Science Fiction Short Story
BURNT BRICK, MORTAR AND BITUMENT is an experimental science fiction short story that interrogates the tensions between authoritarian political regimes and the cultural, social, and biological systems that they seek to control. By focusing on the frictions between State power and the defiant, generative patterns of life within its purview, it explores how embodied and spatial resistance can emerge. Set within a society where a totalitarian government mandates strict, prescriptive control over language, the story takes the perspective of a dissenting cognitive linguist. As state-imposed linguistic rules tighten, the protagonist searches for alternative, subversive modes of communication, rooted in the material and spatial dimensions of written and spoken language.
Inspired by David Foster Wallace’s discussion of ‘descriptive’ versus ‘prescriptive’ grammar, as well as historical examples of linguistic resistance—such as the Greek dictatorship’s ‘Katharevousa’ or the clandestine codes of oppressed groups like Polari—it reimagines the liberatory potential of physical and spatial communication. As the story’s language progressively degenerates into a semiotic puzzle, the reader is invited to uncover the protagonist’s hidden dialect, composed of gestures, objects, and spatial arrangements. By pointing to the latent, untapped potential of bodies and materials to generate new forms of language, the story reclaims these dimensions as sites for resistance and liberation, and by extension, offers emancipatory possibilities for rethinking socio-political relations within the city.
BURNT BRICK, MORTAR AND BITUMENT is an experimental science fiction short story that interrogates the tensions between authoritarian political regimes and the cultural, social, and biological systems that they seek to control. By focusing on the frictions between State power and the defiant, generative patterns of life within its purview, it explores how embodied and spatial resistance can emerge. Set within a society where a totalitarian government mandates strict, prescriptive control over language, the story takes the perspective of a dissenting cognitive linguist. As state-imposed linguistic rules tighten, the protagonist searches for alternative, subversive modes of communication, rooted in the material and spatial dimensions of written and spoken language.
Inspired by David Foster Wallace’s discussion of ‘descriptive’ versus ‘prescriptive’ grammar, as well as historical examples of linguistic resistance—such as the Greek dictatorship’s ‘Katharevousa’ or the clandestine codes of oppressed groups like Polari—it reimagines the liberatory potential of physical and spatial communication. As the story’s language progressively degenerates into a semiotic puzzle, the reader is invited to uncover the protagonist’s hidden dialect, composed of gestures, objects, and spatial arrangements. By pointing to the latent, untapped potential of bodies and materials to generate new forms of language, the story reclaims these dimensions as sites for resistance and liberation, and by extension, offers emancipatory possibilities for rethinking socio-political relations within the city.
