Monday, June 22, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 21, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


Axiom's End is the debut novel from culture critic Lindsay Ellis, known mainly for her YouTube videos analyzing/critiquing movies and other parts of pop culture.  Ellis' videos are done in a really entertaining fashion and I've enjoyed when I've been linked to them, so I was interested in trying out her debut in the genre I love when it popped up on NetGalley.  Of note:  the book is marketed as a stand alone (apparently the publisher only bought this novel originally), but it is apparently part of a series, and ends as such.  So that might affect your reaction to this novel and whether you want to try it in the first place.

And Axiom's End is a really interesting start to a new series - it's a First Contact novel featuring a strong heroine, interesting aliens, and an alternate version of 2007.  It isn't some tremendously original take on the First Contact subgenre - again to the extent that anything is original these days - but it takes a bunch of classic genre tropes - young woman on the run with an alien; aliens with moralities that don't quite mesh with human ones; government/military short shortsightedly making things worse with aggression; second set of more antagonistic aliens chasing the first....etc.  As with any novel, the key is how this novel puts these things together, and Axiom's End does so in an interesting way, with some strong characters and surprising plot twists, although the ending is incredibly and awkwardly abrupt.

One last note before we go in depth - though the novel is enjoyable and not a tragedy in any form, it also doesn't have the same comic type of entertainment as Ellis' YouTube analyses, so if you're looking for that here, you won't be satisfied.

Final Note:  I'm going to talk about the aliens to some extent in depth in terms of their characteristics, even though I won't go into plot points here. So if you want to go into the book completely unspoiled, you may want to skip the rest of the review.

----------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
Cora wanted nothing to do with her father, investigative journalist/notorious-leaker Nils Ortega, who abandoned her mother and siblings to flee the United States after reporting on leaked government documents on his website.  But a month ago, in August of 2007, her father released the leaked "Fremda" memo, which revealed the US Government had been in custody of an alien species for years - a species which had previously never shown any hint of language.  And just before that, a "meteor" hit California, known as the "Ampersand" event, and suddenly Cora's father's name is back on everyone's lips.

And then a second meteor, known as the "Obelus" event, hits California just as Cora was starting her first day at a temp job.  Just after she found her family in the crosshairs of a Federal agent.  And if that wasn't bad enough, Cora soon finds her house invaded by something that looks definitely inhuman.....

Soon, Cora will find herself on the run, with nowhere to go, involved with the very aliens her father has spent the past month trying to reveal to the world - and whose appearance is upending the old world order.  And Cora will find herself - not her father, but her - the only person able to discover the truth of what's out there and the only person able to make choices that will determine the survival of more than one species......
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Axiom's Edge is a story that follows Cora as she tries to figure out what's going on with the aliens, the government and everything.  We see glimpses of the world through news and blog clips that ended each chapter, but otherwise this is entirely Cora's story.  Cora is a tremendous heroine, a young woman whose life is upended by her father's quest for truth - or his quest for recognition and attention, depending upon whom you believe - and who just wants to somehow have some sort of normal life.  Naturally as the heroine of this book, that isn't happening any time soon, but Cora's combination of intelligence, empathy and emotions make her a strong lead who its really easy to care about.  She's very much an ordinary person caught up in a whole mess not of her own making, and Ellis does a great job writing her as such that you really are hoping for the best for her.

It's also a first contact story - which tend to go one of a few ways traditionally:  1) the aliens can be straight out hostile; 2) the aliens can be friendly but we can be hostile, making it for our heroes to have to stop humanity from getting ourselves killed; or 3) the aliens can be hostile as a result of misunderstandings (or well, a proper understanding) of humanity which can be changed over the course of the story.

Axiom's End plays around with all of this by making it not clear which category above we really fit into.  The aliens have, as they aren't humans, a strange sense of morality, which could seem to put us in any of these categories: they fear humanity for what humanity does to each other to some extent (due to some obsolete information), they fear the actions of military-minded government agents who might force them to use powers beyond our abilities; and well, some straight out think of humanity as worms.  But in a clever note, the aliens do not have what TVTropes would call "Blue and Orange Morality" - while it may feel as such to humans like Cora - the aliens do have a frame of mind that is understandable:  they come from a species which evolved to believe itself as superior and the only possible intelligent race, and their equivalent of a leadership finds anything that proves otherwise to be a threat that must be eliminated.  At the same time, humanity isn't at that level yet, so to the aliens, we aren't persons, we're just there.

And then there's the group of Aliens, and the Alien in particular - named Ampersand - who Cora meets.  They broke from their kind over disagreements over such a purge of other species - or were forced out - but still contain the same prejudices to some extent of their original hierarchy.  Being the alien equivalent of "woke" - oh god I'm not using that word ever again, let's just say "enlightened instead" - doesn't make them any less alien to humans or make them better equipped to treat humans - such as Cora as equal partners.  Even more so when their own group and species has its own caste system of sorts which doesn't let them treat each other as partners.  You can uh, see the allegories being made here, I hope.  And Ellis makes this whole situation works really well as Cora discovers these truths about the aliens and her and Ampersand have to deal with it as the plot moves on.  It's really well written work and I do want to see more of where she goes with this.

On the negative front, the setting and premise behind the setting of this book was a bit jarring for me.  As noted above, the book takes place in an alternate version of 2007, with some real world politicians as background players - George W Bush is the President - and some pastiches of real world people having more significant roles - Cora's father Nils Ortega is essentially Glenn Greenwald, although he has his own wikileaks-esque website to make him a bit like Julian Assange as well.  And so a major background element here is Nils leaking the existence of the aliens and the government cover up of it, which causes a political scandal which helps tank the stock market/economy (given the year of the setting and an aside in the book though, it's not the only cause) and takes down the President.

But uh.....why would such a scandal, even if it was believed, really have that effect?  The same politicians from back then are still here in the legislature and it's hard to believe they'd care enough to force a resignation given, uh, you know, what we've just seen here.  And honestly, why would people really care that much - it's not like the actual actions of the aliens are ever leaked, and even then most people just would sort of shrug, to say nothing about those who get their news from entirely partisan news sources who would just believe spin anyhow.  According to Ellis' youtube channel, this book was originally drafted in a much different form 10 years ago so maybe that could explain this mentality, but you'd think such a plot point would have changed in revisions since then?  It's not all that important but it broke my suspension of disbelief just the same.

Aside from that, Axiom's End has a bizarre ending where the main conflict is resolved, but the book just seems to end abruptly mid-conversation.  Fortunately, the conflict's resolution is satisfying and this isn't the end of this story, so I will be more than happy to revisit Ellis' creations whenever the sequel does come out.  I look forward to reading it.
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