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.