"[...] Míeville has become renown for the deft manner in which he uses the fantastic to explore such real world concerns as abuses of government power, international relations (not always with human beings), and the role of the subaltern in industrialized society. Míeville is no apologist for his love of genre fiction and much of the pleasure in his work comes from his engagement with familiar topoi of pulp tradition, his subversions of certain clichés, and his willingness to blur the perceived boundaries between various modes of genre fiction. The Scar weaved monsters and quantum theory into the maritime adventure story, while his Hugo award-winning The City and The City fused Hammett-style roman noir with Phildickian weirdness to explore the ways in which city dwellers can be trained to studiously ignore other communities. The recent novel Kraken is an affectionate parody of Lovecraftian apocalypse narratives. In his newest work, Embassytown, Míeville eschews the generic hybridity that has become his calling card in favor of tackling what is arguably the most traditional of science fiction subgenres: the Space Opera. Unsurprisingly, he makes it his own – crafting a narrative that is at once intellectually rigorous and intoxicatingly strange.[...]
The Ariekei also are a truly marvelous invention, precisely because they feel so alien to the human reader. Their Language, their morphology, their conception of the world around them seems so foreign that it takes a concentrated effort for the reader to get his or her mind around it initially. To create a race of extraterrestrials that doesn’t feel like a thinly disguised caricature of an Earth culture is a significant accomplishment and, in this case, a virtuoso feat of imaginative prowess."
— Andre Shephard, The New Inquiry
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