by Kelly Link
Well, I tried to imagine that, and added my own (not so far-fetched) idea—that they would be speaking Esperanto.
Esperanto was an artificial invented language, perfectly regular once you knew the rules, made by a guy named Zamenhof in the late 1890s. It (and Volapük) had quite a fad and following in the nineties and early Edwardian Age. It was promoted as a unifying language (if people all spoke the same, how could they fight and have national differences? The story about the delegates all leaving the International Esperanto Conference to run home and join up in August 1914 is true).
As late as the 1950s, I’m told, Forrest J. Ackerman and the actor Leo G. Carroll talked the night away in Esperanto—they’d learned as children—when Carroll saw Ackerman’s Esperanto bumper sticker on the car parked outside.
Once I had the situation and the language, I was on my way, trying to imagine what life would be like in the Ninieslando.
When this was published, somebody criticized my Esperanto, which I’d mostly forgotten by the time I wrote the story.
Malmolo faboj.
About Howard Waldrop
Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is an American iconoclast. His books include Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters (Locus Award winner), Other Worlds, Better Lives, and Things Will Never Be the Same. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette “The Ugly Chickens.”