[…] Miéville shines when he is doing Science Fiction. I absolutely loved his The City and The City and Embassytown novels – both of which were smart, poignant and intriguing – much more than his […]

@ jambarama:

Good points. I too thought that the discussion of Immer was a bit tangential to the rest of the book. I guess the Miéville could not resist the temptation of trying to invent his own original FTL method. Of course he could have just mentioned “hyperdrives” without elaborating exactly how they work and the story would still work.

Then again, perhaps he was purposefully planting these ideas in there planning to expand upon them in the future. Kinda like he did for his Fantasy book cycle – with each book feeding off the plot hooks and ideas planted in previous ones.

So I just finished the book. It was enjoyable, I ended up liking it quite a bit. It was thoughtful, it had very novel ideas, and it was complex without bogging down the reader with complexity. I also really liked that the protagonist was female, you don’t often get that in sci fi.

I do have a few criticisms. I wish he’d have spent more time describing the universe and and I wish he’d narrowed the universe he was trying to describe. By the end of the book, he was using quite a few nouns which had no meaning for me. I couldn’t picture the hosts, what they looked like, how many appendages they had, what a giftwing looks like and where it is on the body. I thought Scile’s last action was ridiculous – it didn’t fit in with his theology (should have tried to shoot spanish first), it didn’t advance the plot, and it meant his character was almost completely irrelevant to the story. I thought the explanation as to why the god drug worked was really thin. Erhsul was a character without a function. The whole concept of the Immer was only tacitly relevant with the plot.

I didn’t want everything spelled out, or everything tied together like Dickens. Many terms, left undefined, were clear – like “floaking.” I just wish he’d used & explored the universe he created more thoroughly, and cut down the bits that weren’t relevant to the story or understanding the universe. Overall it was very much worth reading, but I wish he’d had a more demanding editor.

“Miéville addresses some of this stuff in his book.”

This book is definitely going on my to-read list, then. Thanks for sharing.

@ astine:

Nope, I have never read it. In fact I have never read anything by him, because I know him mostly as “that guy who wrote these Star Wars novels”. As a rule of thumb I try to stay away from novelizations and novels that use franchise licenses because in my experience they tend to be unequivocally bad. This is probably not fair to some of the writers, but – meh. I know the Thrawn trilogy by reputation, but I was never really tempted to read it.

When I was in HS and we played Star Wars D6, we set our campaigns sometime before “A New Hope” – at the height of the imperial power because we enjoyed the totalitarian dystopian feel. So knowledge of what “officially” happened after Return of the Jedi was not required of me (yes, Zhan’s trilogy was the official version in my circles).

Anyways, I looked him up and saw he got a Hugo for some original work (I think) but a lot of his output is licensed (Star Wars, Terminator, etc..)

Anyways, to answer your question – Miéville addresses some of this stuff in his book. His universe has more than one alien species, and the characters mention, and sometimes glimpse other creatures but the author does not dwell on the too much, though he mentions that they are not humanoidal in shape and that they do have different forms of communication. Some use chemical messaging, some use gestures/skin pigmentation changes, others use sound. But their languages work similar to those of humans – they are learned, and they can be used to signify things.

For example, a human can say – “look at this” and point. Most aliens have equivalent concepts in their languages. The mysterious Hosts from Embassytown do not. They are born into the language, and they do not have a concept of this/that. They do not point – they describe and reference things. Instead of saying “can you hand me that glass over there” their language would require a construct along the lines of “please pick up the half empty glass from the table in the corner, and give it to [alien-name]” or something like that. They are unable to understand pointing, or signifying this. They cannot comprehend metaphors, and they are incapable of lying.

I don’t want to spoil much of the book, but interesting things happen to their minds when they are deafened and lose the ability to speak and hear their instinctive language.

Oh, and telepathy does not exist in that universe. The ambassadors use mind-syncing implants to emulate it, but it only helps them sync up their brain waves so that they can speak the alien language in unison (requirement for them to understand it) but can’t use it to communicate. No species in that universe is known to have anything akin to a psychic link.

@ LMaciak: With regard to your two approaches to aliens, I’m wondering if you’ve read Manta’s Gift by Timothy Zahn. Zahn usually writes aliens biased towards the first kind, human-analogue aliens, but they’re usually stand-ins for humans anyway. Manta’s Gift puts a little more effort into exploring the aliens, their culture and psychology than his other books and I was wondering if you’d read it.

Another thought though: Why is it that even when an author is constructing an ‘alien’ alien their communication method is nearly always some kind of speech? And if it’s not that, it’s some kind of psychic link? You’d think that if people were going to go through the trouble of having your characters have to overcome a language gap you’d take the opportunity to try a non-vocal communication means, especially since so many creatures on earth use non-vocal communications, such as dance or smell. I can imagine a species with an evolved tendril whose sole purpose was to mime its entire language through a complicated system of motions and wiggles.

@ Luke Maciak:

I kinda have a love-hate relationship with this type of books because I mostly fail to recognize the supposed greatness of the transcended/ascended beings :) Fire upon the Deep does have really fun parts but other parts seemed plain ridiculous and unbelievable. Kilobytes in space cracked me up.

@ Victoria:

How is Fire Upon the Deep? It is actually in my current batch of books sitting on my desk waiting to be read.

Also, Embassytown does pick up later on. It is kinda slow at first, but I don’t mind slow as long as it is interesting or builds toward something.

Need to get back to this one. I started on it some time ago and put it away in favor of A Fire upon the deep because it was way too slow.