Axiom’s End Review
It’s not quite YA, but it’s not quite not YA, and it was one of the books I was most looking forward to at the start of the year.
If you don’t know Lindsay Ellis, she’s a very intelligent and eloquent video essayist in the Youtube community turned New York Times bestselling author. Axiom’s End, her first novel, is about a young woman named Cora Sabino, whose father is an infamous activist who released the first solid proof that the United States Governments is hiding the existence of aliens. When two extraterrestrial objects touch down in the same spot in a month, Cora’s on the run from the Feds who think she’s working with her father and some new, out-of-this-world threats.
More so than most sci-fi novels, this novel left me chewing on the implications of the story. I don’t want to spoil too much (save that in a “first contact” story, you’re bound to meet aliens), but this book raises some very thoughtful questions around communication, trust, and what a hopeless case really looks like. There’s some tension in these questions: communication between humans and aliens is both far easier than it should be, but also seemingly impossible to do correctly. Characters reprove one another for assuming aliens will follow the same rules as humans, but there’s an awful lot that’s familiar about what we see in the stars and what we see down here. Adding onto all of that is the sure knowledge that in most sci-fi, the aliens are still just a stand-in for us. Until we find actual sentient life out there, we’re stuck with each other. So when Ellis leaves us with questions (Can one individual ever, truly know another? Is it ever really safe to trust the unknown? Why do we keep hoping when all evidence is to the contrary?) instead of easy answers, it’s both thought-provoking and troubling.
The back half of the novel moves at a mile a minute, hurrying from revelation to revelation and grave danger to grave danger. It makes the book easy to devour, but did fatigue me a bit on my first read-through: there’s so much shocking stuff going on it’s hard for each of them to land.
Where Ellis really shines, though, is in taking some very common YA/schlocky sci-fi tropes and actually making them work. Things like: an otherwise unremarkable protagonist being thrust into a position of great importance, a friendship failing at a crucial moment in the plot, and songs on the radio telling you EXACTLY what year it is. Explaining this story to your friends plot point by plot point wouldn’t leave them with much enthusiasm. It’s what Ellis makes out of situations that seem played out by now that show off how talented she is.
If I had to judge the book solely on its own merits, I might be more critical of some of the plot decisions: threads that don’t seem to pay off, conflicts left not only unresolved but unexplored. But, knowing there’s more to come, I’m willing to take it on faith that Ellis is continuing to build on a strong foundation. 4 orthographic symbols out of 5.