Book review
Written by China Miéville
Pan Macmillan hardback
Release date 6 May 2011

Avice Benner Cho returns to her home world of Arieka. Humans and 'The Hosts’ peacefully co-exist on the planet, even if the genetically-engineered Ambassadors are the only ones who can speak the Hosts’ language. But after the arrival of a new Ambassador, the peace comes under threat…

From the oppressive weird of the Bas Lag novels to the playful deconstruction of Un Lun Dun, and from the slick crime procedural of The City and the City to the sprawling, strange comedy of Kraken, China Miéville travels a landscape fecund with ideas and vocabulary, unrestrained by borders of genre. His latest sojourn brings him to science fiction with Embassytown.

Embassytown is a concept-driven story that doesn't get bogged down with its own world-building or fetishise the tech that crops up on the world of Arieka. The various spaceships, body augmentation, robots and distant colonies provide set dressing only – this is a science fiction novel where language, not technology, holds centre stage.

The first half of the novel slowly reveals the strangeness of the human diaspora as it has spread through space, and in particular how humans live and operate on Arieka. This is a human culture far removed both geographically and structurally. Embassytown itself is a peculiar corner of a city where humans are set apart not just by locale, but by language, conceptual thought and the very air itself. Miéville ably sets up both the status quo of the colonists and the personal journey of Avice before the coming cataclysm in series of flashbacks.

Avice Benner Cho is a tough, smart and widely travelled protagonist, with a distant calm that sometimes put her at odds with the escalating danger of the novel. If Embassytown has a flaw it is that Avice is so self-assured that her personal safety seems remote and somehow removed.

Embassytown is not a wham-bam bang-for-your buck sci-fi tale that’s just waiting to be repurposed for the multiplex. It is a deeply considered and meticulously crafted story about the words we use and how they drive our thinking. This much is evident in the way Miéville eschews rigorous description, instead favouring evocative yet ambiguous language, never telling readers much directly, but letting them conjure their own version of Arieka and the Hosts. Den Patrick

VERDICT: 8/10
There will, undoubtedly, be a small core of readers who resent the breadth of vocabulary used in Embassytown, thinking Miéville performs wordsmith acrobatics for extra points. But as the man himself says: "I like words."