Review: Axiom's End

Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I love Lindsay Ellis's video essays.

Her new debut novel's all right. It's basically a first contact story framed within the context of the W. Bush presidency with an overt concern about government conspiracies, secrets and miscommunication, and attempts to establish a bond between a human and an alien despite their insurmountable differences (which somehow works). As Lindsay herself admitted in one of her videos (or podcast, can't remember which), you can probably see the influence of her experience in Transformers fanfiction (lol), but hey it got her on the NYT bestsellers list so props to her for that.

I feel like I had this genre spoiled for me already with The Three Body Problem trilogy recently, which set a pretty high bar for potential ideas to be explored in this realm with some backing from hard science. The science shown here is fairly elementary in comparison (i.e. basic time dilation from special relativity) and otherwise mostly serves as background noise to the main relational conflicts.

I honestly found it hard to accept that communication could be established so quickly even in a rudimentary form between humans and an alien species, especially due to what otherwise served as a convenient device for accelerating the plot. You kind of have to suspend your disbelief here just to accept the premise that a human could somehow function as an interpreter for an alien within days, even with technological aids. But if you're able to do so, the resulting story itself isn't bad. The ending definitely left me with something to ponder which is better than I can say for other works that I would call uninspired.

Side-note, but there were other elements introduced in this book that weren't really satisfactorily resolved or probably left hanging, likely for a potential sequel in the works. It doesn't leave you completely hanging (the main thread at least is resolved well enough), but given how much attention was given to these early on in the book it feels a little jarring to have most of that essentially be irrelevant or background noise to the main plot.