I think he’s saying, in order to remake the material world towards a more just and ethical vision of society, we need to also remake the language we have to describe it, and the stories through which we narrate it. The political component in Miéville’s fiction-making is very clear, here. It’s easy to read that as a metaphor for the writer’s own project, to present the reader with a new way of seeing things, encoded in language, and to ask the reader to join with that way of seeing things, even if it means abandoning, destroying or revising old ways, old traditions. The scenes between Avice and the alien she teaches to speak (or to ‘unspeak’ as Miéville might say, since she makes it wreck its own sense of language in order to speak her own) dramatise very strongly what a struggle it can be to begin to see the world differently, though another’s eyes. That’s certainly one aspect of the allegory that is suggested by the story. Is the idea of simile and metaphor as powers that can ‘destroy and remake the very language’ of which the protagonist ‘is a piece’, itself a metaphor for the role of ‘writer’ as destroyer and creator of the world of ideas and ‘realities’ that shape society? Today she chats with us about her essay ‘ Refiguring fiction: Gender and China Miéville’s Embassytown’, featured in Overland 204. Her second novel, A Common Loss, is due to appear in January 2012.

Tranter’s first novel, The Legacy, was listed for the Miles Franklin in 2010. Fiction writer, poet, essayist and literary critic, Kirsten Tranter, grew up in Sydney’s literary atmosphere and studied at the University of Sydney, but it was at New York’s Rutgers University that she completed her PhD in English on Renaissance poetry.

Mieville embassytown