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.