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A review by nicdoeswords
Exordia by Seth Dickinson
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
I just finished reading and need to marinate, but also this book took me on a goddamn ride. Thank you to Tor Publishing via Netgalley for the review copy of this book! All opinions are my own.
And you know what a soul's made of, right? Oh, yes. A soul is made of stories.
Exordia is mostly a book about international militaries responding to threats of the destruction of Earth via alien nukes. Mostly. It's also about: the shape/structure/purpose of the human soul, narrative and story on the meta level, family and reconciliation, what it means to "do the right thing", and, in its own way, how love makes us simultaneously better and worse at any given moment. Oh, and a lot of theoretical math and physics (not kidding, Dickinson does not hold back here). Dickinson packs this story with themes alongside rich, complex worldbuilding and massive moral questions.
What Dickinson sells, I buy. The Traitor Baru Cormorant was one of my favorite reads of last year, an out-of-the-park swing at historical fantasy, genocide, imperialism, queerness, sacrifice, and, of course, betrayal. Exordia touches on a lot of the same themes, but from a wildly different angle. This is hard sci fi. Like I said: aliens. And also nukes.
The text is a monster of meta. If you're not interested in stories about story/narrative/structure/etc then you will find this boring, and probably verging on obnoxious and soapboxy. I, however, am a narrative therapist, and also a writer, and am obsessed with the way Dickinson incorporated the idea that stories have power into such a complicated war story.
I noted in one of my updates while reading that the sentence-level prose in this book is fantastic. I think it's deeply quotable and frankly brilliant in terms of how it structures specific revelations and introduces us to characters. I couldn't believe how quickly I came to care about some of these people, including POVs we only jumped into briefly. This book takes into a LOT of people's heads and takes its turns between limited third person perspective, omniscient third perspective, and some very creative first person perspective too. I like experimental writing so that all worked for me, but it could be disorienting I think.
Dickinson writes large-scale conflict the way litfic writers approach relationships. We're so zoomed out for so much of this story, but still rooted so deeply in character motivations. Dickinson sweeps us through combat decisions, specific battles, strategic maneuvering, to the point that I found myself holding my breath with every new development. I can find war stories boring. This one was not, and probably because the stakes felt so real. Exordia doesn't hesitate to kill off characters. No one has plot armor, every threat is real, and the enemy is terrifying and smarter than you could ever hope to be. I had no idea where this book was going for the entirety of the first.... 60 percent, maybe, but by the end I found that everything made sense.
I do understand the critiques that the pacing was wonky and the second half of the book didn't live up to the setup. I don't really agree, but I also am just a huge fan of Dickinson's writing! I loved this, sue me! Elements of the second half of this book made me cry, gasp, text outraged things to friends, and stare despondently at the wall. I had a lot of feelings!!! I think they were all earned by the story!!! Sorry for the exclamation points I just think certain characters deserve the world and also that it kind of rules that me thinking that didn't make me think they were any safer or less safe from the dangers of this plot just for being great. I do want to acknowledge, though, that the first ~5-10% of the story does not set you up to expect what comes later. The story takes some pretty drastic turns! If you're in it for a more domestic and fantastical spin on things, you may be disappointed by how grounded and grimly clinical a lot of the rest of the book ends up being.
Overall, Exordia was a win for me. I definitely thought it was a standalone (it does not appear to be from that ending!), but I'll be sticking around for book 2 because I'm burningly curious, and at this point I trust Dickinson's writing to take me wherever it wants.
This book is a hard sell as a recommender (queer military-oriented borderline grimdark hard sci fi with lots of body horror and physics/math descriptions, close to 700 pages in my ebook version), but I think it can find its readers, and I am definitely one of them.
And you know what a soul's made of, right? Oh, yes. A soul is made of stories.
Exordia is mostly a book about international militaries responding to threats of the destruction of Earth via alien nukes. Mostly. It's also about: the shape/structure/purpose of the human soul, narrative and story on the meta level, family and reconciliation, what it means to "do the right thing", and, in its own way, how love makes us simultaneously better and worse at any given moment. Oh, and a lot of theoretical math and physics (not kidding, Dickinson does not hold back here). Dickinson packs this story with themes alongside rich, complex worldbuilding and massive moral questions.
What Dickinson sells, I buy. The Traitor Baru Cormorant was one of my favorite reads of last year, an out-of-the-park swing at historical fantasy, genocide, imperialism, queerness, sacrifice, and, of course, betrayal. Exordia touches on a lot of the same themes, but from a wildly different angle. This is hard sci fi. Like I said: aliens. And also nukes.
The text is a monster of meta. If you're not interested in stories about story/narrative/structure/etc then you will find this boring, and probably verging on obnoxious and soapboxy. I, however, am a narrative therapist, and also a writer, and am obsessed with the way Dickinson incorporated the idea that stories have power into such a complicated war story.
I noted in one of my updates while reading that the sentence-level prose in this book is fantastic. I think it's deeply quotable and frankly brilliant in terms of how it structures specific revelations and introduces us to characters. I couldn't believe how quickly I came to care about some of these people, including POVs we only jumped into briefly. This book takes into a LOT of people's heads and takes its turns between limited third person perspective, omniscient third perspective, and some very creative first person perspective too. I like experimental writing so that all worked for me, but it could be disorienting I think.
Dickinson writes large-scale conflict the way litfic writers approach relationships. We're so zoomed out for so much of this story, but still rooted so deeply in character motivations. Dickinson sweeps us through combat decisions, specific battles, strategic maneuvering, to the point that I found myself holding my breath with every new development. I can find war stories boring. This one was not, and probably because the stakes felt so real. Exordia doesn't hesitate to kill off characters. No one has plot armor, every threat is real, and the enemy is terrifying and smarter than you could ever hope to be. I had no idea where this book was going for the entirety of the first.... 60 percent, maybe, but by the end I found that everything made sense.
I do understand the critiques that the pacing was wonky and the second half of the book didn't live up to the setup. I don't really agree, but I also am just a huge fan of Dickinson's writing! I loved this, sue me! Elements of the second half of this book made me cry, gasp, text outraged things to friends, and stare despondently at the wall. I had a lot of feelings!!! I think they were all earned by the story!!! Sorry for the exclamation points I just think certain characters deserve the world and also that it kind of rules that me thinking that didn't make me think they were any safer or less safe from the dangers of this plot just for being great. I do want to acknowledge, though, that the first ~5-10% of the story does not set you up to expect what comes later. The story takes some pretty drastic turns! If you're in it for a more domestic and fantastical spin on things, you may be disappointed by how grounded and grimly clinical a lot of the rest of the book ends up being.
Overall, Exordia was a win for me. I definitely thought it was a standalone (it does not appear to be from that ending!), but I'll be sticking around for book 2 because I'm burningly curious, and at this point I trust Dickinson's writing to take me wherever it wants.
This book is a hard sell as a recommender (queer military-oriented borderline grimdark hard sci fi with lots of body horror and physics/math descriptions, close to 700 pages in my ebook version), but I think it can find its readers, and I am definitely one of them.