Another Hugo Update . . . Miéville For The Win!

Who's Gonna Win the Hugo?  This Guy . . . 

It says it on the cover: "A fully achieved work of art."  These are Ursula K. Le Guin's words, and I have a hard time thinking of someone better qualified to make that sort of pronouncement.  Moreover, China Miéville reads a bit like Le Guin at her best.  I don't mean to compare the two, but that same sense that the author is doing something truly original not only with the story but with the bounds of language itself.  

Because Embassytown is a story about language.  About what it means to relate meaning through simulacra, these noises that we emit and, arbitrarily and through common use, agree actually have meaning.  Much of the story revolves around Avice, a human woman who has become a simile in the language of the Arikenes, the indigenes of strange alien world where the village of Embassytown has been constructed.  In this alien tongue, only two things are immediately apparent--they cannot lie and they cannot understand us.

In order to facilitate communication, the Arikene (or Hosts, as the story calls them) enact elaborate rituals to create new ideas.  Avice, the protagonist, is a particularly useful simile.  Notorious for being the only member of this society to have ever left and returned to the godforsaken hinterland, she bears the fame of her similification uneasily, especially when she realizes that she has created a paradox within the Host society that may very well tear it apart.

Finally, human beings have reached a partial solution to the communication breakdown.  The solution, however, requires human cloning, techno-pyschic pair-bonding, and psychological training to allow two individuals to think--and then speak--with the same mind.  These pair-bonded individuals provide the vital link between the human colonists of this world and the alien indigenes, whose cooperation and largess they require to make any sort of life there.

Then something unexpected happens, and the very fabric of their society is torn apart.

If that last sentence sounds a bit melodramatic, that's because it is; but it's hard to express the sudden turn that Miéville weaves into the narrative without divulging much of what makes the book so unique.  Because the sudden and terrifying arrival to their society is not all that terrifying.  The world itself changes so that you can divide the book easily into before and after.  This is the type of dramatic turn that is both unexpected and deeply satisfying, because it is both internally consistent with the fictional world that he has created, and subtle enough that you probably didn't see it coming--yet nonetheless had to have been.

Embassytown isn't as abstruse as some of Miéville's earlier works, especially Perdido Street Station and The Scar.  Some of the flair and gusto is gone, leaving a stripped-down story comprised of pure characterization and plot, and the bare essentials of world-building.  Don't get me wrong, what's there is pure Miéville and is all the more delightful for the economy with which he parses the world to the reader.

In the end though, Embassytown is a gentle meditation on language, both its limits and its potentially infinite variety; as such, it transcends genre expectations and revels in the delight of fine storytelling.