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3.99 AVERAGE
3.99 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Starts weird, gets even weirder, then incredibly nerdy all the way to the end, which is somehow maximum weird on steroids. Loved it so much, hits every tendon in my scifi loving nerd heart.
This book is FANTASTIC. A whipsmart take on on a trolley problem with exponentially rising stakes used as a moral wringer for a number of humans and aliens, it manages to be hilarious despite going through some depressing stuff and riveting while doing some really heavy lifting in a number of sciences and histories and a really mindboggling array of subjects that give the book so much nice texture and weight. I found it very hard to put down -- it just might be the kind of book that you should, in fact, allow yourself binge deep into the night and then have a hangover for a week after. I agree with a few of the early readers that the first part of the book that introduces Anna and Ssrin was my absolutely favourite -- it was such a firecracker -- so it took a while to adjust my expectations as the cast expanded, but it felt really rewarding throughout.
My thanks to Netgalley and Tor Dot Com for an early copy of Exordia. Thoroughly enjoyed and wholeheartedly recommend.
My thanks to Netgalley and Tor Dot Com for an early copy of Exordia. Thoroughly enjoyed and wholeheartedly recommend.
adventurous
dark
informative
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
sits in both categories of i like it but it's not as good as i expected AND it's extremely well-written but i dislike it
my feelings about this book are complicated. i think seth dickinson is a brilliant writer— A+ character work, themes surrounding anti-imperialist & anti-colonialist ideologies, sharp dialogue & prose, thorough research backing the worldbuilding. however, i think they suffer with pacing issues. not just with this book, but this was also my problem with baru cormorant (monster, specifically). exordia is not for everyone.
i think it's too much military-leaning for my taste & less about the initial promise of Alien Soul Storytelling, which was the main pull for me in the beginning. while i enjoy reading from unlikeable characters, i do think erik & clayton overstayed their welcome & largrly contributed to the pacing issues. by the time i reached around 70% of the book, i didn't care as much for the story anymore & just waited for it to end. i've also seen a post/review somewhere pointing out how the title itself is a pluralized version of "exordium", which means a beginning, an introduction & how this is clear in the ending & how seth has said that this is meant to be a series. it shows. i feel like the meat of the story got away & instead i got stuck reading this drawn out fight sequence, an interlude, that will change the course of anna sinjari's actual story, in seredure with ssrin.
still. i'm glad it's my first read of the year! & i look forward to the sequel(s), when they eventually get published.
my feelings about this book are complicated. i think seth dickinson is a brilliant writer— A+ character work, themes surrounding anti-imperialist & anti-colonialist ideologies, sharp dialogue & prose, thorough research backing the worldbuilding. however, i think they suffer with pacing issues. not just with this book, but this was also my problem with baru cormorant (monster, specifically). exordia is not for everyone.
i think it's too much military-leaning for my taste & less about the initial promise of Alien Soul Storytelling, which was the main pull for me in the beginning. while i enjoy reading from unlikeable characters, i do think erik & clayton overstayed their welcome & largrly contributed to the pacing issues. by the time i reached around 70% of the book, i didn't care as much for the story anymore & just waited for it to end. i've also seen a post/review somewhere pointing out how the title itself is a pluralized version of "exordium", which means a beginning, an introduction & how this is clear in the ending & how seth has said that this is meant to be a series. it shows. i feel like the meat of the story got away & instead i got stuck reading this drawn out fight sequence, an interlude, that will change the course of anna sinjari's actual story, in seredure with ssrin.
still. i'm glad it's my first read of the year! & i look forward to the sequel(s), when they eventually get published.
adventurous
challenging
dark
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
First of all WAW… just WAW.
It's as if Exordia was written for men of my generation.
Men who grew up on Tom Clancy, on alien invasion stories like Foot Fall and grew on enjoying movies like Independence Day and novels like Ender's Game.
Yet now at 50 are more realistic about war and colonization.
Exordia is a techno thriller about first contact that isn't gang ho, or jingoistic.
It starts with a Kurdish refugee living with a terrible choice she had to make during Saddam's genocide of the Kurds in the 1980s.
It focuses on the damning decisions that are involved in trolley problem scenarios.
It explores the intersection between physics, mathematics and meta-physics. It dabbles in narrative causality.
I really want to give it 5 stars, for such an intricate plot and such compelling characters. But I must confess that some of it irked me. It is about 10 hours too long. The middle section is filled with mostly unnecessary detail that doesn't doo much to move the plot or solve the mystery or grow the relationships between the characters.
To many times we are retold information that is already known to us. We spend too much time watching characters walk into disasters who's aftermath we've already seen.
As for the audiobook, Sulin Hasso does a great job, choosing not to do accents, yet doing a very good job, to my ears, of reading out text in different nations native languages.
dark
funny
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book makes me furious. I have so much I want to say but I’ll try and keep it compact.
Pros:
-The first part is KILLER. I was so HYPED after reading part one. The two female characters are so unhinged and vivid and singular in their characterization, I loved them instantly.
-Fun sci-fi nonsense is present.
-Numerous smart concepts all well presented and exaggerated to a believable sci-fi degree.
-The aliens are properly alien in the way they speak and act.
-Excellent writing. This author is clearly extremely talented.
-It’s funny as hell, I really appreciated the humor. It reminded me favorable of John Scalzi in that way.
-It’s slow paced but usually for good reason. The text is dense with scientific stuff but the dialog is snappy. Usually.
Cons:
-This book pulls a bait and switch. The rest of the book is nothing like part one. Part two switches to a new character and I’m like “that’s fine, gotta add the straight man”. When we got another POV, and another, until...
-This became a military thriller! That’s what this book really is. I was furious.
-Approximately 40% of this book is told in retrospect. It kills the pacing exactly as much as you think it would.
-It’s slow paced for grating reasons, like the alphabet soup of military acronyms that are thrown around constantly and left to the reader to either know or look up. And some monologues are full pages of text, no paragraph breaks.
-By halfway through the book we had somewhere between 8-12 POV shifts. I stopped counting because I only cared about two and a half of them. That’s the problem with having large numbers of POVs, the reader is always going to have favorites and be resentful when the perspective changes to someone they don’t care about.
-The book is trying to be too many things. First contact, bio-containment, military escapade, space battle, ect. It's too much packed into one novel and it ends up killing pacing and not being fully satisfying at anything.
-The book is trying to be too many things. First contact, bio-containment, military escapade, space battle, ect. It's too much packed into one novel and it ends up killing pacing and not being fully satisfying at anything.
-It’s masturbatory. This is a little hard to describe, but there is this feeling a book has when the author writes something smart where you can just sense them jacking off to how brilliant they are. It reminds me unfavorably of many Orson Scott Card novels.
-The biggest sin is this book is not a standalone. The story is not complete. It’s set up for a book two. And I despised the ending and it’s justification with everything I have. And I resent the publisher for making no flag that this would be part of a series! I don’t read uncompleted series for person reasons, so discovering a book is part of one where one of the marketing points to it being so is infuriating.
-The biggest sin is this book is not a standalone. The story is not complete. It’s set up for a book two. And I despised the ending and it’s justification with everything I have. And I resent the publisher for making no flag that this would be part of a series! I don’t read uncompleted series for person reasons, so discovering a book is part of one where one of the marketing points to it being so is infuriating.
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes