Language Bound
by Alan Gaynor

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In 2063, the moon is the high ground in the struggle among the combative representatives of three societies. On the moon, the Chairman—an Ayn Rand libertarian and mutant—believes that genomic self-transformation is our destiny and demands that we abandon our language-based prejudices and embrace that destiny now! On Earth’s surface, the USA has become a Christian nation and it vies for dominion over the crowded and resource-poor Earth. Hidden underground and undersea, Saul Baum and the leaderless members of the secular creed of Protagonism believe in the need to harness logic and mindfulness before changing our genome. When the Protagonist, Ner Nala, completes the experiments for a scientific proof of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the Chairman arrests and imprisons her for a recent lunar murder. Her father—Dr. Frank Nala—hires the private detective Ben Song to travel to the moon to prove her innocence. This is the tale of Ben’s quest and how it changes him—and us—forever.

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"The science in Alan Gaynor's powerful science fiction is linguistics, making Language Bound the first science novel in which words not only matter but are central characters in the story. And that story has roots in The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, making it an easy contender for a classic." -Paul Levinson, PhD author of New New Media and The Plot to Save Socrates “Language Bound focuses our minds on basic questions—what possibilities exist for increased human solidarity and what could emerge if we were able to achieve it? Can new forms of language lower barriers and create new kinds of (computer-mediated) human bonds? My father, James Cooke Brown, invented the language Loglan partly to answer these questions, so it's no surprise that Loglan reappears as the lingua franca of the cooperative thinkers in Gaynor's fast-paced and riveting novel.” - Jennifer Fuller Brown, daughter of the inventor of Loglan, the first humanly speakable predicate language

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Born at full-term but weighing less than 4 pounds, Alan has always had to fight to survive. In 1968, he joined Mensa and—with Andy Cicoria—won first place in a high-school science fair with a binary digital calulator that they built cooperatively. After graduating from Antioch College with a degree in computer science/political science, he learned Italian, studied electronic engineering at the Universitá di Pisa, and studied Loglan, too. Back in the USA, at the New School for Social Research, he graduated with a Media Studies MA in 1994. Then, he taught himself Spanish and traveled extensively in Spain and Mexico. He currently lives nearby his two daughters and their mother.

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Alan Gaynor