Embassytown: A Novel

I admit defeat. I’ve been trying to present these events with a structure. I simply don’t know how everything happened. Perhaps because I didn’t pay proper attention, perhaps because it wasn’t a narrative, but for whatever reasons, it doesn’t want to be what I want to make it.

“I don’t want to be a simile anymore,” I said. “I want to be a metaphor.”

“You’d have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it. It’s not exactly a secret. It’s just not thought.

“Similes are a way out. A route from reference to signifying. Just a route, though. But we can push them down it, even that last step, all the way.” It became clearer to me as I spoke. “To where the literal becomes …” I stopped. “Something else. If similes do their job well enough, they turn into something else. We tell the truth best by becoming l

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.

Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable. They could be mythologers now: they’d never had monsters, but now the world was all chimeras, each metaphor a splicing. The city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and

The Hosts were patient, seemed intrigued by and, insofar as anyone could tell through their polite opacity, welcoming to their guests. They had no access to immer, nor exotic drives or even sublux engines; they never left their atmosphere, but they were otherwise advanced. They manipulated life with astonishing finesse, and they seemed unsurprised

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.

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