The Embedding by Ian Watson: language and reality

Largely about the relationship between language and our experience of reality, The Embedding is published by SF Masterworks, and rightly deserves to be. But there's much more to the book than this, and Watson - a former English lecturer - works the title harder than in any novel I've ever read.

We get a clue to this early on with references to the French poet Raymond Roussell, whose debut work Impressions of Africa is a Matryoshka doll of brackets nested within brackets (hold on to that concept), leaving you clueless as to how many diversions deep you're in, let alone which section is parenthetical to which, and you might as well give up trying to remember the index statement.

Pierre is an ethno-linguist who has managed to insert himself with the Xemahou deep in the Amazon forests. Their lands are in the first stages of inundation by a gargantuan dam which will bury the trees out of sight and out of mind, leaving the valuable timber ripe for plucking from its sodden tomb.

Desperate to continue his researches into the sacred drug that inserts its communicant into new ways of experiencing reality, Pierre reaches out to his old friend-cum-rival Chris, whose latest project involves experimenting on war-orphans from overseas. The unit where the children are being reared, and where they are fed an experimental medicine, constitutes an immersive environment where the only language they hear is a computer-mediated translation of human speech whose clauses, instead of following sequentially, are nested within each other in the manner of Roussell's poetry. How, he wants to know, will this impact the children's developing understanding of the world surrounding them?

In comes a senior US officer from a project monitoring transmissions that has started receiving trash TV, but broadcast from celestial coordinates, whose movement indicates that the source of the transmissions is getting closer.

Watson skillfully blends high-concept sci-fi to linguistic philosophy, and the union produces a compelling narrative that is possibly more relevant now than it was upon its first release in 1973, as we get to grips with social-media semiotics and the ways in which all of us, whether we be partakers or not, are semantically conditioned to the vision of reality its hegemonic threads weave us into.

The Embedding is a treasure-trove for sci-fi fans, with esoteric French poetry, tribal psychedelia, experimental drugs, first contact - and, the cherry on the cake, references to Wittgenstein's psycho-linguistic manifesto Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus! Ian Watson's cornucopia carries an important message for our times as well, and I thoroughly recommend it.