China Miéville Embassytown

Science fiction as a genre has often had its stories steeped in allegory and metaphor. From the 1960s Star Trek to James Cameron’s Avatar, sci-fi narratives seeking to impart some greater meaning to their audience have been met with wild success, despite varying degrees of subtlety. In his novel Embassytown, author China Miéville takes this tradition and puts it to the side in lieu of running with it. A self-proclaimed “geek," Miéville has held a lifelong interest in the genres of science fiction and fantasy; an interest reflected in his works, with many of them bearing the genres of “weird fiction” or “New Weird”. While many of his highly acclaimed novels do have the marks of his politics, the award-winning Embassytown among them, in this

She is an Immerser, or traveller by way of the Immer—the dangerous, but faster traversed of the two planes of the universe. This idea remains relatively unexplored, but it serves mostly to bring her linguist husband Scile to Embassytown for plot-related reasons and to give her minor insights into various goings-on. Her more relevant ability is that she is a simile, a living figure of speech for the Hosts’ literal Languages—yes, with an uppercase ‘L’. It is this perspective as “the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her” that brings her into the plot. The Language of the Host is critical to in two ways. They have one mind and two mouths with which to speak and they cannot understand if Language—thoughts given verbal form, nothing more or less—is spoken by anyone or thing besides two living beings in exact mental synchronization. They cannot lie. Both of these things are known by the characters with utter

As a simile, Avice inhabits a gray area between the meaningless noise of most Terre and the clarity of Ambassadors. As the Hosts require that a thing be real before it can become a simile, she had to be hurt in the dark and then given food. Though the title gives her great prestige across multiple circles and is responsible for her meeting her husband Scile, she looks back upon it with the fondness expected of being treated like a thing. The Hosts, though revered by Embassytowners, are seen as inexplicable, limited by Language which does not allow them to express themselves fully. “Say it like a Host” is a And there is the horror of the Ambassadors who are not allowed individualism in any shape or form and what happens to them when they cannot or will not comply. Only when each of these are rejected can any progress be made, though they can never again be what they once were. This theme is nestled within the actual plot and can be acknowledged or left alone with no losses to show for it. Unfortunately, the same cannot always be said in other