Books book reviews Exploring the Other: The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang Jenny Hamilton reviews a novella that’s “dizzyingly ambitious in scope and morality.” By Jenny Hamilton | Published on May 20, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Ro has always cherished dreams of becoming a Senior Linguist, and since his acceptance at the Warren, he’s dreamed of something greater still: making the “jump” to occupy the body of a Star Eater, the most mysterious species in the galaxy. While he acknowledges some moral reservations about the process—is it right to displace a living Star Eater from its own body, even for the short span of Ro’s Ponto lifespan?—he’s desperately eager for the knowledge he can gather and send back to his home planet of Orro. Yet his Seniors say he’s too scattered, not serious enough, not focused enough. Just as he begins to doubt his fitness for the jump, he achieves it. In the body of a Star Eater, Ro begins to learn ugly truths that his Warren has kept from him—truths about his own species and the galaxy as a whole. Still, he’s determined to do his best for his home planet, amidst the constant terror that he will be discovered as a fraud. The Star Eater language is such a tricky one, so foreign even to a talented linguist like Ro, and the Star Eaters themselves are standoffish and purely focused on the work of harvesting meridian, the galaxy’s most precious resource. Ro, accustomed to the warm and cuddly nature of his own Ponto species, struggles to acclimate to the strange, chilly Star Eater culture. There’s a lot that The Language of Liars does well. Ro isn’t human, the Star Eaters aren’t human, and as far as we can tell, nobody in this galaxy is human. It’s a pure secondary world, or else humans have gone extinct, and Huang’s clever about exploring the embodied experience of her non-human protagonist. I pictured Ro like a largeish, upright rabbit or otter—something sweet—although here again, Huang includes signifiers that prevent the reader from settling into any one-to-one correspondence with familiar creatures for Ro or the Star Eaters. Their otherness is the point, allowing Huang to highlight the fundamental person-ness of people, regardless of species or background. It also makes the world feel fully fleshed out—impressively so, for a novella! Huang cleverly channels this through Ro’s all-consuming interest in linguistics, so that we hear about numerous worlds, planets, and species via their use of slang, or their anomalous use of personal and relative pronouns, or their vowel placement. As I was reading, I kept thinking how stress-testable the world of the book felt, like I could exert some pressure on its world-building mechanisms, and I would find solid drywall behind them. It’s impressive for any book, but particularly for a book of novella length, and I did keep having to pause to give thanks for the blossoming of the novella form over the last ten years of SFF. Huang uses a similarly clever mechanism to clue in readers on the backstory of the Star Eaters. Each chapter begins with a quote or excerpt or transcript relating to the Star Eaters and their current status in the galactic conglomerate. This could have been unbelievably clunky, but Huang is deft about conveying exposition without making it seem like exposition. The transcript of a debate about Star Eater gender hints at broader galactic conversations about Star Eaters; the remarks of a so-called political commentator suggests the ugly, acquisitive xenophobia lurking beneath the veneer of civilization. Sometimes I think I have read too many books. Like maybe there was some Book Rubicon I crossed that doesn’t allow me to experience joy anymore. This concern is untouched by the knowledge that I have, on this very site, in this very year, raved and screamed about multiple books I adored. Maybe those were the last ones! Maybe I have loved the last books I will ever love! This came up for me with SL Huang’s The Language of Liars, a book I had every confidence would be a top-five favorite of the year. I’ve loved SL Huang’s work in the past—her Cas Russell series did not receive the attention I felt it deserved—and I knew The Language of Liars was going to be about linguistics and atrocities, two of my absolute tip-top favorite things for science fiction to be about. And yet. To discuss this in more detail, I’ll have to reveal the big twist of the story, so please consider this your spoiler warning. You’ve been warned. I’m going to talk about it now. Ready? Here we go. Buy the Book The Language of Liars S.L. Huang Buy Book The Language of Liars S.L. Huang Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget At the end of the book, we find out that there are no more living Star Eaters. Contrary to what Ro has been taught, many species—not just the Ponto—can make the jump into Star Eater bodies, and they have been doing so for decades, occupying Star Eater bodies to harvest meridian, then siphoning off meridian supplies for use by their home planets. Little by little, the Star Eaters have been replaced, all of them, by people from other planets, each hoping to get a cut of the precious supply of meridian, each willing to commit what they believed was a one-off theft of Star Eater personhood. Terrible, perhaps, but worth it for the greater good of their own species. The reveal in The Language of Liars hit the way it was supposed to, a gut-punch. And then I finished the book, and I closed it, and two minutes passed, and I thought, oh no, but this doesn’t make any sense. The reveal is thematic, allegorical, a story about how small, individual choices, made by mostly well-intentioned people, can become, in aggregate, a massive, unrecoverable atrocity. Thematically, I love it. Unfortunately, by creating such a textured and stress-testable world, Huang conditioned me to expect a degree of specificity and plausibility that the book’s reveal just can’t support. For one thing, what is the mechanism by which other species jump into Star Eater bodies? I was willing to handwave it for the Ponto as part of the book’s set-up, but for oodles and oodles of very different species all across the galaxy, I fear I will need more explanation. Also, has the math always worked out perfectly that each individual Star Eater body has one invading person in them at all times, and that person generally survives to the expected end of that species’ lifespan? Has it never happened that the invading person lived out their natural lifespan and died and now the Star Eater is empty of any person at all? And another question: What about peer review? Let’s assume the math I mentioned above works out. Let’s assume there’s some handwavey mechanism for other species to jump into Star Eater bodies. We know that the knowledge Ro brings to his work comes from non-Ponto researchers. Does nobody involved in this research community ever speak to anyone else involved in this research community? Does nobody send out snippy little interplanetary emails because their Star Eater informant says something different than the Star Eater informant the other researcher has been hearing from? If Star Eater scholarship is shared among species and across planetary boundaries—which, clearly, it is—every single frontline researcher would have had to lie about the source of their information, and the entire network of peer reviewers would have to be like “that’s okay, we trust you :)” and I simply do not buy it because nerds talk. Nor do I find it credible that Ro is the first Star Eater occupier ever to make friends with his fellow Star Eaters, and thereby to set the stage for the truth to be discovered. Look: I am not saying that people aren’t capable of atrocity. I am not saying that people aren’t capable of unfathomable and mindless cruelty, under the guise of promoting scholarship or protecting their own or advancing technology or whatever other justification comes to mind. What I do not believe people are capable of is keeping their damn mouths shut. I can’t believe in the entire suspension, across decades and planets, of our desire to connect with each other. We gossip, we make friends, we exchange research notes, we blab and yap and yammer. I cannot stare into the bleak and stony heart of human cruelty while pretending that the squishy and endearing and aggravating parts don’t also exist. The Tordotcom novella line remains a space for some of the most grim, strange, fascinating work being done in the genre today, and The Language of Liars is dizzyingly ambitious in scope and morality. Landing among the Star Eaters didn’t quite work for me, but in the era of content produced to satisfy an algorithm, I’m thrilled we have SF writers like Huang still willing to shoot for the moon.[end-mark] The Language of Liars is published by Tordotcom Publishing. The post Exploring the Other: <i>The Language of Liars</i> by S.L. Huang appeared first on Reactor.