Title: Axiom’s End
Series: Noumena #1
Author: Lindsay Ellis
Genre: Science Fiction/Alternate History
Trigger Warnings: Mind control, blood, death, gore, excrement, kidnapping
Back Cover:
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.
Review:
I had no idea what this was about going in. I just knew that it was scifi and written by a YouTuber I’ve watched for years and absolutely love. I had really no clue what the book was about besides the bits that Lindsay Ellis has posted and talked about (mainly that there’s aliens and it’s set in 2007), but I wanted to support her.
And it turned out to be really, really good. The back cover doesn’t do it justice.
The story centers around Cora, whose famous father left five years ago because the government started seeing his conspiracy theories (and his rabid conspiracy theory fans) as a threat to national security. She wants nothing to do with him. But when an inhuman something breaks into her family’s house, she barely escapes being taken into government custody, and she starts to discover that her father may be an asshole, but he’s not wrong. Aliens are here on Earth. Hoping to use her ability to communicate with them as a bargaining chip to free her family, Cora convinces the alien Ampersand to let her be his interpreter. And she soon finds herself in way over her head.
The only real thing I can say about Cora is that she’s incredibly human. A lot happens to her in this book, much of it terrifying, but she reacts very humanly and even in the midst of horrible things beyond her comprehension she seizes what agency she can, makes what she can of it, and is deeply likeable and relatable.
I adore how alien these aliens are. These aren’t little green men with big eyes, or any kind of understandable alien at all. They’re big, not fully biological, ancient, and entirely incomprehensible to humans. Lindsay does a fantastic job making them unknown and unknowable and making the gulf of what humans don’t know about them utterly terrifying.
I keep using words like “terrifying” because that’s what this book is about. It’s about the fear, the existential terror of learning that we are not alone in the universe and the other species out there is willing, able, and even likely to wipe out every living thing on our planet. There are a lot of big themes in this book, played out by a single girl and the alien she can talk to and the overwhelming threats of the US government and the alien superorganism.
And I knew that things were going truly, spectacularly badly for Cora when I realized the thing from the beginning that made me think, “That will come back to bite you,” never did and I didn’t even care because so many other things were busy going wrong. This is one of those books where nearly every page is a new variety of disaster and it kept me riveted.
I thoroughly enjoyed this read, but I’m not certain if I want to read the next book. Axiom’s End is really good, and I’m not sure what else there is to say in this series. I’m worried that the next book will be dragging a good thing out too long.
But I also really like Lindsay Ellis, so I may read it just to support her. It’s not coming out for a while yet, so I suppose I’ll just wait and see.
The Noumena series:
- Axiom’s End
- Truth of the Divine
Bluejay Reads 