Wednesday reading: The Raven Tower and Embassytown

[asakiyume]

I finished The Raven Tower. I really liked it, especially the god-narrator's story arc. I loved him, and I loved his best-friend god, the Myriad, who was initially a meteorite but spends most of her time incarnating in swarms of mosquitoes. There was a Justice-of-Toren moment in the story that was very perfect. Ann Leckie sure does know how to show strong emotion in beings that aren't given to emotions; sometimes a very few words indeed will do. And the god-narrator's reflection on the inevitability of change/death and what makes life meaningful was beautiful. The ninja girl is reading it now, and we're having avid conversations. The healing angel has expressed interest in reading it too, and meanwhile we're reading Hamlet aloud together--you know, taking parts--which is very fun. (The human story arc in The Raven Tower has a Hamlet-esque situation and a few analogue characters, though that's more incidental than plot- or character-central).

Having finished The Raven Tower, I started China Miéville's Embassytown, which I've been meaning to read for quite a while. It is *very* rewarding to get around to reading a book you've been meaning to read for quite a while; it feels like keeping a promise. So far I'm liking this book considerably more than Kraken but not quite as much as Railsea. China Miéville has this gonzo imagination that can be a strength or a liability. I found it beautifully, poetically directed in Railsea, but overexuberant (felt self-indulgent) in Kraken. In this one it's better controlled--it's focused on language and other-ness, which I love, but ... I'm waiting to see if the story will have the heart that Railsea had. I'm not holding my breath, though.

In a way it's a perfect book to read after The Raven Tower, because RT had the premise that a god's utterance was performative/became/must be true, and Embassytown features aliens whose language is so bound up in the speakers' perception of reality that they cannot lie, or barely can lie. The (human) narrator and her husband have this conversation:

“Millions of years back there must have been some adaptive advantage to knowing that what was communicated was true,” Scile said to me, last time we’d hypothesised this history. “Selection for a mind that could only express that.”

“The evolution of trust …” I started to say.

“There’s no need for trust, this way,” he interrupted. Chance, struggle, failure, survival, a Darwinian chaos of instinctive grammar, the drives of a big-brained animal in a hard environment, the selection out of traits, had made a race of pure truth-tellers.

And THAT prompted a cynical thought in me about SF worldbuilding--about how even as SF writers play with the rules of one branch of science, imagining (say) a universe with very different physics, they remain very trammelled and hidebound when it comes to other fields--like (in this case) evolutionary biology. Apparently a gajillion years (or mega hours, as the book would have it, because somehow "hour" is a less subjective time unit than a year [why--oh! There is an actual good reason that I was ignorant of: minoanmiss explains here]) in the future, there is no other-better-different notion for how life all and everywhere comes about than Darwinian evolution.

I mean, I get that if you strange up too many spheres of science simultaneously, you end up with a hard-to-understand mess, but still: I'd like to see a book that broke free from the limitations of evolutionary biology. I suppose you could say Le Guin's Lathe of Heaven did that, with characters able to dream things into existence.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

I loved him, and I loved his best-friend god

Ooooh, super interesting to see that you think of the rock-god-narrator as a "him"; I kept thinking of it as a "her". My interest in The Raven Tower was originally piqued because of the Hamlet-inspired plotline, but I found that, if not the least, than one of the less interesting parts of the book.

[minoanmiss]

Actually, I think hour could be less subjective than year. If a hour is defined in relation to a minute, and a minute to a second, and a second in relation to the vibrational frequency of a certain atom (cesium?) at a certain temperature, then those definitions are constant acrosss the universe. But a year can vary greatly from planet to planet and star system to star system.

Also, I loooooooooove your book reviews.

[skygiants]

Embassytown is probably my favorite Mieville (and Railsea my second favorite) - I'll be curious to see what you think of it, in the end!