Subverting or Subjugated?
Posted by Niall Harrison
24 February 2012
Lavie Tidhar continues his series of posts on contemporary sf writers with a look at China Mieville's Embassytown:
What disappoints me – that vague sense of unease at the back of my neck, whispering as I read – is that Mieville, like so many Western SF writers before him, has made the implicit decision that the future belongs to today’s dominant culture. Embassytown’s future is Western; it is Anglo; it is, by definition, White. There are Jews in Embassytown, we’re told. But they’re a minority. There are Asians – witness Cho – but they are a minority. Humanity Uber Alles goes to the star, with its Germanic names and Christian-derived names, there to once again perpetuate the great European Colonial Project.
Of course, Mieville is too smart a writer to fall into such a trap. Isn’t he? Is he, perhaps, saying something profound about our cultural assumptions? Is he gently mocking the great American tradition of SF, its Campbellian (in the John, not Joseph, sense of the word) sense of Jews Need Not Applied (as recounted by Isaac Asimov in his memories of John W. Campbell, Jr., within his autobiography, In Memory Yet Green (1979) and elsewhere)?
If he is, it does not seem to me effective. Embassytown is yet another Anglos in Space novel, the base default assumption of the vast majority of English-language (and not a little of other languages, too) science fiction. It occurs to me Mieville has had the opportunity to do something interesting with Embassytown; to examine the interaction with his fictional aliens by humans not speaking English, whose cultural assumptions may be different to the ones his characters end up exhibiting. It would have been a challenging book indeed – perhaps too much, for a beast already as cumbersome – and also challenging, conflicted and experimental – as Embassytown.
