Embassytown, by China Miéville
Title: Embassytown
Series: Stand-alone
Author: China Miéville
Publisher: Del Rey
Format: Advanced Readers Copy
Year: 2011
Pages: 345
Genre: Science Fiction
Subgenres: Second Contact
Challenge Information: Science Fiction Challenge category "Second Contact"
Full Disclosure: I received this from the Amazon Vine program.
Jacket Description
In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak.
Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language.
When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties-to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak yet speaks through her.
My Review
This is not quite a perfect book; while its reticence in explaining Language is justified, its opacity about everything else is not, and I think that unfairly limits its audience. But it is a brilliant book, epic in its scope, virtuosic in its faults, and surprisingly moving.
The opening of the book is undeniably rough going. This is 401-level science fiction, with more neologisms than I could count, most of which are never explained. The structure is nearly as baroque as some of Catherynne Valente's, but with cues more difficult to parse (it took me nearly half the book to pick up on the formerly/latterday dichotomy in the chapter headings, but then, my brain has been resistant to picking up clues from chapter headings in the past, so maybe that was just me) and less set in a predictable pattern. It's also deeply embedded in the consciousness of its first-person narrator, who appears to be narrating to an audience already informed of most of the story, and whose occasional asides to that audience seem to deliberately obscure understanding.
But even in that opening section there are tantalizing hints at the sort of story this is, a heady delving into the sort of aienness science fiction too rarely explores. I've started calling these books "Second Contact" stories, stories wherein first contact has occurred long since but the humans and aliens are still groping in the dark towards some sort of rudimentary understanding of each other. And while C.J. Cherryh is queen of that subgenre -- and the character of Bren has to be a nod to Cherryh's long-running Foreigner sequence -- Miéville has here contributed a downright exciting take on it.
And when everything clicked. . . I cared. I was not really expecting that. Avice seemed to me a fairly pedestrian narrator, and I understood what was happening with the Ariekei's Language far earlier than the text wanted me to, but I cared anyway, and I could not put the book down. I think it has to do with the fact that underneath all the semiotic pyrotechnics this is also a story about colonialism -- an issue underlying but rarely addressed in all stories of human/alien contact.
Here again, I don't think it works perfectly. A character says at one point "This isn't one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals. . . and bang, he's on the grill. Do you ever think how self-aggrandizing that stuff is?" The irony is that this is one of those stories, and the issue I take with it is that they are fundamentally self-aggrandizing, and Miéville doesn't quite manage to subvert that by the end.
Despite that quibble, this is not a story with clear right and wrong answers, and I loved that about it. Mistakes are made, and those mistakes change the world irrevocably, and even though it ends on a largely hopeful note it's very clear-eyed about all that was lost and all that can still go wrong. It also manages to give the Ariekei agency, even through the lens of a fairly self-absorbed human narrator. So all in all, despite (or perhaps even because of) its flaws, I loved this book, and look forward to rereading it.
My Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★★★
Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★★1/2
Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★★★
Read this for: The ideas, the themes
Don't read this for: The characters
Bechdel Test: Pass
Johnson Test: Fail*
Books I was reminded of: Foreigner, by C.J. Cherryh; "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side," by James Tiptree, Jr.; the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok;" bizarrely, also The Habitation of the Blessed, by Catherynne M. Valente.
Will I read more by this author? Absolutely.
*While Miéville mostly avoids any descriptors that would indicate race, there are few descriptions of characters' pale skin that indicated to me a default whiteness about the characters, especially as Avice is the only character whose name gives any indication of a non-white ethnic origin and they speak a language called "Anglo-Ubiq."