El Dorado of the mind: The Embedding (1973) by Ian Watson [Review]

A startling debut novel of linguistics, anthropology, geopolitics, and first contact.

In England, a team of scientists conduct unethical experiments on children secluded from the outside world. In Brazil, American engineers threatened by left-wing guerilla fighters attempt to complete a massive new dam. In the rainforest threatened by the dam, an enigmatic tribe awaits the birth of a new messiah. In deep space, an alien intelligence receives and analyses transmissions from Earth. The world stands on the brink of an incredible breakthrough, but will it be transformative - or destructive?

As David Pringle wrote, “it seemed in the mid-1970s that the world was Ian Watson’s oyster”. He began his SF writing career with “Roof Garden Under Saturn”, a story published in New Worlds magazine in 1969. Published by Gollancz in 1973, The Embedding is Watson’s striking and sometimes shocking debut novel. As the SFE put it, the book “very early confirmed his stature as an SF writer of powerful intellect”. 

Very much a novel of the “soft” sciences, The Embedding has a complex plot which braids together narratives dealing with linguistics, anthropology, colonialism and resistance, as well as first contact with alien life. Watson explores language, perception and the pursuit of meaning on various scales - from a closed-off lab, to an Amazon village, to an alien civilisation which journeys the cosmos on the shifting tides of space itself.

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Nested destinies

The Embedding has a complex story which is primarily organised into three plot threads, which are initially only slightly connected, but which become braided together.

• The first thread is set primarily in the UK and follows Chris Sole, a British linguist working at the Haddon Unit. A secretive research facility attached to a working hospital, the Unit is experimenting on children who are kept entirely closed off from the outside world. Sole has imposed on these children a constructed language, based loosely on English but grammatically reorganised by computer.
  
• The second thread is set in Brazil, and focuses on American engineer Charlie Faith and his Brazilian deputy Jorge Almeida. They are working on the Amazon Project, a vast system of dams being funded by the United States and forcibly implemented with the help of the local military government. 
  
• The third thread is also set in Brazil. Pierre Darriand is a French anthropologist studying the secluded Xemahoa people. He is particularly fascinated by a variant of their language, Xemahoa B, which is used only in ceremonies facilitated by a potent local drug. Darriand does not realise that he is the father of a son that his former friend, Chris, is raising as his own.

While each of the characters grapple with their own crises, an external element intrudes: Sole is alerted by an NSA agent that contact has been made with an alien intelligence. The linguist is essentially conscripted into an effort to make contact with the beings, who prove to be obsessed with language. They offer a grim bargain to humankind - formidable technology and the coordinates of habitable worlds, in exchange for six live, disembodied, human brains. 

Events in every plot thread rapidly escalate, in part due to their connections with this momentous exchange. What unites many of the deeply flawed characters - and the aliens - is their craving for meaning, for a grasp on language that will enable them to better understand the universe and their place within it. Watson’s novel raises the questions of whether humankind is worthy of this knowledge, what they would do to obtain it, and whether they would abandon it in order to preserve the status quo.

Finding the right words

The Embedding is arguably a far more effective and compelling use of linguistics in science fiction than other efforts like Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 (1966) and Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue (1984). Like other SF treatments of language, Watson’s novel deals partly with the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (or linguistic relativity), which suggests that a person’s notion of reality is structured by the language they speak. 

The novel’s human and alien characters each, in their own way, seek a language that will unveil some truer knowledge of the universe. The aliens in particular are pathologically driven by this quest, which has taken them to numerous inhabited star systems. The pursuit of knowledge comes with a large cost. The alien culture has been warped by it, and Chris Sole is driven to highly unethical experimentation. Pierre Darriand, though an anthropologist, is obsessed partly by Xemahoa B and crosses his own ethical lines.

While the novel’s opening can seem overly dry or academic in tone, no prior knowledge of linguistics or other disciplines is necessary to enjoy The Embedding once it gathers pace. Watson’s chosen title comes from the term centre embedding, and has several resonances in the story.

The stars reach back

The Embedding is as much about people as it is about language. It is suffused with political and personal conflicts, as well as questions about the future of the human species. The novel’s anthropological element examines multiple different kinds of societies and groups, from the supposedly primitive Amazonian tribe to the apparatus of the US security state. The novel has a strong geopolitical element, in which the powerful manipulate the affairs of “lesser” societies in order to secure their own interests.

After contact with the aliens begins, The Embedding widens its scope. It raises questions about humanity’s worthiness for venturing beyond the Earth, and how trustworthy it will be in its interactions with other intelligences. At no point does Watson’s novel indulge in the wish fulfilment typical of much SF. It is clear that human greed and lust for power poses a deep threat to the lofty goals of exploration and understanding.

A unique first novel

The Embedding is a truly striking first novel. Rooted in Watson’s encounters with linguists, anthropologists, and even his experiences with LSD, it is tremendously ambitious in its scope. This is a difficult novel to summarise or even to parse; in its 250 pages it covers enormous intellectual ground, while telling a story that is compelling and - especially in its endgame - genuinely shocking.

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• I read the 1990 VGSF edition of The Embedding, published (as was the first edition) by Gollancz. My copy has a signed inscription from Watson, “to Dennis”. An overview of the VGSF series is available here.
  
• The first US edition of the novel was published by Charles Scriber's Sons in 1975. It carried the highly misleading description "a novel of mind control" on the cover.
• The novel was a nominee for both the 1974 John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the 1975 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
• The Embedding is included in David Pringle’s book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1984). It is described as a “fast, slightly confusing, but very invigorating book.”
  
• Ian Watson was also praised extensively in 100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels (2006) by Stephen E. Andrews and Nick Rennison. They wrote that he “came to be regarded as the premier British SF writer of ideas in the seventies”. J.G. Ballard went further, calling Watson the only British SF writer of ideas.
  
• BBC Archive have shared a segment from The Book Programme from 1979, featuring Watson alongside Peter Nicholls, Harry Harrison, and Douglas Adams.
  
• Ansible has the full text of an interview with Watson conducted by Dave Langford in 1981. In it, the author says that the novel “grew out of my own discovery of the "soft" sciences at the time, plus the political impetus of having lived in a developing country in the third world.”