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 alienness 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.
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 alienness 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.
I was slightly surprised, upon beginning to read the book, that this is absolutely a straight-up science fiction novel - somewhat new territory for Miéville. Avice is a woman who's grown up in the remote, backwater colony world of Ariekei, in Embassytown, where alien Hosts trade technology with humans - and speak a Language in which they cannot conceive of lying. Unusually, for one of her peers, Avice gets out of her small town by becoming an Immerser - a pilot capable of traveling through hyperspace. Even more unusually, she comes back to her homeworld - and finds herself uniquely placed at the center of an unprecedented crisis.
This is a book full of fascinating ideas, and if you have any interest at all in semiotics and linguistics, it is absolutely not to be missed. However, I do feel that Miéville wanted his ideas to drive the story so strongly that he left some logical holes in the plot. Some of the premises seem, to me, flawed or unlikely. I was caught up in the story and the concepts - but I kept catching myself and saying, "but hey, wait? Couldn't they get around that problem by doing... this...?" But it wouldn't have served the plot, so it didn't happen. I was also disappointed that his (really great) conceptions of FTL travel, which were brought out in some detail, didn't end up being more central to how the story developed.
Still, the book is a more than worthwhile read, for its ruminations on the nature of language, the possibilities of communication, a bit of mythological allegory, and a dark yet delicate contemplation of the changes - some horrible, some bittersweet, some simply inevitable - that may occur when different cultures collide. Yes, this is a topic that has been dealt with in many SF stories of First Contact - but Miéville truly brings something new to the table for his entry into this genre.
This is a book full of fascinating ideas, and if you have any interest at all in semiotics and linguistics, it is absolutely not to be missed. However, I do feel that Miéville wanted his ideas to drive the story so strongly that he left some logical holes in the plot. Some of the premises seem, to me, flawed or unlikely. I was caught up in the story and the concepts - but I kept catching myself and saying, "but hey, wait? Couldn't they get around that problem by doing... this...?" But it wouldn't have served the plot, so it didn't happen. I was also disappointed that his (really great) conceptions of FTL travel, which were brought out in some detail, didn't end up being more central to how the story developed.
Still, the book is a more than worthwhile read, for its ruminations on the nature of language, the possibilities of communication, a bit of mythological allegory, and a dark yet delicate contemplation of the changes - some horrible, some bittersweet, some simply inevitable - that may occur when different cultures collide. Yes, this is a topic that has been dealt with in many SF stories of First Contact - but Miéville truly brings something new to the table for his entry into this genre.
