Big ideas are undone by overly complex storytelling. It took easily 100 pages to really understand what this book was about, and another 150 to determine whether or not I cared. Turns out, no. I put it down with 50 pages left.

There are so many interesting things here! The author uses aliens and genetic engineering to explore a fully different envisioning of language and communication. The ideas that speech requires a consciousness behind it to be comprehensible, or that a language has roots so deep in concrete things that to lie is impossible, are super compelling. There are lots of other neat ideas baked into the setting of the book too.

Unfortunately, Mieville can’t get out of his own way. The writing is frustratingly oblique for the first 75 or so pages. Some authors use this to effectively immerse you in their world (Neuromancer, Infomocracy), but for it to work the stakes have to be clear. Gibson’s books always start with a bang. Infomocracy starts in the middle of a political unravelling. This one is written in the first person, so it feels like the narrator is just declining to explain things.

Once the story gets going, it oscillates between interesting (when dealing with ideas and themes) and frustratingly dull (the plot). There are a dozen red herrings, and ideas that are explored only to be forgotten about. By the time things pick up toward the end, I was fully disengaged.