Embassytown
Ratings145
Average rating3.8
Endlessly fascinating. As usual, the ideas and world-building tower over any character development, but this one has more of that than any other Mieville I've read, too. Highly recommended, especially if you have any interest in philosophy of language/mind, or interest in how class plays out in society.
This was really interesting intellectually but didn't grab me emotionally the way some of his other books (like “Kraken”) did. This is another one where the audio version is worth considering because spoken language is key to the story.
Pretty cool book but for whatever reason, it couldn't keep my attention. Abandoned, but it seems worth coming back to.
World-building in the first third really drew me in. Felt like a less-pristine Star Trek episode. I thought the main conflict, once it started, dragged on a little. Character motivations didn't feel strongly defined.
A fantastic story in a fantastic universe with fantastic things. Miéville again has proven that he can come up with some absolutely fantastic universe with fantastic things and an amazing story.
Highly recommended
Really quite excellent. Language shapes reality. A race that is genetically built to speak the truth, learns to lie. When communication demands the training of brain-link twins that act as ambassadors and translators of a two-tongue language.
I admire how Miéville takes you into this complex new world full of new terms and concepts without hand-holding. Same way you're supposed to learn a new language: By immersing yourself into it. No dictionaries :)
I picked this up because I was really excited to read a science fiction novel about linguistics, which is a topic that I think is fascinating and which is fairly underserved in the genre. This wasn't exactly that - it was more a look at the process of colonization, the impact that it has on the cultures of both the colonized and the colonizers, and the way that the colonizers exist in this in-between status where they gain cultural privilege over those that they colonize, while being relatively unprivileged and othered by their home culture. It gave me a lot to think about those topics, while still being entertaining as a story.
China Miéville has a knack for building worlds. Not only is he an expert at building them, but he can convince nearly anyone he has lived in these worlds. Miéville doesn't pause to explain his world or his knowledge of it, he just jumps right in and expects the reader to follow along. His perspective presents the nuances as one might expect from one truly familiar with this world. This is both impressive and potentially confusing.
This was my second Miéville—my first being The City & The City—and though the two books are very different from one another, certain commonalities exist. First, they are intelligent. Even without taking into account his extraordinary talents at world building, Miéville shows his intellect. Second, these worlds are unlike anything I've come across before. Even when it seems the author may be envisioning another well-known work, he veers off and does something completely different. Third, they can be confusing: miss one word, one implication, and you'll be scratching your head the rest of the novel trying to determine what is happening. And lastly—and this is where Miéville loses me—there is a great dependence on chaos and violence in the heart of these stories. It's almost as though the author needs to completely destroy these impressive worlds he's built before moving onto the next. The problem I have here is that Miéville writes chaos too well. Action scenes on top of action scenes on top of... I don't know what's going on anymore. The destruction, the insanity—I feel it, and maybe that's the intention, but I so wish I could see through the smoke and know what was happening.
I liked Embassytown. I liked the characterization, the insight, and the breathtaking scenery. I get the feeling I can walk away from any Miéville novel and know I'll be impressed. Though I don't have a crush on Miéville like so many others I know, I recognize his talents, particularly his god-like ability to create and destroy.
A really interesting book! At times hard to follow but some great ideas mixing language/communication and political/cultural co-operation taking place in the future in a far off world. Sometimes I felt certain characters or plot points were neglected at stages throughout the book, but most of that resolves as the story unfolds. I will definitely pick up more books by [a:China Miéville 33918 China Miéville https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1243988363p2/33918.jpg] in the future!
if i taught linguistics I would assign this book. it's pretty fantastic.
get in started is a little rough, but keep going, it's worth it.
A lot of people really liked this book, I wish I liked it more, but I just didn't. I admit, I didn't ‘get it', so that's probably the major issue for me. And it was a little on the boring side. This isn't the first Mieville I've read, and it won't be the last, but it's definitely my least favorite of all his novels. I know he's an excellent writer with great ideas, but this book just fell short for me.
I found this book very confusing. I know people who love it but I'm just not one of them. I almost gave up on it but I hate to do that. It seems to be about a group of people who don't understand language as we know it but it almost has to have two voices to speak it one for language one for feeling.
China Mieville, author of The City & The City (winner of the 2010 Hugo Award), returns with Embassytown, a novel of a staggering culture who's incapable of speaking lies. Mieville continues his unique story-telling in a way that only he can with this latest novel.
Synopsis for Embassytown:
Embassytown: a city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe. Avice is an immerser, a traveller on the immer, the sea of space and time below the everyday, now returned to her birth planet. Here on Arieka, humans are not the only intelligent life, and Avice has a rare bond with the natives, the enigmatic Hosts – who cannot lie. Only a tiny cadre of unique human Ambassadors can speak Language, and connect the two communities. But an unimaginable new arrival has come to Embassytown. And when this Ambassador speaks, everything changes. Catastrophe looms. Avice knows the only hope is for her to speak directly to the alien Hosts. And that is impossible.
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Embassytown
Pros: truly alien aliens, unique alien language, full immersion in alien world with little to no explanation/
Cons: because the books is told from the POV of an indifferent narrator you don't learn as much about the world/aliens as you'd like/
Avice Benner Cho grew up in Embassytown, escaped to the out for several years and was drawn back by her current husband's interest in the language of the indiginous life forms of Embassytown's planet, the Hosts or Ariekei. She doesn't realize how much her home town is about to change by the arrival of a new Ambassador from their governing world of Bremen. Ambassadors are usually made in Embassytown, and are the only ones with the talent to be understood by the Hosts. She's about to learn how little she truly understands about the Hosts, their world, and the politics of Embassytown./
The novel is told in two parts. The first alternates between her present situation, waiting to see the new Ambassador at his welcome party, and her past (childhood in Embassytown and how she became a simile for the Hosts, and her time in the immer where she met and married Scile, the man who convinces her to return to Emabassytown). The second part deals with the fallout of the new Ambassador's first speech./
This is the first of Mieville's novels I've read. It won't be the last. The writing is absolutely brilliant. He dumps you in the middle of an alien world filled with alien concepts, takes you into space using undescribed technology and expects you to figure out what's going on. A lesser author would have failed, leaving the reader fumbling to understand unexplained words and concepts. Not Mieville. There's no glossary and no translation except for the Host's speech, when required. Yet there's also little confusion beyond the first few times a word/concept is mentioned. Much of what he brings up is understood in context and it makes the world come to life in a way that feels real./
The Hosts and Ambassadors are fascinating and truly alien. If you like languages, as I do, then you'll enjoy the intricacies of thought that are played out with the truth of Language and the Hosts' festival of lies./
My only complaint is that Avice doesn't really like her home world, and so doesn't always tell you things that as a reader you want to know more about. And she ignores some of the more interesting intrigues the Embassy gets into. I wanted to learn more about Scile's theories about the Host Language and about the various Host factions and how their interests intersect with the power struggles of the Embassy./
From what I could tell (I'm no physicist and my knowledge of space travel is quite limited) the science isn't accurate, so hard SF fans may be annoyed by that. But the Host planet has an atmosphere unbreathable to humans, which is dealt with realistically./
If you like intelligent SF this is a fantastic book to pick up.
China Miéville loves to play with fantastic ideas and is one of the great writers of highly political sci-fi. His books are dotted with passages of pure genius. He seems to delight in practicing vocabulary words no one uses anymore which some of us find fun, though some will find it pretentious - like a little boy who has discovered a dictionary published a century ago.
In this case, he plays with ideas of language and the limits of communication when the traditional relationships between signs and their signified don't follow for an alien race. There are moments that this works and provokes thought, and there are other times where he doesn't follow through on how limited a world really would be if his radical propositions were followed consistently through to their impossible end.
It was an entertaining read, and always hope the next will live up to its potential.
Initially reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's [b:Anathem 2845024 Anathem Neal Stephenson http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1224107150s/2845024.jpg 6163095], Embassytown starts off as a fantastically interesting sci-fi story of a world where language is everything. As the book progresses, however, it becomes more and more conventional, to the point where the last 20% of the book is a marauding alien army that can only be stopped by an unexpected hero injecting a sudden change into the system of the world. It's like Independence Day, but without the Macs.
Initially reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's [b:Anathem 2845024 Anathem Neal Stephenson http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1224107150s/2845024.jpg 6163095], Embassytown starts off as a fantastically interesting sci-fi story of a world where language is everything. As the book progresses, however, it becomes more and more conventional, to the point where the last 20% of the book is a marauding alien army that can only be stopped by an unexpected hero injecting a sudden change into the system of the world. It's like Independence Day, but without the Macs.