Embassytown
May. 21st, 2011 05:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI 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: the novel is very nearly a World Without Queer People. And there were no queer characters in Kraken that I recall, and none in The City and the City. Miéville was vocally proud of the fact that two of his three narrators in Iron Council were a gay man and a bisexual man; does he think he's already done his bit for queer representation and can stop?
I'm obfuscating a little when I say Embassytown almost has no queer characters. Avice is nominally bisexual: we're told that one of her several past marriages was to a woman, but within the narrative we never see her either involved with or attracted to a woman. And there are mentions of a couple of very minor characters being queer, but no one of any importance to the story. Moreover, we're told that in Embassytown, "homosex" is "a little bit illegal" (Avice's marriage occurred off-planet). This is a detail that doesn't matter to the plot, doesn't quite make sense with the worldbuilding (the social structure of Embassytown does not include things like heterosexual nuclear families that might make one expect institutionalized homophobia) and honestly I'm not sure why Miéville included it. It depresses me to see a gratuitous bit of "oh, but they still outlaw queerness!" brought up for no good reason in a far-future narrative whose themes center around cultural change and coping with alterity. It seemed, honestly, a bit like throwing queer characters under the bus in order to demonstrate that Embassytown is not a utopia (which was pretty damn clear already).
I want to see Miéville do better than that. As a writer, he's constantly pushing against constraints and conventions--why not the one that says having queers in your story is unnecessary unless the story is somehow about queerness? Or that if you do it once, you never have to do it again? It's not vaccination, for fuck's sake, it's representation of a fuller spectrum of human experience. Once in a lifetime isn't enough.
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: the novel is very nearly a World Without Queer People. And there were no queer characters in Kraken that I recall, and none in The City and the City. Miéville was vocally proud of the fact that two of his three narrators in Iron Council were a gay man and a bisexual man; does he think he's already done his bit for queer representation and can stop?
I'm obfuscating a little when I say Embassytown almost has no queer characters. Avice is nominally bisexual: we're told that one of her several past marriages was to a woman, but within the narrative we never see her either involved with or attracted to a woman. And there are mentions of a couple of very minor characters being queer, but no one of any importance to the story. Moreover, we're told that in Embassytown, "homosex" is "a little bit illegal" (Avice's marriage occurred off-planet). This is a detail that doesn't matter to the plot, doesn't quite make sense with the worldbuilding (the social structure of Embassytown does not include things like heterosexual nuclear families that might make one expect institutionalized homophobia) and honestly I'm not sure why Miéville included it. It depresses me to see a gratuitous bit of "oh, but they still outlaw queerness!" brought up for no good reason in a far-future narrative whose themes center around cultural change and coping with alterity. It seemed, honestly, a bit like throwing queer characters under the bus in order to demonstrate that Embassytown is not a utopia (which was pretty damn clear already).
I want to see Miéville do better than that. As a writer, he's constantly pushing against constraints and conventions--why not the one that says having queers in your story is unnecessary unless the story is somehow about queerness? Or that if you do it once, you never have to do it again? It's not vaccination, for fuck's sake, it's representation of a fuller spectrum of human experience. Once in a lifetime isn't enough.
