Embassytown

And absolutely no one illustrates the raw, destructive power of language quite like China Miéville.

Oh, Embassy Town.

Yes, his 2011 novel, Embassy Town.

So we are on a planet called Arieka, positioned at the very edge of the known universe.

Humans are living there, coexisting with the native alien race known as the Arieki, or just the Hosts.

Right.

She gives them the gift or, you know, maybe the curse of metaphor.

And if we connect this back to our broader theme, Embassy Town is arguing that true meaningful alien contact might require the literal restructuring of consciousness.

Like, The City in the City is in the first person.

Embassy Town is in the first person.

So those are characters that you are literally inside there.

I think this is something different.

He's written children's books, short story collections, novellas, and comics, and he co-wrote with Keanu Reeves the novel The Book of Elsewhere, set within Reeves' Berserker comics universe.

Mieville was first on the show for one of my all-time favorite science fiction novels, a deep dive into questions of linguistics and communication, Embassytown.

Ursula K.

Le Guin, who I should say as an aside, has written some truly terrifying, if also terrifyingly smart and incredibly educational critical takedowns of the writings of others.

She said in her glowing review of this book, something she didn't say lightly, that Embassytown was a fully achieved work of art.

And speaking of Embassytown elsewhere when discussing how genre fiction is siloed and looked down upon, Le Guin said, "When he wins the Booker, the whole silly hierarchy will collapse, and literature will be much the better for it." For the last decade, however, China has mostly been writing and publishing nonfiction.

He's one of the founding editors of the Journal of Revolutionary Arts and Letters, Salvage.

He's the author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, followed by A Spectre Haunting on the Communist Manifesto, of which Tony Kushner said, "China Mieville makes a case for the manifesto as a locus of politically engaged analysis and argument for nearly two centuries.