Speech Sounds Henry Butler Summary

Set in a recognizable yet crumbling Los Angeles, Butler’s “Speech Sounds” does not belong to the category of “hard” science fiction that includes fantastic machinery; the “technology” that the story investigates is human language, and more importantly human communication. In the short story, the consequences of language impairment are the loss of intellectual abilities, constant misunderstandings, murderous jealousy, violence, and the dissolution of society. In the first passage of the prompt, the bus driver responds to Obsidian’s superiority by gesturing “threateningly” (Butler 93) and by shouting “in wordless anger” (93), which is an illustration of one of the major implications of the loss of communication. The bus driver’s brash reaction