Embassytown

I've been musing on China Miéville's Embassytown for a few weeks and while my thoughts are still settling, my feelings are firm: it's a big, ambitious, clever novel worthy of Le Guin and Delany. Set on a distant planet where a human ghetto is surrounded by a much larger city of almost incomprehensible aliens, the book recounts the events of a great upheaval from the viewpoint of Avice, a local woman who has made a name for herself by travelling the galaxy and who has returned to Embassytown in time to get caught up a huge revolution.

Opening with an account of her childhood and her travels though immer — a form of FTL — Avice describes her triumphant return to Embassytown, her new husband Scile in tow. As a linguist, Scile is delighted to be in Embassytown and to have direct access with the Ariekei and their profoundly strange Language which, thanks to a quirk of fate, only provide a one-way channel of communications: humans are able to understand Language relatively easily, but when individual humans or translating machines try to speak to the Ariekei the aliens only hear it as noise.

The reason for this disjunction is partly physical and partly psychological: phonemes in Language consist of two sounds made simultaneously, preventing humans from physically sounding it out; but in addition, words in Language aren't referents to thoughts but actual thoughts themselves, preventing the Ariekei from understanding written scripts or mechanical translators and, almost incidentally, preventing them from saying anything that isn't literally true. Having eventually overcome the language gap using a combination of biological and mechanical engineering to create the Ambassadors — paired clones mentally linked to provide the pretence of a shared consciousness — humans have managed to strike up a trade in bioengineered alien artifacts and to establish a small enclave with the Host city.

( More thoughts... )

Definitely required reading.