Embassytown

Embassytown, by China Miéville, Macmillan, RRP £17.99, 432 pages

Embassytown is China Miéville’s seventh novel and his most pure science fiction work to date. Up until now, the author has traded predominantly in urban fantasy. In his debut, King Rat, and in a later novel, Kraken, Miéville presented a vision of contemporary London layered with occult substrata. For his trilogy of novels, beginning with Perdido Street Station, he created a Dickensian metropolis teeming with different races and species.

These and other books have not only won Miéville many prizes, including the prestigious Arthur C Clarke award for best science fiction novel of the year no fewer than three times, but also brought him a wide audience among mainstream readers as well as genre fans. Miéville, whose exotic name belies an upbringing in Norwich and Willesden, combines in his writing rigorous intellectual high-mindedness with a sense of playfulness. He openly admires the tropes of science fiction and fantasy but also regards them as vectors for serious ideas and radical politics, and is one of a small but thriving band of British SF authors who see no reason why lightspeed spaceships shouldn’t tackle the same human questions that mainstream fiction has been dealing with for centuries.

In his new novel, set in the distant future, we are taken to another planet, in which the Embassytown of the title is a kind of citadel, a far-flung outpost of humanity perched within a larger city inhabited principally by an indigenous race called the Ariekei. Miéville describes the city’s quirks and interstices in typically loving detail. The Ariekei themselves remain more of a mystery, but they have learnt to rub along with the planet’s human population and a handful of other alien races.

Resembling a hybrid of winged insect and horse, the Ariekei have two mouths and converse using both at once. Theirs may be a double language, but the delicious irony is that everything they say has only one meaning; they cannot help but speak the truth and have no scope for duplicity or nuance.

Sets of human test-tube twins, known as Ambassadors, have been engineered to communicate with the Ariekei. Each Ambassador is fitted with technology that links their minds and allows them to vocalise in unison. Thus interspecies trade is possible and humans have access to, among other things, the Ariekei’s advanced biotechnological machinery.

However, through centuries of exposure to humankind, the Ariekei have begun developing the ability to dissemble and take the bizarre step of selecting ordinary humans to enact similes so as to enrich their language. By making a person perform a banal act – a man goes for a swim with fish once a week, for example – the Ariekei can then incorporate descriptions of these actions into their vocabulary, adding new levels of imagery and shades of meaning that permit them to say what they don’t mean as well as what they do.

Avice Benner Cho is selected to become one such simile as a child, and, although we are not told all the details, we learn she is made to eat something that causes her pain. It’s an uncomfortable and degrading experience which nonetheless earns her the admiration of the Ariekei. We then follow Avice as she grows up and leaves Embassytown to become a pilot in the “immer”, a kind of subspace ocean that permits relatively easy faster-than-light travel between worlds.

Returning home with a husband in tow, Avice learns that a new Ambassador is due to arrive in the city. It soon becomes apparent that this conjoined pair are not like the others. The Ariekei listen to them with rapt attention, becoming addicted to their dual voice as though to a drug. What with their junkie-like dependency on this pair of human clones and their new-found capacity for falsehood, the Ariekei are no longer the docile, compliant indigenes they once were. Conflict inevitably breaks out between human and alien, which both sides abhor but are powerless to prevent.

At this point Embassytown threatens to turn into a didactic parable about how contact with civilisation degrades and corrupts “primitive” cultures. Miéville, though, is smarter than that, and delights in wrongfooting us throughout. This is a novel about language – in particular Miéville’s love of language, evident in his use of neologisms and allusive derivations. His prose bristles with verbal invention and at moments verges on a sort of dense polyglot poetry: “The immer’s reaches don’t correspond at all to the dimensions of the manchmal, this space where we live. The best we can do is say that the immer underlies or overlies, infuses, is a foundation, a langue of which our actuality is a parole, and so on.”

But there is also an underlying theme of language as a means of social control. Words can bridge gulfs of understanding but can also, whether inadvertently or not, lead to tragic misunderstanding.

At times, Embassytown seems to be a linguistic thought-experiment more than anything, a book-length crossword clue to be decoded, its pleasures solely cerebral. But this is offset by pacey narrative action and sharp characterisation. What emerges from the wordplay and the exotic drama is an argument for tolerance: the alien, Miéville tells us, is not to be shunned but interpreted, empathised with and, where possible, embraced.

James Lovegrove is author of ‘The Age of Odin’ (Solaris)