Read This: Embassytown

I had another review in Shelf Awareness yesterday, looking at the new China Miéville novel, Embassytown. It’s his first “hard” science fiction novel, with aliens and spaceships and everything, but it’s still chock full of his concern with politics and philosophy—in fact, the emphasis in Embassytown on alien linguistics brings philosophical concerns right into the foreground, but without losing any of the story’s dramatic tension.

The novel takes place on a colonial world where the humans have, after much difficulty, established a relationship with “the Hosts,” a race whose language (called “Language”) is only capable of containing true statements. They can’t even use a simile unless there is an actual referent; Avice, the protagonist, was recruited as a child to act out the part of “the girl who ate what was given to her.” As an adult, returning to her hometown, she reluctantly falls in with a group of other similes, at a time when the Hosts are playing with the idea of learning how to lie, which leads into one of the major tensions that sets the Embassytown crisis in motion. Not many science fiction novels are built around linguistics, so the good ones that do exist, like Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao, and Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue, tend to stand out, and Embassytown is no exception. As I wrote in my review, “If you had to find a writer who could infuse the creation of demonstrative pronouns with dramatic power, China Miéville would be one of the top candidates.” There’s another powerful grammar shift in the novel as well… but I want you to discover that surprise for yourself.

18 May 2011 | read this |