This is a limited signed edition of the enthralling new novel from the award-winning author of "Kraken and The City & The City". Embassytown: a city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe. Avice is an immerser, a traveller on the immer, the sea of space and time below the everyday, now returned to her birth planet. Here on Arieka, humans are not the only intelligent life, and Avice has a rare bond with the natives, the enigmatic Hosts - who cannot lie. Only a tiny cadre of unique human Ambassadors can speak Language, and connect the two communities. But an unimaginable new arrival has come to Embassytown. And when this Ambassador speaks, everything changes. Catastrophe looms. Avice knows the only hope is for her to speak directly to the alien Hosts. And that is impossible.

About the Author

China Mieville lives and works in London. He is three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award (Perdido Street Station, Iron Council and The City & The City) and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice (Perdido Street Station and The Scar). The City & The City, an existential thriller, was published in 2009 to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell (The Times) and Philip K. Dick (Guardian). His most recent novel, Kraken, was published in 2010.

Reviews

Mieville (Kraken) adds to the sparse canon of linguistic SF with this deeply detailed story of the ways an alien language might affect not only thought patterns but ways of life. Avice Benner Cho returns to her backwater colony home of Embassytown so her linguist husband, Scile, can study the almost empathic, in-the-present language of the planet's natives, the Hosts. When a Host learns to lie, the resulting massive cultural earthquake in Host society is compounded by two new Ambassadors whose voices have a profound physiological effect on the Hosts. Mieville's brilliant storytelling shines most when Avice works through problems and solutions that develop from the Hosts' unique and convoluted linguistic evolution, and many of the most intriguing characters are the Hosts themselves. The result is a world masterfully wrecked and rebuilt. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

PRAISE FOR CHINA MIeVILLE
Kraken
"The stakes [are] driven high and almost anything can happen. The reader is primed for a memorable payoff, and Mieville more than delivers."--"San Francisco Chronicle"
The City & The City
"If Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler's love child were raised by Franz Kafka, the writing that emerged might resemble . . . "The City & The City.""--"Los Angeles Times
"
Perdido Street Station
"Compulsively readable . . . impossible to expunge from memory."--"The Washington Post Book World"
The Scar
"A fantastic setting for an unforgettable tale . . . memorable because of Mieville's vivid language [and] rich imagination."--"The Philadelphia Inquirer
"
Iron Council
"A masterwork . . . a story that pops with creativity."--"Wired "
Un Lun Dun
"Endlessly inventive . . . [a] hybrid of "Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz "and "The Phantom Tollbooth.""--Salonk." -"New Y

Avice Benner Cho is a born exile, one of a small human colony on a world in which the locals, the Ariekei, can incorporate humans into their weirdly literal language but not speak to or understand them-except for the Ambassadors, doubled humans bred and raised into an illusion of being a single creature. Made into a living simile as a child, Avice escapes to crew an interstellar ship, only to return to indulge her linguist husband's fascination with her home world. Both become caught up in the Ariekei's evolving view of their own language and the cataclysmic changes that result. Verdict Mieville's (The City & the City) latest novel is incisive, insightful, disturbing, and occasionally even uplifting. For its portrait of aliens that are convincing yet sympathetic, it ranks up with the works of Vernor Vinge and Candas Jane Dorsey's A Paradigm of Earth; for complex cultural interaction, with Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Occasionally, Mieville's worldbuilding is inconsistent, as when a culture of "property-based" marital forms gives its children to be raised by "shiftparents"; Avice's central role in the aliens' mental shift verges on excessive upstaging, and overcleverness like her ABC name can puncture the reader's suspension of disbelief. Still, overall, this is one of the best sf books of this or any decade and likely to reach beyond the genre to appeal to book clubs and other literary fiction readers. [See Prepub Alert, 11/1/10.]-Meredith Schwartz, New York (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.