China (2011) Hardcover, Embassytown by Mieville

China Mieville is one of my favorite writers and I always look forward to a new release. As always, he is creative and imagines a new alien race with very unusual communication abilities. That said, the main story arc is a bit plodding, I did not feel invested in the main character and the "political" side story was poorly developed.

I got roughly half way through this novel, got bored and read the plot summary on Wikepedia. Glad I did as it saved a lot of time. This book is way too long for the actual plot and would have been better as a novella.

It full of great ideas at first, i.e the immer, different worlds and alien species, and that is what made me purchase it as I really enjoy science fiction that describes a universe I couldn't even imagine. Unfortunately these ideas are almost nothing more than a mention and never explored or described in greater detail.

The actual plot/story is dragged out with some very dense writing and I won't repeat the plot since othes have in detail. The author is clearly a good writer but it's like he's trying too hard.

THis book is very imaginative and interesting. It forces you to not only think but also deeply understand the characters. I would highly recommend this book to those who are seeking literature to improve their way of thinking and challenge their creativity.

If you liked Perdido, you will like this. Eternal philosophical questions presented in such original elegant and startling ways that you are not being lectured but participating in an unfolding of life.

Mieville is probably my favorite author. In Embassytown, he shifts to a sci-fi milieu that reminds almost of a futuristic version of his New Crozubon stories. Whereas Kraken was all about the pulp influences mixed with the New Weird paradigm, with a couple elements removed this could be a straight-up sci-fi novel. My favorite speculative books are all about Big Ideas and Embassytown has them in spades, especially if you are interested in language. I don't want to say more because it will be spoiler-laden! Highly enjoyable.

I've enjoyed essentially all of China Mieville's stuff, but this one only has one idea wedged in the middle of some fairly basic story-telling. The setting has nothing in particular to recommend it over any other SF tale (less, quite possibly) so we're left with the language of its aliens... which is pretty cool, but not enough to sustain much of a tale. It's a little like City/City and the alternate London of Kraken - there are wonderfully imagined elements in there, but CM doesn't sustain the plotting to knit them into an equally impressive story, in my opinion. Embassytown is a worse offender here than the other books of his I've read. Worth reading, not as good as I would have liked.

China Mieville has done it again with a totally new vision of life in some future galaxy. The connection with the characters makes them come alive. The aliens are a species unlike any I have read about before. This is inventive, gripping sci. fi.

China Mieville is a mixed bag for me and Embassytown just didn't do it for me. It has an overly complicated plot, bloated pretentious writing style, shallow characters, and clumsy pacing.

Without going into a lot of detail on the plot, which would take several pages to do "justice" to, this novel is about a backwater world colonized by humans. They share the planet with the native Ariekei who have a strange language that very few humans can understand or speak. Humans have to be genetically altered to speak the aliens, who are "ambassasors."

The primary character is Avice Benner Cho who is a human colonist who through a very strange process is "part of" the Ariekei language (don't ask, please).

A breech between the humans and Ariekei ensue and the native being stage a revolt that all centers around their language.
Sound confusing? It is. Sound like a great novel? Think again.

China Mieville has written some of the most creative and avant garde books SF has to offer. Embassytown fits that description only more so. Where some of his early work tends to be a bit rambling, he has tightened his storytelling considerably as seen in The City and the City and Kraken. I can hardly wait to see what he writes next.

I was assigned this book for my Science Fiction class alongside two other books and a tome of short stories. I deluded myself into thinking I could read this over a weekend no problem, but I was wrong. The writing, as many other reviewers, my classmates and even my teacher have said, is dense. I feel dense is too forgiving, though. The writing is downright obscure and boring. I've never read Miéville before, but in this story he seems more interested in sounding intelligent by using as many big words as possible. There's no character development to speak of and nothing making me care about the narrator. She just seems to be an apathetic slacker adrift on the absentee storyline. Not initiating anything, just going along and reacting to things.

The author also seems to think that foreign words and random slang make things better. Luckily I'm familiar with most of the language and slang used, but my classmates think he's making up his entire vocabulary. I wouldn't mind a SF novel about language, but there needs to be a personality within the main character and an actual plot somewhere in the book. I've only gotten halfway through, so it might exist, but it really shouldn't take half a book of nothingness to get to.

And don't even get me started on the bizarre use of double negatives and weird terms like "not-inevitable." Overall I'd say this is a book best used as a door stop or coaster. I know people who could write better books in their sleep, and I've read trashy romance novels with better plots and characterization.

Truly original ideas about a possible alien language. Suggestions of an alien biology linked to an alien way of production/factories/houses as biological secretions. Possible links between biology and language not explored. Story, drama, dialogue -- all the initial wonder evaporizing in the second half of this book. The book itself became weird at that point -- the story came to a standstill, and I could not understand how the writer was able finish it, even though I got stuck again-and-again. Stuck at 75 % -- I have given up on it.

This is a dead boring, lazily written book., poorly edited book. I keep hoping for a really good book from Mieville. I've read & own all of his books. Even pre-ordered this via the store. Mieville is very imaginative & originial but all his books become merely "interesting".

Christopher Priest (see [...]) expresses my sentiments much better than I can myself:
<QUOTE>
Although Miéville is clearly talented, he does not work hard enough. For a novel about language, Embassytown contains many careless solecisms, which either Mr Miéville or his editor should have dealt with. This isn't the place to go into a long textual analysis, but (for example) a writer at his level should never use `alright' so often or so unembarrassedly. He also uses far too many neologisms or SF nonce-words, which drive home the fact that he is defined and limited by the expectations of a genre audience. On the first few pages, alone, he uses the words `shiftparents', `voidcraft', `yearsends', `trid', `vespcams', `miab', `plastone', `hostnest', `altoysterman' ... Yes, of course, it's possible to work out what most of these might mean (or to wait until another context makes them clearer), but it is exactly this use of made-up nouns that makes many people find science fiction arcane or excluding. A better writer would find a more effective way of suggesting strangeness or an alien environment than by just ramming words together. Resorting to wordplay is lazy writing.

I also find Miéville's lack of characterization a sign of author indifference: Embassytown is full of names, full of people, but mostly they just chat away to each other, interchangeably and indistinguishably. And for a writer who makes so much of ambience, China Miéville's fiction lacks a sense of place: this is not the same as a lack of description, as there is a lot of that, but a way of using a physical environment as something the characters notice, respond to, feel themselves to be a part of, so that the reader can also sense and respond to it. In Embassytown there is scene after scene in which these weakly drawn characters twitter away to each other in what might be a field or an airport terminal or someone's front room, for all the lack of evocation the author manages.
</QUOTE>

The last two books by Mieville that I read, Kraken and The City & the City were very readable, and I do believe
the latter will become a classic. This one, though, is a piece of you know what...pardon my French.
First of all, it's really boring. It's written from the first-person point of view, which doesn't work here. The narrator is
a passive, dull person, who does nothing much. The interesting parts, like the biomachines, or the immer, are only described
by means of hints, tantalizing, but nothing more than a tease. The language of the Hosts is - again - just boring, and
unbelievable. I mean, I know this is sci-fi, but even so, I find it hard to 'believe'. A language where lying is not possible, which is somehow directly reflective of the mind - really? Can you picture any kind of idea that's not representative? And does that not instantly mean that a representation could be inaccurate? I mean, what if one of the Hosts
was mistaken in describing something? What if he was convinced that was the truth, whereas the others knew it was a mistake?
Voila, the concept of lying, and the capability. Not everything an author says should be accepted, even in sci-fi.
Overall, though, this is a book where nothing much happens; a lot of passive descriptions, a lot of dialogue that's left hanging... I don't take that as the brilliance of indirection; I take it as laziness, of an author who doesn't know how to move the story... and honestly, do you care about any of the characters? or to put it in a non-Oprah-like manner: do you give a damn if they live or die?
I hope I don't offend others who liked this book... Mieville continues to be one of my favorite authors, and I recommend to everyone 'City and the City' and 'Perdido Street Station.' Even 'The Scar' is almost up there, and Kraken is enjoyable, though rather self-indulgent and baroque. But skip this one.

I bought this after enjoying The City and the City, which IMHO is a much more accessible read than this book.
The prose was heavy going and the characters did not engage me. I kept going on the strength of the intriguing concepts about language the book, but gave up halfway through because It was more effort than pleasure. A disappointing experience for me.

Miévill's prose requires some adjustment in reading style, but it is well worth the effort. He paints a haunting but humane (more than human) world that is full of imagery that echoes. His words flow through your mind like a rich, French sauce: one minute sweet but sorrowful, the next slowly morphing into strong and bitter. Miévill's words are better than any virtual reality I can consider. You travel to a world far, far away, and experience thoughts and feelings you haven't imagined.

I did not want Embassytown to end. It was a pleasant, disturbing and subtly vivid dream that I savored for days after the finish. It is not a book I wanted to immediately read again. But it is a book I know I will read again.

Embassytown is a city far on the fringes of human-colonized space, an enclave on the alien world of Arieka, isolated and far-flung from its administrative world of Bremen. The Ariekei, called Hosts by Embassytowners, are enigmatic creatures who create a wide array of bio-technological creature-devices; their revered Language is built around the Ariekans’ twin mouths, enabling a precise form of double-speech. More important is that they are incapable of abstract thinking: they cannot lie, since they are unable to understand a concept without a previously existing reference point. Nowadays, they form similes by way of Embassytowners who act out a thought or concept for the Hosts.

Avice Benner Cho is one such living simile: “the girl in pain who ate what was given her.” Having grown up in Embassytown, she escaped mainly because of her talent for immersing—meaning she’s capable of operating a starship in the immer, a kind of ur-space or sub-plane which enables fast travel and circumvents the lack of FTL drives. (Though my German is rusty, I did pick up that the immer is the ur-space, and real space is the manchmal, which are auf Deutsch for “always” and “sometimes.”) Avice has spent years in the Out, and didn’t plan to return home until her linguistics professor husband begged her. And she couldn’t have returned home at a better time. The Embassytowners are introducing their newest Ambassador to the Hosts—Ambassadors being paired humans genetically modified to think and speak Language simultaneously, enabling contact with the Hosts. This new Ambassador—Ez and Ra, forming EzRa—triggers a massive change within the settlement: the aliens become addicted to his voice; they lose control of themselves, and society begins to break down…

Where Mieville shines—and where his creativity is unleashed—is with the novel’s big themes. The Hosts’ inability to lie causes a number of humans to form a religious cult around them; the cult sees purity within the Hosts, raising them above humans with no such restraint. Meanwhile, the Hosts become enraptured by the god-drug that is EzRa—religion as the opiate of the masses, creating its own fellowship from the ranks of the addicted, those compelled to hear EzRa’s every word. There’s a strong postcolonial theme in this, with the natives becoming dependent on the humans for their survival, and visa versa. More to the point, some of the Hosts see the human rulers and their Quisling native leaders suppressing any changes to the status quo—-one Host who attempts to learn how to lie is gunned down under the oversight of both human and Ariekei rulers, a tacit assassination allowing the murder of one who would shake the foundations of Language.

These themes come to fruition in the second half of the book with a strange duality of rebellions. Embassytown has planned to succeed from its Bremen rulers, but because of their growing addiction to EzRa, the Hosts trigger their own revolt to get away from their dependence on humans. Ariekei are slaughtered in the streets, torn to shreds by others of their species who have made the ultimate sacrifice and escaped god-drug addiction by maiming their own receptors. This duality of rebellions continues into the finale, with the Ariekei forming two “new paths” in reaction to their addicted state, two new rebellions within the greater rebellion. I’m not sure how many of these layers Mieville intended, but the book is plenty rich in them. And that’s not even getting into the symbolic use and analysis of Language, a living language that transcends mere speech because of the Hosts’ inability to lie.

Embassytown is a pretty epic novel; I’m not sure I’ve done more than scratch at the surface here. There are a few nits I could pick, a few more comparisons I could make. Mieville’s language remains impressive, and Avice is yet another Mievilleian protagonist who plays a small but important part in grand events far beyond her control. Overall, I think it’s one of my favorite Mieville novels for two reasons. First, I’m a sucker for this type of SF—human-alien relations, the postcolonial blues, the living Language, the god-drug opiate. It’s a very ’70s blend of themes that Mieville manages to make fresh and interesting, feeling both new and retro and not past its sell-by date. Second, while I found parts of the world remained under-defined, the character of Avice is incredibly well-drawn and realistic; the Hosts are mysterious and act like legitimate non-humans, but have good cultural depth, and are strange and sympathetic creatures to follow.

#mostimaginativeproseyet #andthatssayingalotifyouknowchina

NOTE: This is part of the #hashtag review program: delivering insights on the overall product experience, without the self-entitlement.

One of the main reasons for reading speculative fiction is to be immersed in the strange. Whether reading something cartoonish and light, like Ring World, or serious and dense, like the Windup Girl, I like that feeling of disorientation that comes from a place that works by different rules and with beings we may never completely understand. And Melville does a great job of creating parts of his alien world, with his new take on hyperspace particularly intriguing.

Unfortunately the rest of his world building is oddly lacking or overdone. The key aliens at the center of the story are described in bits and pieces. The first time we meet one we learn it is odd, has an appendage that might be whip like, and not a lot more. I thought they were small only to learn later they are large. I also discovered they have coral like eye stems and maybe carapaces. By contrast, the two-person teams that act as a single entity to speak to the aliens are described over and over. So too the language theory that informs the central plot (no spoilers), almost as though Melville was worried we might not understand, so felt he had to repeat himself in exposition, dialog, and scenes.

And that central plot is far too drawn out. Maybe my sense of pacing is overly influenced by Stars My Destination and Old Man's War, which are two novels I've read in the past year. The first had wonderfully strange moments (watching a nuclear war in the ultraviolate part of the spectrum) and the second wonderfully strange alien worldviews (helping others through war as consecration). Both had plots that sailed along, plenty of tension, and sharp dialog, and pretty much every scene contributed in some way to the story. In Embassytown, the story is all over the place. And there are a number of scenes that contribute nothing to the story. For instance, Avice, the narrator is an immerser, meaning she can pilot ships in Melville's version of hyperspace. She has traveled to dozens of strange worlds and met scores of aliens. She gets married multiple times. And she has sex with an ambassador upon her return. Her best friend is an independent android. But none that has any impact on the story.

Nor on her character. Events that should have fundamentally altered her she accepts with such blase that they might as well have been walks in the park. And her motivation for learning the nature of the crisis sparked by the new ambassador(s) is never clear. To me it seemed mainly like irritation that she did not know, nothing more. Though her indifference to her own life made me wonder why she cared at all. (Maybe it stemmed from being in a world of dull and underdeveloped characters.) A comment in another review says the story is not about Avice but rather then events. But then why spend so much time on here background and immersion (hyperspace)?

Moreover, the tone was inconsistent. The first-person narration sounded like it was happening in "real time" so to speak, as the action unfolded (which does include flashbacks). Yet every once and a while Avice reminds us she is telling her story from some distant point in the future. This should bring a level of perspective that is missing from the book. On page 168 of my edition, Melville seems to realize this himself, and he has a one-paragraph section where our narrator says she knows the telling of her tale is a mess. I don't mind a book that challenges its readers (I loved House of Leaves and 2666), but there has to be a payoff. Skip this one.

Embassytown by China Mieville (2011, 345 pages, hardcover) - After finishing a book that never seemed to end, I needed something with a little meat and readability so I chose someone dependable (I really enjoyed Mieville’s earlier Scar).

Embassytown, unlike Scar, is pure science fiction. It’s not enough – for me – for a writer to have an interesting concept. There also has to be someone I can relate to going through the adventure and experiencing it with me. China is very good at merging the concept beautifully with the character.

The premise is an interesting, and thoughtful one. Humans occupy a planet where the friendly aliens (called Hosts) create a breathable area for the humans called Embassytown. The air on the rest of the planet is poisonous. Our heroine describes a game she and the other kids played where they dared each other to see how far outside the pocket of air they could go and survive.

The aliens have a language that easily understandable but when the linguists try to talk to the Hosts, the aliens ignore them as if they are talking gibberish. The clue to speaking the alien tongue is to have two emphatically attuned people speak it at the same time.

Using clones called Ambassadors, the humans are able to talk with the Hosts, and they lead a pretty peaceful existence until two men show up as Ambassadors with the ability to talk to the Hosts, but because they aren’t identical, their diction is a little discordant. The effect? It makes the Hosts high, and they will do anything to have the new Ambassadors speak forever, threatening the humans and destroying their own world as they become addicts.

So the story is pretty cool, but the heroine is even cooler. A crèche-raised child in Embassytown, her only goal has been to get out. When she’s discovered to have the ability to withstand the rigors of subspace, she becomes a crewman of interstellar craft. She meets a handsome linguist and travels with him a bit before deciding to bring him back to Embassytown, a linguist’s idea of Mecca. There she sits back in horror as the discordant Ambassadors arrive and destroy her marriage and her world.

I read it in a day.

My only complaint – and this is one I have with almost all single viewpoint stories – is that the heroine seems to be coincidentally too often involved in the action. She’s a friend to other Ambassadors, a member of the group of Similes that are against the Hosts learning how to lie, the close personal friend of one half of a set of Ambassadors, and the wife of the man trying to upset the politics of her home world. All these people move the story along, but it seems a little artificial that she’s involved with all the key players in the story. She doesn’t do much, but she sees a great deal.

At first, I was wary of the climax happening two thirds of the way through the book and didn’t like what I considered to be the added on material at the end, but the battle wasn’t the end, the heroine resolving what caused the battle was the end. Nicely done.

As usual, China invents an entire dictionary of new words and expects you to be smart enough to follow them without explanation. It helps immerse the reader in the story from the first paragraph. He did the same in Scar. Hang in there.

Great, great writing as usual – exciting and emotional. Not only do we have a clever premise, but we have a lead character able to hold our hand as we are carried along on the adventure. What more could you ask for?

China Mieville has a genius for taking an amazing concept and playing it out in a setting that is both fantastic and grittily down to earth, usually in the form of a sprawling metropolis that lives, breathes, suffers and triumphs, and always with the human touch of characters whose struggles we relate to. This was true of the Bas Leng books, which have explored chaos theory and the laws of probability. It was true of theology in Kraken, and it is true of Embassytown.

While a hard SF novel of adventure, espionage and dirty politics, it is at its heart a book about language, what it is, how it shapes the very thoughts of those who speak it, even as the speakers shape it in turn.

Avice Benner Cho (ABC, get it?) is an immerse: a sort of hyperspace pilot and navigator who is able to steer a ship through the turbulent hyperspace that makes travel between the stars possible.

She is also a simile.

She comes from a human colony on an alien world ruled by strange beings known as the Hosts. The Hosts have a language that may well be unique in sentience: a language that is completely literal. Their encounters with human colonists in their shared city of Embassytown have led to changes in the Hosts’ concepts and the need for ways to express those changes.

In order to formulate new ideas, it is necessary to have humans act out certain activities which are then incorporated into the alien language, so to expand the Hosts’ range of rhetoric, and of thought itself.

Avice is a simile. As a child, she performed such a ritual task and became a living part of the Hosts’ language. This gained her the opportunity to pursue her career in space.

Now, returning to Embassytown, she will find herself chronicling a tumultuous time that will shatter and reshape the Hosts, and possibly humanity.

Before the final page is turned, the fabric of civilization will be torn apart and humans and Hosts will face impossible choices. They will learn the concept of lying, which can both disrupt society and allow them to envision something better. They will experience oration that is addictive as a drug. There will be tragedy, there will be heroism, and nothing will ever be the same.

This is a book that feels like it should be longer than it is. There is what could be a sprawling epic condensed in less than 400 pages, all of it funneled and concentrated to Avice’s point of view as she tells her own story and relates what she later learns of all those things that happened elsewhere. The text thus takes on a strangely realistic feel and the reader is teased with glimpses of other stories at Avice’s periphery.

Embassytown is a new triumph by a master of the craft and I find myself hoping Mieville returns to this universe and brings us more stories of adventure.

This is my first exposure to the writing of China Mieville and I am so blown away. This is best SciFi I have read in a very long time. A mesmerizing story populated with fascinating characters - human, alien and machine - set (mostly) on a planet at the very edge of the known universe in the very distant future.

The story is told in a nonlinear fashion by an Immerser named Avice. It is as though you are eavesdropping as she tells her very personal story to a contemporary who is familiar with all the futuristic vocabulary and alien terminology being used. Nothing is explained, so at first it is a little confusing, but eventually the reader begins to pick up meaning from context. The challenge to find meaning in Avice's words is especially significant since the story centers around "Language." "Language" is the singularly unique language of the "hosts" who are native to the planet where the Embassytown colony (where Avice was born) is located. A language that even the Ambassadors who were specifically cloned and educated to translate for the hosts don't completely understand. Not really.

I just can't find the words to express how amazing this novel is. It is incredibly well-written, full of suspense, peppered with action, and has many layers of meaning. Highly recommended for any SciFi fan and for anyone with an interest in language.

I also I highly recommend experiencing this novel as an audio book. Susan Duerden's narration was exceptional. I am certain that my enjoyment of "Embassytown" was significantly enhanced by her performance.

I'm begrudgingly rating this 3 stars. I feel like this book has nearly *everything* I love about writing and speculative fiction, so I should have loved it so, so much. It has some amazingly innovative ideas, especially with regards to language, and the world-building is absolutely exquisite. So why did I have to constantly force myself to slog through it? Why did reading it become such a dreaded and procrastinated chore? I'm impressed and intrigued by the author and will definitely read more of his work, and I love some of the ideas in this novel, but I really wish the actual storyline had gripped me and propelled me through to the end.

Embassytown has some very compelling awesomeness: interstellar travel, biotechnology, excellent world-building of worlds/aliens/cultures/languages, cloning and body modification (both technical and tribal-esque), fame, politics, addiction, sacrifice, war, love. As a writer, I was particularly impressed with the alien Language he created and the concept of Language as a drug. It's a fascinating concept that was tackled well and doesn't skip over some of the ugliness of addiction like so many books and shows often do. I also like the underlying theme of how every species or alien race seems to battle the same difficulty with great change.

But the plot itself just didn't hook me and wasn't even really apparent until the last third of the book. I'd set it down and weeks would go by without picking it up, and then only because I had to finish the thing for book club. While I was cheering some awesome alien touch or technological/linguistic advancement, I was forcing myself onward in search of the point. It eventually got there, but it was a surprisingly and disappointingly boring ride.

I'm somewhat tickled by the irony of my dual feelings on this: I loved all these concepts and little touches/I really hated reading this book.

Far into the future, humans have expanded out into space, colonizing distance planets. They walk among other sentient beings, many of whom humans can communicate with easily. It is on one of these planets that a small ghetto-like town, Embassytown, resides, where the aliens (Ariekei) speak a special type of language. Humans try and mimic their language by using twins who speak at the same time. Follow Avice as she finally learns what drives the politics of their relationship.

At the beginning, this book was very difficult for me to get into. There were a lot of sort of made up science fiction terms that I was unfamiliar with. You’d expect language to change in the future and on distant planets, especially with new technologies, so this definitely made the book plausible. After about 10% of the way through, I was able to finally catch onto the jargon.

The intricacies of Embassytown were really intriguing to me. Avice grows up here, but she leaves as soon as she can. Many of the people who live there never leave. The Ariekei allow the humans to live in a small portion of the planet that is habitable; humans can’t breathe Ariekei air. Avice later returns at the insistence of her husband, who I think was just using her to get there. It isn’t long after they arrive that the two start having problems.

The most interesting parts of this book were the complexities of the relationships between the different humans and the Ariekei. The only people Ariekei can speak to are twins who have been trained in their language. They can’t understand synthetic computerized talk either; they apparently need a soul behind words. They also cannot lie, but apparently want to. The humans and the Ariekei have to work together for trade agreements and the like to each other and other planets.

All turns to chaos when a pair of off-world twins start speaking to the Ariekei and the Ariekei become addicted to them and Avice must help save their world from destruction. Overall, I enjoyed following Avice on her path to find answers and to discover language.

Everything about this book makes me jizz my pants. It's about aliens and it is about language. Aliens. Language. This book was made for me, I swear it. So when I first started reading, some of it was hard to grasp because it jumped right into using alien world terminology. I'll do my best to explain the important/cool stuff about this book. Would it be easier to copy and paste the publisher's description? Entirely. But I like a challenge. And confusing people.

The main character is Avice Benner Cho, a traveler who eventually returns to her home planet, Arieka, right before a revolution. On this planet, humans and the indigenous Ariekei, or "Hosts", live more or less together. What's interesting about the Ariekei is just how alien they are physically and linguistically. They communicate through what is called Language. Each Host has two mouths that say different sounds at the same time to construct words. The humans figured this out, but when they took two people trying to reconstruct the language, the Hosts didn't even register that anyone was talking. Then they tried making a computer speak in Language. Still nothing, because what the Hosts need behind Language is sentience. Without a single mind behind the voices, the words are just noise. In order to communicate with the Hosts, the humans have to take twins at birth and raise them as one person, linking their minds together. They become ambassadors, whose sole job is to communicate with the Ariekei.

Another interesting thing about the Language and minds of the Ariekei is that they speak in similes referring to actual events and they cannot lie. That's what links Avice so strongly to these creatures. When she was younger, the Hosts turned her into a simile. She became a part of Language.

Got all that?

I don't want to say much more about the plot. A lot happens, all of it very fascinating and surprising. Maybe it's just me who does this, but I did what I could to prolong my reading of this book. I just did not want to leave the world the Mieville had created. It's so wildly original, and although I'm not used to hard sci-fi and it took me a while to get used to the world's terminology, it was well worth the time spent. Sometimes Mieville does some jumps back and forth in the plot, but I was able to stay interested in the story.

Mieville said, "if you are a writer who happens to be a human, I think it's definitionally beyond your ken to describe something truly inhuman, psychologically, something alien." He has a point, but I think he came incredibly close to creating something completely new, and a new favorite book of mine.

If you're looking for faster-than-light, galactic-empire-spanning, laser-blasting space opera ... you don't find it here. This is science fiction that makes you think, and it is NOT a fast read! This story has to be taken slowly.

"Embassytown" takes place ... in a town. A small human enclave in a backwater planet on the edge of known space. The entire story takes place in the immediate are of the town. No star-hopping here. The indigenous species, the Hosts, allow this colony to exist, with the aid of their bio-mechanical technology that provides a bubble of breathable air over Embassytown. Communication is difficult. The Hosts speak in a language that requires two mouths speaking together. Everything else, like a single human attempting to speak to them, is simply noise. The only way humans can speak to the Hosts is through Ambassadors: engineered twins who can speak two words simultaneously.

The narrator, Avice Bennon Cho, has become part of the Host's language, which is called "Language". The Hosts can only speak truth; the concept of lying is unknown, they can only speak things that are. When they need a new concept, they need to create it first so that they can speak it. In some cases they use humans as living similies. Avice is a simile: she is "the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was giving to her".

Avice has been away from Embassytown. She became an "immerser", someone who can travel through subspace (the "immer") that is the fast path through real space. She returns with her husband to show him her home town, because he is fascinated with language and wants to study Language. Leaving Embassytown is rare. Someone coming back is even rarer, and Avice and her husband Scile are celebrities. But a new Ambassador has also arrived. Not a home grown twin, but one manufactured by Bremen, the empire that is the shadowy political background of the story. And when the new Ambassador speaks, things start to change.

This book is slow going. Miéville drops us right into the story with very little explanation. We are immediately exposed to new concepts, new words and slang, new sociology and politics. Avice starts telling her story as if we know the entire background, as if we are Embassytowners, and we have to figure things out on our own. This is not easy. It's a challenge. It makes you think. Miéville made my brain hurt with "The City and the City", and he does it again here.

I have not been dropped this hard into an alien culture since Barbara Hambly's "Faded Sun" trilogy, and it's a shock. If you want action right away, you're probably not going to care much for this book. As other reviewers have noted, there's not a lot of action for the first 100 pages or so. There's not a lot of character development or detailed descriptions of the environment. We get the amount of information that Avice thinks we need. It's her story, and she assumes you know the background. You don't understand? You're in Embassytown. Pick it up as you go and figure it out. Or don't worry about it. If she didn't tell you, it's probably not important. Not to her, anyway.

Yes, it's very frustrating. When I have to deal with people like that in real life, I just want to smack them. I can't of course, any more than I can smack Avice. So what can you do? You can walk away, or you can go along for the ride. This book is more of a walk than a ride. It takes an investment in time, and in thought. It's not for everyone.

But if you like the kind of story that will make you think hard, If you're willing to take the time to understand the world where the story takes place, I think you will enjoy Embassytown.

I think Chine Mieville must be the most creative writer alive today. Each of his books is completely unique. Most writers seem to have a theme they keep coming back to again and again. Even if the characters and plots are different, their books seem to have as many similarities as differences. That doesn't mean they don't create compelling fiction, it just means they have something they do well, and keep coming back to it.

Not Mieville. The only thing his books have in common is how different they are. From each other, and from anyone else. In Embassytown, Mieville puts us on an alien world where the native population has little in the way of traditional technology. He gives us glimpses of a society based on a fantastic bio-engineered environment, with living houses, powerplants, and pipelines. And then tosses that whole idea off as a minor piece of the story. The real story here, is language. Not the language of the book, but the language of the alien species. I can't recall ever reading anything along these lines. Truly fascinating.

Mieville's works can be challenging reads, however. He makes up words, which you figure out the meaning of as you go along. And he doesn't start with pages of expository material: he plunks you down right in the middle of things, and you discover the world around you just as you would if you had suddenly woken up in it, not knowing where you were. In the end, it's worth the effort.

Brilliant. Genius. Forceful. Pure shot of brain candy. The story is a poem about the power of the Word. The language of the book is a challenge, for the writer, the reader, the protagonists. Language is the muscular power of the mind. With words, the mind processes the abstract, the past, present and future, 'Thatness', the self. Without words, the mind is crippled. Words are to the brain what food and water are to the body.

I was reminded of the scene in the movie, 'The Miracle Worker' (1962) where Patty Duke, playing Helen Keller, has her hands forcibly washed at a pump by Anne Bancroft, playing Anne Sullivan. Helen is both blind and deaf, and she lives her life as a feral tamed animal. She lost her vision and hearing as a baby due to a brain fever and does not know what words are. During her confrontation with her teacher at the pump with water pouring over her hands, Helen suddenly realizes the water has a name, a word. It is a powerful moment because Helen happened to be a person of a great intellect, which had been lost to her by the illness. The learning of language to Helen was not only a revelation, but it was as if Sullivan had gifted her with wings to fly.

This book is amazing. I had goose bumps.

Language shapes the brain. Recently many scientists have taken up where psychologists and psychiatrists left off and are proving that if you are an original speaker of Mandarin, for example, your brain processes concepts differently than an English speaker. Because Mandarin is musical, more Chinese have perfect pitch than do English speakers. Scientists are looking at how sentence structure affects thinking - the subject, verb, object of Englsh sentences vs. the verb, subject, object construction of other languages, for example. They are measuring actual brain process differences.[...] Words grow neurons, change your personality, increase the depth and width of understanding society, the sciences, politics, math, religion. It does this no matter what you might score on IQ tests.

Through a powerful science fiction story about humans living in a small conclave allowed by the indigenous natives of a planet at the far reaches of human exploration, the symbols behind language and how the understanding of words affects EVERYTHING is chillingly, thrillingly explored. I could not put this book down, and i hated the necessities of life which forced me to anyway. This is a Great Literature novel.

Mieville has said that one of the things he likes about science fiction is the feeling of not knowing what's going on that you have a lot of times when you start reading a book in the genre. I agree. It's that feeling of disorientation that you have until you start to get your bearings and figure out who, what, when, and where you are. For me it's what gives the genre a lot of its appeal.

Well, with Embassytown, he gave me that feeling in spades, and he stretched it out for the book's entirety. It's wonderfully written, it's a fantastic showcase for Mieville's creativity, but that feeling never left me. And I think that's exactly what Mieville intended. His descriptions of the characters, the setting, and the technology are very nebulous. He gives you little insights here and there, but never a complete picture. So it's not an easy book to describe.

If you've ever read one of Mieville's books, you know that he loves language. In his books he heavily uses words whose meanings can only be unlocked contextually. With Embassytown, he makes language itself the core of the story. The Ariekei are a peaceful alien species whose language is so closely tied to reality that it does not allow for lies. The restrictive nature of their language has given the Ariekei almost a lustful desire for the contrary nature of lies.

The Terre are human colonists who live on Ariekei in Embassytown. The Terre and their Hosts have long enjoyed a peaceful coexistence. The Terre have created Ambassadors, sets of cloned "dopels" bred and genetically linked together who can both understand and speak the Ariekei language. Through the Ambassadors, some of the Ariekei have slowly learned how to manipulate their language enough to resemble lying. But by doing so, they've opened Pandora's Box. Soon the first Ariekei murder takes place and chaos quickly follows.

Embassytown is not light reading. If you're looking for a book that you can pick up and read without using your brain, this is not it. But as is usually the case, things that require effort usually provide the greatest reward.

Narrator Avice Benner Cho begins to reveal her home society of Embassytown by describing fleeting scenes of her childhood. All children are raised institutionally (not a major theme). Society is governed by a representative of the Bremen empire, one of several empires flung across space, but more importantly, by an unspecified number of Ambassadors. The Ambassadors are the few humans biologically modified to understand and speak with (therefore to negotiate and trade with) the Ariekei, the native sentients on this backwater planet of Arieka. When Avice is about 18 in our years, she escapes Arieka by becoming an immerser, a pilot who navigates ships through hyperspace by some obscure mental means. In a space bar she meets Scile, a linguist researching alien languages. They travel together for some unspecified period, and eventually marry. Scile urgently wants to go to Arieka to study the Ariekei language, and Avice finally yields to his persistent requests.

The main plot is what happens after Avice returns. She "floaks," a word that author China Mieville delights in having invented. It seems to mean proceeding without any goal, and improvising, where necessary faking, to deal with situations as they occur. Avice has always been apolitical, so she unthinkingly provides Bremen representative Wyatt and the Ambassadors what little information she has regarding Bremen activities elsewhere. She becomes the lover of Ambassador CalVin. (To speak as one person with two mouths as the Ariekei do, all Ambassadors are clones who must share all experiences.) Avice uses her social/political contacts to gain permission for Scile and herself to attend Ariekei social events. The Ariekei generally cannot lie, so their big annual art event is a Festival of Lies, where performers labor to, for example, say something is a color that it is not. Avice gradually becomes aware that some Ariekei are practicing lying to change their way of communication and therefore, their culture. Meanwhile, the Bremen have sent a highly unusual off-planet Ambassador, EzRa, whose mission is apparently to wreak some massive change in Ariekei or local human society, or both. Added to the mix is a loose group of lower-class dissidents, who pride themselves in being symbols for parts of Ariekei language by having performed some very specific act directed by the Ariekei. (As a child, Avice became the simile "the girl who ate whatever was given to her.") As human society, Ariekei society, and the relations between them break down, several people Avice knows well declare themselves to be revolutionary leaders with conflicting goals.

Author China Mieville handles this intricate plot extremely well, even the difficult interweaving of past- and present-time chapters. He beautifully evokes societies very different from ours by only gradually revealing relevant details. He simply omits to describe aspects of human society irrelevant to the plot, and (the many) aspects of Ariekei society unknown to Avice. The book would be improved by better physical descriptions of the characters. The Ariekei merely come across as vaguely insectoid, and Mieville never mentions whether humans have changed in this far future with highly sophisticated biotech. The book's main flaw is its bloodlessness. Avice supposedly loves Scile enough to forsake her career as an immerser and to return to a hometown she had longed to escape. Yet their relationship seems cold and distant throughout. Her complicated affair with CalVin results in emotional and political betrayals, yet comes across merely as a plot convenience. But overall, Embassytown is a fine work of hard science fiction.

Avice is an immerser, a person who flits between worlds by sailing the immer, the strange sea of time and space that underlines our own. To satisfy his curiosity, she takes her new husband to see her homeworld of Arieka, where the native Hosts communicate in a language unlike any other known to humanity and only specially-trained, genetically-engineered humans can talk to them. But back home in Embassytown she discovers that a new Ambassador has arrived, one with a different way of speaking to the Ariekei Hosts...one that may shatter their way of existence and endanger the human population of the planet.

Embassytown is China Mieville's eighth novel and his first science fiction book. This shouldn't be taken to mean that Mieville has dramatically moved away from his traditional fare: this is very much still in the weird vein he is known for. Arieka is a world of uncanny bio-technology where farms and factories are living creatures, whilst the Hosts are an utterly alien, difficult-to-comprehend species whose thought and speech processes are totally different to that of humanity. Even Mieville's take on hyperspace - the immer - is a place where strange and bizarre things can happen. In Mieville's SF novel the usual SF trappings - spaceships, FTL travel, futuristic weapons - are given his typical weird spin, but it wouldn't be hard to re-set the novel on a remote part of Bas-Lag or in another fantastical milieu.

What does make Embassytown SF is its take on the idea of language. The notion of one species trying to talk to another when their reference frames, histories, backgrounds and ways of life may be completely different is a difficult and challenging one, but also something that SF has usually papered over with a universal translator or the like. Here the difficulties of communication between two different species are studied in depth. The Hosts can only understand language when there is sentient thought motivating it: they cannot understand recordings in their language, nor can they communicate with AIs. They also can only think in terms of the truth: the notion of lying is something so foreign to them that they can only barely grasp how it is done, though a few individual Ariekei boldly try to become liars themselves, giving rise to the vividly-described Festival of Lies that Avice encounters at one point in the book. This discontinuity is a minor weak point in the novel: if the Hosts can lie, even with difficulty, than over the course of millions of years they should have developed the ability to do so more freely. If they can't lie at all, than the climax of the book (which is a tad predictable) is impossible. Them being only able to lie with human intervention does open up some interesting questions about inadvertent colonialism, however, that are almost certainly intentional.

Mieville makes his aliens truly alien, so the only way to communicate with them is to make the human Ambassadors partly alien themselves through genetic engineering. Ambassadors are twins who are raised to think and act as one as a way of duplicating the Hosts' duality-based language. This in turn makes them something different to ordinary humans although, as is revealed several times throughout the narrative, not as different as perhaps first appears. This gives rise to an interesting parallel where humans have to alter themselves to talk to the Ariekei, bu the Ariekei cannot conceive of altering themselves to talk to humans...at least not until that decision is made for them, unwittingly, by the arrival of a new Ambassador.

The book is a slow burn, with the opening half focused on exploring Avice's childhood (during which she is chosen by the Ariekei to become a living simile, a walking and talking embodiment of their language) and background before the action focuses on what is going on in Embassytown in the present. Whilst there is a major crisis in the book, one that leads to violence and a loss of life on an epic scale, Embassytown's writing is focused, intelligent and even quiet. The writing style is more like the pared-back City and The City rather than the chaotic Un Lun Dun and Kraken (the former enjoyably so, the latter rather more sloppily), which is a plus for me.

There are big events with major ramifications going on, but Avice is much more of a passive observer of events than an active protagonist, only stepping up to this role quite late on in the novel. This results in a lot of major plot movements happening off-page (several times Avice arrives on the scene of an important, game-changing event just after it's happened) and only being explained later on. This could be slightly frustrating, but in Mieville's hands it's a well-executed inversion of the more traditional (and implausible) format where the narrator is at the centre of every major event in the book. Here Avice is playing just one role in a larger cast, and we don't always get to see what everyone else is up to.

Avice herself is a well-defined but not entirely sympathetic protagonist. She's a bit of a snob, frankly, and invokes her travels to other worlds as an explanation for why she thinks she's better than everyone else. This results in amusing passages where Avice is frustrated because she's not involved at the centre of events. From her POV, she should be, but of course from the POV of the people running Embassytown there's no reason why she should. This frustration becomes more acute when the input of Avice's new husband, a linguistics expert, becomes more valued by the government than Avice's own contribution. It's a solid bit of characterisation that makes Avice more of a plausible protagonist at the risk of making her unlikable, though I think Mieville avoids that pit trap. The other characters in the book are mostly well-defined (especially Avice's robotic best friend and the half-Ambassador Bran), though the limited POV structure means we don't get to know them as well as characters in some of his other books.

Overall, Embassytown (****½) is a formidably intelligent exploration of language, colonialism and communication, not just between humans and invented aliens but between people and people. It raises interesting questions, doesn't give pat answers, and entertains along the way. It's not Mieville at his best, but it's certainly a strong novel and an interesting take on the traditional tropes of science fiction. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

This book begins like a traditional science fiction novel, with a self-deprecating space-adventuring narrator, Avice, who doesn't take herself too seriously (think Hans Solo in Star Wars), returning to her home town on a planet at the very end of known space. She sprinkles her story with unfamiliar terms and words, much as Anthony Burgess does in A Clockwork Orange, and, as in that book, most of the meanings gradually become clear. So far, so good.

The natives of the planet have a language unique in the known universe, one that only a few especially-altered human Ambassadors can speak. And then a new Ambassador arrives from off-world, whose speech causes a violent disruption of the fragile balance between the natives and the humans. Avice is thrown into the middle of the conflict, of course.

From here on the book departs wildly from the familiar science fiction realm. Goodness, it's really about language, and how it can affect thought patterns and even ways of life. It's about the signifier and the signified. It's about semiotics. It's science fiction for the graduate-school crowd.

Traditional science fiction often provides purely escapist reading: grand adventure stories in deep space/alternative universe settings. Mieville takes this and adds a big dose of philosophy and scholarship. If I knew more about language development and so forth I might be even more impressed, or I might be struck by the shallowness of his ideas. As it is, I just found the book fascinating.

Reading China Mieville's novel Embassytown had somewhat of the same effect on me that reading Asimov's The Gods Themselves or Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land did. It's a powerful story of humans living at the edge of the known universe, in a distant future, on a planet where the native inhabitants, the Hosts, have a totally different form of Language. Hosts can only communicate with specially modified and trained human pairs called Ambassadors. Hosts also have highly modified biotechnology -- their buildings, vehicles, and everything else are partly living and partly mechanical. The main character is Avice, an immerser, a rare individual capable of traveling the "immer," something which vaguely resembles other FTL travel systems in SF such as what the Guild Navigators do in Dune (minus Spice). Mieville's story really becomes interesting when a new Ambassador, EzRa, arrives from "the out," and his style of speaking Language causes a new and disturbing reaction among the Hosts. What follows is truly mind-expanding for the reader, and a unique novel of the interaction between our human descendants and a fundamentally different alien race. While this novel really made me think about the essential nature of communication, I lowered my rating by one star only because the middle section seemed to drag a bit.

I've always loved China Mieville's books. This is probably the purest sci-fi novel I've seen from him to date, and he pulls it off as nicely as all his other novels. I especially liked the way that things weren't explained explicitly to the reader. The book was written very much as if Avice, the narrator, were writing it for her contemporaries. The types of space travel, the different aliens, the Terre (Human) politics, and so forth were all treated as common knowledge. Through the opening sections all of this is discussed obliquely so the reader can pick up most of it as he goes. That sort of writing style has always appealed to me for sci-fi and fantasy novels.

The main theme of the book is language. It's beauty and power are shown again and again. Being a professional interpreter, this pushed a lot of my buttons. There's a bit of Orwell in some of this, too. The natives the humans interact with on this planet, called Hosts, are incapable of lying. They also need to bring certain things into being reality before they can properly speak or think of them. Their language limits what they can think or imagine, much as ours does, but as we can't see our own limitations in this area, Mieville has created a 350 page simile to let us think it. I just looked that over; I think it makes more sense if you've read the book.

There were two things that detracted from the book for me. The first thing is pretty simple, the middle section dragged a bit. The second is maybe a bit weirder and perhaps unique to me. Every time I read one of the words he used for the alien planet and its beings (Arieka, Ariekei, etc.) the first thing to come to mind was Frank Herbert and Arrakis. I doubt Mieville intended to bring that to mind, but there it was for me. It pulled me out of the story more than once. I know there is bound to be some similarity in 'alien' terms eventually by random chance, but Arrakis seems like one of those that should probably be avoided. It would be like creating a race of creatures, naming them Ewox or Hoblits, and not expecting it to cause some confusion.

Still, on the whole this is a fantastic book, with a great plot, told by a master. I highly recommend it.

Avice Benner Cho grew up in Embassytown on the planet Ariekei, located on the outer reaches of the well-travelled paths between stars. She left, visiting other worlds to escape her unremarkable home life. She returns wiser and takes up a life of parties, gossip and pointed cleverness. It is no coincidence that she has returned to a time of change.

The Hosts who inhabit Ariekei are tauntingly alien. It isn't just their appearance. Each has two speaking mouths which create Language by talking simultaneously. Language--you can hear the capitalization--has its own oddities. Hosts cannot speak lies and cannot understand Language unless it is spoken by a sentient being. This means no voice recorders, no speech synthesizers, no radios--and presumably no parrots or talking children's toys. Human Ambassadors and selected and trained in pairs, and then linked together with implant tech into a single ambassador that can speak the two-voice Language of the Hosts.

Hosts who want to speak a new simile must first cause it to happen in the physical world. They can then refer to this event as they speak Language. Humans who participate in such events find they have become a part of Language, often with unusual obligations to those who speak it. After a mysterious childhood experience, Avice becomes the simile "The Girl Who was Hurt in Darkness and Ate What was Given to Her." The author uses this cultural backdrop to explore the nature of Language. Tension is created when some Hosts begin changing Language to make lying possible. And we discover what happens when the two halves of an Ambassador speak Language that is subtly out of sync.

This highly imaginative book examines language, identify and what it can mean to be understood. It is highly recommended to readers of thoughtful science fiction. The simultaneous nature of Language comes through particularly well in the audiobook version. It has a haunting, musically alien sound which emphasizes both its strangeness and the familiarity of its blended syllables. An impressive effect. Those unfamiliar with China Mieville's fiction might prefer to start with Perdido Street Station as an introduction to his style.

With this book, China Mieville proves he has one of the most original voices in modern American literature. Of course, to the casual observer, the weird aliens, strange technology and bizarre geography that form the surface of most science fiction seem original, but the truth is that a lot of scifi is hackneyed and repetitive. There are no new stories, only retreads of a few standard plots that regularly make the rounds. Humanity is always right, the bad guy will get his comeuppance, and the hero will get the girl. And not to nit pick, but the linguist in me often wonders why every alien we encounter magically speaks American English, or has a translator gizmo that has no problem figuring out a new lexicon in a matter of hours (and this is worse on TV or in the movies, where the Magic Translator often figures things out within minutes or even seconds).

Not so in Embassytown. The humans living on this backwater world at the far edge of the galaxy know they are only there at the sufferance of the native beings, but due to a language barrier, they don't know much more than that. The aliens of the planet Ariekei are so different from humans, think so differently, see life from such a different angle, that communication with them is nearly impossible, even after many generations. Mieville unfolds his story bit by bit, so that the reader has an impartial understanding of what is actually going on, just as do all of the characters in the book. The true depth of the misunderstanding unfolds slowly, but each revelation is fascinating and makes the reader yearn to learn more about the mysterious Hosts.

I don't want to say more because it might give away too much. I want to acknowledge that I listened to this as an audio book read by Susan Duerden. Her narration was wonderful, and included some excellent sound effects that helped me "hear" what the Ariekei Language *might* sound like.

Melville definitely strayed far off the usual SF beaten paths with this book.

He proposes a radically different type of language, that in fact deeply alters how its users think. Kudos for inventiveness and for the daring to make that central to a plot. I am not totally convinced by the logic of it either but there are some scientists who think human intelligence co-evolved with language and was enabled by it so it's far from a silly idea.

On top of that he layers, as he usually does, a society and city that is totally strange, with weird habits and customs, even amongst the humans. Like The City and The City, we get some Kafka-esque rules and customs that make no sense. Finally, we get the aliens who are way more advanced than the humans, using strange tech and are about as alien as anything I've read of in SF. There is also the outline of a larger human universe that I would love him to come back to. As usual his English is fun and intriguing.

These are the good points. And they are really, really, good, if you want to think deeply about the concepts he presents.

On the other hand, I wasn't really fascinated by the plot. Once presented the problem of alien addiction is intriguing, even if the final resolution for it seems a bit rushed. But there is too much coverage of the period of trouble, without much really happening that is worthwhile in that time. And, yes, as someone else said, it is deeply disturbing and depressing. Without much suspense, in my opinion. So the latter parts of the book disappoint, after a pretty impressive start.

In many ways, this is a "thinking woman's" (or man's) SF. If you are ready to think deeply about what he means by the language, you'll be richly rewarded. If, like me, you find his constant emphasis on Language tedious and perhaps unconvincing, you won't enjoy this book so much.

It feels to me like it deserved a 4 star, but at the same time, I did not enjoy reading it that much, so I am giving it a 3. I'd prefer 3.5/5 but that's not an option. Maybe that's more my fault than the book's fault, but so be it. Still, a worthwhile book by a really good author - well worth your time if the subject matter appeals to you and perhaps even if it doesn't.

This is science fiction. It has all the elements of such. But, it is much more as well. It's about people, some human, some not. But mainly it is about communications. Those communications take place between and within different groups - and the groups can be very different.

Mieville knows how to tell a story and write quite well. That has been proven by his previous books. Embassytown continues that practice. His take on different intelligent life-forms sharing a planet is quite unique. His assessment that people will be people is, of course, true. And it will continue to be true far into the future.

There are parallels to be drawn from human exploration and conquest here on Earth. The author is quite inventive and gives his characters and story an intelligence that made me do some deep thinking many times. The mental effort ranged from questions about meaning to those about how I would act in similar situations.

Don't plan on starting this without having time to read a bunch of pages. You won't want to stop before you finish. If you are a Mieville fan, you'll want to grab this one. If not, why not read this and become a fan.

Masterpiece is not a word I bandy about. Very, very few novels I've read reach this level - even fewer contemporary works.

Where to start? Mieville's style is unlike anything else you will ever read. And, that is a very, very good thing.

Embassytown's entire concept is strikingly unique in its conception and execution. However, it can feel initially off-putting and a tad frustrating. For example, the scenes move right along with seemingly little explanation, and you may want more details. Immer? What's that? The Manchmal? What is cleaved? These sort of things have to, no, must be tolerated. Roll with it! - Mieville is not going to spoon-feed you. Rather, by not spelling out every detail on a third-grade level, Mieville gets you to think about the story, and therein lies the beauty! In thinking about it, Embassytown sparks the imagination, giving a sense of wonder. There is plenty of intellectual 'grist for the mill', but no abandonment to the opaque decay and shiftiness of overambitious Sci-Fi. No techno babble or cheap literary sleight-of-hand. The story stays grounded. It is very human.

Embassytown may seem confusing initially, but persevere! - your questions will not go unanswered for long, and you won't be left hanging. Everything comes together exactly as it should, when is should. Mr. Mieville constructs a world so absorbing, masterful, nuanced and subtly effective it is simply astounding. The intellectual sustenance is certainly there. Character development is there. Atmosphere, plot, pacing, prose, challenging concepts, new ideas - all there.

In short, like "Perdido Street Station", "Embassytown" takes a bit of, well, concentration. But, I can promise you this: Time spent absorbing and becoming "immersed" in this work will leave you feeling good and bad: Good, because Embassytown will be one of the absolute best Sci-Fi novels you will ever read. Bad, because Embassytown will become the one Sci-Fi work against which all others will be judged. Indeed, the bar Embassytown sets is very high.

Its scary to have high expectations. More often than not you end up devastated but I am happy to say this is not one of those instances. China Mieville has exceeded all my expectations and come up with the most unique book that I have ever read. Embassytown is a science fiction novel that is at once a thriller and a treatise in linguistics and as usual Mieville takes on a genre and turns it on its head.
This is at its core a study of language albeit one carried in so thrilling a manner that I hardly paused while reading Embassytown. Imagine there are aliens, of course they have means to communicate with themselves but for them everything is as is, their language does not have a concept of abstraction. They cannot lie and make things up so to speak. What they say has to be the truth. Mieville takes this simple idea and stretches it to its absolute limits, building a world, a system of space travel that is incredibly well realized.
The writing is just magnificent. The way Mieville chooses his words and the way he skillfully he shows and hides the physical characteristics of the aliens teasing the imagination of the reader. The way the first words of the novel prepare you for the ride ahead.
At one point of time I was so engrossed in reading this book that I was shocked when someone called out for me. This book is going to win all sorts of awards and this review does not do it justice. A work of pure unadulterated genius and an absolute masterclass.
"The word must communicate something (other than itself)."

This novel spent an inordinate amount of time describing a genuinely different perspective for science fiction. That is not a compliment. The author could have gone a hundred different directions to make this a novel to stand out, except he chose...language. It turned a neat concept into a boring and dull dredge. I would not recommend this to anyone unless they enjoy silly romance titles.