows how to tell a story that makes you think, and I've said before that those are the stories I really like, and the stories that I am sure will last through generations!
Further Reading: (Cyberpunk/Dystopian/Thought-provoking Literature)
The Children of Dreki--N. R. Tupper
-TYR
-TYR
The Untamed Series--Madeline Dyer
-Untamed
-Fragmented
-Untamed
-Fragmented
The Vemreaux Trilogy--Mary E. Twomey
-The Way
-The Truth
-The Lie
-The Way
-The Truth
-The Lie
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