The Guild of Xenolinguists Author:Sheila Finch The galaxy-wide Guild of Xenolinguists handles all cross-cultural communications by sending agents abroad to learn new languages and program translation computers. The travails of novice linguists animate these 11 stories as they face much more than simple translation work, taking on alien parasites and viruses, a mysterious and violent star-far... more »ing race, dolphin instructors, and large tyrant ants. As cultures and languages collide, first contact quickly becomes a matter of morality, galactic politics, death, and war.« less