AXIOM'S END - Book Review (5/10)
Youtuber/essayist Lindsay Ellis marks her debut with 2020’s Axiom’s End, a sci-fi tale that explores truth, conspiracy, and inter-species relations. Set in 2007, it follows Cora as her life is upended by first contact and her subsequent adventure as a mediator between humans and aliens. Let’s get the negatives out of the way first. The beginning of the book is quite slow and bogs you down with a lot of info through dialogue-dump. I didn’t really find myself getting invested until after 100 pages in, which might be too much for a lot of people. The story is also quite surface level – it attempts to touch on a lot of themes but ends up glossing over them in favor of plot. The idea of truth being a human right is quite prevalent, but only because the book says it is. There isn’t much attempt to actually answer this complicated topic. There wasn’t an emotional core until much later on in the bond between Cora and Ampersand, but that came in quite abruptly and took me a bit to warm up to. This has to do with the writing being clumsy in many places. Her descriptions lacked elegance and she had a tough time landing big moments. Many times, I had to do a double take due to how casually she dropped “shock moments” and how they blended in with the rest of the prose. In the positive, however, her simple prose also works to her advantage. Despite not being too engaging in the beginning, I never found myself struggling to continue – the plot moves quite fast, and the writing never lingers on a moment for too long. I was also quite interested in the aliens themselves. Lindsay’s imagination renders them distinct and their differences from humans are made prominent. I really liked how it covered the topic of certain things being too complicated to communicate to others. Though, I would have liked to see this communication angle explored further (something closer to Dennis Villeneuve’s Arrival). All in all, Axiom’s End serves as a fine beginning for her trilogy. I can overlook some of its flaws due to his easy-to-read nature, but the story does leave many things underexplored that I desperately wish are touched on in the upcoming sequels.
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