![]() ![]() Since the Hosts cannot lie, that makes metaphor tricky – if they need to find a simile for something, they have to get someone to act it out, literally becoming part of language. All communication has to be through twinned Ambassadors, whose paired voices combine to form “Language”. ![]() That, at least, may be your initial reaction to Arieka, a planet where it’s physiologically impossible for single humans to speak with the inhabitants, the enigmatic Hosts, a people who cannot lie. With the benefit of hindsight, Miéville’s instincts were true.Īs to whether they were quite as true when it came to Embassytown 1.0, we may never know, but the 2.0 version is, well… let’s start with difficult, infuriating and downright mind-boggling. ![]() Would we care so much about a new Miéville novel, if he’d spent the last few years turning out Bas-Lag clag ? Quite. Yet step back for a moment and you can understand why Miéville wanted, even needed, to try something new. Hoping for another Perdido Street Station, a rambunctious, sprawling, gothic-tinged urban fantasy, they got a science fiction novel about linguistics. While the novel now being published is in many respects Embassytown 2.0, in that it’s been reworked in the years since, you can understand why publishers Tor might initially have balked (as hearsay suggests they did). ![]()
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