On the planet Arieka, Avice Benner Cho is a little girl who is called to assist the local people, aliens to her, in expanding their Language. The Ariekei are physically incapable of lying, so Avice acts out a story so that they can describe it. In doing so, she becomes a living simile, "the girl who ate what was given to her." Human beings can converse with Ariekei only with the help of genetically engineered Ambassadors: sets of human twins who can speak at the same time with the same intent, approximating the Ariekei's two mouths and harmonious consciousness.
After years of space travel, Avice returns to Embassytown. There, a radical Ariekei is trying to teach itself and its followers how to speak a lie. But a larger threat soon emerges: an Ambassador unlike any other, sent by the galactic government light-years away. This Ambassador contains two people who are not only unidentical, but who even dislike each other. The schism behind their words, the Ariekei's first glimpse of individual human consciousness, shatters the base of the symbiotic alien mind. What follows are war, inspiration about the ethics and origins of abstract thought, and a revolution of an angelic society into modern communication.
This is it: the book I meant to order when I accidentally picked up The City and the City. And though that goof-up was worth it, this book is a step even higher.
The odd structure is the first thing worth noting. The book is neither completely chronological nor completely jumps around. Instead, it begins by spinning the past and the future closer and closer together toward two important moments: the liar Ariekei's public attempt at lying, and the new Ambassador's first words to the Ariekei. Once both of these events have been achieved, the narrative switches to the present, which for a while is a period of timelessness, of agitated waiting. In my own writing, pacing is something on which I focus especially. Sometimes this includes going as slow as possible without making the story less interesting. That's what Miéville does here. I've never seen a portion of any other book in which so much suspense is drawn out before anything actually happens. And even better, it makes the moment of crisis that much more exciting.
As far as the sci-fi aspect can go, Miéville does about as good a job as anyone in my limited experience, with the possible exception of Frank Herbert. He places his gadgets and space jargon precisely rather than lose the reader in them, leaving more room for the story without giving the impression that he knows nothing about science. And the Ariekei are never totally described, making it all the more interesting to imagine them as giant centaur-beetles with wings for hands, based on the tidbits that are provided.
I caught only a few weaknesses. Some of the characters are not as strong as they should be. Unfortunately, this includes Avice. Despite the fact that she's the narrator, there's a portion of the book during which I forgot she was present, and when I remembered, I couldn't figure out why she was still there. This is perfectly acceptable if you want to portray a typical view of an event that's happening to thousands of people, as this does, but Avice turns out to be pretty important in the end. More early exposition of her personality would have helped to make this transition less jarring.
My love of speculative fiction was only one of my reasons for reading this book. The main reason was my exploration of language and its philosophic possibilities. In that and in many other ways, Embassytown delivers handily, proving both incredibly original and profound. I'd recommend it to anyone, especially if it's not in your niche. Authors like Miéville give sci-fi a better name.
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