Embassytown

I just finished reading China Miéville's Embassytown, which is mostly wonderful. It's the story of a backwater colony where a small population of humans have, with difficulty, come to live in a fairly equitable arrangement with the sentient native species they call the Hosts. The difficulty is mostly linguistic: each Host has two communicating mouths, so their speech (called Language) involves two voices expressing a single mind, and they're unable to recognize anything else as language. The human population communicates with the Hosts through the medium of specially-reared human clone pairs called Ambassadors. But then the colonial government sends a new kind of Ambassador to Embassytown, and trouble (of the potentially species-exterminating, civilization-ending kind) ensues.

The worldbuilding is, as you'd expect from Miéville, rich and fascinating, the main character, Avice Benner Cho, is engaging if not as fully developed as I'd have liked, and there's a more straightforward plot structure than in many of Miéville's other books, which may appeal to those who've previously found his work too odd. Personally I think the book could have done with being about a hundred pages longer; it would have allowed for the plot to unfold at a less hurried pace and for both Avice and the subsidiary characters to be more fleshed-out. Nevertheless, this is my favorite Miéville since The Scar.

However, I do have one complaint: ( Cut for minor non-plot-related spoilers )