Review: Embassytown

Embassytown by China Miéville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A great read for a sci-fi fan looking for something novel to chew on. Embassytown is science fiction about the distance between a word and its referent. It sounds ridiculous out of context, but Mieville builds from this seed a clash of language and culture that leads to civil war, political intrigue, and the threat of planetary annihilation.

In this world, humans have survived and thrived, spreading across the universe while retaining a polyglot common tongue. There's faster than light travel, alien technology, and a interstellar government, but they all serve the story without bogging it down in mechanics. While I can dig my teeth into interesting world-building - of which there is plenty, don't get me wrong - it's Mieville's lively, character-driven writing that turns that information into plot.

The book can drag at times, when the machinations become as labyrinthine as they are futile in the fact of the larger plot. (The other Mieville I've read, Perdido Street Station, seemed to have the same flab in the middle, while still being a great read overall.) Nonetheless, the spinning of a thrilling story out of a clash of language is an impressive feat.

The way the plot hinges on changing minds, as opposed to shooting all the aliens or blowing up the reactor core or whatever, reminds me of what I liked so much about Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide. Mieville isn't writing about sci-fi Jesus, though, so the book doesn't tap into that Great Myth storytelling power. It's to Embassytown's credit that the story feels like a totally new idea, unlike anything I've ever read.

View all my reviews