Each Host has two mouths, so that its speech is a duet between two voices, but this is almost incidental beside the aliens’ main oddity: instead of the human system of signs yoked arbitrarily to referents, the Hosts’ language is ‘a direct function of their consciousness’, which somehow involves an inherent bond between each word and the thing it represents.
Avice, the human narrator, is a native of Embassytown who grew up desperate to escape her backwater home but, having travelled the galaxy, returns as a favour to her husband, Scile, a linguist fascinated by the unique language the Hosts speak.
In themselves all these elements will be familiar, almost liturgical, to anyone versed in science fiction, but for China Miéville the tradition’s tropes are the keyboard, not the performance.Įmbassytown is a tiny, isolated human settlement, on a remote planet at the fringe of a spacefaring empire, that goes for years between relief missions and survives on the sufferance of the planet’s other inhabitants, an inscrutable alien race known as the Hosts. Embassytown features the following: intelligent horse-sized insectoid aliens, faster-than-light propulsion, androids, organic technology (‘biorigging’), warpspace (‘the immer’), clones, advanced bionics, nanotech notepaper, flying microcameras (‘vespcams’), people with futuristically well-adjusted sexualities, projected holographic adverts (‘trids’), a diasporic human race spread across galaxies and tracing its roots back to the mythical home planet of Terre, a pan-galactic language closely resembling English (‘Anglo-Ubiq’), space-adapted monotheism (‘Christ Pharotekton’) and artificial intelligences (‘artminds’) made seemingly sentient with ‘turingware’.
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