Rebellious Avice lives in Embassytown, a bubble of humans on a world belonging to alien Hosts whose most remarkable feature is their Language: they cannot lie. When an Embassytown Ambassador introduces discord into Language, it looks like apocalypse for planet Arieka unless our heroine can come up with a plan.
China Miéville is a masterful creator of worlds, and the baroque weirdness of Arieka – biorigged machines, robot tramps, tentacled aliens – leaves enough room for the reader’s own imagination to be realised. But it is for his use of SF to carry big, clever and frequently political ideas that he has become the darling of mainstream critics. In Embassytown, his focus is on language, on the gap between signifier and signified, on the power that comes with command of the dominant discourse, on words’ capacity to move and affect. It’s a self-reflexive preoccupation: the fantastical lands described by an SF writer can seem unreal, and yet his underlying message can have a profound truth.
Miéville has a lot of fun with his set-up, introducing Festivals of Lies, humans used by Hosts as similes and recordings of Language doled out as a drug; because plot and theory are so closely intertwined, though, the constant emphasis can get a bit wearing. The ideas and setting are also more exciting than any emotional content: our protagonist is an off-the-peg, ballsy SF heroine whose only character arc is to become more ballsy, while other characters and relationships fade in and out over the course of the book. Still, this is breathtakingly original, smart and imaginative storytelling. Miéville looks set to be SF’s poster boy for some time to come.
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