I was incredibly moved by Octavia Butler’s short story “Speech Sounds.” From the minute I read the blurb before the story and learned that it “imagines a dystopic near-future Los Angeles ravaged by a virus…” I was hooked, given the current climate. Yes, COVID-19 does not destroy people’s ability to read, write, and speak, but it was incredibly eerie reading Butler’s vision of a virus-ravaged city. One quote that really stuck out to me was:

“The illness, if it was an illness, had cut even the living off from one another, As it swept over the country, people hardly had time to lay blame on the Soviets (though they were falling silent along with the rest of the world), on a new virus, a new pollutant, radiation, divine retribution…” (Butler, 871).

Change out “Soviets” for “Chinese” and you get a picture of our world today. It is interesting to me, but not at all surprising given Cold War sentiment, that Butler chose to include this line of “blaming” another country for the pandemic.

As a neuroscience major, another part of this story that was intriguing to me was the ways in which different characters lost communicative abilities. Rye could no longer read or write, but she could speak fluently, as we see her do at the end. Obsidian, on the other hand, can read, but cannot speak. These difficulties do not map perfectly onto the two main types of aphasia: Broca’s and Wernicke’s. Broca’s aphasia is when a person knows what they want to say, but cannot communicate it. Wernicke’s aphasia is when a person can speak in fluent syntax and grammar, but they have lost comprehension ability and their words have no meaning. One part of language in the brain that does map on more accurately to this story is the idea of the children being able to speak if someone can teach them. This has to do with the critical period in which children have to be exposed to and taught language by a certain point in development or else they will never be able to learn it. I really enjoyed how Butler included this in the story and I was pleasantly surprised that the story ended with hope, which I feel is often not what you find at the end of an SF story.