Imagine some not too distant dystopian future where women are completely subservient to men and barely allowed to speak. This is the premise of Vox (Berkley, Aug.), a debut novel by Christina Dalcher, a short story and flash fiction award-winner with a doctorate in theoretical linguistics.
The book actually started as a piece of flash fiction. “I imagined a world where some kind of bioagent had gone viral and induced a certain type of aphasia, so it eliminated humans’ ability to speak.”
Then she saw a call for submissions for a dystopian fiction anthology featuring female protagonists, with the plot centering around a specific skill. “I wanted to keep going down the rabbit hole of the aphasia doomsday story, so I thought, ‘Let’s make this woman a neurolinguist on the brink of curing aphasia’ and I brought in the irony of her working all of her life to try and help people to speak, but she can’t express herself because she lives in a world where women are limited to speaking 100 words a day.”
The author’s background in linguistics informs her work, and while she enjoyed looking into a fictitious cure for the loss of the ability to express oneself, she was more interested in exploring the importance of language when she decided to expand her story into a novel. “We are the only species that has language. Other species can communicate, but communication and language are very different things. A dog barking or spinning on command—that’s communication. Language is really quite different, and if you think about the idea of taking that away or preventing children from acquiring it, things become really frightening.”
As to what readers will get out of her book, Dalcher says, “I’d certainly like them to think hard about whether their voice matters—whether it’s in politics or in any other sphere. Standing by and watching the parade pass is not the best option. I also hope people will think a bit more about this uniquely human capacity that we have for language; it’s so ubiquitous, but it’s so unique.”
The author is excited that ARCS of her book will be given out at Book Expo. “If you think about one person telling two friends about the book, and each of them telling two friends, and so on—we’re looking at a possible geometric explosion. I’m definitely in favor of that!”
