A review by flying_monkey
Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

adventurous emotional fast-paced

2.5

I'm not sure why I picked this up other than I seemed to remember people talking about it as one of the SF novels of the year. If it is, then it really was a poor year for SF. I had no idea who the author is other than that this is a debut novel. From what I've since read she's a film critic vlogger, and some people have called this Transformers fanfic but, while there are transformer-like elements to the aliens, that seems to be an accusation that comes from pre-existing animus towards the author rather than actually reading the book.

However, from the clunky title onwards, this is a very weak novel without being overtly terrible. It's set in the mid-2000s, with our heroine, Cora Sabino, a drop-out from a college linguistics degree program, doing a crappy job that her mother has got for her. Her father, Nils Ortega, has left for Germany, where he is a Julian Assange-esque whistleblower and political refugee, running a Wikileaks-a-like site, 'The Broken Seal'. While he was initially provoked by the invasion of Iraq now, after a mysterious asteroid strike in California, her father now claims to have discovered evidence that the government is in contact with extraterrestrials, which seems to make Cora a magnet for her father's disciples as well as strange man in aviators driving black cars. And what's more, this all seems to involve her sister, Luciana. 

 

Of course it turns out that Nils is right, and of course Cora turns out to be the one whom the aliens, or at least one of them code-named Ampersand, can communicate with, via some technologically enabled telepathy. The author has clearly watched Arrival (or read Ted Chiang's original 'Story of Your Life') a lot. Mysterious hand-waving advanced technology that allows improbable things to happen pop up all the time in this book, and this is merely the first instance. The aliens themselves are biotechnological beings, reminiscent in some ways of Gwyneth Jones's far more genuinely alien Aleutians in her Universe of Things stories, and can use their bodies in some very non-biological ways (hence the Transformers fanfic accusations, I suppose). And finally the other obvious influence is Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem sequence, from which Ellis appears to have borrowed the entire central dilemma of first contact, but without improving on it at all. Eventually, the book devolves into the usual running, chasing and fighting in the second half, which is only leavened by the often ridiculous YA-style 'relationship' between Cora and Ampersand, which is clearly intended to be the weighty emotional heart, if not the entire point, of the book.

I really got the feeling there were a lot of personal issues being worked out in this book, which can make for the best kind of fiction, but here it just seemed to be a lot of extraneous stuff that served to pad what is in the end a weak, derivative and unoriginal first contact story, which rather than simply being set more than a decade ago, feels dated.