Embassytown

This is the third China Miéville novel I’ve read, behind The City and the City and Railsea. One thing I really like about Miéville’s work is that he manages to make every novel so different from the others, and all so very good. Embassytown continues his streak, though it does have some parallels with The City and the City like overlapping urban sprawls and living in the margins. I think Miéville has an enduring love of the sea, or at least its metaphor, because the immer in Embassytown—basically, subspace—is described as basically the ocean, complete with tides, monsters, and even lighthouses. So what’s this book about, anyway? The main character, Avice Benner Cho, grows up in the titular Embassytown, which is a human colony on an exot (exoterre, alien) world within a larger city of the Hosts, an insect-adjacent (very roughly) species with two voices and an inability to lie. She becomes an immerser, or crew on an immer ship delivering goods and people throughout subspace, and…