Embassytown: A Novel

“Similes are a way out. A route from reference to signifying. Just a route, though. But we can push them down it, even that last step, all the way.” It became clearer to me as I spoke. “To where the literal becomes …” I stopped. “Something else. If similes do their job well enough, they turn into something else. We tell the truth best by becoming l

They were worldsick, as meanings yawed. Anything was anything, now. Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable. They could be mythologers now: they’d never had monsters, but now the world was all chimeras, each metaphor a splicing.

“I don’t want to be a simile anymore,” I said. “I want to be a metaphor.”