News Tangled Live-Action Tangled: It Was Kathryn Hahn All Along for Mother Gothel It was previously rumored that Scarlett Johansson was attached to the role… By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on March 10, 2026 Screenshot: Disney Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Disney We have confirmation that Kathryn Hahn (Agatha All Along) will play Mother Gothel in Disney’s live-action rendition of Tangled. Hahn herself confirmed (kinda) the news on social media by revealing on an official Walt Disney Studios account that she was wearing a Mother Gothel T-shirt. The comment from the official Disney account said, “You want her to be the bad guy? FINE. Kathryn Hahn is Mother Gothel in Disney’s live-action Tangled.” That’s what I’d call a confirmation that Hahn will be Rapunzel’s toxic “mother” in the film. Hahn isn’t the only official casting news we have for the live-action Tangled, which was taken off the shelf after being put on hold after the poor box office performance of Snow White. We also know that Teagan Croft (Titans) will be playing Rapunzel and Milo Manheim (School Spirits) will be Flynn Rider. Hahn also isn’t the only A-list actor rumored to take on the role of Mother Gothel. Back in October, reports suggested that Scarlett Johansson was taking on the role before speculation about Hahn also started circulating. Today’s message, however, confirms that it will be Hahn playing the bad guy in the film, including singing a rendition of the catchy song, “Mother Knows Best.” No news yet on when the live-action Tangled will go into production or make its way to theaters. [end-mark] The post Live-Action <i>Tangled</i>: It Was Kathryn Hahn All Along for Mother Gothel appeared first on Reactor.

Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari” Mollari collapses from a heart attack and battles with his guilt in a dream state, while Lennier announces a career change… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on March 10, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 1 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari”Written by J. Michael StraczynskiDirected by David J. EagleSeason 5, Episode 2Production episode 503Original air date: January 28, 1998 It was the dawn of the third age… Delenn gets a call from Ruell on Minbar, wanting to start the process of finding a replacement for Lennier, which is the first Delenn is hearing that Lennier won’t be her aide anymore. She confronts Lennier on the subject during their morning meeting, at which point Lennier abashedly says he was going to tell her after dinner that night and didn’t realize Minbar would be so efficient in working to replace him. He feels that Delenn no longer needs him, as she has Sheridan now, and so he feels redundant. Plus, he feels the loss of Cole deeply, and so wishes to, in essence, replace him in the Rangers. Mollari is arguing with Allan over the disposition of a case of brivari he’s had delivered. Vir takes Allan aside to try to reason with him. Mollari takes advantage of Allan not looking at him to sneak a drink from one of the bottles. A few seconds later, he collapses. Allan calls in the medical emergency, and Mollari is brought to medlab, with the bottle sent for chemical analysis. However, he was not poisoned: he had a heart attack in his left heart. Centauri have two hearts; the left one cleans the blood of toxins, and is also smaller and harder to operate on. Franklin reports to Sheridan that it’ll be very difficult for Mollari to recover from this. Sheridan and Delenn watch over the comatose Mollari, with Sheridan joking that it’s the quietest he’s ever seen the ambassador. Delenn says she’s worried about him. They briefly discuss Lennier, with Delenn saying he must find his own path. The comatose Mollari has a very vivid hallucinatory dream. It starts with him being given a tarot reading by a hooded Delenn. Mollari declares to her that no one will care if he lives or dies, and he thinks that dying now would be better than the death he saw for himself in his prophetic dreams, with him and G’Kar strangling each other. Delenn informs him that a single word can save him, but doesn’t tell him what that word is. She gives him a bloody tarot card, and then leaves him with a grate covering a large red thing that beats like a heart. Credit: Warner Bros. Television In the Zocalo, Vir and Lennier meet up for what is their final drink together as commiserating ambassador’s aides. Vir is drinking a Shirley Temple, and Lennier mentions the possibility of visiting that particular temple the next time he’s on Earth, har har. They wish each other well. In Mollari’s dream, he also is in the Zocalo, but the bottles behind the bar are all empty. Sheridan arrives, and Mollari queries him about being dead. Sheridan says he didn’t enjoy it much, and he says that his plan for the nineteen years he has left is to live the best life he can. Mollari feels he’s wasted his life. Sheridan says all Mollari has to do to live is turn around. Mollari—who knows full well that G’Kar is standing behind him—says he doesn’t want to. Sheridan disappears. In medlab, Mollari’s condition is deteriorating. Franklin does what he can, but at this point, either Mollari will come out of it or he won’t. Vir joins Franklin at the ambassador’s bedside, on what Vir refers to as a death-watch. In the dream, Vir tells Mollari that he’d miss him. Mollari admits that he’d miss himself as well, but he still won’t turn around to face G’Kar. In medlab, Mollari is crashing. Franklin works to keep him alive while Vir watches. In the dream, Mollari finally turns around to face G’Kar. In medlab, G’Kar enters to observe Franklin working on Mollari. In the dream, G’Kar and Mollari are in the Centauri throne room, with G’Kar telling Mollari that he fears the power of the throne, and reminds him of when Mollari went with Refa to bomb the Narn homeworld. Mollari insists that it wasn’t his idea, and that he’s never apologized for anything in his life. G’Kar counters that it’s because he was never sorry for what he did, only for getting caught. Credit: Warner Bros. Television They then are in the room where G’Kar was whipped, only G’Kar is now dressed as Cartagia and Mollari is dressed as G’Kar was at the time. Mollari is tied to the column and whipped as G’Kar was, with Mollari finally screaming on the 39th lash, as G’Kar did. Once again, Mollari sees the pulsing red thing, and this time Mollari not only pounds at it, but says he’s sorry. In medlab, he awakens from his coma. Upon seeing G’Kar in the observation room, he mouths an apology. G’Kar just stares for a moment, then leaves. As he recovers, Mollari complains about hospital food, because that’s always a cheap and easy joke to make. Meanwhile, Lennier tries to leave without saying goodbye, but Delenn catches him before he can depart. Lennier insists that it isn’t goodbye, that he’s still devoted to her, heart, body, and soul, and he hopes to return a better person. Delenn says that isn’t possible, and wishes him well. Get the hell out of our galaxy! Sheridan appears in Mollari’s dream in multiple outfits: the EarthForce uniform he wore when he first reported to the station, in just the undershirt, as he was in “Severed Dreams,” then in the Army of Light uniform he started wearing at the end of “Ceremonies of Light and Dark,” then in the robes of Ranger One that Sinclair wore in “The Coming of Shadows” and the “War Without End” two-parter, then in white Minbari robes like those worn by Delenn in (among other places) “The Parliament of Dreams” and by Dukhat in “Atonement.” Then he turns glowy and disappears much like the evolved human in the framing sequence of “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars.” The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is the one who tells Vir that Mollari had a heart attack and wasn’t the victim of a poisoning. Why the director of covert intelligence for the Interstellar Alliance is delivering medical news to an ambassdorial aide is left as an exercise for the viewer, though it’s likely to justify Jerry Doyle’s place in the opening credits. If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn is gobsmacked by Lennier’s departure. Credit: Warner Bros. Television In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Apparently there is a Centauri legend about how a great and noble spirit trapped in the body of a monster will attempt to kill the body of the monster in order to be free. But if the monster subjected to the noble spirit’s trial survives, he becomes a better person. Can’t imagine why they’re discussing that particular bit of mythology… Though it take a thousand years, we shall be free. In Mollari’s dream, G’Kar says that this could be a remnant of G’Kar’s Dust-induced telepathic contact with Mollari in “Dust to Dust.” We live for the one, we die for the one. There’s always been a bit of the Foreign Legion in the Rangers, and Lennier joining them to get away from his complicated feelings for Delenn definitely goes along with that. No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Lennier insists that Delenn doesn’t need him because she has Sheridan now. Since the duties of a husband are not even remotely the same as the duties of an ambassadorial aide, it’s obvious that he’s talking about the possibility of a romantic relationship with Delenn. Welcome aboard. The only guests in this one are Ross Kettle as Ruell and Akiko Ann Morison as the medtech. William Forward also appears as Refa via archive footage from “The Long, Twilight Struggle.” Trivial matters. We see old footage of Mollari and G’Kar strangling each other from “The Coming of Shadows” and of Refa inviting Mollari to join him in the bombing of the Narn homeworld in “The Long, Twilight Struggle.” Brivari was established as a Centauri drink Mollari is fond of in “Knives.” Mollari first mentioned his prophetic dream of him and G’Kar strangling each other to death in “Midnight on the Firing Line,” and we saw it in full when Sheridan jumped forward in time in “War Without End, Part 2.” Mollari first mentioned a dancer he married in “A Voice in the Wilderness, Part 1,” which seemed to contradict the arranged marriage to three wives mentioned in “The War Prayer,” with those wives seen in “Soul Mates”; Mollari’s dialogue in this episode reconciles the two, establishing that his family forced him to divorce the dancer and go ahead with the arranged marriages. Cartagia had G’Kar whipped in “The Summoning.” Vir and Lennier were shown to be drinking buddies in “The Fall of Night.” J. Michael Straczynski had intended to do an episode in the fifth season entitled “The Very Long Night of Susan Ivanova,” but Claudia Christian’s departure meant he had to abandon that notion, but he recycled the title for this episode (which had a plot that was nothing at all like the Ivanova one). The echoes of all of our conversations. “Do you know what this is? No, I can see you do not. You have that vacant look in your eyes that says, ‘Hold my head to your ear, you will hear the sea’.” —Mollari ranting at Allan. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Prophecy is a guess that comes true—when it doesn’t, it’s a metaphor.” I really really really really really dislike stories like this where a person’s remarkably specific psychological issues also resolve their physical medical issues at the exact same moment. The notion that Mollari’s heart would heal itself at the exact same moment that he decides to finally apologize to G’Kar is just too damn precious and ridiculous. Getting there is only worth watching because, no matter how good, bad, or mediocre the material, Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik can generally make it work. Which they kind of do here? Honestly, Jurasik’s best material comes at the beginning of the episode when he’s ranting and raving about his brivari shipment to Allan. His dream sequences are perfectly adequate, but there’s something lacking in these scenes. This show has generally been good at showing the disconnected, surreal nature of dreams and visions, but this is all very linear and straightforward. The closest it comes is Sheridan’s ever-changing outfits, but even that feels more like a cute trick than the bit of surreality it wants to be. The best part of it all is the re-creation of G’Kar’s torture in “The Summoning,” and that’s entirely on Katsulas’ back, as he provides us with a delightful Wortham Krimmer impersonation, absolutely nailing Cartagia’s mannerisms and speaking style, while still very much being G’Kar. It’s still, ultimately, a very bland dream sequence that barely carries any weight, mainly thanks to Katsulas. The Lennier B-plot has a similar issue. There have been plenty of stories that have shown the weight of Lennier’s dedication to Delenn (probably the best is “Rumors, Bargains, and Lies”), but his actions in this episode just seem, I dunno, pathetic? Weak? Unconvincing? I particularly was rolling my eyes at the line about how Delenn doesn’t need him because she has Sheridan now, and that didn’t even work as a bullshit justification, as Sheridan’s contribution to Delenn’s existence is not the same as Lennier’s. Of course, we know what Lennier really meant, but if he’s trying to do this with dignity, he’s failing. I think that’s the biggest problem I have with this storyline. Lennier is one of the most dignified and respectable people in the cast, and to see him acting like a doofus rankles. I get that the characters are supposed to be complicated, but getting this on top of Cole being a doofus because of his love for Ivanova and it stops being complex characterization and starts becoming a lazy trope. What’s funny is that Cole’s death actually provides us with a much more interesting reason for Lennier joining the Rangers: guilt. Lennier’s the one who set Cole on the path to finding out about the Great Hit Point Rearranger, which is what led to him abandoning his post in the middle of a war to sacrifice his life for Ivanova’s. But all Lennier can talk about is mooning over Delenn and how he wants to, in essence, replace Cole because he feels the latter’s absence. Next week: “The Paragon of Animals.”[end-mark] The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari” appeared first on Reactor.

News From According to the From Season 4 Trailer, Becoming What You Fear Isn’t Great An ancient force that feeds on human suffering also isn’t a great thing, if we’re being honest… By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on March 10, 2026 Screenshot: MGM+ Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: MGM+ The fourth season of MGM+’s From, an excellent show about a town that no one can escape, is set to premiere in a few weeks. The streamer released a full-blown trailer today to complement this brief teaser that came out in February, and in it we see Harold Perrineau’s Boyd Stevens changing into someone (something?) he’s not sure he likes. Before we talk more about today’s trailer, here’s the official synopsis for the upcoming episodes of From: In season four, the closer the residents of town get to the answers they seek, the more terrifying their search becomes. Who is the Man in Yellow, and what does he want? Will Jade and Tabitha’s revelation be the key to finally going home? How much longer can Boyd hold the town together, even as his body and mind are falling apart? And what role will the town’s most recent arrival play in the events to come? Season four will open doors that some in town will end up wishing had remained closed. The trailer sets up the show’s unsettling, creepy vibe and lays out how the residents know there’s an ancient evil where they live that feeds off their suffering, and that they’re losing at a game they don’t even know the rules of. We also see how Boyd is unraveling and perhaps becoming a monster himself. In that vein, today’s trailer mirrors the last line of the synopsis, where Boyd says that he’ll make sure the truth doesn’t get out, no matter the cost. (But will WE find out the truth?? I hope so!) The stakes are high! We’ll see how it plays out when From season four premieres on MGM+ on April 19, 2026. Check out today’s From trailer below. [end-mark] The post According to the <i>From</i> Season 4 Trailer, Becoming What You Fear Isn’t Great appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Bride The Bride! Can’t Decide Which Revolution It Wants to Power In the words of its eponymous character… I would prefer not to. By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on March 10, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share As a long-time admirer of writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s acting career, I was excited for The Bride! It has horror and romance and dance sequences (dreamed or imagined) and a character who hasn’t had enough story attached to her name. It has an absolutely phenomenal cast. It certainly promises a lot of the things I was hoping Joker: Folie a Deux would give us (which was probably a mistake on my part).  The Bride’s troubles begin in its very first frames—a strange plot device wherein the ghost of Mary Shelley (Jesse Buckley), the author herself, lets us know that she was unable to write the story she wanted to tell after Frankenstein due to dying. She’s stuck in a void/purgatory of some sort until she gets this opportunity, which is now upon us. Said opportunity involves “possessing” a young woman named Ida (also Jesse Buckley) in the year 1936 in a manner that ultimately causes her death. After all, you can’t be the Bride of Frankenstein without a resurrection. Forgive me, but… what? Okay, sure, this is clearly meant to reflect the opening of 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein—there, too, Mary Shelley is a character who appears at the opening to tell Lord Byron, husband Percy, and the viewer that she has more story to tell. But a reflection is only worthwhile if it adds something of value to your story. This feels like pieces of a first draft that should have been red-penned and summarily scrapped. Shelley’s “presence” in the narrative is by far its weakest link, and that’s rather pointed in a film that has at least a baker’s dozen worth of narrative threads it keeps failing to weave into a cohesive whole. Because Shelley occupies such an elephantine place in our cultural conscience—she kinda invented an entire modern genre at the age of twenty—writers have a tendency to project all sorts of ideas onto her as a person when she’s fictionalized in any sense. In this instance, it seems as though she exists to wag a finger at screenwriter William Hurlbut for suggesting that Bride of Frankenstein would be the next story Shelley intended to tell. This one is the real deal, The Bride! seems to whisper to us. This is the sort of story Mary would get behind. And it’s silly because there’s never a moment where Shelley’s “authorship” of The Bride! makes a lick of sense, either in theme or in content or in narrative construction. 20th and 21st century feminism are both incredibly different from 19th century feminism. The choice to set the story the year after the Bride of Frankenstein film came out is puzzling because it doesn’t take place in the universe where Bride of Frankenstein was released—this is a universe in which Frankenstein’s monster is real. Are we in the 1930s for vibes, then? Or perhaps just for copious Bonnie and Clyde references? There are tons of those. The story unfolds as such: Ida is murdered after her “possession” by Shelley because she starts shooting her mouth off, and part of her babble includes incriminating talk about the local Chicago mob boss, Lupino (Zlatko Burić). Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale), who we call Frank for the duration of this exercise, approaches Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening) about her work on reanimation. He’s hoping she can make him a companion because he’s so very lonely, and has been for well over a century. It’s here where I must pause and mourn for a movie that could have been, where Annette Bening gets far more screentime as our current flavor of mad scientist, with her lady maid Greta (Jeannie Berlin) serving as the best Igor replacement I ever could have wished for. The places where Gyllenhaal chooses to cast women in roles always reserved for men work are the high notes in the The Bride!, and it’s a shame that they don’t get more attention. And I should pause again because this setup is one of the first (and possibly most interesting) story threads gets swatted away in a hurry. Frankenstein says he’s needs a companion because he’s lonely, to which  Euphronious blessedly replies that everybody’s lonely. We’re in the midst of what many influencers and fearmongers are dubbing “the male loneliness epidemic,” so you’ll forgive me for expecting that The Bride! might be intentionally calling attention to this dynamic? That men expect women to offer them companionship because that is the place where they have been trained to expect all the warmth, closeness, and affection in their life to come from? There are brief glances at this thought, but no, that’s not what the film is aiming toward. Instead, Ida gets dug up and resurrected… but can no longer remember who she is. Frank and Euphronious lie, claiming she is Frank’s wife—or at least his fiancee—and she takes the name Penelope, or Penny, but she knows something is wrong. She escapes Euphronious’ institute and Frank follows, their burgeoning romance coming to the fore in queer dance halls and movies theaters—Frank is obsessed with Ronnie Reed (an utterly apropos turn by Jake Gyllenhaal), a Hollywood musical star, and shares this love with Penny. It here where I’ve got to stop again and note that the couple are promptly being hunted by the law due to Frank’s murder of two men… two men who, of course, try to rape Penny after her wild night in the dance hall. There’s a lot of attempted rape and sexual assault in The Bride! While I’m not against any depictions whatsoever as a matter of course, there’s nothing in these depictions that feels relevant or revelatory. If anything, those moments feel like a resurgence of the films of my youth, where it was shown all the time, everywhere, just to remind women and afab folks that this was the only thing waiting for them out in the world. The Bride! is a film that clearly wants to do something about that state of affairs; when Penny gets a bit of her memory back, she remembers that she had been working as part of a sting operation to expose Lupino, but all the girls kept getting murdered, their tongues cut out. (I remind you, this is supposedly the story Mary Shelley was desperate to tell before her death, according to the film.) In a fugue state at a fancy party—where a dance break just occurred, but more on that later—Penny starts spewing information as the cops arrive and surround her… and this winds up becoming fuel for a movement of woman gangs who punish men for their crimes against other women. Which sounds like it could have been a cathartic angle, were it any kind of focus in the film’s story. Oh, and there a few dance breaks, by the way. Some of them are in Frank’s head, moments where he gets to be the Ronnie Reed he so admires in his own dreams, but the one at the fancy party is set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Which you might recognize from another famous Frankenstein film that Mel Brooks directed. If you don’t, the script forces poor Bale to shout “Puttin’ on the Ritz!” in a frenzy. Trying to make anyone even attempt an echo of Peter Boyle’s greatest performance is… never the move. There are points and pieces of The Bride! that are so very enjoyable. (Honestly, that dance sequence is a blast until the homage trips into usurpation.) Parts of the romance are funny and endearing. Jessie Buckley is giving an unstoppable performance (even if the occasional switching back and forth to Shelley’s “possession” and accent feels more theater than film). The bits of old Hollywood glamor we get from Reed’s movies are expertly laid out. The makeup and costumes are fantastic, and I’ll be shocked if I don’t see cosplayers go all out with it on the convention circuit this year. But there are simply too many stories to tell and not enough cohesion. I haven’t even gotten to Penélope Cruz’s effortless performance as Myrna Malloy, the cop secretary who is better at solving crimes than her boss (a droopy, ineffectual Peter Sarsgaard). Their entire wing of the story is important, in fact, but do we really have time to get around to it? In this economy? If Gyllenhaal gets a co-writer or a script editor, I think her next film could be brilliant. She’s got the eye and room to grow. She clearly has a lot of tales she’d like to tell. But The Bride! isn’t there yet. It feels like listening to the orchestra tune their instruments before the performance begins—you get hints of what you’re about to experience, but not the experience itself.[end-mark] The post <i>The Bride!</i> Can’t Decide Which Revolution It Wants to Power appeared first on Reactor.

Books Seeds of Story Saying “Hello” to Elephants and “Come Back Here” to Coral Reefs: Karen Bakker’s The Sounds of Life Bioacoustic technologies allow us to explore how the natural world communicates through sound — and it is fascinating. By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on March 10, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Karen Bakker’s The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. From budding corn to elephants, life takes greater advantage of sound—and has more to communicate—than we once imagined. New recording and analytic tools are helping us listen. What It’s About As we know from Ed Yong’s An Immense World, every species has its own unique sensorium. Culture—as Robin Wall Kimmerer points out—affects our ability to acknowledge and respect those different ways of engaging with the world. But even with that openness, our understanding remains limited. Karen Bakker explores the bioacoustic technologies that take us beyond our own sensory limits in the realm of sound. Human hearing, on average, lets us perceive frequencies between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz. Below that band is infrasound, the realm of earthquakes and elephants and thinking your house is haunted. In the other direction is ultrasound—used by medical scans but also by plants and insects. Ultrasound is also the tool of animals that (like the medical scan) use echolocation to pick out the shape of the world. Digital microphones can pick up these sounds and translate them for humans’ understanding and analysis. They can be made small enough to impress James Bond, but attached to bees rather than used for international espionage. They can be placed in deep forests or deep ocean. And they find communication where we expected only silence: unhatched turtles coordinating their births, mice exchanging signature whistles, coral larvae homing in on their mother reefs. They help us, in Kimmerer’s words, with “listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.” Bakker’s discussion begins with the study of whalesong. Long recognized by Indigenous arctic hunters, for a long-time awareness by Europeans (and their colonial populations) was limited to the occasional perceptive whaler. Jacques Cousteau titled his book about oceans The Silent World. But post-World War II research on submarine detection gathered clear evidence that humans weren’t the only thing making noise under the waves. The initial focus was on differentiating marine animal sounds from Soviet torpedoes—but casual descriptions of mysterious “Jezebel monster” and “A-train” sounds grew into direct study of the whales producing them Whale sounds can be divided into communication (orca pods have their own dialects, the babies babble), echolocation, and song. We still don’t entirely understand the purpose of this last: it may be produced only by males, and it may be related to mating. But it has affected humans in ways its creators couldn’t have intended. Publicly-released recordings led to the Save the Whales movement, which worked. And we are continuing to improve: recent work uses machine learning to tease out cetacean grammar. Bakker and others have also expressed optimism about full AI translation; I confess to some worry that this will result in hallucinating at humpbacks. Whale research informed work on elephants, who pick up each other’s infrasonic rumbles through their feet. Like the whales, their communications are optimized for long-distance connection, allowing herds to coordinate even when dispersed across difficult terrain. And like the whales, increased awareness of elephant social interactions bolstered conservation, in this case the international ivory trade ban of 1989. The same tools used to record elephants were then used to detect and fight poachers. Conflict between humans and disrupted elephant herds was mitigated with “bee fences”—regularly spaced hives whose sting elephants find particularly unpleasant—and this in turn led to the discovery that elephants use different “words” for different threats. New communication discoveries aren’t limited to potentially-sapient megafauna. Turtles make more noise than herpetologists once believed—the originally belief being “none”—not just the occasional distress call but a whole vocabulary of chirps, wails, howls, and pulses. These were long hidden not by their frequency, but by their low volume. Turtles are also slow conversationalists: minutes or hours may pass between vocalizations. Fish, too, make noises, allowing us to track the health of underwater ecosystems via changing soundscapes. Sound can also heal: recordings of healthy reefs attract life to artificial seed reefs, helping to regenerate ecosystems. Plants both make and respond to sounds. Young corn shoots produce clicks based on hydration level, and bend their roots toward specific frequency ranges. The roots of pea vines grow toward the sound of water, even if no other indications of moisture are present. And plants that have once been attacked by caterpillars make new defensive secretions in response to caterpillar recordings. Where might this relatively young research area go next? It isn’t new for humans to live in community with other species, but our dominant cultures discourage it. Could movements like Rights of Nature combine with new technologies to rebuild cross-species communication and collaboration? Groups like the Cetacean Translation Initiative use machine learning on what we suspect to be sperm whale language(s). Elephant researchers look for correlations between communicative sounds and external stimuli. The Interspecies Internet Project coordinates a wide range of such studies, looking for ways that we might someday achieve consistent, meaningful communication across species. Buy the Book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants Karen Bakker Buy Book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants Karen Bakker Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The idea of communicating with other species is irresistible, and stories where animals can’t speak are a more modern innovation than those where they can. I appreciate Bakker’s acknowledgment that bioacoustic research builds on longstanding Indigenous wisdom. You have probably noticed by now that I read a lot of books that quote Robin Wall Kimmerer. I don’t even do this on purpose; it’s just that good thinkers tend to make that connection for so many interesting topics. Along with Kimmerer’s Potawatomi paradigm, Bakker also pulls in relationships between African communities of humans and elephants, Aboriginal knowledge about the Great Barrier Reef, and Inuit understanding of whale migration patterns. Which raises the question: when are new research technologies genuinely the best way to learn, and when would we be better served by a change of attitude? It’s not a dichotomy, of course—we can do both. The risk is that we won’t. Bakker was a technological optimist, and her second book—which is on my TBR list—focuses on AI-based efforts to translate communication from other species. I’m more cautious about this potential. Machine learning is good at picking up patterns, even in areas that are tough for humans. Grammar is an obvious application. But the ability to learn new vocabulary, without clear observable correlates, is more limited. And as even Bakker admits, we’re prone to glossing over this challenge. You can buy sensors and apps that claim to translate your houseplant or your dog, but all they really do is paint a layer of English over soil acidity or anxious barking. You know what that tail wag means even without a translation collar, I assume. You know what your cat is on about. These gadgets are a high-tech way of saying “No one ever feeds me!” while getting out the can opener. It would be all too easy to paste ChatGPT on top of a miked-up humpback, and find out that whales want us to use more vibe coding. But still: irresistible. I love the idea of a world that no one could pretend was silent, where you could go outside and share gossip with the elm tree and the crows. But then, I gossip with the crows now, no translation app required. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories Who Learns to Listen? The first researcher to detect elephant infrasound, Katy Payne, was also a classically-trained musician. That training in how to think about sound, and about recording, shaped her assumptions going into bioacoustics. This kind of interdisciplinary work is often a source of new scientific direction, but it’s something we rarely see in fiction. What other fields could help us connect with other species? And what other scientific areas would benefit from stronger artistic input? Payne also raises the possibility of interspecies music, something that Bakker brings up later—there’s a musician who teaches a bonobo piano. But surely other species have rhythms and musical methods to teach us as well. I would read that story. The Not-So-Universal Translator. We’re beginning to lay out cetacean grammars. The Hello in Elephant app offers very simple translations, starting with basic emojis. But assume that full translation becomes possible. What would we do next? Presumably different species have different things to say—would they be able to negotiate shared resources? Tell us what they need? Or what they want—does an oak tree want anything beyond what it needs? Maybe we’d finally find out what it’s like to be a bat. Depending on the depth of conversation, and the differences in cognition, this could affect our laws, our everyday interactions, or the core philosophical questions that have bugged us for millennia. How alien—and how much like us—are the aliens who share our world? New Growth: What Else to Read Ursula Le Guin’s “The Author of the Acacia Seeds, and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics” is a classic of animal communication SF. There are a bunch of dolphin communication books from the 70s that probably belong in one of my retro posts; David Brin’s Startide Rising has dolphins “uplifted” to join humans in the intergalactic community. I haven’t read it in years and am not per se recommending it, but the concept has been influential—for example, Adam Roberts’ Bête plays with the idea. Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon doesn’t involve humans learning to talk with or understand animals, but her aliens take the ability to do so as a given. Oceanic intelligences, particularly cephalopods, have been particularly popular lately, from Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea to Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures. My housemates insist that I include Up, which does in fact include a device for translating Dog. Squirrel! Bakker’s (unfortunately final) companion book to The Sounds of Life is Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth. Amorina Kingdon’s Sing Like a Fish: How Sound Rules Life Underwater focuses in on aquatic bioacoustics. Tom Mustill’s How to Speak Whale: The Power and Wonder of Listening to Animals explores both the current state and the potential implications of improved human-animal communication. What does your dog think of this column? Tell us in the comments.[end-mark] The post Saying “Hello” to Elephants and “Come Back Here” to Coral Reefs: Karen Bakker’s <i>The Sounds of Life</i> appeared first on Reactor.