Name: Drue Thomas's review of Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis
Item: Axiom's End
Rating: 4
Author: Drue Thomas

Lindsay Ellis

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The alternate history first contact adventure Axiom's End is an extraordinary debut from Hugo finalist and video essayist Lindsay Ellis. Truth is a human right. It’s fall 2007. A well-timed leak has revealed that the US government might have engaged in first contact. Cora Sabino is doing everything she can to avoid the whole mess, since the force driving the controversy is her whistleblower father. Even though Cora hasn’t spoken to him in years, his celebrity has caught the attention of the press, the Internet, the paparazzi, and the government—and with him in hiding, that attention is on her. She neither knows nor cares whether her father’s leaks are a hoax, and wants nothing to do with him—until she learns just how deeply entrenched her family is in the cover-up, and that an extraterrestrial presence has been on Earth for decades. Realizing the extent to which both she and the public have been lied to, she sets out to gather as much information as she can, and finds that the best way for her to uncover the truth is not as a whistleblower, but as an intermediary. The alien presence has been completely uncommunicative until she convinces one of them that she can act as their interpreter, becoming the first and only human vessel of communication. Their otherworldly connection will change everything she thought she knew about being human—and could unleash a force more sinister than she ever imagined.

A Novel

Axiom's End

Drue Thomas

Ahh! Feels like it’s just like arrival movie & also beginning is totally kinda vague and doesn’t make any sense and makes me feel like I’ve missed a chapter already or a book. 

Kaarthik sekar 

Oddly not my style, but a good time anyway! kept me on my toes and a bit off-balance, and i suppose we do love a monster bf

August Stone

This one was a slow burn. It felt like it dragged in the start but quickly ramped up into a chaotic adventure that was worth the wait.

’Mike Richardson

Patricia Nelson

It's been ages since I read a GOOD science fiction story. This story starts with a young woman whose father is on the run for releasing leaked government information about first contact with extraterrestrials. There are many boilerplate directions a story like this could go, but this one surprises! It is a page turner, with unique themes - Is truth a human right? Is it ethical to lie by omission? How far should one go to protect family? What is family? The author also poses thought-provoking issues about first contact and how that might go, and if perhaps we humans might get it all wrong? If you would like a new and different science fiction read that is well written and compelling, this should be on your list!

I received this book from Netgalley and St. Martins Press in exchange for a fair and honest review. All opinions are my own and have not been influenced.
#AxiomsEnd

Rose

It's rare I want to create fan art from a book. Or at all. But I'm hooked. This one hits notes close to my heart: First Contact, linguistics, and some monster boyfriend/companionship elements. So I am very biased. It's a fun read. It does have some confusing visual descriptions, but overall does feel like a straightforward 90s action/adventure cinematic experience. I'm dying for the next book.

Shona Tiger

This book is weird and disturbing, and the dialogue is odd. Would have given it 2/5, but the concept made me read to the end (and there was enough action to keep going) - so, 3/5.

Oh, and so confusing in the beginning. Felt like I'd missed the first book in the series.

it was ok, ig. idk, i am in the middle of a burnout episode, i have no idea what's going on around me and can't focus on ath.

Fraser Simons

I did like some aspects of this book. There is some philosophical stuff brought up, the aliens can be interesting at times), it’s not completely bad—but I simply can’t get over some of the issues that constantly crop up. 

A few scenes make it through, otherwise this has a lot of fundamental problems. The character work is bad, sentence level issues are predominate, dialogue is exceptionally bad. Tonally it vacillated so often I wasn’t sure if it was trying to be comedic in a given scene or not. Mostly, the problems kicked me out of the narrative more often than I was able to get into it. There’s granular detail on stuff that isn’t interesting, it contradicts its own worldbuilding or else handwaves things. It’s on rails, with the protagonist just having things done to her. And she reacts in mystifying ways that hamper the flow and story.

The blurb, while technically accurate, is not a great representation of what to expect from this book. So what can you expect?

Fast-paced action while running from the law--yes.

Suspense and info-gathering while reluctantly cooperating with shady government agencies--yes.

Xenomorph-cyborg-alien /human romance-- YES.

Look, I don't have the patience to get on a PC and throw together a Parks&Rec meme to insert here, but 
*"It's about the [[CONSENT]]"*

Some people really don't like the narrator voice, which I didn't have a problem with. But I have since remembered that I, too, am a disillusioned twenty-something facing unprecedented times, deflecting personal crises with sarcasm, and doing my best to ignore that I'm woefully out of my depth. So yeah, the voice works for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A few descriptions were redundant and distracting, but I really enjoyed the book overall and found it impossible to put down. Looking forward to the sequel!

elif sinem

IM FREEEEEE!!!!!!!! WORST EXPERIENCE OF MY FUCKING LIFE

Cindy Lieberman

“The biggest coverup in human history is a crime against all of us. Truth is not freely given in our society and must be taken.”
- Axiom’s Edge by Lindsay Ellis

So...if this novel were to be placed in the Trump era, the author would have to revise quite a bit. That’s because it presupposes a government and president that are rational. With Trump at the helm, rational action has been long gone. Nevertheless it was fun to dream about a president - even George W - taking responsibility for his actions. 

This is a science fiction story about first contact with an alien species. Having just finished the second Hank Green novel about the alien Carls, I can see some similarities (and the author thanks both John and Hank Green in her acknowledgments), although this book is not as funny. 

It’s about the daughter of a well-known leaker (think Assange or Snowden) who ends up at the center of a CIA operation (but on US soil?) as the translator for a 9’ tall alien with an invisibility cloak.... There’s also a climate change message woven throughout. For a first book, it’s good if a bit long. Some good action scenes and alien descriptions, especially w/r/t language and communications.

Lauren Sullivan

I have no idea who Lindsay Ellis is, so I picked this up solely based on the blurb. I have a definite soft spot for first contact stories, especially ones where the humans involved are not, well, exactly who you’d pick to represent humanity.

“Truth is not freely given in our society; it must be taken. Where walls are built, tear them down. Where borders are drawn, erase the line. Where you see wax, break the seal.
Truth is a human right.”

It’s 2007, and amidst a flurry of revelations that the American government has been holding aliens captive for years, an unidentified object crashes near LA. The alien’s mission, he soon discovers, requires a human to help him navigate society. The person he choses to act as his interpreter is Cora, a college dropout who’s the estranged daughter of the conspiracy theorist rabbling-rousing man who’s releasing secret government files detailing the existence of aliens. Of course, we see this all from Cora’s point of view, so it takes a while to find out that Ampersand, the government codename the alien adopts, is there to rescue those captive aliens. But everyone’s keeping secrets from Cora – Ampersand, the government, her own family. And while she hates to agree with her father, truth and transparency are necessary if she hopes to survive what’s coming.

“She was determined to give Kaplan what he wanted, not out of fear for herself, or her family, nor even out of love for species or country but out of spite.”

Each chapter starts with a blog post or article about the government cover-up, giving a general overview of what’s going on in the world in general as the book progresses. I didn’t find them particularly interesting, other than as confirmation that Cora’s dad is a jerk. The part where I think this book fails is when it tries to deal with the greater world, especially in terms of Cora’s estranged father Nils. It initially seems like he’ll play a big part in the book and then he just… doesn’t. Which is, in its own way, telling in terms of his and Cora’s relationship. While the safety of Cora’s family is one of the things held over her head, they play a surprisingly small part, and the other characters, like Sol Kaplan the FBI agent, are pretty thin characters.

“Looking into his eyes was like looking into ten billion years of history, like she could see the particles and rocks and gases coalesce over eons, until somehow, impossibly, here they both were.”

Where this book excels is in the small-scale depiction of alien contact, specifically between Cora and Ampersand. Cora’s initial horror movie heroine reaction to him morphs as she realizes he’s just as terrified as she is. For all the fact that the Fremda are obviously more advanced technologically, a planet full of violent, meat-eating humans has its own horrors to them. Trusting each other – that Ampersand won’t attempt to mind control Cora, that Cora won’t get hungry and decide to eat Ampersand – is a slow process and one that I think was well done. There’s a few scenes where Ampersand attempts to “care” for Cora that were pretty hilarious to me, and then one, where Cora plays her guitar for him, that was actually quite sweet. There’s some vaguely romantic feelings on Cora’s side, which I’m honestly not sure how I feel about. It felt a bit more like her latching on to the closest being that gave her any attention rather than love, but I suppose we’ll see how that pans out in the next book.

“She’d been privy to information given to no other human in history, and she hadn’t even scratched the surface of all there was to know. She could rationalize it as a selfless, necessary act all she wanted, but it wasn’t the truth.
She wanted to know more.”

As for the bigger issues, there’s a lot of interesting talk about what will happen when the two continue to try to interact and coexist despite their basic incompatibilities, and about the pitfalls of anthropomorphizing aliens, as Cora learns painfully, as well as quite a bit about genocide, cultural superiority, and caste. The ideas, as well as some mid-book info dumping about their language and culture, are interesting, but it’s not explored as fully as I’d like.

The pacing is also very uneven. While the last quarter or so of the book is extremely action-packed, the rest of it fumbles. There’s the general “Cora’s family in danger!” suspense (which doesn’t work very well as she frequently seems to forget about them) and then also a sort of threat in the undefined future which the aliens don’t provide much information on initially. Perhaps this was supposed to add some unknown menacing air, but it just left me wondering what Ampersand was so worked up about. But despite all that, it’s a very readable book, with fairly simplistic prose, and I liked Cora in all her “what the heck am I even doing???” confusion.

Overall, 3.5 stars, rounding up.

Content notes: (view spoiler)[violence (including blood and dismemberment), medical operations (including autopsy), kidnapping, mind control, mentions of genocide, threats against family (including minor children), car accidents (hide spoiler)]

Caroline Lewicki

I want to start this review by saying I'm not typically a sci-fi reader, so take this review with a large grain of salt.

I was so excited about Axiom's End and wanted to like it so badly. I think there are a lot of places where it was great but so many more where it could have been better. There are a lot of background characters you have to keep track of that I simply lost along the way. There's often too much going on and it's hard to put this book down and pick it back up without thinking "wait, how did we get here?"

(view spoiler)[ Plot-wise, one of my biggest bones to pick was how "Twilight-y" the relationship between Ampersand and Cora is. It danced just around the edge of the same sentiments that Bella and Edward's relationship had between the first two Twilight novels. I wanted Ampersand and Cora's relationship to either back off from that trope, or lean full into it (like bring the corny, cheesy, sappy). It just felt strange and too familiar.  (hide spoiler)]

Overall, I'm glad I read this because it was at the top of my list for 2021, but I still struggle to find a sci-fi book that I really get sucked in to.

Rose Stanley

Full disclosure: bought this because I'm a big Lindsay Ellis fan, but in fact Ellis skilfully disappears into the background here from the word go and lets the story tell itself. A bit of a slow start but once things get going, you're in for a treat. Looking forward to the sequel already.

Cheryl Hedlund

A first contact sci-fi story with truly non-humanoid aliens. The balance of contemplating ideas and exciting plot worked for me. It feels like the author has thought in detail about the world and culture of the Amygdalin species. The characters have dimension and are not always likeable. There is a tone of sarcastic humor in Clara's POV which I enjoyed. The concepts are not new to sci-fi, but are told with the author's voice and in the context of late 2007 US culture and politics. I enjoyed the writing and the story, so will keep reading more in this series. 

erin s

I have been a longtime fan of Lindsay Ellis's YouTube channel, and was excited to see her take on science fiction. Axiom's End is a unique twist on the first contact trope, and her main alien character Ampersand is hands-down the best character in this novel. His relationship with Cora, our POV character, is the most compelling part of the story, acting as a microcosm for the greater clash between human and extraterrestrial. 

I am not a prolific reader of sci-fi, and I had a decent amount of trouble following the plot at the beginning of the book. The terms and code names for the alien-related events and leaks were difficult to parse through at first, and even when it was explained later, I still had a bit of confusion. Again, this could be my non-sci-fi brain, but I wished I had a bit more clarity (or even a little reference/definition page). 

The writing style was decent; some of the book felt a bit choppy and colloquial (Cora kept referencing her "lizard brain," which read more like a 2020 tweet than a 2007 thought), but the interactions between Cora and Ampersand were the strongest and most engaging scenes. Overall, reading it reminded me of Crichton's Jurassic Park -- fast-paced, non-lyrical, a cast of characters ranging in competency. 

I didn't love this book like I wanted to, but it was a solid read. I liked the late-Bush-era setting, the alien species, and the way it sets up a sequel by the end. Both Lindsay Ellis fans and those who have never seen her videos should definitely check it out if they are at all interested in science fiction. Her strong voice from her media critiques shines through at times, and I am interested in seeing more writing from her in the future.

[3/5: Fun first contact story that picks up the pace along the way The aliens are the best part, particularly Ampersand. Sci-fi fans will find something to like here, and non-sci-fi fans should also enjoy this as well. It's not a perfect book, but a fun read nonetheless.]

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

diana

this book was ... a lot. ampersand was great tho

Randy Robbins

This is a unique take on the alien invasion genre that reminds me of Arrival. The characters are interesting and the story keeps you enthralled. I am looking forward to more.

Drue Thomas &
Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

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