The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” is an account of five alien races and the ways they create and keep stories. The first aliens are the Allatians, a musical species who etch their thoughts with their proboscis into a surface; to read it, they drag their noses through the grooves to create sound. This way of bookmaking captures tone, voice, inflection, and rhythm, but also damages the groove each time an Allatian reads it. The Allatians lock important books away, but they constantly re-interpret and debate over influential books.

Another species, the mechanical Quatzoli, believe that thinking and writing are the same activity. At the end of a workday, their bodies expel water through a porous stone that acts as their brain. The pattern the water creates in the stone forms channels, flows, and mazes that become consciousness. When the Quatzoli reproduce, they give their children a sliver of that stone, which becomes the core of the child’s own brain: “[a]nd so the Quatzoli are themselves books” (4).

The warriors Hesperoe do not trust writing and stopped doing so altogether once they learned about mind storing and mapping.