Over time, humanity and the Ariekei have developed and sustained good relations, establishing a barter economy around the living biotechnology that the Hosts 'farm' elsewhere on the planet's surface. Humans have long since left Earth, spreading across the universe as 'homo diaspora' and travelling light years through an omnipresent sub-space dimension they call the 'Immer'.

It was a brilliant, Borgesian idea, but it was also a good metaphor for Miéville's writing, in which there's usually more going on than meets the eye.Įmbassytown perches on Arieka, a planet at the edge of known space, within a larger city that is home to the indigenous Ariekei, known to the human colonists as 'Hosts'. In his last but one – The City & the City – the two titular cities coexisted in identical space, kept apart by the careful indoctrination of each one's citizens to ignore the inhabitants and urban fabric of the other. In some ways, it's a place that Shakespeare's sorcerer might recognise, filled with strange beings, political intrigue, stirrings of revolution, and powerful voices echoing in its unbreathable air.Īfter the darkly comic departure of 2010's Kraken, Embassytown returns to some of the preoccupations of Miéville's seven prior well-received novels: urban division, reflections and doublings, subjugation and propaganda. Its science-fiction setting has a lot in common with Prospero's realm, rising out of imagination as an unearthly place transformed by the rough magic of exceptional speech. With the implicit curse they deliver in and on an acquired tongue, the lines also suggest how language and power go together on Prospero's island, and remind us how quickly an exchange of words between colonist and colonised can give way to an exchange of fire.Ĭhina Miéville's impressive new novel also deals with the unpredictable potencies of language, and of fictional language in particular.

'Y ou taught me language,' says Caliban in The Tempest, 'and my profit on't/ Is, I know how to curse.' As Caliban knows to his disadvantage, language is a species of exchange, a transaction in which you might hope to turn a profit as well as a phrase.