Structurally it works well: builds a world, introduces us to characters, makes clear the complicated relationships and politics of people and place, twists and turns through an active plot and leads us to a satisfying conclusion. This should have been a book which I loved: brilliantly high-concept, detailed world-building, fascinating originality, clever and witty… and yet I really struggled to stick with it.Įmbassytown is far from being a bad book. Miéville exploring the artificiality of language, the interstice of translation, cross-cultural semiotics. I was so looking forward to Embassytown: Miéville writing sci-fi, on an alien planet, with a whole alien race – a whole alien city – to create, with the technology for AI and constructs. At times it was frustratingly slow and tangential, but it had its rewards.

I developed a different understanding of geography and place. I went away and researched towns with amorphous boundaries and cross/hatching. I liked the religiosity and sociology of these ab-Londons.Īlthough some I know disliked The City & The City, I found it fascinating and I enjoyed the way that he drew back from what could have been absurdly fanciful and made it more about psychological dissonance, whether imposed or by way of self-discipline. I liked the cross-culturalism of a modern city clashing with the ancient history of place. I liked the subversions and inversions of ancient tales, of folklore, of nursery rhymes, of drum and bass. I liked the London it showed me, familiar and strange at once, lovingly recreated and then twisted and shaped by myth and magic.

I am as interested in where he is headed as where he has been. That said, I’m not one of those calling for Miéville to return to Bas Lag. The Fantasy villain could be a moth, or a mayor, or some trans-dimensional benthic leviathan. The Fantasy hero could be a fat, middle-aged scientist, a bug-headed artist, a surgically enhanced man-dolphin. Fantasy was worlds drawn from a global supply of myth and eons of folklore and it was new things as well like physics and invention and theoretical sciences.

Fantasy was no longer the cobbling together of the D&D Monster manual. They opened shackles I’d unknowingly worn since my early-pubescent reading of Tolkein, Feist, et al. They changed the way I understood the Fantasy genre, my understanding of genre as a costruct, and what imagination and creativity really looked like.

Perdido St and The Scar were both magnificent.

China mieville embassytown review