SEMIOPUNK (37)

By: Joshua Glenn
September 5, 2025

An irregular, ongoing series of posts dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.”

EMBASSYTOWN

In China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011), often described as the prolific author’s first sf-only novel, human colonists have established themselves on Arieka, a far-distant planet. One ghetto-like human enclave, there, is the titular Embassytown, which is on the outskirts of the civilization of the Ariekei (or Hosts), who are native to the planet. The Ariekei possess two mouths and are therefore capable of speaking two words at once — a device expressed here via fractional notation.

Any human wishing to negotiate for the Hosts’ valuable biotech must communicate in their language: “Language.” It takes two human ambassadors, genetically bred and pharmaceutically altered, speaking at the same time, to communicate in Language. Because the human have figured out a way to communicate with the Hosts, they believe that they understand them. However, they do not….

The Hosts’ Language is exclusively literal, containing no figurative dimension. It cannot traffic in irony, metaphor, simile, oxymoron. Therefore the Ariekei recruit humans to perform such figures of speech — in bizarre ordeals — to make it possible to allude to them. What’s more, Language’s non-figurative nature means that lying is impossible for the Ariekei.

Things begin to change for the worse when a new human ambassador (consisting of two non-identical people) named Ezra (or: Ez/Ra) arrives. Becomes known as the “God Drug”. Ez/Ra’s subtly unusual fashion of speaking the Ariekei’s Language leads the native population to become addicted en masse to his intoxicating speech-forms! So addicted, in fact, that they cannot live without it. In order to avert disaster, Avice Brenner Cho, who in the past has gained the trust of the Ariekei by acting as one of their human similes (specifically, “the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her”), and who is married to Scile, an academic linguist, attempts to train a group of them to use metaphors… and to lie!

If this sound like a book about linguistics, not semiotics, don’t ask me, ask the author. In an interview about Embassytown, which won a Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, Miéville would explain that “the book is not so much about actually existing linguistics necessarily so much as it is to do with a certain kind of more abstract kind of philosophy of language of symbols, and of semiotics, and indeed some of this crosses over into theological debates.” All of which sounds very promising; let’s investigate!

Miéville’s novel, appreciative readers and critics will tell you, is an extended meditation on language’s figurative function, i.e., on what separates art from quotidian speech. Embassytown‘s acknowledgements page lists as influences the formalist literary critic I.A. Richards, coauthor of The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923); the philosopher Paul Ricœur, who revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology; and the philosopher Tran Duc Thao, who argued that the defects of the phenomenological account of consciousness could only be remedied by Marxism’s account of labor and society. Plus: monsters and rayguns.

Aiming to explain how we connect abstract language to concrete reality, Richards suggested that symbols gain their power by being linked with experiences and contexts. Words and things are linked through their shared presence in a context, that is to say, not by an inherent or direct connection; meaning is always contextual. Ricœur valued the structuralist approach of semiotics for its analytical rigor but — arguing that it “decentered the human subject” by reducing human experience to an effect of linguistic structures — he subordinated semiotics, in his work, to the more all-encompassing philosophical project of understanding how language refers to the world and shapes human experience.

Like the protagonist of Hesse’s The Glass-Bead Game, these thinkers rightly note that its focus on the formal system of language (langue), its signs, and the internal relations between them, i.e., rather than on the actual use of language in communication, creates a hermetically sealed environment in which meaning cannot grow.

Tran Duc Thao, meanwhile, goes even further in bringing semiotics into contact with the real world. His “semiology of real life” posits that language and consciousness arise from collective, goal-oriented, cooperative work activities. Language is not merely a tool for communication, but a foundational element of thought and social reality — something that colonialists understand perfectly. In the 1940s, he argued that the colonized Vietnamese experience, perception, and horizons of existence were separate from and incommensurate with the colonialist (French) horizon; his life’s work was locating and liberating those political possibilities foreclosed by the epistemological hegemony of French colonialism.

With the above intellectual context in mind, let’s think about what it means that the Hosts’ references to the world are bound so tightly to empirical facts, and why they cannot tell a lie.

What Avice helps us puzzle out is that the Hosts cannot separate signifiers from signifieds in any abstract fashion — which is to say, via metaphor and other forms of figurative speech that allow us to be playful with signs and signifieds. One can’t signify if elision or slippage between sign and signified is an impossibility.

Human language is a medium of signification, of meaning-making. Which, as has been discussed several time in this series, is (for semioticians in particular) highly pleasurable. This helps us to understand why the Hosts, for whom signs have always only offered access to unmediated reality, become dangerously intoxicated when the myriad possibilities of signifier/signified connections are revealed.

Having no defense against this virus. In fact, it looks as though the Hosts may die slowly and painfully. So a faction of the Ariekei deafen themselves to break their addiction and begin to violently convert others. Catastrophe! Avice’s efforts to teach the Hosts’ not just the idea but the practice of metaphor is an antidote, and a peacekeeping initiative.

From a Miéville interview: Embassytown is “about a group of humans who live on a very distant alien planet in the very far future and get involved in a linguistic apocalypse with the local species. And it’s about language and subspace and lots of classic science fictional stuff like that. Hopefully with bringing a bit of interesting linguistic ruminations to the table.”

One reviewer calls Embassytown “a book fundamentally concerned with the role of language as an imaginative liberation. Miéville has taken the theoretical and philosophical insights of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur and turned them into story.”

There’s more cool stuff going on in Embassytown, which is just as much space opera as it is planetary romance.

The Hosts aren’t described in detail, but we catch some glimpses. In addition to their two mouths, they have multiple eyes. Their motion is crablike, sometimes insectile. They walk on hooves. They have both fanwings and giftwings.

Miéville’s version of hyperspace (warped dimensionality, fluid distances) and faster-than-light travel (dodging pseudo-animalistic creatures); the Hosts’ biological (living, fleshly) machinery, dwellings, and urban infrastructure; alien pets that are also batteries… I’m here for all of it.

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SEMIOPUNK (37)

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