It’s 2007, though not quite as we remember it. A leaked memo revealing that the U.S. government might have engaged in first contact has sent the country into a frenzy. The source of this leak is Cora Sabino’s whistle-blower father, Nils, and though she hasn’t spoken to him in years, all the government and media attention has been redirected at her. Cora wants nothing to do with him and doesn’t care whether the leaks are a hoax or not. That is, until she learns that there has been an extra-terrestrial presence on earth for decades and that her own family has been involved in the cover-up.
To save her and her family’s lives, she offers herself as an interpreter to a literal alien, and the alien accepts. As Cora learns the extent to which she and the public have been lied to, she decides to gather as much information as she can. But as she comes to realise that she has agreed to become the voice for a being she cannot ever truly know or understand, she starts to question what kind of future she may be setting humanity up for.
Like many, I am a fan of Lindsay Ellis’s work: both her video essays on media, narrative, and film theory, and her It’s Lit! series for PBS Digital Studios, and was excited to learn she had written a novel. Axiom’s End is a first contact story, set in an alternate 2007, that was pitched as Arrival meets The Three-Body-Problem. And with one of the major themes being that of communication and language – how governments communicate (or don’t) with their people; the limits and vagaries of language; how do you communicate with something whose language and culture is completely alien, how do you relate to it enough that you can interpret it into something everyone can understand, what gets lost in translation? – Arrival is certainly a good comparison. It also taps into the paranoia and distrust of authority that is as relevant now as it was when the book is set, all the way back to the 90s with shows like The X-Files. This does mean that it feels like the story could’ve been told in any era, as there doesn’t seem to be a specific reason that it has to be set in the period it is, but that’s a minor niggle.
The most important part of the book, of course, are the characters of Cora and the alien (who is given the name Ampersand) and the relationship between them. Almost by necessity, Cora is easy to relate to. She is a young woman who’s drifting in a job she doesn’t much care for and doesn’t really know what she wants to do with her life, smart, snarky, and in way over her head. Those who are familiar with Ellis and her work will definitely recognise her voice in Cora. By contrast, Ampersand is inhuman in every way – appearance and biology (this is definitely not your ‘basically-human-looking-but-with-a-funny-forehead’ variety of alien), culture and language; impossible to anthropomorphise, even though we and Cora inevitably do because, as Cora herself admits, we’re human and that’s what our brains are designed to do. The relationship between them is well crafted, beginning as wary, awkward allies and developing into something approaching friends, but never letting you forget about those differences and how they’ll likely always be a barrier to them understanding the other completely. Ellis also shows her film school background (she studied Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and earned her MFA in Film and Television Production, with a focus in documentary and screenwriting, from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts), striking a good balance between cerebral and cinematic.
It’s not perfect: the pacing is a little uneven – starting off quick before slowing down for a large portion of the middle and then speeding back up again toward an ending that felt a little abrupt (I’m unsure as to whether Axiom’s End is intended to be a stand-alone or the beginning of a series, but if it were to become a series there are definitely dangling plot threads waiting to be taken up) – and certain characters turned out to be less important than first implied. Flaws aside however, Axiom’s End is a great read that’s both entertaining and thought provoking.
Axiom’s End is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of July 21st 2020.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
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.
