Lucas Blogs About Axiom's End
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| A 2000s sci-fi period piece you say? Tell me more. |
So, what's this book's dea—Wait a minute, it's by Lindsay Ellis, the YouTuber?
Yes, that Lindsay Ellis.
She wrote a book?
She wrote a book.
I like her video essays.
As do I. In fact, that's how I found out that she wrote a book. Wanna talk about the book?
Yeah.
Okay. So it's 2007, and Nils Ortega has just leaked a government memo detailing the fact that the US government has been hiding a group of aliens for decades, and that scientists have made no progress in attempting to communicate with them. Enter Nils's estranged daughter Cora Sabino who's just trying to get by at a temp job after dropping out of UCI, when she finds herself under surveillance by the FBI following both the release of the Fremda document and the Ampersand Incident.
Ampersand Incident?
It's the codename for a recent meteorite strike in Southern California. In light of the recent leaks and the fact that the government is being particularly cagey about the Ampersand Incident, a lot people are speculating that it was actually the arrival of another alien. This would be, in fact, the worst possible time for Cora to make contact with an extra-terrestrial being. Which she does. A couple of times actually. Culminating in the extra-terrestrial — whom everyone calls Ampersand for convenience sake — kidnapping her and using mind control to force her to break into the Google campus.
You mean the Googleplex?
Yeah, the Googleplex. That's when an electromagnetic pulse shuts down all kinds of electronic devices (including Ampersand's cybernetic body) and she's able to escape. However, she would feel guilty about abandoning Ampersand in a parking lot (also, he's too heavy for her to remove from the van) and she takes him with her. And then they're on the run. There's a lot more that happens in the novel but I think this should give you an idea of where the story might be headed. So let's talk about what's good about this book.
That sounds ominously like there's another shoe waiting to drop.
Hush, you. Ellis does a great job of making Ampersand and the Fremda Group convincingly alien. First of all, they're transorganic. Hmm, that seems like the wrong way to put it. Their bodies are cybernetic and house their nervous system and other organs. Their bodies are often described as dinosauroid or birdlike, varying in size depending on their social standing, and they have unsettling mechanical spider-hands. But that's just superficial. The Fremda are also culturally alien, something that becomes more and more apparent as Cora and Ampersand get to know each other better, and instead of amplifying their similarities, it instead emphasizes their differences. That's not to say that she makes the aliens entirely unsympathetic, after all they are (highlight for TEH SPOILARZ) refugees from a genocide, but she does make it clear that the government scientist who emphasizes that people shouldn't anthropomorphize the aliens is correct. While Cora initially finds herself working with Ampersand because of happenstance, the relationship the two of the establish requires them to both put in a significant amount of work because of the ways in which their values conflict.
For example?
Well, in spite of the fact that he's a gigantic cyber-raptor, Ampersand is fears humans because he sees them as primitive flesh-eating aliens. There's also the question of the extent to which Ampersand and other members of his species view human beings as persons (at least in their ability to explain these concepts to Cora).
Oh, I get it.
Get what?
Well, that's kind of big topic in the science fiction you like. Like what makes something a person. It's there in the Imperial Radch trilogy, it's in Ack-Ack Macaque, it's all over the place in the works of Philip K. Dick.
Oh, yeah, it totally is. This book is relevant to my interests. Ellis also does a good job of selling the period setting. Which I guess isn't surprising as she lived through it.
As did you. Are we thinking of the late 2000s as a "period setting?"
We are. And as someone who lived through the year 2007 in Southern California and was a few years older than the protagonist, I would say that Ellis pretty much nails the depiction. I'm not one hundred percent sure why the novel had to be set back then instead of roughly now-ish. But then again, I didn't question why Kintu had to be set in 2004 instead of at the time it was published. But, yeah, I do agree with the basic premise that any Bush administration response to alien contact would be a disaster. Anyway, it was fun to see a formative period of my life (that wasn't the 80s or 90s) recreated in fiction, and to see it portrayed in a non-nostalgic light.
So about that other shoe. . .
Oh, so Ellis is a good writer, her prose flows nicely and is easily readable. It's just that the voice of the narrator is very similar to the voice she uses in her video essays (which I know are not solely written by her, but still). I just found it a little distracting. So while the point of view is third-person and tightly focused on Cora's perspective (except for inter-chapter excerpts from web postings and opinion pieces), sometimes the narration will be interrupted by jokes that might pop up in one of her videos and I just didn't feel like they worked in the context of the novel. It's a relatively minor complaint, but it did sometimes take me out of the story, like the time when Ellis references a recurring joke from one of her video series. You know, the one about consuming the totally of a dish.
Really, you're gonna be cagey about that?
Gotta be cagey about something.
You really don't. And it seems a little hypocritical to complain about that when a large part of your blog is premised around jokey interactions with an imagined audience.
I suppose it does. Whatever, I enjoyed this book, overall, it's thoughtful story exploring questions that I find fascinating. I'd recommend it.
Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis, St. Martin's Press hardcover edition, July 2020, 374 pages, pairs well with financial instability and the whole plate
Oh, so you will just out and out say it.
Links:
Or this video explaining the process that went into writing the book and getting it published.
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