It’s December and the New Year is just around the corner. What better time than this to look back at some of this year’s best books, as well as some of next year’s most anticipated titles?
For the next few weeks, we at Suvudu will be sharing some of our favorites from 2011. After that, we’ll focus on what we think is going to make 2012 a great year for reading.
Today’s choice for Best of 2011:
Embassytown by China Miéville
Every year, I read books that scream award-winning. It’s kind of like the Patrick Rothfuss definition of “epic” fantasy: You know it when you see it. 2011 saw a few books I think will be nominated for the Hugo Award and Nebula Award but easily, without a doubt, I read one that should win both prestigious sci-fi/fantasy awards.
Embassytown is an odd amalgamation when one starts reading the book. It’s hard science fiction for one, a departure for China who has historically written weird fantasy. It has odd characters and odder names. Once I began to absorb the space setting China had created though the book becomes as engrossing as anything I’ve read. The emphasis on language—and its power—drives the narrative, with a character I came to really appreciate for her complexity making her way through a very alien world on the brink of war.
Here is a bit more about Embassytown:
China Miéville doesn’t follow trends, he sets them. Relentlessly pushing his own boundaries as a writer—and in the process expanding the boundaries of the entire field—with Embassytown, Miéville has crafted an extraordinary novel that is not only a moving personal drama but a gripping adventure of alien contact and war.
In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak.
Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language.
When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties—to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak yet speaks through her.
The command of language that China possesses makes the read all the more enjoyable, given its subject matter. It is storytelling tightly written, with every word needed and every sentence important. Readers who can immerse themselves in the story will see the literary quality China is weaving throughout it—how words and the things we say have more power than we give them credit for. Embassytown is, in short, a masterpiece of science fiction.
I know there are a few other novels that will award contend with this one, but I’ll place my money on Embassytown.
