Suzette Haden Elgin books

Anthologies

Coyote Jones Reading Order

Native Tongue Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Ozark Reading Order

Poetry Collections

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

Suzette Haden Elgin was one of the more unusual figures in American science fiction: a working academic linguist who used her field expertise as the foundation for her speculative fiction. Born in 1936, she earned her doctorate in linguistics and spent years teaching before writing became a central part of her career. She was a founding member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association and wrote across an unusually wide range of forms, from space opera to self-help to poetry to linguistic textbooks.

Her science fiction career began in the late 1960s with the Coyote Jones series, a sequence of space operas following a government agent in a future galactic civilization. These early novels established her confidence with plot-driven genre fiction. Her most lasting science fiction work, however, is the Native Tongue trilogy (1984-1994), which imagines a future where women have lost their legal rights and a group of female linguists secretly develop a new language, Laadan, designed to express the experiences and perceptions that existing human languages fail to capture. Elgin actually constructed Laadan as a real language, complete with grammar and vocabulary.

Running parallel to her fiction was an enormously productive non-fiction career. Her Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series, which began in 1980 and ran to over a dozen volumes, addressed how language is used as a tool of hostility and how to respond to verbal attacks without escalating conflict. The series drew directly on her linguistics training and found a large popular audience well outside the academic world.