Alien Referents--Embassytown and Storytelling

     China Mieville's Embassytown draws together an impressive variation of ideas, even for an author so accomplished at exploring the interstices of esoteric theory, fantasy, science fiction, political thought, and the sometimes shockingly bizarre.  In the space of a bare 350 pages, Embassytown creates a setting at first very familiar to readers of science fiction--humans have set up a colony engaged in a power struggle with its sovereign on an alien world and established contact with the local extraterrestrials, the Ariekei.  Mieville then may as well have drawn a box around mainstream science fiction and scrawled "here there be dragons" in the margins he so boldly inhabits before unveiling the mind-bendingly fascinating linguistic implications of the dialogue between his humans and their not-so-relatable alien counterparts.  One particularly interesting facet of Mieville's writing style is that he reveals the inner workings of his worlds as the book progresses rather than frontloading all the information at the same time, as can be seen in the following passage:

     All those structures in place, for all those thousands of hours, years.  Embassytown years, the years I grew                    up with, long months named in silly nostalgia for an antique calendar, each many dozen-day weeks long.  For    almost an Embassytown century, since Embassytown was born, structures had been in place.  Clone farms had been run, careful and unique child rearing had raised doppels into Ambassadors, with the skills of governance they would need.   It was all under Bremen's aegis of course: they were our home power; our public buildings all displayed clocks and calendars in Charo City time.  But so far out here in the immer, everything should have been under Staff control.
     CalVin once told me that Bremen's original expectations of Arieka's reserves, of luxuries and oddities and local gold, had been overoptimistic.  Ariekene bioriggery was valuable, though, certainly.  More elegant and functional than any of the crude chimeras of particle-spliced jiggery-pokery any Terre I knew of had ever managed, these Ariekene things were moulded from fecund plasms by the Hosts with techniques we could not  merely not mimic, but that were impossible according to our sciences.  Was that enough?  In any case, no colony is ever wound down.

Mieville does a number of things in the above passage which qualify it as great storytelling.  First, in keeping with his penchant for revealing things as if the character assumed the reader were already familiar with them, a description of what exactly "immer" is or the exact relationship of Embassytown with Bremen--the sovereign in control of the colony--are lacking, and yet the context of the passage makes it very easy to intuit without making it necessary for Mieville to arbitrarily have his characters break into explanation of what are, to them, facile topics.  Equally impressive are both the character's voice, which by its syntax alone helps to solidify an idea of the character in the mind of the reader, and the almost stream-of-consciousness structure of the passage that manages to convey the impression of a thought process without abandoning clarity.