RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksEmbassytown is a novel of ideas — a novel about the philosophy of language, about how language is linked to ethics, and about our ‘biopolis,’ the structure of the links between individual humans and the larger human community. It’s easy to envision the book taking center stage in the seminar room, since Miéville’s star continues to get brighter, no doubt becoming the topic of more and more dreary academic articles which claim to have finally figured out the proper, definitive way to explicate those ideas … Everything in Embassytown revolves around the conditions and consequences of language, offering up an extended meditation on its figurative function, on what separates art from quotidian speech … It is a miracle of a novel, one where Big Ideas cohabitate with Monsters, and neither is lessened by what academic propriety insists must be capital letters.
