Embassytown by China Mieville (2011, 345 pages, hardcover) – After finishing the “Book That Never Ends,” I needed something with a little meat and readability so I chose someone dependable (I really enjoyed Mieville’s earlier Scar).
Embassytown, unlike Scar, is pure science fiction. It’s not enough – for me – for a writer to have an interesting concept. There also has to be someone I can relate to going through the adventure and experiencing it with me. China is very good at merging the concept beautifully with the character.
The premise is an interesting, and thoughtful one. Humans occupy a planet where the friendly aliens (called Hosts) create a breathable area for the humans called Embassytown. The air on the rest of the planet is poisonous. Our heroine describes a game she and the other kids played where they dared each other to see how far outside the pocket of air they could go and survive.
The aliens have a language that easily understandable but when the linguists try to talk to the Hosts, the aliens ignore them as if they are talking gibberish. The clue to speaking the alien tongue is to have two emphatically attuned people speak it at the same time.
Using clones called Ambassadors, the humans are able to talk with the Hosts, and they lead a pretty peaceful existence until two men show up as Ambassadors with the ability to talk to the Hosts, but because they aren’t identical, their diction is a little discordant. The effect? It makes the Hosts high, and they will do anything to have the new Ambassadors speak forever, threatening the humans and destroying their own world as they become addicts.
So the story is pretty cool, but the heroine is even cooler. A crèche-raised child in Embassytown, her only goal has been to get out. When she’s discovered to have the ability to withstand the rigors of subspace, she becomes a crewman of interstellar craft. She meets a handsome linguist and travels with him a bit before deciding to bring him back to Embassytown, a linguist’s idea of Mecca. There she sits back in horror as the discordant Ambassadors arrive and destroy her marriage and her world.
I read it in a day.
My only complaint – and this is one I have with almost all single viewpoint stories – is that the heroine seems to be coincidentally too often involved in the action. She’s a friend to other Ambassadors, a member of the group of Similes that are against the Hosts learning how to lie, the close personal friend of one half of a set of Ambassadors, and the wife of the man trying to upset the politics of her home world. All these people move the story along, but it seems a little artificial that she’s involved with all the key players in the story. She doesn’t do much, but she sees a great deal.
At first, I was wary of the climax happening two thirds of the way through the book and didn’t like what I considered to be the added on material at the end, but the battle wasn’t the end, the heroine resolving what caused the battle was the end. Nicely done.
As usual, China invents an entire dictionary of new words and expects you to be smart enough to follow them without explanation. It helps immerse the reader in the story from the first paragraph. He did the same in Scar. Hang in there.
Great, great writing as usual – exciting and emotional. Not only do we have a clever premise, but we have a lead character able to hold our hand as we are carried along on the adventure. What more could you ask for?
