The familiar knock against science fiction is that it is all escapism, full of thrills like a theme park ride, but empty of ideas. Yet open-minded readers may puzzle over such gripes. In the world of highbrow literary fiction, the novel of ideas has virtually disappeared. Meanwhile contemporary sci-fi writers, such as China Miéville, Liu Cixin, and Neal Stephenson, stuff their books full of intriguing concepts and philosophical angles. Have the traditional roles begun to reverse?
Miéville is an especially fascinating case. You can tell that without reading a page of his fiction—just by looking at his bio. He holds a degree in Social Anthropology from Cambridge and both a Masters and a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He was a candidate for Parliament in Britain, and has published articles on a number of academic subjects.
That makes for an unusual pedigree for a genre fiction author. But Miéville defends his embrace of genre fiction in articulate terms: "The impulse to the fantastic is central to human consciousness," he told interviewer Joan Gordon in 2003 "in that we can and constantly do imagine things that aren't really there. More than that (and what distinguishes us from tool-using animals), we can imagine things that can’t possibly be there. We can imagine the impossible."
Eight years later, Miéville would take this very theme—the conceptualization of the impossible—and turn it into the central premise of his novel Embassytown . Here he envisions an alien race, the Ariekei, with a peculiar disability —they are incapable of expressing anything in language that does not exist in reality. As a result they are u nable to tell lies, or even us e the kind of metaphorical language that humans take for granted.
This might seem a modest foundation on which build a novel, yet by the time Miéville has worked all his variations on this theme, he has not only crafted a fast-paced, exciting story filled with unexpected twists and turns, but also explored a dizzying array of philosophical, sociological and theological implications of his opening gambit. I’ve read few novels in recent years—whether sci-fi or mainstream—which invite so many different interpretive stances.
Embassytown is an outpost of human life at the far end of the known universe. But cities are never just settings for Miéville, who must have been an urban planner in a previous life. Back with his novel Perdido Street Station (2000), our author revealed an interest —indeed, almost an obsession—with the friction and jostling, the conflict in agendas and architectures of cities. “Transition” was, in his description, “the fundamental dynamic” of the world, and he reveled in the shifts from “industrial to the residential to the opulent to the slum to the underground to the airborne to the modern to the ancient to the colorful to the dram to the fecund to the barren” that constitute urban reality. The City & the City , the Miéville novel immediately preceding Embassytown , was built on an even stranger conceit. Here Miéville imagines a grotesque political dynamic in which two distinct city-states occupy the same territory, each one trying to pretend that the other does not exist.
The co-existence of two radically different communities returns in Embassytown, where the terrestrial visitors live in small enclave surrounded by a large city of "host" aliens. Yet the Ariekei are so different from humans, and rely on such an impenetrable language, that even the most basic communication is fraught with difficulty and risk of misunderstanding.
The aliens' inability to lie is interpreted differently by various onlookers. Some idealize this limitation, and see the Ariekei as akin to angels—their unblemished honesty a sign of their blessed state. Others treat them as hopelessly naïve, little better than children (albeit with much more powerful technology). Still others pity their inability to lie as proof of a chronic lack of imagination, an inability to understand the poetic and metaphorical aspects of life. From the perspective of the latter group, the aliens are intellectually crippled by their extreme scrupulousness.
Miéville’s story gets richer and more complex as it proceeds, but even at an early stage, readers are left with many questions to contemplate. Is absolute honesty an advantage from an evolutionary standpoint? When language stops telling the truth, is it liberated or debased? Are our moral obligations altered when we are dealing with creatures—whether aliens from outer space or animals here on planet Earth—who are incapable of comprehending right and wrong as we understand it?
It is to Miéville’s credit that he avoids spelling out these issues, rather leaving them for readers to consider (or not) as they see fit. "I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek," he has explained. “I love this stuff. And when I write my novels, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I'm creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters.”
True to his word, Miéville packs this book full of strange creatures and intense conflicts. His aliens, as it turns out, have other linguistic quirks that the terrestrial visitors in Embassytown learn about only when it may be too late to head off their disastrous consequences. Here again, the thematic material at play in the novel—in this instance, relating to the dangers of making assumptions about cultures you hardly understand—is not without implications for real world situations outside the pages of a science fiction book. As a case study in applied anthropology, Embassytown might serve as a cautionary guide for assigned reading before embarking on fieldwork.
Perhaps my description above makes Miéville sound like a dry, polemical author. But that would be a misleading takeaway. Readers who simply want a thrilling fast paced story filled with surprises will not be disappointed by this novel, which ranks among the most exhilarating science fiction novels I have read in recent years. Miéville shows, time and again in the book, how an intelligent, thoughtful novel can also provide plenty of action and suspense.
“I do retain this hope that you can actually have it both ways,” our author once explained. “And if you can have it both ways at all, fantasy is a uniquely powerful arena that would allow you to do that. So my aim would be precisely to write the ripping yarn that is also sociologically serious and stylistically avant-garde. I mean, that's the Holy Grail right there.” If that’s the Grail, Miéville has got it in his grasp in this expansive book. With Embassytown , he has set a standard that even he may find it hard to match in the future.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books. His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).
"My aim would be precisely to write the ripping yarn that is also sociologically serious and stylistically avant-garde. I mean, that's the Holy Grail right there."