Embassytown: A Novel

It made me wonder if, had the Bremeni designers used Ariekene biorigging, the implants themselves would have become infected like the Hosts, and the thing that let Ez and Ra be EzRa would have become hooked on their voice. What theology that would have been, a god self-worshipping, a drug addicted to itself.

It would have been an elegant imperial manoeuvre. Counterrevolution through language pedagogy and bureaucracy.

I watched tiny lights move across his corneas.

A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”

“A simile,” he said, “is true because you say so. It’s a persuasion: this is like that. That’s not enough for it anymore. Similes aren’t enough.” He stared. “It wants to make you a kind of lie. To change everything.

Everything in Language is a truth claim. So they need the similes to compare things to, to make true things that aren’t there yet, that they need to say. It might not be that they can think of it: maybe Language just demands it.

Tactile languages, bioluminescent words, all varieties of sounds that organisms can make. Dialects comprehensible only as palimpsests of references to everything already said, or in which adjectives are rude and verbs unholy.

“You quash secession,” said Bren. “God, no,” Wyatt said. “You may be the mysterious old man here, but I’m from the out, and you can’t hide your ignorance from me. Berit Blue did secede, with only the tiniest war.” He held thumb and forefinger minutely apart to show how small the war had been. “Dracosi’s independence was totally peaceful. Chao Polis

Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.