Aliens on The Planet – China Mieville’s New Science Fiction Novel Embassytown Reviewed!

Fanboys and girls of the superlative contemporary fantasy writer China Miéville’s got anticipation amplified as he has finally released an exciting new novel that again tests the genre-bending waters. Pegged as an experimental foray into science fiction, Miéville launches us into universal orbit with Embassytown, a place in the far future that becomes a precipice for beauty, mystery and terror.

Narrated by sprightly ‘Immerser’ Avice Benner Cho, a human gifted with the capability of travelling through the sub-realities of the universe without severe physiological and psychological peril, she provides a bizarre and engaging head trip for the uninitiated, with insights in her seemingly normal but extraordinary life, and of the surroundings and inhabitants of Embassytown and beyond. Embassytown is a human colony in the planet Arieka, with Ariekei natives known as the Hosts, an alien race that has a method of speech so impregnable that there are a distinct few humans modified and trained as Ambassadors to speak their language and maintain a peaceful and bountiful co-habitation. Everything is utopian for a predictable time, with a catch that the Hosts “cannot speak about something unless it is true and it has happened”… until one Host learns to lie. All this happens while political machinations send a new Ambassador to Arieka, and this instance sets off a major imbalance in the system, because of the Ambassador rendering a powerful and catastrophic effect on the Hosts.

Miéville’s storytelling is effortless through his eloquent imagination (descriptions of objects, places and event almost leap off the page), the philosophical aspects he stylistically relays, as well as the “immersive” jargon of his sci-fi universe – measuring time by megahours and monthlings, and his play on linguistics with (crazy) words such as, for starters: corvid (ship), sopor (stasis) and manchmal (reality). The Hosts’ language leaves a lot to be discerned, but it is through Avice that their endangered existence finds a solution.