Embassytown

China Miéville loves to play with fantastic ideas and is one of the great writers of highly political sci-fi. His books are dotted with passages of pure genius. He seems to delight in practicing vocabulary words no one uses anymore which some of us find fun, though some will find it pretentious - like a little boy who has discovered a dictionary published a century ago.

In this case, he plays with ideas of language and the limits of communication when the traditional relationships between signs and their signified don't follow for an alien race. There are moments that this works and provokes thought, and there are other times where he doesn't follow through on how limited a world really would be if his radical propositions were followed consistently through to their impossible end.

It was an entertaining read, and always hope the next will live up to its potential.