The Guild of Xenolinguists

The galaxy-wide Guild of Xenolinguists handles all cross-cultural communications by sending agents abroad to learn new languages and program translation computers. The travails of novice linguists animate these 11 stories as they face much more than simple translation work, taking on alien parasites and viruses, a mysterious and violent star-faring race, dolphin instructors, and large tyrant ants. As cultures and languages collide, first contact quickly becomes a matter of morality, galactic politics, death, and war.

Contents:

• Foreword by Ian Watson
• First Was the Word
• A Flight of Words
• A World Waiting
• The Roaring Ground
• No Brighter Glory
• Out of the Mouths
• Stranger Than Imagination Can
• Babel Interface
• The Naked Face of God
• Communion of Minds
• Reading the Bones
• Afterword: Berlitz in Outer Space (essay)