“The words have got the soul in them. And it has to be there, the meaning. Has to be true to Language. That’s why they make similes”

China Miéville’s ‘Embassytown’ should be required reading. For everyone. Not just because the author is the only three-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award, and probably the most innovative and exciting writer the UK has produced in a very long time. Miéville’s work – which he describes as ‘Weird Fiction’ – is much more than literature: it is feisty, robust exercise for the mind, and succour for the questioning soul. In the second of a three-part series on the best new science fiction from Africa, the USA and the UK, I talked to China Miéville about all things language.

First, what are your thoughts on the recent situation in London with the riots? As a Londoner yourself, would you agree that the themes of the demonization of  the ‘other’ and the barrier of communication in Embassytown are of great topical interest in this context? How does a Tory politician communicate with a ‘hoodie’? In Embassytown you write, “Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth”…

If people find parallels or anything, that’s up to them, and I’ve no problem with it, but I think it would be presumptuous of me to make links between my books and anything as epochal as what’s going on in London. And it is, I think, epochal. For a long time I’ve been struck and horrified by the incredible cultural spite we’ve got in the UK towards young people. The constant use, for example, of the term ‘feral’ to describe trouble/d children should be a matter of utter shame: that our culture has normalised that adjective is an expression of our culture’s moral degradation, far more than children’s. Add to that the slashing of funding for youth amenities, add to that the hopelessness engendered by underinvestment, by lack of jobs and opportunities, by confrontational and racist policing, this is no surprise.

Is it a problem of communication? Or purely one of perception?

I don’t think it’s either: I think it’s one of structures.

In an interview with the Independent, you quoted Dambudzo Marechera, the writer of your favourite book Mindblast: “the language is very racist; you have to have harrowing fights… before you can make it do all that you want it to do”. Is one of your suggestions in Embassytown that language must be conquered before it itself can be weaponized – for good or ill? Are we to both master our own language and assimilate others – or seek out the dying languages for our ammunition? Here in Botswana of course we have the click languages of the indigenous (and oppressed) Koi…

I don’t think it’s really my job to make suggestions in the fiction. (In real life I make them all the damn time, of course.) The thing I like about fiction is that I can raise ideas without coming down on one side or another. So I was very interested in the idea of lying as being something that is both toxic and emancipatory. I don’t have to come to any conclusions about this. I do think in general, however, that fighting language is almost always a good thing. If nothing else, it tends to have fantastically exciting aesthetic effects – to wit, Marechera, as you say. And it may also, if we’re lucky, prod our thinking in one or other interesting ways.

Has the possibility of language as a weapon been lost as an option for young people in Britain? They must have lost all hope after the Murdoch scandal recently…

I think young people use language as a weapon all the time. I think the intoxicatingly brilliant London slang is a weapon. And it, like all slang, is as the surrealist radical Benjamin Péret said, ‘proof of the necessity of poetry in everyday life’. The problem with language as a weapon is that while it has its uses – is, indeed, indispensable – those uses are limited. There’s only so much you can do. Language alone will neither destroy nor liberate us, but that’s because it’s always a function of other thigns, other power structures. Not reducible to them, but not distinguishable either.

Your protagonist Avice has to become a simile in order to be able communicate with the Ariekei, the central alien species of Embassytown. The book is an incredibly muscular toe-to-toe with the possibilities and dynamics of language. What did you discover about your own mind’s processing of language during the writing of the book?

That’s a good question and a hard one to answer, not least because the book was written in an odd way – there was a long, long break – about four years – between draft one and draft two. So any answer would probably only hold for this book. I think it was not necessarily so much discovery, as confirmation and exaggeration of a certain structural scepticism I’d had for some time, about the notion of narrative as liberating – which is still something one hears, all the time. I think it isn’t necessarily anything of the sort. And at the level of words and sentences, the book continued my interest in trying to see how far I could go with making language simultaneously alienating and alienated *and* quotidian. Something SF can do very well, if all goes well.

Ursula Le Guin said in her review of Embassytown of the Ariekei that it seems “they crave that which is not, the unthinkable untruth, the lie.” And there is a rather sinister and frightening concept explored about how the Ambassadors on the aliens’ home world cannot be understood by their “Hosts”. Would you elaborate on the political inspiration for this idea, and the novel’s proposal that language is only comprehensible if there is sentience behind it?

There was no direct political inspiration that I’m aware of – the more obvious metaphoric resonances are, as you say, pretty obvious, but I wasn’t at a conscious level riffing off a specific thing. (But intentionality is a partial and inadequate beast.) The idea of language as a direct, unmediated representation of reality – which is the telos of your point about sentience – is a riff on an old theological debate about ‘Adamic’ language, supposedly spoken in Eden. For which there really was no gap between the signifier and the signified. If you think of that gap, according to whatever theory you fancy, as at the core of the way language works in reality – symbolising and signifying – then removing it so language is just a way of speaking the Real is simultaneously a very simple trick but one with immense and hugely alienating ramifications. Those ramifications are at once philosophical and theoretical, but also political. As everything is.

Embassytown posits that not only is our own universe in its third incarnation, but there is something outside it – the Immer – which is so far beyond our comprehension that to travel within it causes nausea and psychological distress without the aid of medication and “augmens”. City and the City also dealt with the idea of realities outside our own. Is it then your instinctive conclusion that to seek life in our own universe is rather missing the point? You describe “powers like subaltern gods, who sometimes watched us as if we were interesting , curious dust”…

No, not my conclusion at all! Again, I have the luxury of fiddling around with big ideas in the fiction, without deciding whether or not I subscribe to them in reality. A bad theory can make a good novel – and this has happened loads of times. I think there’s every point seeking life in our own universe. I am just also powerfully drawn, and always have been, to the tradition of the numinous and strange, the awe-blasted and inexpressible, that posits something Outside. The tradition of ecstatic, visionary literature, from religious chants through to pulp SF. Again, I stress, that doesn’t mean I believe it’s true – all I need is to believe that it’s an interesting way of thinking about things. And that, I do.

So can I ask for your views on alien life?

I understand that given the imponderables of scale and stars it is impossible to have a ‘measured’ or ‘evidence-based’ position on this, yet, but for myself I am absolutely and unhesitatingly a believer that there is other life in the universe. In fact, I suspect there’s loads. I think part of the problem is the assumption that for years xenobiologists had, of the ‘goldilocks’ paradigm, where planets had to be ‘just right’ to harbour life. That is anthropocentric and parochial, and has come under sustained attack from other more radical xenobiologists, recently, which I think is all to the good. Extremophile organisms on our own world have proved to us how vastly more fecund and less restricted life is than we might have suspected. I blatantly believe in aliens.

Your descriptions of alien lifeforms are deliciously coy and flirtatious – we are asked as readers to give our imaginations a very healthy work out. And this reinforces another theme of the book, that of the human mind’s ability to approximate – it’s interesting that the currency of Embassytown is the Ersatz, with all the political subtexts and duplicity packed within that word!

Well… yes. Good. Thank you! I’m glad you think so, and that I will cop to. The book has a lot of approximation in it. I wanted to make it so that the organisms were left, in part, up to the readers’ mind. Because – to fit in with a bunch of other themes – among the jobs that language is doing at the point we read it is not, in particular, capturing the specificity of the Ariekei.

The Operating System of the AI in Embassytown is called turingware, and runs Avice’s friend, a robot called Ehrsul – who rebukes Avice for asking her if she can joke to herself. The concept of AI in the novel suggests that AI might encapsulate the best of human wit and benevolence… I believe Turing himself said, “Machines take me by surprise with great frequency”…

I like the idea that intelligence and sentience is always contextual, and social, in the sense of not reducible to a monad, so seeking to understand it in the abstract won’t get you very far. That can go both ways. Ehrsul is definitely Avice’s best friend. But there are also points where her behaviour, absolutely clear and sensible from one point of view, distinguishes her from what we might think of as ‘mainstream’ consciousness and sentience the next.

I was thrilled every time she appeared. I think I fell in love with her a little bit.

Thank you. She’s – in a terribly predictable and intentional irony – the most likable and human character, I think, for a lot of it.

You were very critical of Avatar, and called CGI “a mannerist absurdity” – is Hollywood then missing the point entirely, or does it fear to present something to an audience that it thinks it might not be able to process? It’s rather nice that Embassytown doesn’t ‘reveal’ the creatures so to speak… so would a film adaptation fill you with dread? Might I (humbly) argue that one powerful point made in Embassytown is that some things might be better left unknowable?

I don’t think Hollywood’s missing any point – I think its fidelity is to the dollar, and thus considerations of aesthetics will always take a back seat. My criticisms of its affects and effects are on my terms, not, I have to freely confess, its. And yes – I’m very ambivalent about a film, were one to be mooted, for precisely the reasons you cite. You’d lose, definitionally, a lot of the nuance of representation. In that by having the latter, you’d lose the one. But I’m not opposed in principle – just nervous.

Early in the book you write, “We’re still playing you, when we tell you: the story dramatizes, even without lying.” Do you believe in an absolute truth that lies at the heart of all great art? Or that the only truth lies there?

I don’t think I think that there’s an absolute truth in all great art… but I’d have to have the terms clarified to be sure. I do think – and that quote points at it – that narrative, whatever its strengths and necessities, is a manipulation, and to be approached with caution.

What can we look forward to next?

I’ve finished a novel about which I will, I’m afraid, say very little, as I don’t like jinxing things by talking about work in progress. But I’ll say that it’s done, I like it, I need to finish editing it, and I’m raring to go on the next one. I know that’s horribly vague. I’m hoping to do work in a bunch of other media, soon, too. I’d like to do a lot more drawing and so on, for example. But novels will always be my first professional love, I think.

Would you leave us with a simile to describe yourself, and/or your writing?

Well this will sound like an evasion, but I promise it’s not – it’s a rigorously thought-through position! Which is that one of the points of language is that you don’t get to choose how it interpellates and embeds you. So to take my own approach seriously, I have to insist that I’m the last person who gets to choose what simile I would be. I’d love it to be something awesome and cool, of course, but I don’t make the rules. It could be awful. Not my choice.