The Embedding (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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The US presidential elections certainly makes it more relevant. One person found this helpful. As usual for 70s sci-fi it's hamfisted and the political satire in it reads like which might sound good but actually no, that's a bad thing. This is an alien first contact story in which language plays a central element. The various story lines are engaging and tightly written. The main interest for me was that the book portrays a tension between mystic and thoroughly pragmatic elements, and I was intrigued to see how this tension was resolved in the end.

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So ultimately the book disappoints, coming across as sardonic and supercilious, without any real content of interest. This book is generally famous within the annals of SF for really dealing with the concept of language and its nature, indicating a level of thought that wasn't often seen in the genre and helping to elevate its status above that of "rayguns and spaceships", which is how people typically see these types of novels.


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The origins and evolution of language is one of the more fascinating topics in the world, and many a person spends a large amount of time trying to piece together evidence in order to discover the "original language". Ian Watson probably has a background as a linguist to some extent or at least he's well read , but it doesn't translate as well into novel form as one might hope. One of fiction's most famous linguists was, of course, JRR Tolkein, who basically came up with Lord of the Rings to field test his nifty Elven language that he came up with.

Ian Watson doesn't go to those extremes and keeps things more in the realm of the abstract and the story suffers a little for it. It may be a case of biting off more than he can chew, because there are a lot of subplots swimming around in what turns out to be a fairly slim book ah, the old days of SF, nowadays half the plots take up ten times the space, thank you, "decompression".

And much like "Day of the Dead" they want brains. The cover copy on this novel, as if typical of most seventies SF books, tends to overpromise up the wazoo, calling the book a "superthriller about mind control" when I'm not really sure that's the case. Not only is the book not exactly thrilling in the same way that a good spy novel is, it's not really about mind control either, unless that went over my head.

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I originally thought that the focus of the story was going to be on the aliens and our attempts to understand them and that would be where the language theories would come in, much like "Solaris" which this book is compared to on the cover it could be have been about our attempts to understand that which we have little common ground with. Alas, the aliens speak perfect English, just like any other SF alien. So instead the book is all over the place, to the aliens, the kids, the jungle, back and forth and it's not really clear where any of it is going.

The importance of the Other-Reality language that the natives can tap into isn't really that clear and the implications of the experiments on the kids is never really apparent either. Needless to say there's probaly just too much plot stuffed into too little space, although the sketches of Watson's ideas are absolutely fascinating and it's a better first novel than anything I might have written or have written, I should say. By the end it all gets quite psychedelic and more science-fictional, and it all becomes rather vague.

Watson gets credit for tackling so much at once and for introducing questions on the nature of language itself and its ability to manipulate reality, an honest to Asimov original idea in SF. Unfortunately intent and execution aren't the same thing and a lot gets lost, the reader is left with a lot of pieces that don't really connect in any obvious fashion and the transcendental feeling that Watson is shooting for kind of falls flat. But it does read quick and a lot of the scenes are quite fun, most of the interactions with the aliens are interesting and the bits with the tribe range from intriguing to disturbing including one of the most disturbing moments I've ever read in SF.

But it still deserves to be on your reading list and should be required reading for anyone looking to devour the more important novels of the genre.

Just be warned that what you expect may not be what you get. Ian Watson's first novel, published in , was one of his best, and an acknowledged classic of science fiction. Its theme is not a traditional sf topic, but a very intellectually challenging one: In Watson's fictional "embededed" language of the Xemahoas, a Brazilian Indian tribe, "This-Reality" is converted into the transcendent pattern of "Other-Reality," which is the world of pure being.

The Sp'thra who represent the essential otherness of the objective world, everything about it that we do not understand bargain for the brains of speakers of this language, which they desire to learn. The World According to Anna. The Unfinished Novel and Other stories. From the Place in the Valley Deep in the Forest. Books Ian Watson The Embedding. Download Image Download Image. A cutting-edge novel about the nature of communication and what it means to be human. More books by Ian Watson. Praise for The Embedding.

More books by Ian Watson

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The Embedding (S.F. Masterworks) by Watson, Ian Paperback Book The Cheap Fast | eBay

The First Men in the Moon. The City and the Stars. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The Dancers at the End of Time. Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Downward to the Earth. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The Left Hand of Darkness. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. SF Gateway forum posts by Malcolm Edwards [8] ; cover image on artist's site [9].