Book Review: Embassytown

China Miéville

2011

Awards: Locus
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

               

China Miéville has the ability to do the best of what science fiction authors can do: to set up unique, alien environments that allow us to become conscious of, and think differently about, what we take for granted.

                          

Embassytown does this. It makes you think about language, and what words represent, and how what you say can determine what you think and believe, and vice versa. I only wish that the plot and characters had been better able to keep up with the creativity of the concepts.

The story is set in a far-flung corner of the populated galaxy on the planet Areika. The human colony on Areika is limited to a small enclave called Embassytown, which is enclosed in an oxygen bubble to protect the colonists from the planet’s toxic air.

The Areikei, the indigenous sentient beings that populate the rest of the planet outside of Embassytown’s bubble, are big, tree-like creatures with two mouths, multiple eye stalks, and spindly spider-like hooved legs.

Humans have found it difficult to communicate with the Areikei for a number of reasons. For one thing, the Areikei are poly-vocal, which means that their language requires them to speak one part of each word out of each mouth at the same time.

The other, more imposing challenge is that for the Areikei, language is directly and inextricably connected to thought. This means that the Areikei cannot speak anything that they cannot think. Their language is explicit and concrete, short on theoretical concepts, and completely bereft of lies.

This also means that they can only understand words when they are spoken by a conscious, thinking mind. The sounds of the words themselves mean nothing to them; the meaning is produced by the thoughts coming from the mind speaking the words. Because of this, the humans’ recordings and linguistic tools like auto-translators don’t work with the Areikei. They are able to record and generate poly-vocal speech, but the Areikei don’t understand it when it is played back to them on a mindless device.

To solve this problem, humans have developed a new breed of person: an Ambassador. An Ambassador is made up of two identical clones raised from birth to think of themselves as one person; their mental connection is strengthened as they grow up with training and drugs and technology. These two people must not only say the word parts at the same time, but also must be thinking the same thing at the same time as well. If it all works, they are able to speak to the Areikei, functioning as one person with two voices. All of these Ambassadors live in Embassytown, along with police, merchants, pilots, and other staff needed to support the town’s infrastructure.

Everything is peaceable and civil on Areika between the humans and the natives for a long time, with the two races establishing beneficial trade relations. The Areikei start to use the humans to grow linguistically; they ask humans to act out scenarios in front of them, turning the human actors into similes which they can use to say something that hasn’t ever happened before. And from the humans they also learn, theoretically at least, the concept of lying.

Trouble begins in a small way with a growing group of Areikei who get a charge, a real physical high, out of the cognitive dissonance that arises when they attempt to tell a lie. Discord is whipped up even more with the arrival of a new Ambassador named EzRa, who is not made up of two identical clones, but of two distinct, very physically different individuals who have an unusually strong mental connection to each other. EzRa’s ever-so-slightly mentally misaligned speech has powerful, damaging consequences for the Areikei, eventually leading to a huge planet-wide crisis for humans and natives alike, which the two races must join together to solve or die.

This is one of those books where you acclimatize to it by immersion. It plunks you down in the middle of a strange landscape with alien technology, concepts, language, and slang, and starts using them in context with little explanation. But it’s not jarringly fakey, and everything is used consistently, so you quickly learn words like automs, turingware, and biorigging as you need to.

I liked the way the book made me think about my own language. While reading it, I found myself thinking in stilted similes like, “I am like the frog that was put in cool water which was then raised to the boiling point.” I became conscious of my sentence structures and how I am able to use words to signify something that has no relationship to how the word sounds. It was like dipping back into a college semiotics class (without having to write the papers).

And I enjoyed Embassytown, overall. But I did not get as carried away by it as some of Miéville’s other work. The plot limped to catch up with the ideas and didn’t always keep my interest; much of the time it seemed like it was only a tool to explore the premise of the poly-vocal Areikei, rather than being a good story on its own merits.

And, maybe more importantly, there were times when the premise didn’t stand up to all circumstances. The City & the City worked because the whole time, you knew that everyone really did physically have the ability to see the other city, but that they forced themselves not to see it by common agreement. In Embassytown, it sometimes seemed that the Areikei really physically couldn’t hear or speak untruths, and other times it seemed like it was just a shared illusion that could be changed with effort and willpower.

Marketing Wonder Woman

Ah, Wonder Woman. Why is it so hard for live-action film and TV to portray her as the "unapologetically feminist super heroine" she is? Why hasn't there been a modern major motion picture about her the way there has been about Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Thor, Ironman, Hellboy, etc.?

This post by Shoshana Kessock on Tor.com explores the difficulty of packaging the Amazon warrior in today's media.

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/06/the-problem-with-wonder-woman

Book Review: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Kate Wilhelm
1976
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Kate Wilhelm’s writing is subtle and understated. It grows on you gradually.

This story sucked me in so slowly, in fact, that at first I thought it was going to be boring.

Also, the first part of the book, which takes up about a quarter of its total length, is basically an introduction to the rest. So many major events happen and so much time passes during that first section that it seemed like too much; I thought I was never going to be able to get into any of the characters. I would just start to get attached to one and then they were gone.

The later sections of the book go at a better speed, however. And for them to work as well as they do, I have come to think that the first part has to cover that much ground.

This is a post-apocalyptic story in which we have destroyed our environment with radiation and toxic chemicals. All the pollution and contamination cause people to become infertile and, over time, Earth’s human population gradually dies off and dwindles down to almost nothing. And, to top it off, another ice age begins and glaciers start crawling all the way down into Maryland.

Only one very organized, very wealthy family in the Shenandoah Valley continues to reproduce – by cloning themselves. They saw the writing on the wall, trained themselves on the necessary technology, and built themselves a secret compound complete with hospitals, laboratories, incubators, schools, and dormitories.

This is all very well and good and controlled at first, but then instead of sticking to producing one child at a time, the family scientists begin to produce multiple sets of identical children. At first there are twos and threes and eventually they get up to sevens and eights.

The sibling sets start to discriminate against oddball “singles” with increasing viciousness. And, at the same time, the sets grow progressively more and more group-focused until they are completely dependent on their clone brothers or sisters to function. They are unable to think originally or creatively on their own.

Ironically, this means that the clones themselves are headed for extinction, since they cannot invent new technology or repair their equipment when it breaks, much less adapt to the approaching glaciers. And they have ostracized the single children, the only ones who have a hope of doing these things.

I did think that the ending was a little too neat. But, overall, I liked the book. In particular, I thought that Wilhelm did a good job of taking an idyllic setting and a group of happy fresh-faced youths and gradually making them into something more and more sinister and unpleasant. Something almost as sinister and unpleasant as… junior high school.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: The Fountains of Paradise

Arthur C. Clarke
1979
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This novel is not one of Clarke’s best, but I enjoyed it anyway.

The book follows several intertwining, somewhat-related plot lines which seem a little bit artificially mashed together. As usual with Clarke, though, the science in it is realistic and impeccable. And the last half of the book, which focuses almost completely on only one of the plots, is pretty exciting.

The main story takes place in 2069. Humans have established colonies on the moon and several other planets in our solar system. Vannevar Morgan, an engineer who has become world-famous for building a bridge across the Straights of Gibraltar, now wants to build a space elevator. This would essentially be an incredibly tall tower extending from a point on Earth’s equator all the way up through the ionosphere to a space station in geosynchronous orbit. Goods could be brought up and down the elevator using relatively cheap electricity, and ships could shuttle those goods between the space station and other planets without having to waste energy getting in and out of Earth’s atmosphere.

Morgan needs to build the earth-bound terminal station of the elevator (a) in the area of greatest gravitational stability and (b) at an elevation high enough to avoid hurricanes. The best place is one particular mountain on the fictional island of Taprobane (which Clarke has modeled after Sri Lanka) in the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately, the location is already occupied by a 2,000-year-old Buddhist monastery and the monks are reluctant to leave, to say the least.

Interwoven with this modern story is the story of the corrupt and ruthless king Kalidasa who ruled Taprobane 2,000 years ago. He built an enormous pleasure palace, including elaborate fountains kept filled by water-carrying slaves, next to the same Buddhist monastery, and his disruptive presence and decadent lifestyle led to similar quarrels with the monks.

Another parallel story is that of Starglider, an interstellar probe built by aliens on a planet 52 light years away, which passes through our solar system in the early 21st century. Starglider is definitive proof that we are not alone and forever changes our understanding of our place in the universe.

Debates about God and religion come up throughout the book. There is constant tension between those who feel that you should not challenge the gods (usually represented by the monks) and those who appear to challenge them (represented primarily by Morgan, Kalidasa, and Starglider).

The God debate holds promise and the separate plots are interesting in themselves. The space elevator is particularly tantalizing because it could, in fact, be built today, if we put our minds to it (see Kim Stanley Robinson’s exploration of the idea in his Mars trilogy). Unfortunately, together, the different story lines make for a little bit of a disconcerting jumble. And the messages Clarke seems to want to send us about challenging God (if, in fact, that is what we are doing) are muddled; there are sympathetic and unsympathetic characters on both sides.

I did, of course, appreciate Clarke’s reference to R. Gabor’s Pharmacological Basis of Religion, published in 2069 by Miskatonic University Press.

One technical note: If you’re getting this book used or from the library, avoid the 1979 hardcover edition as it has a few erroneously transposed paragraphs in key places towards the end.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: The Claw of the Conciliator

Gene Wolfe
1981
Awards: Nebula, Locus
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

The Claw of the Conciliator is the second installment in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun quadrilogy. It takes place on Earth (or “Urth”) a very, very long time in the future. It is one of these futures in which everything is in decline; the sun is dying, the world is getting colder, and humans have forgotten how to use most of their technology and have regressed into a middle-ages-type society full of magic and lore and superstition.

In this society, most professions are organized into guilds, where young boys are taken in as apprentices and work their way up to be journeymen and then – if they’re lucky enough and good enough – masters. The four books of the New Sun series follow the life of Severian, who, as a child, was adopted into the guild of the Torturers.

The Torturers are a sort of necessary evil. They are feared and reviled by most people but they’re the only ones who are willing to do the punishing and executing of criminals. They maintain a professional, emotionally-detached front but their medieval methods for the “excruciation” of their “clients” are brutal and disgusting (or sometimes entertaining, for those of us who enjoy bloodcurdling tales of horror and the macabre).

I figured that for me to evaluate The Claw of the Conciliator accurately I should first read the first book in the trilogy, The Shadow of the Torturer. I really liked Shadow but did not feel the same way about Claw.

The first half of Shadow tells the best part of the story, when Severian is a boy apprentice living in the dorms in the Torturer’s Citadel. Things go well for him until, right after he graduates to journeyman, he makes the mistake of showing mercy to one of his “clients.” His masters show leniency on him by not killing him for this infraction, but they do have to cast him out. They get him a job as a local executioner in a hick town way up north called Thrax. The second half of Shadow describes the first leg of his journey on foot to Thrax, in which he runs into strange characters and is challenged to a duel fought with carnivorous flowers and has to learn how to do freelance executions to make money.

The entire book of Claw (and, I assume, the third and fourth books in the series) describe more of Severian’s adventures on the way to Thrax. Unfortunately, the book gets increasingly magic-based and riddle-filled as it goes on, and the things that happen in it aren’t very interesting. Sure, he stumbles into an underground cave filled with hundreds of man-beasts that he has to tame with the light of a magical gem, and that's okay. And he does take part in a weird ceremony in which he eats the flesh of a dead person and afterwards has that person’s memories as well as his own. But he also falls in with an unappealing group of itinerant actors and hefty chunks of the book are taken up with descriptions of the incredibly boring plays he performs with them as they all travel northward together.

It was a real struggle to keep reading to the end of Claw. This was too bad because I liked Severian and the way he had to be in a certain amount of denial about the profession he was trained in from childhood. The third and fourth books might make a fabulous recovery but I don’t have the energy to find out. 


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Blue Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1996
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT (For Red Mars and Green Mars) 

This is the third book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy about the colonization of Mars. It is, on the whole, not quite as awesome as the first two books in the set, but it has its own strengths.

After the more than one hundred years of construction, terraformation, feuds, sabotage, and war that were described in Red Mars and Green Mars, Blue Mars rewards the colonists’ perseverance (and yours) with a Mars that is now warm enough that its ice is melting and forming oceans. Plants and animals are rapidly adapting to the Martian environment. And, at sea level, humans can breathe the air without special equipment.

The people of Mars have turned the planet into a habitable world and have created a unique system of government with which to manage themselves. They actually are now doing much better than the people of Earth, who are dealing with environmental catastrophes and political chaos.

Robinson is an absolute master of the super-hard science fiction that makes up his Mars trilogy. He describes in minute, realistic detail what the colonization and terraforming of Mars could be like, and at the same time understands the emotional reactions the colonists might have to their situation. There are two themes in Blue Mars that particularly show how wise Robinson is about what people would feel at this point in their progress.

One is the colonists’ need to have some ritual way of looking back and celebrating what they have accomplished. All three of Robinson’s Mars books explore the complicated tensions between “greens,” who want to change Mars to make it habitable for humans, and “reds,” who want to keep Mars as it originally was. Obviously, by the time of Blue Mars, the greens have won. But the reds get a victory of a sort when everyone agrees on a set altitude on Olympus Mons above which nothing will be grown or built and the atmosphere will be preserved in its original state. Greens and reds (and everyone in between) begin to use this zone as a remembrance space; once a Martian year, they hike up and build a city of temporary tents like those used by the first colonists and they spend a while there remembering what it was like in the beginning and thinking about the friends who have died along the way.

The other theme I really liked was the effect of super-long lifespans on the minds of the First Hundred colonists. In Blue Mars, fewer than 35 members of the First Hundred survive; the rest have been killed in accidents, murder, and battle. Those remaining have all taken the life-extending treatments invented in Red Mars and are now over two hundred years old.

There are a number of side effects of living this long. For example, as time passes, the original colonists find they have more and more in common with each other and less and less in common with either the newer colonists or the native-born Martians. This makes them tend to draw together, even if they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum or if they originally hated each other.

Another side effect is that even though their brains are perfectly functional, so many things have happened to them that they start to forget or misremember the details of events from a hundred and fifty years ago when they first arrived. Sometimes they say they feel like their early experiences happened to someone else, not themselves. And some of them are unable to keep up with the constant changes that surround them and retreat emotionally, living only in the past.

In general, Blue Mars is a good conclusion to Robinson’s Mars trilogy. There are a couple down sides to it, however. For one thing, it is extremely long, even compared to the first two books. And also much of the last part of the book deals with the expansion of human space colonization into the rest of our solar system, which I found more abstract and less interesting than the original colonization of Mars.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.