Embassytown by China Mieville

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

‘Unfortunately’, says China Mieville, ‘You can’t really sell books of monsters to publishers. They insist on stories linking them’. But that’s barely a bother for a man with the sort of storytelling skill Mieville has. Why then, is he so underrated? Perhaps because he has never written a straight up ‘realist’ mainstream novel and instead chooses to write in a wide variety of genres, repurposing them in his own particular way to be what is commonly known as ‘weird fiction’. Mieville has written a nautical adventure with a tentacled monster slimy enough to do H.P. Lovecraft proud, a western, YA fiction, metaphysical noir and now his love for science fiction is clear in Embassytown: an intense, jarring look at language, communication, power and colonization. Of course, these themes come via a story about a space traveler, aliens and bio-engineered diplomats. Because, by the hair of your horse limbed, giftwinged double-mouthed insect alien hosts, this is China Mieville and he’s in this business for the monsters!

Embassytown itself is essentially a diplomatic enclave existing within a bubble of breathable air on the planet Arieka, which lies on the outer zone of the known universe. Locals are almost ironically knows as Hosts (as if the human’s were invited guests who never left!). The Ariekei Hosts are ‘cool, incomprehensible presences’ who seems to be generally harmless and are engaged in trade with the humans, providing them with ‘biorigging’ – various systems they grow out of what seems to be ‘intelligent’ flesh. They have two mouths and speak simultaneously through both in ‘cut and turn’,  so in order to communicate with them effectively, humans have genetically engineered identical twins who are telepathic to each other and can speak as one double-mouthed being. These Ambassadors are experts at Language, the particular doublespeak that allows them to communicate their needs to their Hosts. Of course what they need isn’t what the ultimately may want, and with the arrival of a very special Ambassador who has a strange effect on the Ariekei Hosts, Embassytown’s future is uncertain.

The Hosts can not lie: for them language and reality are one and the same thing.  There are no words for things that do not exist. To try and improve their communication they create similes out of humans volunteers by putting them in situations that are ‘like’ other things so that their vocabulary and their frame of reference increases. The protagonist of the book, Avice, is one such a human simile – she is ‘the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her’. She is an ‘immerser’, a person capable of guiding vast ships through time and space, and she remains a minor celebrity with the Hosts, moving in and out of the Ambassadorial circles, eventually proving essential in the communication between the two species.

Embassytown demands a certain leap of faith even from more discerning readers. Mieville explains very little and is fast and ferocious in his world building, plunging deep into innovative concepts and words. He drops his readers abruptly in the middle of a culture, a time, space, a story that is completely unfamiliar and expects them to keep up when he looks at his frequent concerns of duplicity, duality, subjugation and urban dissolve. Embassytown isn’t just science fiction, it is also very much post-colonial fiction, of the likes of Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin, who has, in fact, lauded the book generously, saying ‘only the trash forms of science fiction are undemanding and predictable; the good stuff, like all good fiction is not for lazy minds’.

While Embassytown requires an intelligent reader, there is no threat of the dreaded science fiction ‘info-dump’ at all. Mieville has the subtlety and intellect to be writing ‘literary’ fiction, and yet his admiration for the ‘New weird’ means he uses alternate genres to ask the very same questions about humanity that mainstream writers ask in ‘realist’ fiction. He may never win the Booker, but he won’t care either, because he’ll have other monsters to fight.