Book Review: "Axiom's End"
Lindsay Ellis's debut sci-fi novel is everything one could hope from the genre, with a complex heroine, terrifying aliens, and interspecies conflict.
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Warning: Spoilers for the book follow.
A good friend has been raving about Axiom’s End for years now, but for some reason this was one of those books that I simply never got around to reading. Finally, he seemed to lose patience with my reluctance and bought me the book for Christmas and, since I wanted to actually take his recommendation and since I was in the market for a good sci-fi read, I decided to take the plunge.
Whew, lads, am I glad I did.
This is one of those science fiction books that gets its hooks into you from the very first page and doesn’t let go until the ending. It has a fast pace–thanks in no small part to its relatively short chapters–but this isn’t to say that it doesn’t have all of the other features a work of propulsive sci-fi should have. There are aliens with their own societies and ways of looking at the world–many of which are either incomprehensible or downright horrifying to humans–and there are humans who are scrambling to do the right thing, despite often not having all of the information they need in order to do so.
Center to all of this is Cora. When the novel begins she is, like many other millennials in 2007, trying to figure her life out. Her efforts in this regard aren’t helped by the fact that her mother doesn’t seem to like her and by the fact that her father, from whom she is estranged, is a self-proclaimed whistle-blower against the government who is holed up in Germany. Things go sideways in a big way when an alien creature invades her living room, and it’s not long before she has been conscripted as its interpreter and intermediary with various governmental figures as well as, terrifyingly, other aliens.
Cora is a truly fantastic heroine. She’s fierce and independent and intelligent and no shrinking violet, but she also has vulnerability, and she’s hardly perfect. Still, given what she has to deal with–a deeply dysfunctional family, including a father who is an avowed enemy of the US government and a mother who seems to really dislike her; a kidnapping at the hands of an alien who is about as different from humanity as it’s possible to be; becoming an intermediary and interpreter between said alien and the US government–one could very well understand why she would fall apart. That she doesn’t do so is nothing short of a miracle, and she becomes the kind of heroine that you can cheer and root for and who you actually enjoy getting to spend time with during the course of an entire novel.
As for the aliens themselves, they are as richly-developed and described as any that I’ve seen in recent sci-fi. Of course, everything is filtered through the being known Ampersand and his relationship with Cora, but even so we’re given a remarkably textured glimpse at this being and his fellow aliens. They have their own social and government structures, their own language, their own conceptual mappings through which they understand the world and the humans they encounter. Despite this, there are still aspects of Ampersand and his compatriots that remain behind a wall, both because he only tells Cora what he thinks she needs to know (and what would prove most useful) and because, when it comes right down to it, they are just so unlike humanity that they can never be understand in their totality. Indeed, the question of how much one can ever truly know a being from a different species is one of the most fascinating, and troubling, themes in Axiom’s End.
Axiom’s End is also breathlessly paced. Once Cora crosses paths with Ampersand, she doesn’t stay in one place for long, both by her own choice and, more often, not. Despite the novel’s breakneck pacing, however, Ellis also excels at slowing down and giving us some time to breathe. She has a keen eye for when to dive in for more detail and when to keep it moving, and she also has a knack for action sequences that leave you breathless by the end.
Then there’s the mid-2000s of it all. As someone who was roughly Cora’s age at the time, the way that Ellis describes the period and its atmosphere is very true to the time. There’s also more than a little wish-fulfillment in the plot development that sees George W. Bush resign the presidency after it’s discovered that he knew about contact between the aliens and humans and yet lied about it under oath. Indeed, much of the novel is an examination of the ethics of the War on Terror and its aftermath, though in this case the human race is the one poised to be invaded by a hostile power that wants to make a preemptive strike.
Axiom’s End, in the tradition of great science fiction, also poses a number of heavy questions to us as readers. Most of us like to believe that humans really are the center of the universe, but this novel dares to ask the question of what it would be like to really confront our own tininess in the vastness of the cosmos. As the book goes on, it quickly becomes clear that Ampersand and his compatriots and enemies are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the sentient life that lives in the universe. It’s only a matter of time before the entity known as the Superorganism–and its leader, the Autocrat–decide that Earth must be destroyed in order to keep it from being a threat. The fact that this invasion might be delayed for some is only small comfort.
Much like Three Body Problem, which also features an alien invasion that won’t arrive for many centuries into Earth’s future, Axiom’s End asks us what we owe not just to those with whom we share the world but also to those who come after us. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see this question as a thinly-veiled engagement with the ever-growing crisis around climate change and the debt those of us living in the present owe to those generations who will have to deal with the severest consequences of our actions. Just as climate change poses a true existential threat to all of life on Earth, so aliens of this book, including Ampersand himself, pose a challenge that will not be easy, or even possible, to really meet.
By the time the novel ends, we’re on the edge of our seats wondering just what’s going to happen next. Now that Cora and Ampersand have established a bond like nothing else in the universe, nothing is ever going to be the same. Can they ever really overcome the boundaries that separate two species, or will they be forced to make do with human language? Can humans avoid the end of their species?
Only time, and the next book, will tell.