China Miéville

Winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, China Miéville's astonishing Embassytown is an intelligent and immersive exploration of language in an alien world. 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.

Embassytown

Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist on a distant planet populated by the Ariekei, sentient beings famed for their unique language, returns to Embassytown after many years of deep space exploration to find she has become a living simile in the Ariekei language even though she cannot speak it, and she is torn by competing loyalties when hostilities erupt between humans and aliens.

** spoiler alert **
           Great book, mad premise, etc, but I think I missed exactly how she hurt and what she ate that was given to her and I wondered the whole book

Retaining a tenuous peace on a distant planet in the far future, humans and aliens work together through a mutually beneficial economic arrangement that is threatened by the arrival of a new group of humans that destabilizes the world's balance. By the Locus Award-winning author of The City & The City.

Natalie

Cindy Lieberman

Not sure why I had never read Mieville before now. I enjoyed this complex world as well as the focus on Language. 
One of the species inhabiting Embassytown is incapable of telling lies. They hold an annual festival to celebrate their failed attempts. But one individual has been practicing. 
Lying is a slippery slope, after all. Especially interesting to me are the author’s perspectives on how language develops. For example, a flower sways like it is dancing. The flower is dancing. Is that last statement true or a lie? Understanding and being able to use similes and metaphors is essential to developing a language that can communicate across species. 
That being said, this is a novel of politics, of class struggle, of subjugation and uprising. A bit of gory violence as a result. There is also travel and adventure, told through the eyes of a female human raised in an Embassytown creche, selected for a special assignment at a young age.

Robin M Cabana

I'm still not sure how I feel about this book. It's a crazy story about a futuristic, human society sharing on a planet with a strange alien race, but it's also all about language and communication. I was fascinated by this world that Mieville created. Embassytown is a colony run by clone ambassadors who are the only people who can communicate with the planet's native hosts. I really wish this book (or audiobook) came with drawings and a dictionary because I had a hard time conceptualizing what the Arieki looked like and how they communicated with two mouths and various wings, and understanding some of the invented terms that are used throughout the book. But the main character is a different breed - a woman born and raised in Embassytown who went out into the "out" (space) as an immerser (a sort of sailor/traveler/pilot). Avice, who has a strong link to the Arieki from her childhood, returns to Embassytown at a time when the whole world is about to be turned upside down. While she's a strong character, I felt like she was relating too much of the story instead of participating it. She recaps what's going on for the reader and it goes on for way too long. But when there's action, it's good stuff. I liked the audiobook version because it really helped in understanding the dual language of the Arieki and other strange words. And at the end there was also a shout out to one of the producers who I went to high school with!

Zoë Schaefer

The premise of this was fantastic, but the actual execution felt stilted and sterile. I think if I could have connected more with Avice and had a little more character-driven moments, I would have liked it a lot more. Spanish Dancer is awesome, though.

Luke Kanies

I deeply enjoyed this book but somehow still found it hard to motivate myself to read it. I kept finding myself mixed between loving it, and finding excuses to put it down.

It is a book of language and semantics, of individual and group change, and of exploring ideas in an alien planet set up perfectly for them.

I adore that there was no explanation, no narrator helping us to understand. We gain that only through experience, through reading the story.

I think the protagonist was sufficiently uninterested that it made me less interested, but the rest of it was better than that.

Jessica Smith

Harsh rating, I know. The main problem I had with Embassytown is that the first half was very slow, and I never really got sucked in like I did with Perdido Street Station which had a similar problem.

The world-building wasn't as intricate, even though it was pretty damn intricate compared to a lot of other fantasy/science fiction writers' works. The Ariekei in particular, despite being the centre of the book, are so underdeveloped. The reader ends up knowing nothing about their culture or social structures. This might have been because the narrator of the book is a part of the settler-colonial society, which (having parallels to the British Empire) doesn't care so much about the cultures of the colonised. But I still thought this aspect was pretty weak, a cop-out.

But I couldn't get very invested in the human characters, either. The only one who really tugged my heartstrings at any time was Vin, and only because (view spoiler)[he was so devastated that Avice hadn't been able to distinguish him, who loved her, from his doppel Cal, who had never even touched her in bed (as she afterwards realised) (hide spoiler)]. Avice was kind of cool in theory but didn't seem that way in practice. I spent most of the book desperately wishing it was about her travels through space instead of about her being stuck on this boring, conniving backwater. Those travels sounded more interesting. And her husband Scile was a dickhead too.

I guess this book is very interesting if you don't care to get emotionally invested in any characters and you just want to read about high-brow concepts (a "language" that has never developed the symbolic nature of the sign??? how) in an applied, fictional form. It wasn't for me, though. In this light, I'm not sure what Miéville I'll aim to read next; maybe Kraken. Once I've put a dent in what's already on my "to read" list, though!

Leafling

Everything about this book is perfect for me. It's about aliens and it is about language. Amazing. When I first started reading, though, some of it was hard to grasp because it jumped right into using alien world terminology. I'll do my best to explain the important/cool stuff about this book. Would it be easier to copy and paste the publisher's description? Entirely. But I like a challenge. And confusing people.

The main character is Avice Benner Cho, a traveler who eventually returns to her home planet, Arieka, right before a revolution. On this planet, humans and the indigenous Ariekei, or "Hosts", live more or less together. What's interesting about the Ariekei is just how alien they are physically and linguistically. They communicate through what is called Language. Each Host has two mouths that say different sounds at the same time to construct words. The humans figured this out, but when they took two people trying to reconstruct the language, the Hosts didn't even register that anyone was talking. Then they tried making a computer speak in Language. Still nothing, because what the Hosts need behind Language is sentience. Without a single mind behind the voices, the words are just noise. In order to communicate with the Hosts, the humans have to take twins at birth and raise them as one person, linking their minds together. They become ambassadors, whose sole job is to communicate with the Ariekei.

Another interesting thing about the Language and minds of the Ariekei is that they speak in similes referring to actual events and they cannot lie. That's what links Avice so strongly to these creatures. When she was younger, the Hosts turned her into a simile. She became a part of Language.

Got all that?

I don't want to say much more about the plot. A lot happens, all of it very fascinating and surprising. Maybe it's just me who does this, but I did what I could to prolong my reading of this book. I just did not want to leave the world the Mieville had created. It's so wildly original, and although I'm not used to hard sci-fi and it took me a while to get used to the world's terminology, it was well worth the time spent. Sometimes Mieville does some jumps back and forth in the plot, but I was able to stay interested in the story.

Mieville said, "if you are a writer who happens to be a human, I think it's definitionally beyond your ken to describe something truly inhuman, psychologically, something alien." He has a point, but I think he came incredibly close to creating something completely new, and a new favorite book of mine. 

Full review: http://outlandishlit.blogspot.com/201...

Retaining a tenuous peace on a distant planet in the far future, humans and aliens work together through a mutually beneficial economic arrangement that is threatened by the arrival of a new group of humans that destabilizes the world's balance.

Jay Carter

Lindy

Hannah Swithinbank

Melly

Michael Cowell

Vladimir

Crystal L

Michael Springer

Bo Gotthardt

Andrew Louis

Rohan Uddin

Clare B

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.

Embassytown

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