Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

[Werthead]

Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

 

August, 2007. A meteorite falls on northern California. A whistleblower goes public with evidence that the US government has been in communication with an alien intelligence and flees to Germany. His daughter, embarrassed by his behaviour, tries to ignore the unwanted cult of celebrity and get on with things. Suddenly a second meteor falls on apparently the exact same sport as the first, a coincidence so remote as to be effectively impossible, and suddenly the implausible feels very real indeed.

 

Axiom's End is the debut novel by Lindsay Ellis, a popular video essayist and film critic known for her deep dives on the making of film and TV shows. She was nominated for a Hugo for her three-part series on Peter Jackson's deeply troubled Hobbit film project, and also posted an excellent analysis of the problems with Game of Thrones.

 

Fortunately, it turns out she's pretty handy in the realm of fiction as well. Axiom's End is a story about humanity encountering an alien race, only to find the aliens are almost impossible to communicate with due to the total absence of common frames of reference. Early parts of the book, where the existence of the aliens is unclear, are framed like an X-Files thriller where government agents are keeping tabs on a young woman because of what she thinks is her father's criminal activities. Cora gets first-hand evidence that the aliens are real and that pretty much everyone is in the dark about what's really going on, resulting in a satisfying story shift where she gains more power, knowledge and agency because of her own experiences (a nice inversion on the more traditional story where the protagonist is always playing catch-up with the plot but somehow ends out coming on top).

 

There's some pretty cool horror scenes early on, and a vein of humour running through the books which stays just on the right side of dated pop culture references (the alternate-past setting helps with that). Cora's conspiracy theorist father - Edward Snowden fused with Fox Mulder - starts off as an all-knowing sage drip-feeding the audience with hints of greater knowledge via excerpts from his blog, until you realise he doesn't really know anything either and is desperately trying to make himself seem more important than he really is (sort of a budget Melisandre in the story) whilst also falling way behind the curve of the story, which becomes increasingly amusing.

 

The second half of the story feels like it slightly undercuts its own premise. The aliens initially appear almost too different for humans to effectively communicate with them, but ultimately a method of communication does appear which ends up being about as good as Google Translate (i.e. mostly okay with the occasional clunker), which makes the story way more manageable, but some of the unique atmosphere of the story is lost. It is replaced by a more traditional story about people from completely different civilisations trying to overcome apparently insurmountable odds to establish a rapport. This is excellently handled, but it does feel that the story has switched directions from something a bit weirder (think China Mieville's Embassytown or Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life, later filmed as Arrival) to something a little more traditional (maybe Starman with a slightly less attractive and indeed non-humanoid Jeff Bridges).

 

There are still a lot of interesting plot twists and the weirdness of the aliens is maintained through their technology and weapons; when two of the aliens come into conflict, Ellis successfully portrays the idea of humans interfering as being akin to a gnat trying to stop a jet fighter dogfight. There's also another raft of thematic ideas related to first contact that are intelligently explored, from the existence of the so-called "Great Filter" (the puzzle that if intelligent, technologically-advanced life is possible, as we have shown, why hasn't it already colonised the galaxy?) to the dangers incurred when a more technologically advanced species encounters a less technologically-advanced one.

 

Axiom's End (****½) may end up being a bit less strange than it initially promises, but it's still a compulsive page-turner with a nice line in both terror and humour. There will be sequels - the book is touted as the first in the Noumena sequence - but the book has a fair amount of closure to it and no immediate cliffhangers. It is available now in the UK and USA.

[Targknight]

The book is awful.

[Ran]

Just now, BloodyJollyRoger said:

The book is awful.

Who was your least favorite character in the book?

[Targknight]

3 minutes ago, Ran said:

Who was your least favorite character in the book?

I dropped it. 

[Ran]

22 minutes ago, BloodyJollyRoger said:

I dropped it. 

What was going on that made you decide mid-book that it sucked? 

[Luzifer's right hand]

A link at the beginning of the book rickrolled me...

I did enjoy it and read it in one go but I agree that the sudden switch from impossible to translate to google style translation was weird.

I'm looking forward to a possible sequel.

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

A link at the beginning of the book rickrolled me...

I did enjoy it and read it in one go but I agree that the sudden switch from impossible to translate to google style translation was weird.

I'm looking forward to a possible sequel.

The book's been re-titled on several websites as "Book 1 of Noumena" so it looks like there will be more. Unsurprising given that it immediately hit the Top Ten bestseller lists in the States and the initial US print run sold out immediately. The publishers hadn't quite cottoned on at how popular Ellis is, which is yet another example of the Old Media seeing these numbers for YouTube views and personalities and not believing they are real.

I think it would be a reasonable Astounding nominee next year, but probably not quite a worthwhile winner in that or the novel categories (unless it's a much weaker year than last year, which is possible; I've still to read a lot of 2020 books).

[shortstark]

I really enjoyed this book and found it hard to put down, i am unsure of where the story goes from here but am looking forward to it.. I lol when the FBI guy called Cora a Sweet Summer Child.. 

[Werthead]

12 hours ago, shortstark said:

I really enjoyed this book and found it hard to put down, i am unsure of where the story goes from here but am looking forward to it.. I lol when the FBI guy called Cora a Sweet Summer Child.. 

That was funny because, as the book was set in 2007, that must have been a book-only reference and I was expecting Cora to either go WTF or recognise the reference, but it went unmentioned (probably for the best).

[shortstark]

Yup, this is purely authorial indulgence as i am not sure this phrase from the book would have been in popular culture at the time.. 

[Kyll.Ing.]

Finished the book now. I liked it, but it was a tad frustrating not knowing what was going on at any time. In the end, so many plot threads were left hanging. I guess there's plenty of material left for the sequel(s) to explore. But I can't quite see the sequels following the same tone as this book, otherwise it's going to be all questions and no answers.

[All Cats Are Bad]

It's like if Zim wasn't an idiot.

[Lord Patrek]

It's currently on sale and I'm keen to pick it up. But 99% of the reviews from people who were not already fans of Ellis are pretty awful. . . :/

[SkynJay]

I am a huge Lindsay Ellis fan and eagerly picked this one up.  I found it... pretty good?  But also disappointing.  It has some humor, an engaging lead and a great premise.  But it got bogged down in the details a bit and ultimately wasn't that memorable.  I will read more from her, but it wasn't something that would make any year end lists for me.  

[Kyll.Ing.]

The sequel, "Truth of the Divine" is now out. Has anybody read it?

I'm a bit more than halfway through it and find it quite intriguing. But there's still that annoying structure of plot where everybody keeps withholding information from each other all the time, resulting in a book that would have been approximately ten pages long if everybody had just sat down and played their cards straight. The aliens in particular annoy me to no end, as practically everything they say is a lie, a half-truth or a lie by omission, and "by the way character Y didn't tell you X, and that changes everything" appears approximately twice per chapter.

Still, though, intriguing. It's well written.

[El Kabong]

I have no opinion on this one way or the other, having never read the first nor knowing much about Ellis, but there was a huge blow up over something she said on twitter, oh, about a year ago? in which, as social media does, a lot of old videos of hers were dug up and criticized and there was a lot of, I dunno, bad blood. I don't even remember what it was about, just saw some of the fallout on my twitter, but from what I recall, she lost a lot of goodwill with people and seems to have greatly reduced her social media presence to the point this book kind of came out with no fanfare. Whether what happened was fair or not I have no idea, but that may be why you are seeing little about the new book.

[polishgenius]

The whole Lindsay Ellis getting cancelled thing was such utter nonsense. She said Raya and the Last Dragon was similar to Avatar the Last Airbender, as a lot of properties nowadays are similar to TLA, and somehow that got turned into her being a racist. And then all her past sins got dragged up, so she made a long video addressing them and apologising for the ones that needed apologising for. 

She then cut back on twitter coz she decided, probably rightly, that some of her initial attempts at justifying made it worse and that just being on twitter is bad for you. 

[El Kabong]

15 hours ago, polishgenius said:

The whole Lindsay Ellis getting cancelled thing was such utter nonsense. She said Raya and the Last Dragon was similar to Avatar the Last Airbender, as a lot of properties nowadays are similar to TLA, and somehow that got turned into her being a racist. And then all her past sins got dragged up, so she made a long video addressing them and apologising for the ones that needed apologising for. 

She then cut back on twitter coz she decided, probably rightly, that some of her initial attempts at justifying made it worse and that just being on twitter is bad for you. 

Twitter is bad. No argument.

And, yeah, I have no idea what actually happened there, just caught like ... some of the fallout of it cause it started to some how involve Star Wars.

[Kyll.Ing.]

Before this thread sinks back into the unrecoverable depths of the forum, and before I forget what the book was all about, let me quickly air my thoughts on Truths of the Divine almost a month after I finished it. Beware of some light spoilers.

In short ... much the same as I said above. It's well-written, but one eventually gets quite tired of so much of the plot hinging on various instances of "person X knows something that would change everything for person Y, but doesn't tell them". Like, this book and the previous could both have been done with in ten pages if Ampersand wasn't such a sulking idiot.

Spoiler

There's also the fact that the book ends more-or-less where it began. Not in a "bookends" sort of way, but more in a way that not much actually changes over its course. The public gets to know about aliens (which already was an open secret by the end of the previous book), aliens threaten Earth (which was also a thing in the previous novel), another character joins the cast (but dies at the end), and a different alien shows up, but Cora ends up in a similar position with a whole slew of new trauma to process.

Continuing from the spoiler, it seems like processing trauma is the big theme of the novel, while the alien stuff mostly happens along the way. It's obviously something Ellis knows a lot about, presumably with some first-hand experience too. The book certainly delves deep into trauma and how to get out of it.

A strange side effect, that took me a bit out of the immersion, is that all the characters seem acutely aware of how to deal with trauma. Somehow the right words or actions for comfort are always right on hand, every POV character keeps acknowledging how difficult trauma is to treat, but that they are always deeply set on doing their best in accordance with the latest best-practice guidelines. It feels as if every character has been spending years doing therapy, on both sides of the table, and spends their free time keeping up to date on what the best practices are and how to best accommodate a person struggling with trauma. Lindsay is not letting any research or experience go to waste, it seems, but it has the strange effect of making all the characters seem like experienced therapists.

I think I will read the reviews before eventually picking up the next novel. A month is long enough to forget some details and letting only the overall impression remain in my head, and generally the alien stuff moves too slowly and the therapy stuff is too voluminous for my taste. It probably fits right into somebody's taste, but for me it takes a direction I'm not too enthusiastic about.

[C.T. Phipps]

It's such a shame Lindsay Ellis left the internet.