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.
3.9 out of 5 based on 8 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Science Fiction & Fantasy |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
432 |
| RRP |
£17.99 |
| Date of Publication |
April 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0230750760 |
| Publisher |
Macmillan |
| |
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.
KRAKEN by China Miéville
THE CITY AND THE CITY by China Miéville
Reviews
The Daily Telegraph
Roger Perkins
"... he lays out a stall of riches, spectacularly exploring how revolutions work, the limits of language, messages, media and the fluidity of friendship ... It’s easy to tire of linguistic pyrotechnics and its eagerness to impress with intellectual achievement, but the only people who will feel hacked off with Miéville’s semiological complexity are the typesetters. "
11/05/2011
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The Times
Lisa Tuttle
"This is a serious, thought-provoking, idea-driven novel. It’s also playful, politically acute, complex, stylish and the best fictional take on linguistics since Ian Watson’s The Embedding. It’s not an easy read, but it’s worth it."
04/06/2011
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The London Review of Books
Sam Thompson
"By asking us constantly to imagine surreal transformations, bizarre bodies and impossible architectures, Miéville confronts us, sentence by sentence, with the spectacle of language representing what can’t exist. Far from inviting the lazy genre reader to sink, unreflecting, into the tale, ‘the weird’ insists we pay attention to the unbridgeable distance between words and what they stand for."
16/06/2011
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The Guardian
James Purdon
"The originality of Embassytown arises partly from its fusion of two traditions in which the complicity of language and power has been examined and worked through with particular urgency. The first, of course, is science fiction, and here Miéville earns his place in the long line of politically oriented writers – Orwell, Burgess, Delany, Lessing – who have made art out of the divide between their own language and an imagined idiom. The other is post-colonial fiction, with its reformations and repudiations of the languages imposed by foreign power."
20/05/2011
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The Financial Times
James Lovegrove
"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"
29/04/2011
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The Scotsman
Stuart Kelly
"With each book Miéville becomes more and more ambitious, with a profusion of ideas and images on each page that makes other contemporary books look thin and reductive ... Embassytown is his least ostensibly and most intrinsically political book."
26/04/2011
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The Guardian
Ursula K Le Guin
"The story, at first a bit hard to follow, very soon attains faultless impetus and pacing. If Miéville has been known to set up a novel on a marvellous metaphor and then not know quite where to take it, he's outgrown that, and his dependence on violence is much diminished. In Embassytown, his metaphor – which is in a sense metaphor itself – works on every level, providing compulsive narrative, splendid intellectual rigour and risk, moral sophistication, fine verbal fireworks and sideshows, and even the old-fashioned satisfaction of watching a protagonist become more of a person than she gave promise of being."
07/05/2011
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The Literary Review
Keith Miller
"There's a case for such inventiveness, to be sure: better too many ideas than too few ... But too many of the ideas in Embassyown seems to lack any wide revelance beyond Embassytown; in the end, it produces a feeling of being trapped in someone else's dream.
"
01/07/2011
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