Status
Available
Collection
Publication
Ballantine Books (2011), Edition: 1st US Edition, 345 pages
Description
Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist on a distant planet populated by the Ariekei, sentient beings famed for their unique language, returns to Embassytown after many years of deep space exploration to find she has become a living simile in the Ariekei language even though she cannot speak it, and she is torn by competing loyalties when hostilities erupt between humans and aliens.
Media reviews
Readers who want to delve no further than turning the pages will come away satisfied with "Embassytown," because Mieville's fertile imagination has created a fascinating alien species to go along with plenty of familiar human drama.
It is a miracle of a novel, one where Big Ideas cohabitate with Monsters, and neither is lessened by what academic propriety insists must be capital letters.
Miéville has a muscular intellect, successfully building a science fictional world around semiotics. For some readers, that will be enough.
I don’t hold this will to abstraction against him. Genre writers, and for that matter writers of the well-wrought middlebrow novel, mostly tell the usual stories in the usual way: narrative and character are advanced through conventional action. Miéville is up to something else.
In this sense, Embassytown plays out as a novel of metropolitan-colonial conflict, holding out the hope that language might not serve only as a tool of oppression, but be reclaimed as the instrument that makes resistance possible.
...as the narrative begins to deepen into a kind of tragic power, Miéville’s style gains momentum as well, in some of the most nuanced and evocative prose I’ve seen from him.
Miéville has constructed a breathtaking world of understanding: a new system of measuring time and neologisms that crackle in nearly every paragraph, adding style to the plot.
China Miéville knows what kind of novel he's writing, calls it by its name, science fiction, and exhibits all the virtues that make it an intensely interesting form of literature. It's a joy to find this young author coming into his own, and bringing the craft of science fiction out of the
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backwaters where it's been caught lately between the regressive drag of publishers marketing to a "safe" readership and the bewildering promises of change and growth offered by postmodernism in all its forms and formlessness. Embassytown is a fully achieved work of art. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member HeikeM
Beautiful. For a moment, after closing the book, I sat speechless and in awe. Wow. This is a truly amazing story. Where to start?
Sometime far in the future, far away from Earth, which is only a distant rumour, a legend, in a city called Embassytown at the near-end of the universe lives Avice, an
The first few pages of the book were difficult to read – imagine a world so far in the future, so far away in space – language has changed, must change because there is so much new to be spoken. Think of our ancestors maybe only 500 years ago – will they understand you? No, of course not, and in the first chapter the reading is a little difficult because here we are being introduced to the *new* language as spoken by the books heroine. But soon we glide as easily through the landscape of the new English in the book as we do today in ours. And the new words and turns of phrase are so very clever, it wasn’t just the story I enjoyed, it was also the play with words and language and the associations that were being made by naming things. I don’t know how Mieville arrived at the decision when he made up names and words but I had certainly fun imagining. For example: *Immer* is a German word for always or ever – like the space it means here. *Immerser* is such a clever name for people who travel that space, arriving from the word *immer* and at the same time using the English *immerse*.
Like in Mieville’s other books there are no holes in the plot or the descriptions of beings, landscapes or happenings, everything seems quite believable and smooth, even though if this ever will be made into a film CGI has to play the lead role. It is a story of hope and the future, of war and tragedy, love and hate, corruption and desperation and all the other things that happen everywhere were humans are involved. It is a book that plays with language exactly the way I enjoy so much, making up new words that have a clear link to their roots – real fun.
Wherever China Mieville is going – I do like the direction and hope there is more to come. Soon.
Sometime far in the future, far away from Earth, which is only a distant rumour, a legend, in a city called Embassytown at the near-end of the universe lives Avice, an
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immerser, a traveller in the immer, the space above and below. The town lies on the planet Arieka and humans are not the only inhabitants out here. The natives, Hosts, live with and for the city, making and delivering everything needed. Only a few, Ambassadors, can speak their language and connect the two communities. And then a new Ambassador arrives and starts to speak – and nothing will be the same again. When a catastrophe is close to happening Avice knows that the only hope is to speak to the alien Hosts. But that is impossible.To say more would spoil it, but it is a fascinating, thrilling story with characters alien and wonderful, landscapes strange and nightmarish.The first few pages of the book were difficult to read – imagine a world so far in the future, so far away in space – language has changed, must change because there is so much new to be spoken. Think of our ancestors maybe only 500 years ago – will they understand you? No, of course not, and in the first chapter the reading is a little difficult because here we are being introduced to the *new* language as spoken by the books heroine. But soon we glide as easily through the landscape of the new English in the book as we do today in ours. And the new words and turns of phrase are so very clever, it wasn’t just the story I enjoyed, it was also the play with words and language and the associations that were being made by naming things. I don’t know how Mieville arrived at the decision when he made up names and words but I had certainly fun imagining. For example: *Immer* is a German word for always or ever – like the space it means here. *Immerser* is such a clever name for people who travel that space, arriving from the word *immer* and at the same time using the English *immerse*.
Like in Mieville’s other books there are no holes in the plot or the descriptions of beings, landscapes or happenings, everything seems quite believable and smooth, even though if this ever will be made into a film CGI has to play the lead role. It is a story of hope and the future, of war and tragedy, love and hate, corruption and desperation and all the other things that happen everywhere were humans are involved. It is a book that plays with language exactly the way I enjoy so much, making up new words that have a clear link to their roots – real fun.
Wherever China Mieville is going – I do like the direction and hope there is more to come. Soon.
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LibraryThing member KingRat
For the first 100 pages of Embassytown my fanboy willingness to read anything by China Miéville was close to a breaking point. It’s rare when a book I read is so bad for so much of the beginning and actually gets readable by the end. While there is lots of meaty stuff to chew on, the plotting is
In Miéville’s first book of straight science fiction, Embassytown is an outpost on an alien planet. It’s wholly surrounded by an unbreathable atmosphere kept at bay by a permeable bubble. The alien Ariekei evolution bred sentient beings who have two mouths with which they use to speak. Consequently they’ve developed Language, where two things spoken at once. Humans quickly learn to understand it, but the effort required to speak it is substantial. In fact, it can’t be done by one person or a computer translation. It requires two people speaking exactly in harmony or the Ariekei don’t even recognize it as speech. These Ambadssadors are paired clones who are linked electronically.
The main character, Avice Brenner Cho, grows up in Embassytown but leaves to be an immerser, someone who can consciously travel through hyperspace between worlds. Most people get sick or are otherwise incapacitated by the mode of travel, so immersers crew the ships that travel intersystem. While away, she marries the linguist Scile. He talks her into returning home so he can study Language.
During her second stay in Embassytown, things fall apart. Dissident humans murder a dissident Ariekei, with the complicity of both the human and Ariekei rulers. The first off-world Ambassador since the early days of the colony sets off the breakdown of society. Something about EzRa’s method of speaking Language is addictive to the Ariekei who hear it. The addicts can do little but seek to listen more, forgetting to eat or care for themselves.
The first chapters of Embassytown are incredibly convoluted. The normal advice to writers to show not tell worked badly in this case. The story could have used some telling to clear things up. Embassytown also took a hell of a long time to get to the meat of the story. It was all back story and world building until well after page 100. Some of those details were important later on, but man were they boring.
For instance, the Ariekei have a complicated system of similes. The Hosts (as they are called by the locals) cannot simply make up the constituent parts of a simile. Both sides of the language construction have to exist for them. I can say snow is like a blanket but the aliens cannot unless they’ve seen both the snow and the blanket. Avice is a simile in their language. She is the girl who ate what she was given. She performed this action in front of the Ariekei so that they could use that particular action in similes. The driver staying on the road is like the girl who ate what she was given. At the point of the telling of this story, it was all very tedious. At the time, it seemed like overly detailed language geek nerdery. (If you are into that, this book is definitely for you.) It does play an important part later on, but the reader really has to wait a long time for it.
What’s good about Embassytown is exactly what you would expect from China Miéville, creativity. He makes alien aliens, who never act anything at all human life. Mr. Miéville periodically adds details to their appearance. Each detail only adds to the mystery of their visual impact; they never solidify. Two mouths, multiple sets of wings, and hooves. Pendulous bodies in old age designed to be eaten. I imagined various lengthy appendages though I can’t recall if they were ever described.
The Ariekei world is equally interesting. Most everything there is bio-rigged, meaning that they are live animals bred for specific purposes. One of the ones that Mr. Miéville uses frequently are battery creature which follow the Hosts, periodically plugging into other animals that need juice. At one point the situation breaks down so that the battery animals scramble around aimlessly, looking to plug into something to power up. That is their purpose after all. I imagined something similar to my cat when she goes on a nightly tear for reasons I cannot fathom. Farms and other means of Ariekei life are similarly interesting.
And I have to give mad props to Mr. Miéville for using and skewering one of my pet peeves of writing. That’s when characters in a story have themselves a bit of a conversation to solve some sort of problem, but at the crucial moment the author pulls a whispering act so the reader doesn’t know the resolution. If that were to happen naturally, I would have no problem with it. But when I get to hear the rest of the conversation, it’s a lazy attempt to keep some sort of mystery going. That’s the problem. It’s lazy. The author couldn’t think of a way to legitimately structure the story without popping the bubble of fake reader omniscience. Here’s how China Miéville wrote it (emphasis added by me, quote comes from A.R.C. and may not reflect the final text):
How many days before they get here? I said. Can you get hold of YlSib? And others? Any you can? He narrowed his eyes but nodded. We need to go. Get YlSib or whoever to contact Spanish Dancer and the others. I’ll— I stopped. I don’t know, I said. I don’t know whether … Maybe I can tell Cal.
Tell me, Bren said. I thought you’d despaired.
I did too.
What, then? Tell me.
I told him. Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you.
Lots of material is fodder for political discussions too. Given Mr. Miéville’s socialist background, I’m not surprised. Embassytown sets the humans up to have a very precarious existence on an alien world. Even so, I have some qualms about their participation in the plot that I unfortunately cannot detail without spoilers. Embassytown includes a good illustration of what could be the politics of a superpower and it’s interaction with a remote colony. So much so that my guess is that it incorporates elements from a specific instance in our history. I’m not enough of a student of history to know what it is though. The government is not malevolent, but it’s not benign either. It very much does not have the best interests of the residents at heart. It also very much satisfies the Bechdel test too.
As I noted above, the book finally settled into something readable. Still, parts of the resolution were much to esoteric for my taste. Considerations on the connection of language to the nature of sentience are great for philosophy discussions over beers or marijuana (or for linguists) but it just isn’t very exciting. Again, if the construction of similes sends you into ecstasy, you’re opinion will most assuredly be different than mine.
Everything considered, the book rates more highly than last year’s Kraken, but isn’t going to challenge Perdido Street Station or The Scar for the best Miéville book in my mind.
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a hot mess that I can’t recommend to anyone but devoted Miéville fans.In Miéville’s first book of straight science fiction, Embassytown is an outpost on an alien planet. It’s wholly surrounded by an unbreathable atmosphere kept at bay by a permeable bubble. The alien Ariekei evolution bred sentient beings who have two mouths with which they use to speak. Consequently they’ve developed Language, where two things spoken at once. Humans quickly learn to understand it, but the effort required to speak it is substantial. In fact, it can’t be done by one person or a computer translation. It requires two people speaking exactly in harmony or the Ariekei don’t even recognize it as speech. These Ambadssadors are paired clones who are linked electronically.
The main character, Avice Brenner Cho, grows up in Embassytown but leaves to be an immerser, someone who can consciously travel through hyperspace between worlds. Most people get sick or are otherwise incapacitated by the mode of travel, so immersers crew the ships that travel intersystem. While away, she marries the linguist Scile. He talks her into returning home so he can study Language.
During her second stay in Embassytown, things fall apart. Dissident humans murder a dissident Ariekei, with the complicity of both the human and Ariekei rulers. The first off-world Ambassador since the early days of the colony sets off the breakdown of society. Something about EzRa’s method of speaking Language is addictive to the Ariekei who hear it. The addicts can do little but seek to listen more, forgetting to eat or care for themselves.
The first chapters of Embassytown are incredibly convoluted. The normal advice to writers to show not tell worked badly in this case. The story could have used some telling to clear things up. Embassytown also took a hell of a long time to get to the meat of the story. It was all back story and world building until well after page 100. Some of those details were important later on, but man were they boring.
For instance, the Ariekei have a complicated system of similes. The Hosts (as they are called by the locals) cannot simply make up the constituent parts of a simile. Both sides of the language construction have to exist for them. I can say snow is like a blanket but the aliens cannot unless they’ve seen both the snow and the blanket. Avice is a simile in their language. She is the girl who ate what she was given. She performed this action in front of the Ariekei so that they could use that particular action in similes. The driver staying on the road is like the girl who ate what she was given. At the point of the telling of this story, it was all very tedious. At the time, it seemed like overly detailed language geek nerdery. (If you are into that, this book is definitely for you.) It does play an important part later on, but the reader really has to wait a long time for it.
What’s good about Embassytown is exactly what you would expect from China Miéville, creativity. He makes alien aliens, who never act anything at all human life. Mr. Miéville periodically adds details to their appearance. Each detail only adds to the mystery of their visual impact; they never solidify. Two mouths, multiple sets of wings, and hooves. Pendulous bodies in old age designed to be eaten. I imagined various lengthy appendages though I can’t recall if they were ever described.
The Ariekei world is equally interesting. Most everything there is bio-rigged, meaning that they are live animals bred for specific purposes. One of the ones that Mr. Miéville uses frequently are battery creature which follow the Hosts, periodically plugging into other animals that need juice. At one point the situation breaks down so that the battery animals scramble around aimlessly, looking to plug into something to power up. That is their purpose after all. I imagined something similar to my cat when she goes on a nightly tear for reasons I cannot fathom. Farms and other means of Ariekei life are similarly interesting.
And I have to give mad props to Mr. Miéville for using and skewering one of my pet peeves of writing. That’s when characters in a story have themselves a bit of a conversation to solve some sort of problem, but at the crucial moment the author pulls a whispering act so the reader doesn’t know the resolution. If that were to happen naturally, I would have no problem with it. But when I get to hear the rest of the conversation, it’s a lazy attempt to keep some sort of mystery going. That’s the problem. It’s lazy. The author couldn’t think of a way to legitimately structure the story without popping the bubble of fake reader omniscience. Here’s how China Miéville wrote it (emphasis added by me, quote comes from A.R.C. and may not reflect the final text):
How many days before they get here? I said. Can you get hold of YlSib? And others? Any you can? He narrowed his eyes but nodded. We need to go. Get YlSib or whoever to contact Spanish Dancer and the others. I’ll— I stopped. I don’t know, I said. I don’t know whether … Maybe I can tell Cal.
Tell me, Bren said. I thought you’d despaired.
I did too.
What, then? Tell me.
I told him. Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you.
Lots of material is fodder for political discussions too. Given Mr. Miéville’s socialist background, I’m not surprised. Embassytown sets the humans up to have a very precarious existence on an alien world. Even so, I have some qualms about their participation in the plot that I unfortunately cannot detail without spoilers. Embassytown includes a good illustration of what could be the politics of a superpower and it’s interaction with a remote colony. So much so that my guess is that it incorporates elements from a specific instance in our history. I’m not enough of a student of history to know what it is though. The government is not malevolent, but it’s not benign either. It very much does not have the best interests of the residents at heart. It also very much satisfies the Bechdel test too.
As I noted above, the book finally settled into something readable. Still, parts of the resolution were much to esoteric for my taste. Considerations on the connection of language to the nature of sentience are great for philosophy discussions over beers or marijuana (or for linguists) but it just isn’t very exciting. Again, if the construction of similes sends you into ecstasy, you’re opinion will most assuredly be different than mine.
Everything considered, the book rates more highly than last year’s Kraken, but isn’t going to challenge Perdido Street Station or The Scar for the best Miéville book in my mind.
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LibraryThing member g33kgrrl
China Mieville in outer space. I actually kept forgetting I was reading a China Mieville book, and thinking I was reading a Neal Stephenson book.
But the book was written by China Mieville, and (this is what reminds me of Stephenson) the book is not about space. It's about communication and
Language is important. It always has been. It always will be.
(Don't get me wrong, the SF trappings are awesome. The immer, the biotechnology of the world, the Ambassadors, the entirety of Embassytown and it's brilliant hybridization, and the language of the Ariekei - all pretty effing great! But not the point of the book.)
But the book was written by China Mieville, and (this is what reminds me of Stephenson) the book is not about space. It's about communication and
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sentience and language. There are SF trappings but at heart this is a deeply philosophical book. It is about how we know what we mean, how do we say what we mean, and how important abstract thinking is. It's about how to communicate with someone truly alien and how, if you succeed in communicating, they are no longer alien. Language is important. It always has been. It always will be.
(Don't get me wrong, the SF trappings are awesome. The immer, the biotechnology of the world, the Ambassadors, the entirety of Embassytown and it's brilliant hybridization, and the language of the Ariekei - all pretty effing great! But not the point of the book.)
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LibraryThing member -Eva-
In a place far, far away, lies Embassytown, inhabited by spider-legged, winged equine/insects, the Ariekei, who play Hosts to a little enclave of human settlers. For the longest time, they have been cohabiting peacefully, both groups providing the other what they cannot themselves make.
Of course, of course, the ideas and workings of the Ariekei language are at the forefront (it wouldn't be Miéville if a discourse on language wasn't a part, after all). The Ariekei's advanced and simultaneously basic language does not allow for lies - the thought and the word are the same thing, so in order to speak a simile, they have to create the situation in real life before being able to think/speak it. Needless to say, it's a fascinating idea, and the lengths to which the Ariekei go in order to be able to think/speak are outrageously imaginative. Not only that, but just the idea that someone could get physically intoxicated by a paradox is not only funny, it's possibly a little nod to Miéville's own readers, who are no doubt the kind of people who are excited by adventurous and inventive language, who are receptive to a writer's greatest task: "to tell the truth with lies."
However, although this is clearly a book discussing the workings of language, the big issue here is politics. Colonial politics. And Miéville shines when it comes to asking the questions: How do two (or more) different peoples/species, living in the same space, manage to coexist without one culture obliterating the other(s)? How do we sit down and break bread (or share the hummus-bowl) without bickering about whose culture created it, which culture should reign supreme? When one generation is so determined to maintain the status quo that it will sacrifice itself only so that the next generation can live as tradition dictates, is it worth it? Are the old ways really that important, that great, that they can justify any action? Surely, there has to be another solution and so our heroes cannot be the Ambassadors, the elite, the politicians, but it has to be the rebels, the refuseniks, the people who dare to imagine the unimaginable and who will not accept "impossible" as the final answer.
Is there then a solution, a "happy ending" to it all? Would it be Miéville if there were? There is some kind of resolution, sure, but it's neither finite nor perfect. As always, Miéville is a master as creating imagined worlds that seem real - in this particular case actually alive - and part of that lies in the open-endedness of his stories. A polished ending would reduce the complexity of the whole and would render it less meaningful than its potential. As it is, in many ways, it's more real than real.
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Negotiations between the groups are held by engineered humans, the Ambassadors, created specifically to be able to approximate the Ariekei's language, which is physically impossible for a regular human to imitate. Until one day, a new Ambassador arrives, things go awry, and peace is disintegrating fast. Of course, of course, the ideas and workings of the Ariekei language are at the forefront (it wouldn't be Miéville if a discourse on language wasn't a part, after all). The Ariekei's advanced and simultaneously basic language does not allow for lies - the thought and the word are the same thing, so in order to speak a simile, they have to create the situation in real life before being able to think/speak it. Needless to say, it's a fascinating idea, and the lengths to which the Ariekei go in order to be able to think/speak are outrageously imaginative. Not only that, but just the idea that someone could get physically intoxicated by a paradox is not only funny, it's possibly a little nod to Miéville's own readers, who are no doubt the kind of people who are excited by adventurous and inventive language, who are receptive to a writer's greatest task: "to tell the truth with lies."
However, although this is clearly a book discussing the workings of language, the big issue here is politics. Colonial politics. And Miéville shines when it comes to asking the questions: How do two (or more) different peoples/species, living in the same space, manage to coexist without one culture obliterating the other(s)? How do we sit down and break bread (or share the hummus-bowl) without bickering about whose culture created it, which culture should reign supreme? When one generation is so determined to maintain the status quo that it will sacrifice itself only so that the next generation can live as tradition dictates, is it worth it? Are the old ways really that important, that great, that they can justify any action? Surely, there has to be another solution and so our heroes cannot be the Ambassadors, the elite, the politicians, but it has to be the rebels, the refuseniks, the people who dare to imagine the unimaginable and who will not accept "impossible" as the final answer.
Is there then a solution, a "happy ending" to it all? Would it be Miéville if there were? There is some kind of resolution, sure, but it's neither finite nor perfect. As always, Miéville is a master as creating imagined worlds that seem real - in this particular case actually alive - and part of that lies in the open-endedness of his stories. A polished ending would reduce the complexity of the whole and would render it less meaningful than its potential. As it is, in many ways, it's more real than real.
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LibraryThing member Aerrin99
Embassytown is an uneven book that nevertheless managed to captivate me thoroughly in the second half and keep me turning the pages.
Mieville's world-building here is particularly disappointing, in part because his previous work leads the reader to expect him to paint new places with a vivid brush
I think he was trying to keep the frame of reference narrow in order to let us better delve into his protagonist's - Avice's - head. The problem is that Avice is an Embassytown native, and so she sweeps past important details of the Hosts (aliens who speak a Language that requires two mouths but one mind) and the Ambassadors (cloned doppels who are technologically 'linked' in an attempt to create one-mind-two-mouths as nearly as humans can) that are absolutely required to understand the story. So there, I've maybe spoiled you a bit, but knowing those two facts won't ruin your enjoyment of the story and might save you a lot of agony in the reading.
The first half of the novel meanders all over the place. I can sort of see what Mieville is trying to do. Through Avice - one of the few natives to make it off the island, so to speak - we gain a sense of the claustrophobic nature of Embassytown, of the larger world outside, of the narrowness of vision, of the things that are strange. Unfortunately, Avice has very little real personality to speak of and her wanderings aren't that interesting. By the time she returns to Embassytown with a linguist husband and the /actual plot/ kicks in, the book is half over and I was frustrated.
It's fortunate, then, that the second half of the book is engaging and interesting and thoughtful. I've recently read Suzette Elgin's Native Tongue, which makes this even more engaging, because Embassytown's real story is about communication and language and thought and the relationship between them.
You see, not only do the Hosts require two mouths and one mind - but they can't lie. They are unable to form the thoughts that allow them to speak a lie, and they're fascinated by humans' ability to do so. They hold festivals celebrating those among them who can come closest to mimicking a lie, via verbal tics or sleights of tongue or other tricks. They create elaborate similes (which must be acted out in order to be spoken - in order to be /thought) to describe things that might happen or could happen.
But for some, lying is more than just a fad or a game. It's something more. Because as the similes suggest, the Hosts' ability to conceive the world around them is limited by their Language. Abstract is nearly impossible. Contradicting truths are inconceivable. They can't signify. They have no concept of 'this' or 'that', only 'the glass with the flaw in the bottom next to the apple.' Specifics.
I won't get into the details, save to say that something happens that threatens the easy camaraderie in which the two species exist, and it revolves around the differences in how they speak - and thus in how they think. The second half of the novel explores interesting questions about how we perceive the world, and how we represent it.
It's worth the first half.
Mieville's world-building here is particularly disappointing, in part because his previous work leads the reader to expect him to paint new places with a vivid brush
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that makes us not only see, but hear and smell and feel and taste them. Here, though, Mieville seems to eschew such things as 'description' in favor of 'vague references that leave the reader confused about what they are actually looking at'. I think he was trying to keep the frame of reference narrow in order to let us better delve into his protagonist's - Avice's - head. The problem is that Avice is an Embassytown native, and so she sweeps past important details of the Hosts (aliens who speak a Language that requires two mouths but one mind) and the Ambassadors (cloned doppels who are technologically 'linked' in an attempt to create one-mind-two-mouths as nearly as humans can) that are absolutely required to understand the story. So there, I've maybe spoiled you a bit, but knowing those two facts won't ruin your enjoyment of the story and might save you a lot of agony in the reading.
The first half of the novel meanders all over the place. I can sort of see what Mieville is trying to do. Through Avice - one of the few natives to make it off the island, so to speak - we gain a sense of the claustrophobic nature of Embassytown, of the larger world outside, of the narrowness of vision, of the things that are strange. Unfortunately, Avice has very little real personality to speak of and her wanderings aren't that interesting. By the time she returns to Embassytown with a linguist husband and the /actual plot/ kicks in, the book is half over and I was frustrated.
It's fortunate, then, that the second half of the book is engaging and interesting and thoughtful. I've recently read Suzette Elgin's Native Tongue, which makes this even more engaging, because Embassytown's real story is about communication and language and thought and the relationship between them.
You see, not only do the Hosts require two mouths and one mind - but they can't lie. They are unable to form the thoughts that allow them to speak a lie, and they're fascinated by humans' ability to do so. They hold festivals celebrating those among them who can come closest to mimicking a lie, via verbal tics or sleights of tongue or other tricks. They create elaborate similes (which must be acted out in order to be spoken - in order to be /thought) to describe things that might happen or could happen.
But for some, lying is more than just a fad or a game. It's something more. Because as the similes suggest, the Hosts' ability to conceive the world around them is limited by their Language. Abstract is nearly impossible. Contradicting truths are inconceivable. They can't signify. They have no concept of 'this' or 'that', only 'the glass with the flaw in the bottom next to the apple.' Specifics.
I won't get into the details, save to say that something happens that threatens the easy camaraderie in which the two species exist, and it revolves around the differences in how they speak - and thus in how they think. The second half of the novel explores interesting questions about how we perceive the world, and how we represent it.
It's worth the first half.
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LibraryThing member ladycato
I received this ARC through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.
China Mieville's work is extremely difficulty to summarize, but here we go: Embassytown is at the extreme reaches of humanity's diaspora in space. It's a place where Avice is born amongst a fully biological world; houses live and
This is the dense sort of science fiction book that scares people away from the genre. I struggled through the first 100 pages. I felt like I'd been thrown into the deep end of the pool without any swimming lessons. The world was too alien, with no basis of comparison to Earth. The book also jumped from past to present, and that left me more confused. However, when things start to fall apart about halfway through the novel, it became interesting. The Hosts are fascinating and complex, and the concept here is outright brilliant. It's about the power of words and language, how a simile can change the entire world. It's incrediblely deep stuff... if you can make it through to the end.
There are also issues of characters. The supporting cast is fantastic. However, Avice, the first person narrator, plays the observer for most of the book. She's connected to everyone (actually, she sleeps with most of the other main characters) but never feels alive. Her gender neutrality doesn't bother me; compared with the Hosts, male-female differences mean nothing. It's more than Avice felt... blank. That her presence in most of the book is because of nosiness, up till the end where she takes action. I never cared about her as a character because she never came to life for me, not like the others. The most brilliant presence of all is Embassytown itself. My curiosity about Embassytown's fate was why I kept reading. Avice could have narrated from beyond the grave as far as I cared.
If you love language and words, try and make it through the first 1/3 of the book. The end result is brilliant in many ways. Would I read this again? No way. But I'm glad I forced myself through this pass.
China Mieville's work is extremely difficulty to summarize, but here we go: Embassytown is at the extreme reaches of humanity's diaspora in space. It's a place where Avice is born amongst a fully biological world; houses live and
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breathe, as well as most machines. All are tended by the enigmatic Hosts, aliens in the most alien sense. Hosts speak in two overlapping voices and hear via wings. They cannot comprehend voices of individual humans, and don't acknowledge their existence. Human Ambassadors are the mediators: twins created with a particular mind-meld so that they speak like the Hosts. And then a new Ambassador arrives, one different from the rest. The Hosts don't notice the physical changes; it's all about the voice. And that voice drives Embassytown to starvation, insanity, and war.This is the dense sort of science fiction book that scares people away from the genre. I struggled through the first 100 pages. I felt like I'd been thrown into the deep end of the pool without any swimming lessons. The world was too alien, with no basis of comparison to Earth. The book also jumped from past to present, and that left me more confused. However, when things start to fall apart about halfway through the novel, it became interesting. The Hosts are fascinating and complex, and the concept here is outright brilliant. It's about the power of words and language, how a simile can change the entire world. It's incrediblely deep stuff... if you can make it through to the end.
There are also issues of characters. The supporting cast is fantastic. However, Avice, the first person narrator, plays the observer for most of the book. She's connected to everyone (actually, she sleeps with most of the other main characters) but never feels alive. Her gender neutrality doesn't bother me; compared with the Hosts, male-female differences mean nothing. It's more than Avice felt... blank. That her presence in most of the book is because of nosiness, up till the end where she takes action. I never cared about her as a character because she never came to life for me, not like the others. The most brilliant presence of all is Embassytown itself. My curiosity about Embassytown's fate was why I kept reading. Avice could have narrated from beyond the grave as far as I cared.
If you love language and words, try and make it through the first 1/3 of the book. The end result is brilliant in many ways. Would I read this again? No way. But I'm glad I forced myself through this pass.
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LibraryThing member kmaziarz
In a future so distant that Earth itself is barely remembered, the universe has been colonized by humans, or Terre. They have encountered multiple strange alien species, and made peace with most of them. Perhaps no species they have found, however, have been as strange as the Ariekei. The Ariekei,
Avice Benner Cho, a young woman raised in Embassytown who became an immerser, or space traveler, never thought she’d return to her childhood home. But when her husband, a linguist, becomes obsessed with the Ariekei and Language, she finds herself back in Embassytown, traveling in the Ambassadors’ social circles. But trouble is brewing. One faction of the Ariekei have become obsessed with learning to lie—Language is incapable of encompassing anything other than strict, literal truth. Even abstracts like similes must be performed by actors so that the Ariekei can refer to them. But learning to lie would change the Ariekei and their culture, and not everyone is happy with that idea. In addition, Bremen, the home nation of the colony Embassytown, has its own plan for wresting political influence away from the doppel Ambassadors. When the plans of the liar Ariekei and Bremen’s agents collide, only Avice and a small contingent of rebellious Ambassadors and Ariekei can save the colony—and the Ariekei species—from total destruction.
A very slow-starting book! I found it very difficult to immerse myself (pardon the pun) into this world at first. Avice, the narrator, seems to have very little personality of her own and her voice did not grab me. The whole first half of the book was a real chore to get through, even though certain things that happened ended up being more important later. It all felt like a very extended prologue. But once the book got to the real meat of the plot, I suddenly found myself much more engaged and interested. This book would definitely benefit from less build-up and more action!
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called the “Hosts” by those humans who live on their world in an enclave called Embassytown, have two mouths. Their language, called Language with the capital L, is contingent upon the use of both mouths, and therefore both portions of their minds, at once. They are literally unable to comprehend any language spoken by only one mouth, and therefore one mind. The Ambassadors of Embassytown are specially-bred identical clones, called doppels, who are trained from birth to be so empathically linked that they are able to speak Language with the Hosts and be understood as two minds speaking one thought together.Avice Benner Cho, a young woman raised in Embassytown who became an immerser, or space traveler, never thought she’d return to her childhood home. But when her husband, a linguist, becomes obsessed with the Ariekei and Language, she finds herself back in Embassytown, traveling in the Ambassadors’ social circles. But trouble is brewing. One faction of the Ariekei have become obsessed with learning to lie—Language is incapable of encompassing anything other than strict, literal truth. Even abstracts like similes must be performed by actors so that the Ariekei can refer to them. But learning to lie would change the Ariekei and their culture, and not everyone is happy with that idea. In addition, Bremen, the home nation of the colony Embassytown, has its own plan for wresting political influence away from the doppel Ambassadors. When the plans of the liar Ariekei and Bremen’s agents collide, only Avice and a small contingent of rebellious Ambassadors and Ariekei can save the colony—and the Ariekei species—from total destruction.
A very slow-starting book! I found it very difficult to immerse myself (pardon the pun) into this world at first. Avice, the narrator, seems to have very little personality of her own and her voice did not grab me. The whole first half of the book was a real chore to get through, even though certain things that happened ended up being more important later. It all felt like a very extended prologue. But once the book got to the real meat of the plot, I suddenly found myself much more engaged and interested. This book would definitely benefit from less build-up and more action!
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LibraryThing member dukedom_enough
China Mieville, who has written fantasy novels thus far, switches to science fiction for this superb novel. I think of it as a notional twin to 2009’s The City and The City. Where the earlier book centered on perception, and how we use and are used by it, Embassytown is about language. As always
Again, Mieville starts with a city. In Embassytown, the eponymous city is a colonial enclave, an outpost of a human interstellar empire that is, in turn, but a tiny part of a huge, old, complex galaxy, of which the reader learns just enough to glimpse how much more is untold. Most of the book is set on Arieka, a planet far from the rest of the known galaxy, where the Embassytowners have coexisted with the strange, nonhuman, native Ariekei for a couple of centuries, facilitating trade in technologies and studying the unique language. The humans’ colonial relations with the Ariekei are a bit more enlightened than most in Earth’s history, and they rely on Ariekei resources for survival - even for the very air they breathe.
Avice Benner Cho grows up here, having the usual childhood experiences, plus one quite unusual encounter with the Ariekei. She crews a starship during her young adulthood, then returns to Embassytown with a husband, not long before a new development in communication with the Ariekei changes the status quo.
(Spoiler warning for the remainder of this review.)
Could there be a language without lies, whose speakers only ever say true things? But what is true? How might this language work? Might its speakers be interested in learning how to lie? How fragile a worldview might those speakers have? What of language may vary, and what is intrinsic? Mieville takes William S. Burroughs’ famous “language is a virus from outer space” and presents a case where it is we who are the virus, with deadly consequences for both humans and Arekei.
Again Mieville’s fabulous imagination is on display. In his Bas-Lag novels, he mechanizes the biological, many characters being Remade into part-mechanical beings. Here, he biologizes the mechanical: Arekei technology uses designed creatures as technology - everything in their built environment is alive.
Mieville expertly uses SF tropes - infodumps where necessary, incluing in most places - to create the impression of a different world. From the beginning of the book, after a shuttle has landed from an orbiting starship:
...a window metres high and wide, which overlooked the city and Lilypad Hill. Behind that slope was the boat, loaded with cargo. Beyond kilometres of roofs, past rotating church-beacons, were the power stations. They had been made uneasy by the landing, and were still skittish, days later. I could see them stamping.
Here we have the comforting familiarity of a window that people look through, roofs, and a landmark with an earthlike name - but also the unfamiliar: churches have beacons that rotate? Power stations can be skittish, and they stamp? The first-person narration lets Avice gloss over things familiar to her, utterly strange to us. The centuries of makeshifts by which the humans communicate with the Ariekei are strange, yet finally almost convincing - not hard SF, but quite satisfying.
In 2010’s Kraken, Mieville’s amazingly fecund imagination was so much on display that it cramped all the other elements of the fiction. Here, he reins it in, concentrating more on his main ideas. This is not to say that it is absent. Avice meets her husband at a convention of linguists:
“I’m working in Homash. Do you know it?” said one young woman to me, apropos of nothing. She was very happy when I told her no. “They speak by regurgitation. Pellets embedded with enzymes in different combinations are sentences, which their interlocutors eat.”
A typical Mieville throwaway, striking, grotesque, not reused in the book and probably not in anything else he’ll ever write. Encountering these is one of the delights of Mieville’s fiction, but they are not present in such overabundance as in Kraken.
Politics, as always for Mieville, is present. To live is to be political, for both species, and for both Embassytown and its parent world. The pace and excitement of the latter part of the book, as the fate of every living thing on Arieka comes into question, and Avice and her allies struggle to survive, is as great as in any of his earlier books. Embassytown leaves The City & The City as Mieville’s best work, but it is a definite step up from Kraken, and further proof that here we have a writer who always has something new and original for us.
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with Mieville, the theme is developed subtly, but with the intellectual fireworks we’re now used to expecting from him.Again, Mieville starts with a city. In Embassytown, the eponymous city is a colonial enclave, an outpost of a human interstellar empire that is, in turn, but a tiny part of a huge, old, complex galaxy, of which the reader learns just enough to glimpse how much more is untold. Most of the book is set on Arieka, a planet far from the rest of the known galaxy, where the Embassytowners have coexisted with the strange, nonhuman, native Ariekei for a couple of centuries, facilitating trade in technologies and studying the unique language. The humans’ colonial relations with the Ariekei are a bit more enlightened than most in Earth’s history, and they rely on Ariekei resources for survival - even for the very air they breathe.
Avice Benner Cho grows up here, having the usual childhood experiences, plus one quite unusual encounter with the Ariekei. She crews a starship during her young adulthood, then returns to Embassytown with a husband, not long before a new development in communication with the Ariekei changes the status quo.
(Spoiler warning for the remainder of this review.)
Could there be a language without lies, whose speakers only ever say true things? But what is true? How might this language work? Might its speakers be interested in learning how to lie? How fragile a worldview might those speakers have? What of language may vary, and what is intrinsic? Mieville takes William S. Burroughs’ famous “language is a virus from outer space” and presents a case where it is we who are the virus, with deadly consequences for both humans and Arekei.
Again Mieville’s fabulous imagination is on display. In his Bas-Lag novels, he mechanizes the biological, many characters being Remade into part-mechanical beings. Here, he biologizes the mechanical: Arekei technology uses designed creatures as technology - everything in their built environment is alive.
Mieville expertly uses SF tropes - infodumps where necessary, incluing in most places - to create the impression of a different world. From the beginning of the book, after a shuttle has landed from an orbiting starship:
...a window metres high and wide, which overlooked the city and Lilypad Hill. Behind that slope was the boat, loaded with cargo. Beyond kilometres of roofs, past rotating church-beacons, were the power stations. They had been made uneasy by the landing, and were still skittish, days later. I could see them stamping.
Here we have the comforting familiarity of a window that people look through, roofs, and a landmark with an earthlike name - but also the unfamiliar: churches have beacons that rotate? Power stations can be skittish, and they stamp? The first-person narration lets Avice gloss over things familiar to her, utterly strange to us. The centuries of makeshifts by which the humans communicate with the Ariekei are strange, yet finally almost convincing - not hard SF, but quite satisfying.
In 2010’s Kraken, Mieville’s amazingly fecund imagination was so much on display that it cramped all the other elements of the fiction. Here, he reins it in, concentrating more on his main ideas. This is not to say that it is absent. Avice meets her husband at a convention of linguists:
“I’m working in Homash. Do you know it?” said one young woman to me, apropos of nothing. She was very happy when I told her no. “They speak by regurgitation. Pellets embedded with enzymes in different combinations are sentences, which their interlocutors eat.”
A typical Mieville throwaway, striking, grotesque, not reused in the book and probably not in anything else he’ll ever write. Encountering these is one of the delights of Mieville’s fiction, but they are not present in such overabundance as in Kraken.
Politics, as always for Mieville, is present. To live is to be political, for both species, and for both Embassytown and its parent world. The pace and excitement of the latter part of the book, as the fate of every living thing on Arieka comes into question, and Avice and her allies struggle to survive, is as great as in any of his earlier books. Embassytown leaves The City & The City as Mieville’s best work, but it is a definite step up from Kraken, and further proof that here we have a writer who always has something new and original for us.
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LibraryThing member kevinashley
The world needs more books by China Miéville. That sums up my feelings as I finished "Embassytown." But for the sake of my own failing memory if nothing else I should say a little more about it.
Embassytown is set on a world of uncertain location which contains a town, with a special environment to
The author reveals these details and others of the setting to us slowly, letting the reader experience them before they are explained, if they are explained at all. The physical characteristics of the Ariekei are described in a fragmentary fashion but their overall appearance is never entirely clear. In doing so, an truly alien way of thinking and the difficulties of cross-species communication are described in ways that I've rarely seen bettered. So too are the ways in which language can be seen to constrain or shape thought and society.
Inevitably there is change, change with threatens to become revolutionary. As is often the case with the author's work, the revolution is not so much instigated deliberately as something which emerges from events., It is caused by intentional action, but it was not the intent of the action. How this is so, and how those involved deal with the consequences as individuals and communities is at the heart of the story.
An excellent read, combining philosophy, politics and engaging story-telling with a real sense of 'other.'
Embassytown is set on a world of uncertain location which contains a town, with a special environment to
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host the diplomats who live here in order to engage with its inhabitants, the Ariekei. The Ariekei speak Language, a tongue almost impossible for other species to master. It requires two voices speaking simultaneously (since the Ariekei have two vocal organs) but this must be done by one mind. Language, and by implications the Ariekei themselves, possesses restrictions which other languages don't. In particular it is impossible to speak of something which the speaker does not have direct experience of, and by implication it is impossible to lie. Specially trained Ambassadors are the only outsiders who can communicate in Language with the Ariekei. Exactly how special they are becomes apparent as the story progresses; I shan't say more.The author reveals these details and others of the setting to us slowly, letting the reader experience them before they are explained, if they are explained at all. The physical characteristics of the Ariekei are described in a fragmentary fashion but their overall appearance is never entirely clear. In doing so, an truly alien way of thinking and the difficulties of cross-species communication are described in ways that I've rarely seen bettered. So too are the ways in which language can be seen to constrain or shape thought and society.
Inevitably there is change, change with threatens to become revolutionary. As is often the case with the author's work, the revolution is not so much instigated deliberately as something which emerges from events., It is caused by intentional action, but it was not the intent of the action. How this is so, and how those involved deal with the consequences as individuals and communities is at the heart of the story.
An excellent read, combining philosophy, politics and engaging story-telling with a real sense of 'other.'
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LibraryThing member jackdeighton
It’s not often a novel is concerned primarily with language but Embassytown is that exception. Unlike in Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue series, however, Miéville does not merely dally with the idea of language and translation but instead embeds this concern in the narrative; indeed the
On a planet named Arieka, at the edge of known space, the Bremen colony of Embassytown is a habitable enclave surrounded by the otherwise poisonous demesnes of the indigenous Ariekei who are known as Hosts. Their language (Miéville emphasise its importance to the novel by naming it Language rather than Ariekan) contains no facility for lying and also requires the simultaneous uttering of two words/thoughts in order to be understood. This leads to a typographical representation oddity which I cannot fully reproduce here and is merely one illustration within the book of Miéville’s fascination with duality, a seam mined repeatedly in his earlier novels. “Twinned” Ambassadors referred to as doppels are identicalised individuals, kept identical by regular cleansing sessions which remove the superficial blemishes picked up between these ablutions, have been tested for empathy and trained to interact with the locals by speaking simultaneously. They have names such as ArnOld, RanDolph, CalVin, MagDa, CharLott or JoaQuin and are always referred to in the plural in constructions such as “the Ambassador were” - except when their components are on their own. The first three sections of the book, up to the initial crisis, are also twinned, with succeeding chapters respectively headed as Formerly or Latterday. Here, the difficulties of communicating with the Hosts and the struggles of a few of them to adopt human modes of speech are laid out. The remainder of the book deals with the fall-out from that endeavour.
Narrator Avice Benner Cho is a former immerser - a traveller in the immer, the void between planets – who, unusually for one of her kind, has returned to Arieka. Like many Embassytowners she has been made into a simile (she is the girl who ate what she was told, rather than what she wanted.) These human similes help the Ambassadors to talk with the Hosts. Avice’s status is, of course, vital to the plot’s development.
The book is not flawless. Too many Ambassadors are indistinguishable (not in themself, but between them – you see where this twinning thing makes comment problematic) and the characterisation and motivations can be sketchy. That the Hosts are mere plot carriers is more forgiveable as they are not human and Miéville has taken pains to underline the difficulty of cross-species understanding.
Overall, though, as an intellectual exercise, an exploration of the idea of language as a defining cultural construct, the book succeeds admirably.
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plot’s resolution is dependent on language and communication. On a planet named Arieka, at the edge of known space, the Bremen colony of Embassytown is a habitable enclave surrounded by the otherwise poisonous demesnes of the indigenous Ariekei who are known as Hosts. Their language (Miéville emphasise its importance to the novel by naming it Language rather than Ariekan) contains no facility for lying and also requires the simultaneous uttering of two words/thoughts in order to be understood. This leads to a typographical representation oddity which I cannot fully reproduce here and is merely one illustration within the book of Miéville’s fascination with duality, a seam mined repeatedly in his earlier novels. “Twinned” Ambassadors referred to as doppels are identicalised individuals, kept identical by regular cleansing sessions which remove the superficial blemishes picked up between these ablutions, have been tested for empathy and trained to interact with the locals by speaking simultaneously. They have names such as ArnOld, RanDolph, CalVin, MagDa, CharLott or JoaQuin and are always referred to in the plural in constructions such as “the Ambassador were” - except when their components are on their own. The first three sections of the book, up to the initial crisis, are also twinned, with succeeding chapters respectively headed as Formerly or Latterday. Here, the difficulties of communicating with the Hosts and the struggles of a few of them to adopt human modes of speech are laid out. The remainder of the book deals with the fall-out from that endeavour.
Narrator Avice Benner Cho is a former immerser - a traveller in the immer, the void between planets – who, unusually for one of her kind, has returned to Arieka. Like many Embassytowners she has been made into a simile (she is the girl who ate what she was told, rather than what she wanted.) These human similes help the Ambassadors to talk with the Hosts. Avice’s status is, of course, vital to the plot’s development.
The book is not flawless. Too many Ambassadors are indistinguishable (not in themself, but between them – you see where this twinning thing makes comment problematic) and the characterisation and motivations can be sketchy. That the Hosts are mere plot carriers is more forgiveable as they are not human and Miéville has taken pains to underline the difficulty of cross-species understanding.
Overall, though, as an intellectual exercise, an exploration of the idea of language as a defining cultural construct, the book succeeds admirably.
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LibraryThing member kaipakartik
Its scary to have high expectations. More often than not you end up devastated but I am happy to say this is not one of those instances. China Mieville has exceeded all my expectations and come up with the most unique book that I have ever read. Embassytown is a science fiction novel that is at
This is at its core a study of language albeit one carried in so thrilling a manner that I hardly paused while reading Embassytown. Imagine there are aliens, of course they have means to communicate with themselves but for them everything is as is, their language does not have a concept of abstraction. They cannot lie and make things up so to speak. What they say has to be the truth. Mieville takes this simple idea and stretches it to its absolute limits, building a world, a system of space travel that is incredibly well realized.
The writing is just magnificent. The way Mieville chooses his words and the way he skillfully he shows and hides the physical characteristics of the aliens teasing the imagination of the reader. The way the first words of the novel prepare you for the ride ahead.
At one point of time I was so engrossed in reading this book that I was shocked when someone called out for me. This book is going to win all sorts of awards and this review does not do it justice. A work of pure unadulterated genius and an absolute masterclass.
"The word must communicate something (other than itself)."
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once a thriller and a treatise in linguistics and as usual Mieville takes on a genre and turns it on its head.This is at its core a study of language albeit one carried in so thrilling a manner that I hardly paused while reading Embassytown. Imagine there are aliens, of course they have means to communicate with themselves but for them everything is as is, their language does not have a concept of abstraction. They cannot lie and make things up so to speak. What they say has to be the truth. Mieville takes this simple idea and stretches it to its absolute limits, building a world, a system of space travel that is incredibly well realized.
The writing is just magnificent. The way Mieville chooses his words and the way he skillfully he shows and hides the physical characteristics of the aliens teasing the imagination of the reader. The way the first words of the novel prepare you for the ride ahead.
At one point of time I was so engrossed in reading this book that I was shocked when someone called out for me. This book is going to win all sorts of awards and this review does not do it justice. A work of pure unadulterated genius and an absolute masterclass.
"The word must communicate something (other than itself)."
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LibraryThing member RBeffa
Mieville plays hard and does not make reading easy. This memoir from the future starts off rambling with references to all kinds of stuff the reader will have to slowly assimilate to try and make sense of what the narrator is trying to recall and relay to us, the readers. In a way it is very true
This narrative memoir, however, begins in the future on a planet, in a city, on the edge of the then known space, where humans interact with some very alien aliens. Mieville has the reader completely off balance and virtually struggling at times to try and figure what is going on. He makes up words constantly. The stuff tossed at us is incredibly imaginative. A lot of stuff is thrown to keep you off balance, page after page of it. The woman tells us she left the city at 7 years of age and returned at 11. On her 4th marriage. whaaaat?
The first quarter of the book is like that. Then the author eases up a bit and then after nearly 100 pages (that feels like 200 pages) the hard work getting there begins to pay off and the story starts to kick in. The problem for me after all that was the payoff. Mieville has created an ultra-complex and interesting world, but the reward for all that hard work of reading wasn't much to me. After the hard initial investment I read on because i was interested enough to see where it would go. But I wasn't really caught up in it all. For the most part I was never really invested in the characters either. There were also more than a few sections of the novel that I just found boring. This book has garnered a lot of praise but I won't be recommending this one to others.
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to life of how people narrate old memories to others, and ramble all over hell and back with bits of things from here and there that may mean something to them but don't mean anything, or much, to you the listener. That is how this story feels. These little bits here of course do come back later to mean something. This narrative memoir, however, begins in the future on a planet, in a city, on the edge of the then known space, where humans interact with some very alien aliens. Mieville has the reader completely off balance and virtually struggling at times to try and figure what is going on. He makes up words constantly. The stuff tossed at us is incredibly imaginative. A lot of stuff is thrown to keep you off balance, page after page of it. The woman tells us she left the city at 7 years of age and returned at 11. On her 4th marriage. whaaaat?
The first quarter of the book is like that. Then the author eases up a bit and then after nearly 100 pages (that feels like 200 pages) the hard work getting there begins to pay off and the story starts to kick in. The problem for me after all that was the payoff. Mieville has created an ultra-complex and interesting world, but the reward for all that hard work of reading wasn't much to me. After the hard initial investment I read on because i was interested enough to see where it would go. But I wasn't really caught up in it all. For the most part I was never really invested in the characters either. There were also more than a few sections of the novel that I just found boring. This book has garnered a lot of praise but I won't be recommending this one to others.
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LibraryThing member stellarexplorer
This was my first Mieville, and my expectations were high. I found Embassytown an inventive gritty portrait of an alien species and their planet. Mieville’s consideration of language here exceeds expectations. In that way, this is a novel of ideas, which elevates what it offers considerably.
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Unfortunately, for me satisfaction was limited by the lack of a character with whose story I could become engaged. The book also evolved slowly and for me tediously. Another might enjoy the slow revealing of an alien culture. I felt it did not draw me in sufficiently on its own, and the motivating drive to read was to grasp the world created, and not to follow characters whose story captivated me. Show Less
LibraryThing member nhlsecord
I just can't get comfortable with Mieville's writing because I am so often unsure of what he's saying. He has a wonderful gift for seeing complex societies, that's for sure, but I can't hold it all well enough to enjoy it.
LibraryThing member chelseagirl
If you know me, and we talk about books, chances are pretty good you know I'm a fan of China Mieville's writing. Still, I haven't loved all his books equally. Embassytown, however, is not one of those mere four-star Mievilles. No, it's really, really good.
First of all, as everyone says, it's a
I've always wondered, if there was life on other planets, whether we might be such different orders of being that we would be incapable of perceiving each other. Certainly, communication and cultural barriers, language structures and basic assumptions, would be immensely different. It's been awhile since I've read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God, but she addressed some of the cultural incomprehension effectively.
Mieville, here, deals with the language, or rather, the Language, and the whole concept of how humans can possibly communicate with beings who process language in such different ways that signifiers mean nothing to them and that lying is impossible. Smart, challenging stuff.
The book has its flaws. I'm not ordinarily one who chides Mieville for lack of characterization; as far as I'm concerned he's created indelible characters in a number of his books. Here, though, I don't have a very solid sense of most of the characters, except in terms of their functions and some basic characteristics of each. Also, Mieville can be an incredibly visual writer, but here there's a lack of description; I can imagine Embassytown and the surrounding Arieke world, but I can't really *see* it, not in the ways he usually shows things to his readers. However, that may be the point. Bas-Lag and the cities in The City and The City, not to mention Mieville's various takes on London, are solidly grounded in reality, even if it's simply the reality of the imagination. Embassytown may be beyond what narrator Avice can show us with the language we have.
Now, please bail if you don't want to know.
Seriously.
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The novel presents a tragedy, the downfall of the Ariekei people (the Hosts) and that what we don't realize until the very end is that our narrator, Avice Benner Cho, is actually on the wrong side. That is, the Ambassadors accidentally addict the Hosts to a particular performance of Language, but then deliberately continue to feed it, first for their continued survival, but then for their reshaping of the planet's society. (Opium Wars, anyone? Supplying Native Americans with whiskey?) And Avice is one of the colonists who does it. The "happy" ending, in which some of the colonists survive, to form a new society along with Hosts who have lost their Language, but learned to speak various "Anglo-" dialects, represents so many colonial histories. Avice compares the Embassytown of the conclusion to "deadwood planets and pioneer towns," consolidating the Old West metaphor. Avice's estranged husband, Scile, confined at the end to a prison/asylum for his support of the Ariekei resistors, is neither insane nor villainous; he's taken a morally correct position and he's lost. As Avice says, "he must think he's fallen among Lucifers." At the end of the novel, Language is on its way to being wiped out in the urban center, Ariekei collaborators are speaking forms of English and have learned to lie, and "drug" addiction is rampant.
I haven't heard anyone talking about this, and it may be because the novel is so recent that most of what's out there are book reviews which necessarily can't give away the ending. But I think Mieville is also playing an interesting game with us. We're presented with Avice as a sympathetic narrator, and don't expect her to be implicit in the systematic destruction of a culture. And yet . . .
First of all, as everyone says, it's a
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science fiction novel about linguistics, but it manages to remain compelling throughout. This is smart stuff. There's also a very interesting take on colonialism, which of course interplanetary travels are all about. I'm going to leave a spoiler space at the end and then say more.I've always wondered, if there was life on other planets, whether we might be such different orders of being that we would be incapable of perceiving each other. Certainly, communication and cultural barriers, language structures and basic assumptions, would be immensely different. It's been awhile since I've read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God, but she addressed some of the cultural incomprehension effectively.
Mieville, here, deals with the language, or rather, the Language, and the whole concept of how humans can possibly communicate with beings who process language in such different ways that signifiers mean nothing to them and that lying is impossible. Smart, challenging stuff.
The book has its flaws. I'm not ordinarily one who chides Mieville for lack of characterization; as far as I'm concerned he's created indelible characters in a number of his books. Here, though, I don't have a very solid sense of most of the characters, except in terms of their functions and some basic characteristics of each. Also, Mieville can be an incredibly visual writer, but here there's a lack of description; I can imagine Embassytown and the surrounding Arieke world, but I can't really *see* it, not in the ways he usually shows things to his readers. However, that may be the point. Bas-Lag and the cities in The City and The City, not to mention Mieville's various takes on London, are solidly grounded in reality, even if it's simply the reality of the imagination. Embassytown may be beyond what narrator Avice can show us with the language we have.
Now, please bail if you don't want to know.
Seriously.
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The novel presents a tragedy, the downfall of the Ariekei people (the Hosts) and that what we don't realize until the very end is that our narrator, Avice Benner Cho, is actually on the wrong side. That is, the Ambassadors accidentally addict the Hosts to a particular performance of Language, but then deliberately continue to feed it, first for their continued survival, but then for their reshaping of the planet's society. (Opium Wars, anyone? Supplying Native Americans with whiskey?) And Avice is one of the colonists who does it. The "happy" ending, in which some of the colonists survive, to form a new society along with Hosts who have lost their Language, but learned to speak various "Anglo-" dialects, represents so many colonial histories. Avice compares the Embassytown of the conclusion to "deadwood planets and pioneer towns," consolidating the Old West metaphor. Avice's estranged husband, Scile, confined at the end to a prison/asylum for his support of the Ariekei resistors, is neither insane nor villainous; he's taken a morally correct position and he's lost. As Avice says, "he must think he's fallen among Lucifers." At the end of the novel, Language is on its way to being wiped out in the urban center, Ariekei collaborators are speaking forms of English and have learned to lie, and "drug" addiction is rampant.
I haven't heard anyone talking about this, and it may be because the novel is so recent that most of what's out there are book reviews which necessarily can't give away the ending. But I think Mieville is also playing an interesting game with us. We're presented with Avice as a sympathetic narrator, and don't expect her to be implicit in the systematic destruction of a culture. And yet . . .
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LibraryThing member slothman
China Miéville turns his pen toward science fiction, in a far-future setting where Earth is a distant memory and the mapping between his version of hyperspace (the “immer”, a term derived from “immerse”, a realm as perilous as Earth’s oceans in the days of sail) and our realm may have
Avice has the talent to become an immerser, crew on a faster-than-light starship, and leaves to seek her fortune. When she returns home, her broader perspective puts her in a position of being able to get involved in events that stem from the surprising things that happen when a species that never knew what lies were begins to learn from a species that is quite good at it. The festivals where humans tell obvious, blatant lies for the amusement of the Ariekei, and the Ariekei attempt to tell their own lies, are just the beginning of a much, much bigger mess.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Miéville never figured out how Ariekei speech works; early on, for example, he establishes that the Ariekei can’t comprehend machine-generated speech, and later on, recordings of speech in their language is significant to the plot. That, and other “wait, what are the rules now?” moments detracted from an otherwise interesting plot.
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your neighbor for trade purposes being in an entirely different galaxy. Our heroine, Avice Benner Cho, is from a backwater world at the edge of navigable hyperspace, where the native Ariekei have a language that requires two separate mouths, working simultaneously to pronounce it. As the story unfolds, we find out that the language has some unusual properties: the Ariekei can’t comprehend the language when synthesized by a machine, and can’t even imagine that a being who doesn’t speak their language is anything more than a pet. And they can’t lie in that language... though humans can. The place where the rest of the universe talks to the Ariekei is Embassytown.Avice has the talent to become an immerser, crew on a faster-than-light starship, and leaves to seek her fortune. When she returns home, her broader perspective puts her in a position of being able to get involved in events that stem from the surprising things that happen when a species that never knew what lies were begins to learn from a species that is quite good at it. The festivals where humans tell obvious, blatant lies for the amusement of the Ariekei, and the Ariekei attempt to tell their own lies, are just the beginning of a much, much bigger mess.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Miéville never figured out how Ariekei speech works; early on, for example, he establishes that the Ariekei can’t comprehend machine-generated speech, and later on, recordings of speech in their language is significant to the plot. That, and other “wait, what are the rules now?” moments detracted from an otherwise interesting plot.
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LibraryThing member Beakif
I've had to start re-writing this review 3 times now. With every instance of this review, I've felt that I'm not doing this book justice in writing platitudes of explanation about a complex, compelling context of argument.
Miéville is not scared to take on big issues in his works, and Embassytown
However, despite its complexities, it became a thoroughly enjoyable book as soon as I stopped worrying about distinctions between different species of alien, what on earth Avice was made to do as a child, what an "immer" was (in the end I settled for "someone who doesn't get travel sick, but on a level beyond our comprehension"), what Ambassadors "links" looked like and what (not on) earth the Hosts and their battery animals resembled.
As soon as I'd got over my confusion and just read, I loved it.
Miéville doesn't run away from difficult things. At times, I felt very much like a Host. I had absolutely no idea what it was that Avice was trying to convey, and Miéville is utterly masterful in ensuring that when the Hosts experience their revelation, the reader is finally able to pull all the narrative strands together at the same time. The difficulties in distinguishing between metaphor and outright untruth are brought to the fore in what is a fascinating argument, with humans as the agents of change at the center.
I also really enjoyed the religious analogies. In being agents of change, does that make humans unforgivable, responsible, their own worst enemy, the purveyors of wider knowledge, magpies? I'm still turning all the questions Embassytown raises over in my mind, and feel it's still too early after reading it to engage in the ethics debates it also raises through this.
Maybe I've taken Embassytown on in the wrong way. To begin with, I really did feel that I was wading through quicksand, desperately trying to stop myself being bogged down by incomprehensible detail. My advice to prospective readers would be to go in with the knowledge you'll be confused. Enjoy working out the issues as they unfold, and don't bother trying to explain them fully (as I did in my earlier review attempts). Miéville takes an entire book to be able to spin out his thoughts; really, we should just respect a master at work.
Miéville is not scared to take on big issues in his works, and Embassytown
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concentrates on language, development, argument, negotiation and nuance, all with vague religious references that allow us, humans, to question our agency and influence in our current dealings. Superficially then, Embassytown approaches this through the examination of a political relationship between different species, with heavy heaps of character nostalgia and desire thrown in.However, despite its complexities, it became a thoroughly enjoyable book as soon as I stopped worrying about distinctions between different species of alien, what on earth Avice was made to do as a child, what an "immer" was (in the end I settled for "someone who doesn't get travel sick, but on a level beyond our comprehension"), what Ambassadors "links" looked like and what (not on) earth the Hosts and their battery animals resembled.
As soon as I'd got over my confusion and just read, I loved it.
Miéville doesn't run away from difficult things. At times, I felt very much like a Host. I had absolutely no idea what it was that Avice was trying to convey, and Miéville is utterly masterful in ensuring that when the Hosts experience their revelation, the reader is finally able to pull all the narrative strands together at the same time. The difficulties in distinguishing between metaphor and outright untruth are brought to the fore in what is a fascinating argument, with humans as the agents of change at the center.
I also really enjoyed the religious analogies. In being agents of change, does that make humans unforgivable, responsible, their own worst enemy, the purveyors of wider knowledge, magpies? I'm still turning all the questions Embassytown raises over in my mind, and feel it's still too early after reading it to engage in the ethics debates it also raises through this.
Maybe I've taken Embassytown on in the wrong way. To begin with, I really did feel that I was wading through quicksand, desperately trying to stop myself being bogged down by incomprehensible detail. My advice to prospective readers would be to go in with the knowledge you'll be confused. Enjoy working out the issues as they unfold, and don't bother trying to explain them fully (as I did in my earlier review attempts). Miéville takes an entire book to be able to spin out his thoughts; really, we should just respect a master at work.
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LibraryThing member eeio
"the lie that truths"
this book manages to describe an alien race in the most alien terms i have ever encountered. what i mean is that in the process of describing (or not describing) this alien race china mieville uses a description of their form of communicating that is so utterly unfamiliar to us
it's interesting that in other books china mieville's characters are so plastic, so carefully described and molded (i'm thinking of the new crobuzon books: perdido street station and so on) and in this book the description of the creatures seems very basic, just a few hints really to allow the reader to compose an operational mental image, almost lovecraftian.
the first third of the book is almost incomprehensible. i treats the reader as if she was familiar with the universe of the book. in my opinion this adds much appeal to the reading experience. i'm a big fan of books that walk that thin line and almost force me into their realm. it might beg for a second reading.
if you are into linguistics you'll love the argument of the story. it's very subtle and simple in a way, but it's a beautiful use of linguistics theory. the concepts of simile and metaphor are stretched and molded and explored in fantastic ways and are the skeleton of the story. linguistic sci fi.
this book manages to describe an alien race in the most alien terms i have ever encountered. what i mean is that in the process of describing (or not describing) this alien race china mieville uses a description of their form of communicating that is so utterly unfamiliar to us
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humans that this fictional race seems truly alien, otherworldly, beyond comprehension. i love that.it's interesting that in other books china mieville's characters are so plastic, so carefully described and molded (i'm thinking of the new crobuzon books: perdido street station and so on) and in this book the description of the creatures seems very basic, just a few hints really to allow the reader to compose an operational mental image, almost lovecraftian.
the first third of the book is almost incomprehensible. i treats the reader as if she was familiar with the universe of the book. in my opinion this adds much appeal to the reading experience. i'm a big fan of books that walk that thin line and almost force me into their realm. it might beg for a second reading.
if you are into linguistics you'll love the argument of the story. it's very subtle and simple in a way, but it's a beautiful use of linguistics theory. the concepts of simile and metaphor are stretched and molded and explored in fantastic ways and are the skeleton of the story. linguistic sci fi.
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LibraryThing member clfisha
It’s an oddly paced novel and a frustrating novel but ultimately a brilliant novel.
Mieville very slowly builds the world and the plot and the characters (and I love the characters). Told in the 1st person, with all that ensues; slapdash descriptions, biasness, omissions, emotional responses, all
All of this of course pays off because you are thoroughly immersed in the alieness off it all when the plot morphs into a gripping page turner that twists unexpectedly and wont let go of your head. However this is also the books main flaw; it's too directionless at the beginning.. impatience can set in and, if you don’t buy into what Mievilles doing, huge frustration.
But I think it''s worth it, not only a damn good story but one that uses science fiction to have the freedom to explore some huge and interesting concepts. So yes it's about language and how language defines who we are, how it allows us to think but also it's about colonisation, the clash of cultures with accidental cruelties, misunderstandings and power plays. There are political intrigues galore, violent plots, religious fanaticism, betrayals, huge sacrifices, love, despair and war.
Be reassured it's not just a lofty intellectual exercise, Mieville succeeds damn well in exploring the weightier, dryer topics, I mean I can't remember many other books that contain nail biting discussions on semiotics.
So it may not be a good place to try Mieville nor is it a book to convince his detractors, an odd bastard child of strong concepts in City and the City and the baroque chaos of Kraken. It’s ambitious, refreshingly different and thoughtful and I already want to reread; so lovers of literature and fans of speculative fiction I think it's worth your time.
Mieville very slowly builds the world and the plot and the characters (and I love the characters). Told in the 1st person, with all that ensues; slapdash descriptions, biasness, omissions, emotional responses, all
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seductively create the narrator and other characters. Of coursing being Mieville he is his usual playful self with language (floaker, immer, turingware, miab). The words and phrases are beautiful, his concepts fun to decode.All of this of course pays off because you are thoroughly immersed in the alieness off it all when the plot morphs into a gripping page turner that twists unexpectedly and wont let go of your head. However this is also the books main flaw; it's too directionless at the beginning.. impatience can set in and, if you don’t buy into what Mievilles doing, huge frustration.
But I think it''s worth it, not only a damn good story but one that uses science fiction to have the freedom to explore some huge and interesting concepts. So yes it's about language and how language defines who we are, how it allows us to think but also it's about colonisation, the clash of cultures with accidental cruelties, misunderstandings and power plays. There are political intrigues galore, violent plots, religious fanaticism, betrayals, huge sacrifices, love, despair and war.
Be reassured it's not just a lofty intellectual exercise, Mieville succeeds damn well in exploring the weightier, dryer topics, I mean I can't remember many other books that contain nail biting discussions on semiotics.
So it may not be a good place to try Mieville nor is it a book to convince his detractors, an odd bastard child of strong concepts in City and the City and the baroque chaos of Kraken. It’s ambitious, refreshingly different and thoughtful and I already want to reread; so lovers of literature and fans of speculative fiction I think it's worth your time.
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LibraryThing member othersam
Do you ever wonder why non-humans in stories – monsters, gods, aliens, you name it – so often seem mysteriously able to speak English? So, it would seem from Embassytown‘s premise, does China Mieville.
The Ariekei don’t speak English, they speak Language. If the humans who depend on them for
Though it’s got its thrilling moments (particularly the scenes of inter-species chaos, war and carnage!) Embassytown isn’t an action story: this is proper capital letters Speculative Fiction – a story that takes a wild idea and sees where it will go. And with Embassytown Mieville pulls off the trick that only the very best SF manages, namely /making you care/. If you’re up for something complex, and not scared of a book that drops you in at the deep end and makes you work a bit, then Embassytown will reward you with a unique imaginative experience to astound you.
If I spoke Language I’d say this: China Mieville is an author always worth watching out for, and Embassytown is his best book yet.
The Ariekei don’t speak English, they speak Language. If the humans who depend on them for
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their valuable biotech are to continue to survive they will have to learn to speak it too – and alien vocabulary and grammar are among the least of their problems. For one thing, Language can only be spoken via two mouths simultaneously, necessitating some (heh!) unusual sacrifices on the part of those human Ambassadors who wish to speak it. For another, Language can only be used to speak truth: lies, speculation, even metaphor are beyond the Ariekei’s capacities for expression or understanding. Until now…Though it’s got its thrilling moments (particularly the scenes of inter-species chaos, war and carnage!) Embassytown isn’t an action story: this is proper capital letters Speculative Fiction – a story that takes a wild idea and sees where it will go. And with Embassytown Mieville pulls off the trick that only the very best SF manages, namely /making you care/. If you’re up for something complex, and not scared of a book that drops you in at the deep end and makes you work a bit, then Embassytown will reward you with a unique imaginative experience to astound you.
If I spoke Language I’d say this: China Mieville is an author always worth watching out for, and Embassytown is his best book yet.
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LibraryThing member GingerbreadMan
As he’s done before, China Miéville seemingly without effort dives into a new genre and makes it look like he’s never written anything but. This is classic, hard sci-fi with just a little twist of weirdness (mostly the strange biotech of the planet where the book is set). And a dash of
Embassytown is a frontier Terran settlement on Ariekes, at the edge of the Immer, the cryptic hyperspace that is the only way to travel through the vast universe. Avice is among the very few from here to have become an immerser, with the skills and abilities to travel the strange immer fully conscious. She’s travelled wide and far, and it’s surprising even to herself when she decides to return to her home planet with which she shares an odd and strong bond. She brings her new linguist husband with her.
Because Ariekes is a unique place, languagewise. The Hosts, the indigenous intelligent life form, has a Language unlike anything else in the universe. It’s a form of communication so alien, so closely connected with this world and it’s speakers, it can only be spoken by terran Ambassadors trained since birth – in a very special way. But now, however, a new form of Ambassador is arriving to Ariekes. And the conseqences of it’s speaking to the Hosts are beyond what anyone could imagine.
This is really one of those books where you should try and know so little about the plot as possible before reading. It’s pretty hard to talk about it without spoiling a lot of the fun. But despite it being pretty advanced, the story is straight enough, and just grows more and more suspenseful. Miéville revels in world building as usual, and the Hosts and their Language are just another wonderful creation by him. I love how he manages to create a life form that feels completely alien in the way it looks and reasons, without it becoming empty abstraction.
I have some minor complaints with this book though. The editing seems unusually sloppy for a Miéville book. There are quite a few annoying repetitions, presenting elements of world building again and again. And some sentences that need to be exact for plot reasons suddenly change their phrasing. But while mildly annoying, they cannot take away the originality and excitement of this book. Not one of my absolute favorites of Miéville’s, but absolutely among his better work. And that’s saying a lot.
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political thriller, I suppose. Oh, and linguistics, lots of it.Embassytown is a frontier Terran settlement on Ariekes, at the edge of the Immer, the cryptic hyperspace that is the only way to travel through the vast universe. Avice is among the very few from here to have become an immerser, with the skills and abilities to travel the strange immer fully conscious. She’s travelled wide and far, and it’s surprising even to herself when she decides to return to her home planet with which she shares an odd and strong bond. She brings her new linguist husband with her.
Because Ariekes is a unique place, languagewise. The Hosts, the indigenous intelligent life form, has a Language unlike anything else in the universe. It’s a form of communication so alien, so closely connected with this world and it’s speakers, it can only be spoken by terran Ambassadors trained since birth – in a very special way. But now, however, a new form of Ambassador is arriving to Ariekes. And the conseqences of it’s speaking to the Hosts are beyond what anyone could imagine.
This is really one of those books where you should try and know so little about the plot as possible before reading. It’s pretty hard to talk about it without spoiling a lot of the fun. But despite it being pretty advanced, the story is straight enough, and just grows more and more suspenseful. Miéville revels in world building as usual, and the Hosts and their Language are just another wonderful creation by him. I love how he manages to create a life form that feels completely alien in the way it looks and reasons, without it becoming empty abstraction.
I have some minor complaints with this book though. The editing seems unusually sloppy for a Miéville book. There are quite a few annoying repetitions, presenting elements of world building again and again. And some sentences that need to be exact for plot reasons suddenly change their phrasing. But while mildly annoying, they cannot take away the originality and excitement of this book. Not one of my absolute favorites of Miéville’s, but absolutely among his better work. And that’s saying a lot.
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LibraryThing member AlanPoulter
As the title of this novel suggests, it is set in a special place, where different peoples meet. However, it is soon clear that the 'people' who meet are somewhat more different than might be expected. The slew of newly-coined words and phrases immediately signals science fiction. We are ushered
We learn all this from one Avice, an 'Immerser', a human trained in coping with the stresses of Immer travel. Avice grew up in Embassytown and the whole novel is recounted by her. One of the things we learn about her is a that an unpleasant event happened to her, while she was still young. Arieka is inhabited by the Ariekene. No direct description of them is ever given, because there seem to be no parallels between their forms, and those shared by Terran life. They are called 'Hosts' by the humans. The Hosts are not backward: they have technologies that the Terrans covet. But one thing above all others makes them totally alien. They communicate using something called 'Langauge'. It is not language as we understand it. Hosts have two 'mouths' (or more accurately 'apertures') and both 'speak' together. Host's names are shown in the text as name1/name2 for 'individual' Hosts. This strange biology results in a Language which cannot express anything other than truth. The unpleasant event that Avice was involved in was orchestrated to get Hosts to experience the concept of 'likeness'. They can use it as a simile later, to compare and contrast with other experiences. For the Hosts this is a mildly addictive piece of fun. One Host in particular, for fun, tries to take things further and edge towards being able to lie...
This all sounds rather Edenic. And it is until the creation of 'Ambassadors', pairs of twinned humans linked like Hosts. They are ostensibly there to better communicate with the Hosts. But what happens is a descent into chaos. Language is used as a means of oppression. Avice has to use deliberately oblique language in her recounting of events so as not directly state things (like that there seems to be a 'black ops' team based in Embassytown which is trying to de-stabilise the Ariekene world). Finally, Avice is instrumental in stymying this clandestine colonisation effort, by devising yet another twist in the nature of language...
By any means of accounting, this is a remarkable novel. There are some pretty obvious political 'messages' emblazoned in it, but they fail to take away the sheer alieness of this novel, generated by all the different meanings and usage of 'language' it plays with
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into a strange universe. 'Real' space is not real. What is real is an underlying void called the Immer. Locations in 'real' space do not in any way match up to locations in the Immer. The planet Embassytown is on, Arieka, is nowheresville in 'real' space but in the Immer it is on the border between human and alien space. We learn all this from one Avice, an 'Immerser', a human trained in coping with the stresses of Immer travel. Avice grew up in Embassytown and the whole novel is recounted by her. One of the things we learn about her is a that an unpleasant event happened to her, while she was still young. Arieka is inhabited by the Ariekene. No direct description of them is ever given, because there seem to be no parallels between their forms, and those shared by Terran life. They are called 'Hosts' by the humans. The Hosts are not backward: they have technologies that the Terrans covet. But one thing above all others makes them totally alien. They communicate using something called 'Langauge'. It is not language as we understand it. Hosts have two 'mouths' (or more accurately 'apertures') and both 'speak' together. Host's names are shown in the text as name1/name2 for 'individual' Hosts. This strange biology results in a Language which cannot express anything other than truth. The unpleasant event that Avice was involved in was orchestrated to get Hosts to experience the concept of 'likeness'. They can use it as a simile later, to compare and contrast with other experiences. For the Hosts this is a mildly addictive piece of fun. One Host in particular, for fun, tries to take things further and edge towards being able to lie...
This all sounds rather Edenic. And it is until the creation of 'Ambassadors', pairs of twinned humans linked like Hosts. They are ostensibly there to better communicate with the Hosts. But what happens is a descent into chaos. Language is used as a means of oppression. Avice has to use deliberately oblique language in her recounting of events so as not directly state things (like that there seems to be a 'black ops' team based in Embassytown which is trying to de-stabilise the Ariekene world). Finally, Avice is instrumental in stymying this clandestine colonisation effort, by devising yet another twist in the nature of language...
By any means of accounting, this is a remarkable novel. There are some pretty obvious political 'messages' emblazoned in it, but they fail to take away the sheer alieness of this novel, generated by all the different meanings and usage of 'language' it plays with
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LibraryThing member KarenIrelandPhillips
An opening quote doesn’t usually set up the premise of a novel as well as this:
“The word must communicate something (other than itself).”
Walter Benjamin “On Language as such and on the Language of Man”
But, must it? The science fictional story is always in the interfaces, is it not? In the
At the edge of the known galaxy, an enclave of humans inhabits Embassytown, a machined/mutated city on the planet held by the Hosts. Communication is difficult at best – humans see language as a symbol. The Hosts do not. Nor do they necessarily recognize the individuality of humans.
The protagonist, Avice, was a precocious child chosen to become part of the Host’s language, a simile. (And really, do you think that the author, playing with words as he does constantly here, didn’t name her knowing what parallels we’d draw? A Vice? Avarice? Do you have to telegraph that your narrator is unreliable so strongly? Or, is that just a feint?) But – that isn’t the story, or isn’t even much of the beginning.
Readers first meet Avice as a grown woman. Scorning temporal framework created difficulty because on one level this novel is all about slippage, but illustrating that with time as the medium meant that Mr. Miéville demanded more work from me right from the start than I felt he’d earned.
On another level, Embassytown is about slippage in language –shifts in meaning. And on yet a third, slippage in culture/behavior, the natural outgrowth – or is it?– of confronting the unknown, or formerly unseen.
The second difficulty was that while the premises aroused my cold intellectual interest, the story was interesting, but not engaging. A bit arch. Twee, even. Like the really good-looking kid in class who knows it – and might share a wink or a joke or even an afternoon, but will never, ever go to the dance with you.
I liked the winks and jokes, but I won’t go looking for another afternoon. It’s not a matter of making myself emotionally vulnerable – Avice, and Scile, Bren and the Hosts all were just the other side of a window, but not where they could touch me, or me them. I wasn’t in any danger of losing my heart, but they frequently lost my interest.
I confess I liked the textual nods to authors as disparate and talented as C.J. Cherryh, Frank Herbert, Mary Gentle, and Karen Traviss, among others. And that I was moved to write such a long review of a book I disliked is a tribute to the author’s ability to challenge readers.
I can look at a work like this and admire the thought process that birthed it, the complexity of the plot, the baroque touches and writerly affectations even as I reshelve it for something more – congenial.
“The word must communicate something (other than itself).”
Walter Benjamin “On Language as such and on the Language of Man”
But, must it? The science fictional story is always in the interfaces, is it not? In the
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friction between humans and humans, between humans and less human, between aliens and human, between aliens and aliens. And yes, sometimes between humans and machines. Those stories are all about the endless slips and catches of communication, translation, connection. At the edge of the known galaxy, an enclave of humans inhabits Embassytown, a machined/mutated city on the planet held by the Hosts. Communication is difficult at best – humans see language as a symbol. The Hosts do not. Nor do they necessarily recognize the individuality of humans.
The protagonist, Avice, was a precocious child chosen to become part of the Host’s language, a simile. (And really, do you think that the author, playing with words as he does constantly here, didn’t name her knowing what parallels we’d draw? A Vice? Avarice? Do you have to telegraph that your narrator is unreliable so strongly? Or, is that just a feint?) But – that isn’t the story, or isn’t even much of the beginning.
Readers first meet Avice as a grown woman. Scorning temporal framework created difficulty because on one level this novel is all about slippage, but illustrating that with time as the medium meant that Mr. Miéville demanded more work from me right from the start than I felt he’d earned.
On another level, Embassytown is about slippage in language –shifts in meaning. And on yet a third, slippage in culture/behavior, the natural outgrowth – or is it?– of confronting the unknown, or formerly unseen.
The second difficulty was that while the premises aroused my cold intellectual interest, the story was interesting, but not engaging. A bit arch. Twee, even. Like the really good-looking kid in class who knows it – and might share a wink or a joke or even an afternoon, but will never, ever go to the dance with you.
I liked the winks and jokes, but I won’t go looking for another afternoon. It’s not a matter of making myself emotionally vulnerable – Avice, and Scile, Bren and the Hosts all were just the other side of a window, but not where they could touch me, or me them. I wasn’t in any danger of losing my heart, but they frequently lost my interest.
I confess I liked the textual nods to authors as disparate and talented as C.J. Cherryh, Frank Herbert, Mary Gentle, and Karen Traviss, among others. And that I was moved to write such a long review of a book I disliked is a tribute to the author’s ability to challenge readers.
I can look at a work like this and admire the thought process that birthed it, the complexity of the plot, the baroque touches and writerly affectations even as I reshelve it for something more – congenial.
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LibraryThing member csayban
2.5 stars
Humans have colonized the far reaches of the galaxy, including the home of the Ariekei, whose language can only be spoken by a small group of altered ambassadors. Avice Benner Cho has returned to Embassytown after years in the deepest reaches of space. While she can’t speak the Ariekei
British author China Miéville has penned some of the most unusual science fiction stories in recent memory, including Perdido Street Station, Kraken and The City and The City (4.5 stars, Recommended). With Embassytown, Miéville immerses the reader into an exotic writing style to explore an exotic world. Unfortunately, the language is a little too exotic. Miéville makes understanding Embassytown virtually impossible for the first half of the book. It is not just that he is using all sorts of words and terms that the reader has no initial understanding of – he is inconsistent in their usage, which creates confusion. I understand that Miéville is trying to write stories that are avant-garde. He has done this very successfully in his past novels.
But with Embassytown Miéville drops the ball. It isn’t just the storytelling that is problematic with Embassytown. The story itself is just plain boring. For a couple hundred pages all we get is the failure of humans to understand Ariekei and Ariekei to understand humans due to the sharp contrast in language and thinking. That is all we get – there is simply nothing to drive the story forward and create interest. Much of the story is told through the first person narrator Avice, who we learn virtually nothing about in the entire book. She is a prop – touted as a simile – who really is not much more than an observer. We are never allowed to penetrate the stiff exterior of her personality. There is simply no emotional connection to the main character or any of the other characters.
There were some interesting insights into different modes of thought that I’m sure was Miéville’s point. But with a tedious plot and little character development, Embassytown reads more like a graduate dissertation on language than a novel. Only near the end do we get any sort of plot to engage with. However, by then I had lost interest in the cardboard characters and lack of any emotional change. Fighting through all of that difficult prose just wasn’t worth the effort.
I must say that I was completely impressed and entertained with The City and The City. As a result, I came into Embassytown with high expectations. Unfortunately, I was left very disappointed. I would stick to Miéville’s other works and hope that his future writings bring a return to form.
Humans have colonized the far reaches of the galaxy, including the home of the Ariekei, whose language can only be spoken by a small group of altered ambassadors. Avice Benner Cho has returned to Embassytown after years in the deepest reaches of space. While she can’t speak the Ariekei
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language, she is about to become an integral part of their future – and survival of both humans and Ariekei. When the fragile understanding between humans and Ariekei is fractured by a new ambassador, Avice may hold the key to preventing the end of their world.British author China Miéville has penned some of the most unusual science fiction stories in recent memory, including Perdido Street Station, Kraken and The City and The City (4.5 stars, Recommended). With Embassytown, Miéville immerses the reader into an exotic writing style to explore an exotic world. Unfortunately, the language is a little too exotic. Miéville makes understanding Embassytown virtually impossible for the first half of the book. It is not just that he is using all sorts of words and terms that the reader has no initial understanding of – he is inconsistent in their usage, which creates confusion. I understand that Miéville is trying to write stories that are avant-garde. He has done this very successfully in his past novels.
But with Embassytown Miéville drops the ball. It isn’t just the storytelling that is problematic with Embassytown. The story itself is just plain boring. For a couple hundred pages all we get is the failure of humans to understand Ariekei and Ariekei to understand humans due to the sharp contrast in language and thinking. That is all we get – there is simply nothing to drive the story forward and create interest. Much of the story is told through the first person narrator Avice, who we learn virtually nothing about in the entire book. She is a prop – touted as a simile – who really is not much more than an observer. We are never allowed to penetrate the stiff exterior of her personality. There is simply no emotional connection to the main character or any of the other characters.
There were some interesting insights into different modes of thought that I’m sure was Miéville’s point. But with a tedious plot and little character development, Embassytown reads more like a graduate dissertation on language than a novel. Only near the end do we get any sort of plot to engage with. However, by then I had lost interest in the cardboard characters and lack of any emotional change. Fighting through all of that difficult prose just wasn’t worth the effort.
I must say that I was completely impressed and entertained with The City and The City. As a result, I came into Embassytown with high expectations. Unfortunately, I was left very disappointed. I would stick to Miéville’s other works and hope that his future writings bring a return to form.
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LibraryThing member mzieg
I don't know how you would express awesomeness in Language — perhaps kick/ass would be a coarsely equivalent Anglo-Ubiq vocalization.
Embassytown is like the boy who strove too far, and surpassing expectations reached great stature.
It is like the well-loved tome, in the building which once held
It is like the downloaded dats flowing into plastic contrivance, bringing soul and purpose to lifeless machine.
Before China Miéville, we did not read of such things, hold such ideas...
Before China, we did not read such things...
Before China, we did not read.
Embassytown is like the boy who strove too far, and surpassing expectations reached great stature.
It is like the well-loved tome, in the building which once held
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many but now is rarely visited, which is clasped by girl in wonder.It is like the downloaded dats flowing into plastic contrivance, bringing soul and purpose to lifeless machine.
Before China Miéville, we did not read of such things, hold such ideas...
Before China, we did not read such things...
Before China, we did not read.
Show Less
Awards
Hugo Award (Nominee — Novel — 2012)
Nebula Award (Nominee — Novel — 2011)
Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award (Winner — Science Fiction Novel — 2011)
Locus Award (Finalist — Science Fiction Novel — 2012)
SF Site Reader's Choice (2011)
RUSA CODES Reading List (Shortlist — Science Fiction — 2012)
John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (Finalist — 2012)
Arthur C. Clarke Award (Shortlist — 2012)
British Science Fiction Association Award (Shortlist — Novel — 2011)
Seiun Award (Nominee — 2014)
The Kitschies (Finalist — 2011)
Nagroda SFinks (2014)
Ignotus Award (Winner — 2014)
Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (Science Fiction and Fantasy — 2011)