I just finished listening to the audiobook of Embassytown. My wife really enjoys audiobooks and I thought that I’d give the format a try. Suffice it to say that I didn’t enjoy the audiobook experience, or Embassytown, or both. I’m normally a Mieville fan, although I like his Bas-Lag stuff better than The City and the City or Kraken. For some reason this book didn’t have that Mieville ‘feel’ for me; although it tried to put forth some interesting ideas it really didn’t grab me in that ‘eerie’ way that his other books have.
I’m wondering if anyone else has read it…
Here be spoilers:
[spoiler] I just couldn’t get behind the conceit of a race that couldn’t lie or think outside of Language until they really, really needed to, at which point they almost all could with the right effort. Mieville spends a lot of ink relaying how the Ariekei may not even be sentient in the way we think of it, since in some unexplained way speaking, hearing, and thinking are all of a piece for them. Except it kind of isn’t, since when some of them tear off their organs of hearing they can still reason, and can now have abstract thoughts. That would be neat in and of itself, but then you have some of the non-maimed Ariekei who can do the same thing through mental effort. That seems like spending much of the book talking about how slowly humans are forced to run due to our biology, and then at the end there’s some human who learns to run at 100 mph and can teach the technique to just about everyone. And some people who cut off their legs can run 100 mph as well. The crisis with the approaching army of absurd didn’t provide a palpable sense of threat, and the Embassytowner’s ignorance of everything outside of their enclave was baffling.
There were some really interesting ideas that were either overemphasized or underemphasized, IMO; the whole immer/manchmal thing got a lot of play but didn’t really amount to much; the advanced AI/android who disappeared for a lot of the book; the weirdness of the Ambassadors who, while supposedly nearly identical in thoughts, actually didn’t get along with themselves. Characters seemed to change personalities, etc. etc.
I don’t know; it’s one of the rare times that I’ve ‘read’ a book and thought that it should have been edited better. But then again as I said I was fighting against the audiobook format and it may have colored my perceptions. Kind of meta, no? [/spoiler]
I’ve not read it yet but interested to hear your take. I think he needs to chill. He could write the most moumental SF of his generation but he’s knocking out too many interesting but flawed efforts at the moment. A man needs to eat but come on - there’s a legacy to think of.
Reminds me a bit of Bonnie Prince Billy (the singer) in that respect. Stop putting out a (quite good) album a year, take some time off and get it together.
ETA I think he lost his way a bit with Iron Council not working out. Great effort but a bit muddled, so was good to take a break. Maybe time to pick up the threads of Bas-Lag again.
Busy Scissors, I agree about Iron Council as well. My favorite book of his by far is The Scar, followed by Perdido Street Station. I think the best aspect of those books is that they convey a deep sense of strangeness, of the uncanny, along with their political messages. Iron Council got close, I think, but was overloaded with the whole uprising of the proletariat business. I read Mieville for his glorious weirdness, not for his politics. I admire him for trying to break away from the Tolkienoid paradigm of fantasy fiction with its endless iterations of dragons, dwarves, elves, and orcs, though.
More spoilers for Embassytown:
[spoiler]When I read a book, I try to read the book in front of me and not the book that I think should have been written, but I had a lot of trouble doing that with this book. There are the germs of so many great ideas here, almost all of which I thought were handled badly. For instance, the Ariekei’s weird ability/requirement to perceive a mind behind Language makes no sense in that they don’t understand machine-synthesized Language but do understand audio recordings of Ambassadors. Why not have an Ambassador pre-record one voice and then speak the other voice over playback? I guess that that comes down to magic. But I wanted to hear about aliens for whom speech and thought and hearing are really the same thing; you can’t think without speaking and, in some feedback loop, hearing your own voice. Laryngitis would becomes a form of brain damage, affecting not only the characteristics of the speech but the quality of the thoughts spoken. Perhaps the Ariekei bodies are intelligent in a way that is separate from the speaking parts of their minds, like humans with separated right and left brain hemispheres. Perhaps Ariekei interpret the voices of others as their own thoughts, like anti-schizophrenics.
At any rate, I was frustrated by the fact that the Ariekei were sketched out in such a tantalizing way and then the rest of the novel felt as though it were devoted to an English major’s masturbatory treatise on the power of metaphor. I must admit, the more that I think about this book the less satisfied I am with it. [/spoiler]
ETA: I’d like to have my neighbor, the PhD linguist, read the book and try to make some sense of it for me, but I’m afraid that he would hate it and lose respect for me.
Interesting–my three favorite Mieville novels (and I rank him among my all-time favorite authors) are, in no particular order, Perdido Street Station, The City and the City, and Embassytown. To respond to what you write:
Part of what delighted me about the book was the way the Ariekei slowly became aware of their limits and worked against them. Your analogy to running doesn’t quite work for me: it more seems as if humans can’t comprehend five-dimensional reality, but then something happens that starts to infect our world with fifth-dimensional effects–say, an addiction to the appearance of a color that only manifests in fifth-dimensional reality–and so we must find a way to understand fifth-dimensional reality, and act within it, before we all die. In other words, the Ariekei’s use of language was hard-coded in their brains, but they found a way to write code around those hard-coded sectors.
It’s definitely among the best SF I’ve read in many years, right up there with Spin.