I mentioned in my review of The Left Hand of Darkness a few years ago that it took an anthropological approach to science fiction. Indeed, the main character in that book was an anthropologist who comes to another planet with humans that have been separated from other humans for centuries and have evolved subtle but definite cultural and biological differences from humans on other planets. This anthropological approach allowed a deeper exploration of culture and custom than one usually reads in science fiction books.
Embassytown, by China Mieville, takes this even a level further. One of the main characters, Scile, is a linguist (which if I recall my college courses correctly, is one of anthropology’s four sub-specialties). Scile has married the narrator, Avice, and is excited to return to her native world, a distant, backwater planet where an alien race named the Ariekei live and tolerate the presence of a small human city named Embassytown. Scile is eager because the Ariekei speak a language unlike any other language known in the universe, and he wants to study it.
The Ariekei are giant insectoid-like creatures with lots of legs and wings. Two of their wings have mouths on them–the fanwing and the cutwing–and Ariekei can only understand words that are produced by both mouths at once. More than that, they only recognize language produced by living beings where both streams of speech are produced by one mind. It’s not enough to have two people talking at once–it just sounds like noise to the Ariekei, even if the sounds are perfect. And as the final kicker, their language has no capacity for expressing untruth. That is to say, it is not possible for the Ariekei to lie, or even to conceive of lying–making their language, and species, totally unlike any other alien races humans have encountered.
When humans first arrived on the planet centuries before, they were completely unable to communicate with the Ariekei. But they learned to breed and raise twins whose brains are connected with embedded electronic communication devices through which they constantly share their thoughts. These twins grow up thinking the same things at the same time–they are essentially one person in two bodies. This allows them to speak in a way that the Ariekei recognize as words. These two-bodied same-brained people who can talk to the Ariekei are called Ambassadors, and they have names like CalVin and MagDa (with each half taking half the name, forming a full name when they’re together, which is basically all the time.)
Communicating with the Ariekei is important, not only because it means the humans on the planet itself can safely build a settlement in an area the Ariekei set aside for them, but also because it allows trade. The Ariekei have biorigging–biological technology that is available nowhere else, such as living, breathing houses, tools, factories, and vehicles. Humans cannot replicate biorigging and it is in high demand on other planets, giving the colony a measure of wealth, though attenuated by the extreme difficulty in reaching the place.
The narrator, Avice, is actually a part of the Ariekeis’ language–she’s a metaphor. Because the Ariekei cannot speak untruth, they need something to literally happen at some point in their history to even discuss the concept. Thus, when they sense the need to discuss something they aren’t able to, they seek humans to act out what it is they’re trying to describe. As a child, Avice is taken to a house in Embassytown where the Ariekei have her enact a rather unpleasant scenario for an afternoon. Although she never does understand exactly what it is the Ariekei need to say, she does learn later that her metaphor translates as “the girl who had to eat what was given her.” Apparently, this proves to be a useful phrase that occurs often in Ariekei conversation, once Avice has literalized the concept for them.
Later, as an adult, Avice has an unusual combination of physical and personality traits that permit her to become an immerser. Immersers are people who can travel through immer-space, which allows space travel to distant planets. This is in opposition to sometime-space, which is our normal way of moving through space. It’s not even right to say that immer-space allows faster-than-light travel; it’s more that immer-space operates on a different map altogether, where some planets that are distant in sometime-space might be really close, and vice-versa. Embassytown’s planet is about as far away as human technology can go in immer-space, and impossibly far to reach through sometime-space.
But when she meets the linguist Scile on her travels and quickly forms a deep, intimate connection with him, she decides to return home so he can have the once-in-a-lifetime experience of hearing and studying the Ariekei (although of course he won’t be able to talk with them, not being an Ambassador). Ships travel so rarely to Embassytown that this stay will be at least a couple years.
As it turns out, Avice and Scile decide to stay a bit longer, as Scile is highly involved in his research of the Ariekeis’ language. The next ship brings a new Ambassador from Bremen, the mother planet to the colony of Embassytown. This Ambassador, named EzRa, is different–his two halves were not raised together. In fact, they did not meet until they were adults, though they proved to be capable of forming the highly unusual empathic bond required of an Ambassador. When EzRa speaks to the Ariekei, they can indeed understand the Ambassador’s words, but their reaction to him is…unusual. In fact, EzRa is something like a living lie–capable of speech the Ariekei can understand, but not consisting of only one mind. And when EzRa, the living lie, talks, it has an unexpected effect on the Ariekei that will change their relationship with the humans forever.
I had previously read the first two books in China Mieville’s dark steampunk Bas-Lag series, Perdido Street Station and The Scar. These instantly became two of my favorite fantasy books of all time, right up there with Zelazny and Tolkien. I guess I didn’t realize beforehand that this book was not fantasy, but science fiction. I can honestly say that Mieville is as gifted in writing SF as he is fantasy. He excels in writing about truly strange creatures with such completely alien thought processes that humans can’t really understand their motivations. In fact, I think this is up there with Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye as a really plausible and well thought-out scenario for what a human encounter with an alien race might really be like.
Actually, an interesting contrast in Embassytown is between a couple humanoid alien races that live side by side with humans in the city that are different but not too different, almost like Vulcans and Klingons in Star Trek, and the truly inscrutable Ariekei, with their dual-mouthed language, bio-rigged landscape, and rituals and actions beyond human understanding. It’s as if Mieville wants to tell us, “You think we’d be able to communicate with aliens if we actually encountered them? No, we wouldn’t have the first thing in common with them. We wouldn’t even know where to start.”
I’m afraid some readers might find Embassytown a bit slow. Although there is some action, much of the interest in the novel is intellectual, and stylistically, Mieville delights in big words and philosophical concepts. But for those who don’t mind a more cerebral journey, Embassytown is one of the most fascinating and rewarding SF novels you are likely to find.