Word Made Fresh

Random House

Pages: 345

Price: Rs 1217

Genre-bending fantasy writer China Miéville is not known for restraint,so when he follows up a Western (Iron Council),a noir police procedural (The City and the City) and a squid-centred whodunit (Kraken) with a science fiction novel set on the distant planet of Arieka,belt up and prepare for serious interplanetary hi-jinx.

On Arieka,the original inhabitants,the Ariekei,or the Hosts,live alongside the Terre,a small population of human settlers. The Terre live in Embassytown,an air-controlled colonial outpost of the Bremen Empire,trading artificial intelligence for the Ariekeis gold and biorigged technology. Like all Miévilles creatures,the Ariekei Hosts are gorgeously inhuman,with insect-horse bodies,many-jointed legs,two wings,and most relevantly,two mouths. Miéville,exulting in the sheer weirdness of these cool,incomprehensible presences… powers like subaltern gods,wisely refrains from humanising these unsettling creatures,or reducing them to allegory.

Still,theyre not averse to similes and metaphors themselves. The Ariekei speak in two voices at once,like two frequencies. But theres more. Instead of the human system of signs randomly yoked to referents (where the word cat has no relation to the cat itself),in this stereo-sound language,the word is inseparable from the thing itself. The gap between the word and the thing it gestures towards doesnt exist,and so,metaphor,lying and other similar inventions are unthinkable. Like Swifts horse-people Houyhnhnms,the Hosts cannot lie. The only Terre who can speak to the Ariekei are Ambassadors,genetically engineered pairs of clones who share a consciousness,speaking the Ariekei language in careful unison.

Embassytown plunges you into a future universe that is immeasurably different from ours,gleefully kicking around neologisms: the humans speak Anglo-Ubiq,run their machines on Turingware and trade for biorigging,the Ariekei speciality of half-biological,half-mechanical engineering where buildings twitch and rear like clanking puppets. The text is a Joycean deluge of convoluted sentences,leaping excitedly from idea to idea,let down sometimes by clunky phrasing.

When the narrator,Avice,an immerser pilot from Embassytown returns home with her linguist partner Scile,she finds everything is about to change. Ariekei factions are practising how to lie; conversely,well-meaning Terre crusaders are trying to preserve their pure,pre-lapsarian speech. Embassytowns overlords,Bremen,have sent a new Ambassador whose speech acts as an auditory drug on the Ariekei,turning them into junkies maddened by their need for Ambassador EzRas voice. Arieka is moving towards fratricide and civil war,and so Avice bands together with Spanish Dancer,one of the lying Ariekei,and a group of renegade Ambassadors. What they attempt is revolutionary,but its a peculiarly Miévillean revolution: a semiotic leap for the Ariekei that will reshape Embassytown.

This isnt a book for lazy readers; Miéville expects you to loop the loop with him all through the plot. But though Embassytown drags in several places,it is never ponderous for too long. And thankfully,abstract semiotics turns,through sleight of hand,into narrative action. One of the books best tropes is the performance of similes. The Ariekei cannot say anything that has not occurred in reality,but they know theres more to language than this hapless adherence to the true. Ingeniously,they ask the Terre to stage performances of similes,acting out phrases like the stone that was split and put together again,or the man who swims with fishes.

Similes are a means to transform the universe,and everything hinges on how the Ariekei can find a link to Avice,the girl who ate what was given her. Its the centrality of language and speech that ties together all the various threads of Embassytown intergalactic war saga,biopunk caper,postcolonial advisory and guide to space-frontier semiotics making it finally a cheerfully overwrought story about where meaning can live: in truth,in fiction or in both.