Brett Hodnett reviewed Embassytown by China Miéville
Interesting.
3 stars
Interesting. A bit longer than needed.
paperback
Published Jan. 1, 2012 by Pan Publishing, PAN.
Embassytown
4 stars
(12 reviews)
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.
Jon Nixon reviewed Embassytown by China Miéville
Review of 'Embassytown' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
Loads of potential but waaaay too slow. This book would have been better if it was half as long.
I've read six of China Mieville's novels and a collection of his short stories, and thought they were all wonderful, but I struggled with this one.
It starts really strong, with loads of great ideas; I love the immer (hyperspace) the pharos (a lighthouse in hyperspace), the wreck, and the stitcher (a hyperspace sea monster) and i really hope we get to see more of them in future stories. The Hosts, the Language and the biorigging (living technology) are all wonderfully alien.
But then the novel stalls and nothing much happens for hundreds of pages, And all of the nothing-much-happening is narrated by someone who is just observing, not taking part.
It picks up again at the end (where Mieville somehow manages to make an epic war story out of a …
Loads of potential but waaaay too slow. This book would have been better if it was half as long.
I've read six of China Mieville's novels and a collection of his short stories, and thought they were all wonderful, but I struggled with this one.
It starts really strong, with loads of great ideas; I love the immer (hyperspace) the pharos (a lighthouse in hyperspace), the wreck, and the stitcher (a hyperspace sea monster) and i really hope we get to see more of them in future stories. The Hosts, the Language and the biorigging (living technology) are all wonderfully alien.
But then the novel stalls and nothing much happens for hundreds of pages, And all of the nothing-much-happening is narrated by someone who is just observing, not taking part.
It picks up again at the end (where Mieville somehow manages to make an epic war story out of a philosophical exploration of the relationship between language and consciousness) but the resolution is rushed and implausible (even by the rules set up in the story) and by then I'd really lost interest anyway.
