RaveThe London Review of BooksThe alien language, which is the novel’s driving conceit, is plainly impossible, which is the point: like H.G. Wells in The Invisible Man or The Island of Doctor Moreau, Miéville takes an impossible proposition and works through its implications with rigour. At some moments the novel resembles a thought-experiment in semiotics, except that it’s at least as interested in the tangential oddities its premise entails: because the Hosts can’t lie, they can’t use metaphors, and their limited lexicon of figurative language consists of laborious similes that must be manufactured in reality before they can be spoken … Embassytown is an SF novel through and through, unironically committed to its own narrative, and serious, like a no-nonsense B-movie, about providing the discerning genre fan with the monsters she’s paid to see. There’s no reason this should preclude an interest in the manner of a story’s telling.
