Embassytown

Avice Benner Cho is a born exile, one of a small human colony on a world in which the locals, the Ariekei, can incorporate humans into their weirdly literal language but not speak to or understand them—except for the Ambassadors, doubled humans bred and raised into an illusion of being a single creature. Made into a living simile as a child, Avice escapes to crew an interstellar ship, only to return to indulge her linguist husband's fascination with her home world. Both become caught up in the Ariekei's evolving view of their own language and the cataclysmic changes that result. Miéville's () latest novel is incisive, insightful, disturbing, and occasionally even uplifting. For its portrait of aliens that are convincing yet sympathetic, it ranks up with the works of Vernor Vinge and Candas Jane Dorsey's ; for complex cultural interaction, with Mary Doria Russell's . Occasionally, Miéville's worldbuilding is inconsistent, as when a culture of "property-based" marital forms gives its children to be raised by "shiftparents"; Avice's central role in the aliens' mental shift verges on excessive upstaging, and overcleverness like her ABC name can puncture the reader's suspension of disbelief. Still, overall, this is one of the best sf books of this or any decade and likely to reach beyond the genre to appeal to book clubs and other literary fiction readers. [See Prepub Alert, 11/1/10.]—Meredith Schwartz, New York

Avice Benner Cho is a born exile, one of a small human colony on a world in which the locals, the Ariekei, can incorporate humans into their weirdly literal language but not speak to or understand them—except for the Ambassadors, doubled humans bred and raised into an illusion of being a single creature. Made into a living simile as a child, Avice escapes to crew an interstellar ship, only to return to indulge her linguist husband's fascination with her home world. Both become caught up in the Ariekei's evolving view of their own language and the cataclysmic changes that result.