Embassytown
- 416
- Pages
- about 8 h
- Reading time
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About the book
Winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, China Miéville's astonishing Embassytown is an intelligent and immersive exploration of language in an alien world. 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.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.7 across 298 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 66% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Science fiction average of 7.8. That is how 7.7 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.3 | 23 | 8% |
| Hardcover | 7.7 | 275 | 92% |
Reader voices
The most-liked reviews on Hardcover (credited to their authors).
“I enjoyed Miéville's literary, weird prose (especially the beginning 'proem') and the rich world building. I appreciated the alienness of the aliens, especially the uncanny, slightly Lovecraftian world of doors with ears. Language, mind, and reality are central themes in the book and the TLDR…”
“Strange conceptual sci-fi about language itself. We meet humans on a planet where the other species are a dual-mind with a language without metaphors and demonstrative pronouns or even most parts of meta-language/grammar. A wonderful, mind-opening idea, but at times the story takes the rap.”
Frequently asked
How long is Embassytown?
It has 416 pages — shorter than 57% of the ranked books in Science fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Science fiction — and a score of 7.7, the closest to this book.
