Embassytown

As I promised a 'blot' on Embassytown on Twitter recently - so here goes....

I'm profoundly grateful to my wonderful wife, Bryndís, for giving me The City and the City by China Miéville a while back, as a gift for the Icelandic 'holiday' - 'husbandsday' (Bóndadagur). Since then I've been working my way through his work; King Rat and Iron Council and now Embassytown. Miéville is the definite master of fantasy writing now, and with Embassytown he emerges as a fully fledged sf author too. In my mind he now assumes a position right up there with le Guin.

Embassytown is a true incredible absoloutely mind blowing masterpiece. It is a study in semiotics, frontier politics, colonialism, machine psychology and cyborg culture. His aliens are so wonderfully alien, and his mind blowing conception of the dual Language, 'cut and turn'. The basic idea is an alien race that speaks only the Truth. They cannot lie - these are the Ariekei, or 'Hosts' - the story takes place in Embassytown which is an outpost of Bremen and functions as a go-between for commerce with the Hosts. The humans have managed to create dual persons - 'ambassadors' who can actually speak Language, one of them speaking Cut the other Turn (confused yet?) .... they have such interesting names as EdGar, and SibYl. When the two have sex it is considered masturbation....

Then of course, as is wont in such tales, trouble arrives.... but I'm not going to spoil that.

To make it even more interesting this is the central idea, but it is framed by the concept of Immer. Now for example le Guin invented the 'ansibil' which is a device which you can use to communicate instantaneously from any two points in the Universe. The Immer is similar, except you can travel through it and arrive in places extremely far apart in the normal physical sense.... Embassytown is on the outskirts of the known Immer, and is thus a frontiertown and discoveries further of await at the end of the book, which could easily be followed up.

Miéville is fascinated by dual realities (The City and the City, omg) - and words like 'non-place' and 'cross-hatching' crop up all over his ouevre. I suggest to anyone interested in stretching their mind and imagination - plus anyone with a nerdy obsession with the philosophy of language to read Embassytown - the best place to start is The City and the City (no aliens there, and the weirdness is very very weird, while not supernatural or alien in nature, just, well really weird, I could do a little blog on that but not now.)