The story is presented as a murder mystery, and less formally as a first-contact SF story (which is of course always a mystery plot). The author needs to convey the unconscious assumptions of each character, but does it more by explicit description than by clean implication. The points of view of the various cultures is never quite smooth, from the inside. For posture, gesture, distance, and all such nonverbal communications are part of language thus they can be spoken with an accent, translated poorly. Or bilingual puns between a fictional language and English *body language*.

I don't mean the narrative is a groanfest you just run into these little bits of translation that work out to be bilingual puns (in two fictional languages). All of this is completely unremarked in the narrative. *And also* that, at some point, 'Lord' as an English-idiom title has become gender-neutral. Elsewhere, the ship is the _Margaret Lord Lynn_ - therefore, it must be that Alfvaen is a personal name, Tinling is a family name, and the protagonist is politely transforming her ship's name into Alfvaen's native idiom. (Trivial example: early on, the protagonist introduces her computer (and starship) to a new friend: 'Lord Lynn Margaret', meet 'Tinling Alfvaen'. The reader is absolutely in on the game, as well there's a running stream of little details about people's cultures that you can pick up and run with. All the characters are having *so much fun* learning and understanding and realizing and connecting and figuring it out. I will skip the plot squib and say what I love about this book: the joy. (Not okay with the author's having died in 2008, either.) This is an old favorite - what the hell, 25 years old.

Hellspark by Janet Kagan