It is difficult to pin down this work to any genre – SF? Yes, but not quite. Not an intersection of SF and Fantasy either. Political? Definitely yes, It is difficult to pin down this work to any genre – SF? Yes, but not quite. Not an intersection of SF and Fantasy either. Political? Definitely yes, but not that alone. Mieville himself, perhaps, describes it best – WEIRD FICTION.
No, it isn’t weird as an end in itself. It is thematically complex, uses devices of SF and Fantasy only as a necessary, inevitable setting to posit even more radical views on concepts we are already extremely familiar with. Language. Politics. Similes and Metaphors. Power. And the intersections of power and knowledge. Colonialism.
This novel has a very simple premise. In the far-future, humans have settled on the very farthest edge of the Universe they can possibly traverse to, so far – a planet inhabited by native Ariekei, on which humans have built a small town – Embassytown, and for many thousands of megahours, have sustained a symbiotic, peaceful relationship with the peculiar Ariekenes.
The Ariekenes have a very simple conception of language – they cannot lie. Because they can only articulate what they know to be true, and their language is limited to their experience. With the coming of humans, they transform people into similes in their language in order to signify them. Those humans become reference points for them, signifiers, as Saussure would put it.
They speak with two mouths simultaneously. No human can do that – so Embassytown breeds sets of two people destined to become an Ambassador – two bodies, two minds, two mouths, one thought, one speech. One speaking in the Cut voice, another in the Turn voice simultaneously, so that the Ariekenes would understand them.
Avice Benner Cho, a simile, and an Immer returns to her town, Embassytown with her fourth spouse Scile, just in time to witness the arrival of a new Ambassador EzRa, Ez and Ra. This new Ambassador upsets the fragile exchange between the Ariekei and humans, and utter chaos ensues. Meanwhile, other Ambassadors have agendas of her own, Scile has his own ideas, and Avice is left to her own devices to make sense of a place she no longer relates to, with people she can no longer trust.
Language, its transition from simile to metaphor, its wielding as a source of knowledge, and therefore, power is the basic theme of the novel. The inability of language to escape Politics and Power equations. The embedding of contradictions in language itself, what Derrida would call Deconstruction. It is about our vulnerability to language, and its power to shatter the world through words. It is the idea of language having multiple pointers, one signifier encompassing multiple significations, plural meanings all contradictory to each other, paradoxes that conveniently assimilate into each other.
You think the plot is boring and you wanna skip it? Damn… Mieville will prove you utterly wrong and you’ll keep on wondering why you chose to dump him. Somebody needs to stop this guy! He’s projecting complex, uninteresting ideas about language and its ramifications on power with such vivacity, such wild imagination and draws it to an end with such concreteness though he began with an abstract idea, it is impossible to pin down the essence of this book in a review the size allowed by Goodreads.
It has so many levels of complexity, it is rich, allusive, weird, sensible, imaginative and titillating to the very core. Mieville is a fantastic world-builder. Oh, we know that not only his worlds are fake, and completely impossible to come across anytime in the future, but they are so amazingly well-drawn, as if from first-hand experience. Perhaps Mieville did go there, after all. It is so realistic, how could a person fake it so realistically? He built two (three?) mythical cities in THE CITY AND THE CITY, and he now suddenly transports you to a completely different world, but just as credible as his imaginary cities.
Technically, the narrative slowed down in places where the interest was at its peak. It is, however, a necessity, given the complexity of ideas. The ideas, sometimes, seem stretched out – because they seem so simple to us, but are catastrophic to the Ariekenes. Now, the narrative is smooth, reader-friendly, despite being weird.
Anyone interested in how language shapes our world, and sometimes destroys it, how it is both a source of power and powerlessness, how it is complicit with politics and also a weapon to resist politics must read this. It is highly imaginative and a rare masterpiece in how it blends the SF/Fantasy (heck, Weird Fiction) genre with a more prosaic discourse of power through language.
DEMANDS a second read.
Any surprises it won some of the top awards for Science Fiction? ...more
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