BOOK REVIEW: China Miéville's Embassytown

I have been a fan of China Miéville ever since I picked up his mind-bending books The Scar and Perdido Street Station after trawling through the Award Annals website looking for award-winning speculative fiction. China Miéville's writing has won him many, many awards. His work is generally relegated to "genre fiction" but the question is which genre? Miéville often doesn't just stick to one, or he purposefully reinvents and reimagines the genre he is working in.

His latest books, The City & The City (2009) and Kraken (2010), have been somewhat disappointing. They are still as hard-to-classify and mind-bending as his earlier works but they are not as rewarding (to this reader).

Embassytown was expected to be different, since it was announced as China's first book with actual spaceships. Expectations that it would be a true science-fiction book, instead of another one of his genre-benders were raised.

Unfortunately, China being China it means that even though Embassytown is definitely science fiction, it is also Weird.

The basic outlines of the story is that it is told from the first-person perspective of Avice Benner Cho, a "Immerser" (someone who helps pilot spaceships at faster-than-light speed through something called The Immer) who returns to her home town of Embassytown on her home planet of Arieka after a successful career with a husband named Scile who is a linguist. Embassytown is inhabited by aliens known as the Ariekei or Hosts. The Ariekei have multiple mouths and produce word simultaneously from two mouths simultaneously to produce what is known as Language.  Language possesses multiple unusual properties, the most important of which is that it is more than just sounds. If the sounds of Ariekei producing Language is recorded and played back for them they do  only hear it as noise. Somehow the Ariekei can only understand Language that is spoken with meaning by an intelligence. Another property of Language is that the statements and thoughts communicated using it must always be true, Ariekei can not lie. The Ariekei have advanced bio-technology and provide it to the humans (and other aliens) who inhabit Embassytown, which happens to be an important way-station on to a whole other section of the galaxy. In order to communicate with the Ariekei humans have produced Ambassadors, who are twinned humans (i.e. Cal and Vin become CalVin) who are so closely aligned with their thoughts that they can speak simultaneously and produce Language which the Ariekei can understand.

The plot is unsurprisingly complicated, and involves the arrival in Embassytown of a new kind of Ambassador which eventually results in the entire structure of Language being challenged and changed. The Ariekei are also forever changed, as well as life on Arieka itself.

Of course the reader is supposed to connect to the story through the lens of Avice. Avice, is a celebrity among the Ariekei because as a young girl she became a simile in Language, "the girl who sat in the dark and ate what was given her without question." Her husband becomes obsessed with the Hosts and plays a very important role in the development of the plot.

The main problem is that China is more interested in challenging (and impressing) the reader than actually entertaining them. He has interesting things he wants to show that he can do within the confines of familiar sci-fi tropes (faster-than-light travel, real-life aliens, human-alien contact, planet colonization and advanced technologies) while also incorporating things like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But China spends so much time on these other things, in my view, he neglects to make the reader really CARE about the characters, and thus we really don't care what happens to them in the end.

Title: Embassytown.
Author: China Miéville.
Paperback: 368 pages.
Publisher: Del Rey.
Date: May 17. 2011.

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).


PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A.