Sunday, August 15, 2010

Nonfiction essay: "How to Learn Martian" by Charles F. Hockett (1955)

Interested in exploring some of the linguistic problems involved in communicating with aliens? Check out "How to Learn Martian", a nonfiction essay written by American linguist Charles F. Hockett that was published in the October 1955 issue of Astounding Science Fiction (British edition). Access is a bit cumbersome, as the issue is part of a huge library of old pulp magazines that have been scanned in CBR format.

[via Tinkoo Valia of Variety SF]

4 comments:

Doc Mars said...

Hi Paul,
The essay is here in pdf
http://gotomars.free.fr/How_to_Learn_Martian_1955.pdf

illustrated by Kelly Freas.

The Astounding SF cover is from the nice Paramout movie "Conquest of Space".

Anonymous said...

Thank you...
And Thanks to Doc Mars... I know that someday I will have to figure out how to get torrents - but I have very unpleasant memories of peer sharing and all the viruses and other crap which wound up being invited onto my system. ...And I worry that this would be similar.
I prefer to remain anomalous...

Doc Mars said...

To Anomalous:
Use FilesTube http://www.filestube.com/
to download old pulps on other web hostings.
Anyway you should scan all the downloaded files with a good anti-virus, configure it for automatical scan.
Cautiousness is security.

Paul said...

Thanks, Doc Mars!