Axiom's End: A Novel (Noumena, 1) Hardcover – July 21, 2020

The 5 stars are for the book and for Lindsay Ellis. I've been watching her video essays for years and was very excited to buy her first book. I'm about halfway through and it has not disappointed. She's a great author with a compelling story; it's a real struggle to put this book down. 10/10 recommend.HOWEVERI do not give 5 stars to Amazon. My copy came a little worn around the edges (see photos) which was extremely disappointing. This was my graduation present to myself, I just got my BA and don't have a job because of COVID. Therefore, a $27 book is a treat. I'm really disappointed. I'm going to keep the copy because I really want to read it (hence the pre-order), but it did make me want to come on here and warn you all against purchasing through Amazon. They don't ship their books well and if you want a nice, pristine 1st edition - take your business somewhere else.

It's hard to talk about what I liked about this book without spoiling it.If you like sci-fi, investigation thrillers, aliens, and stories of First Contact going sideways, you will enjoy this. While hard sci-fi, the relationship and character interaction is just as enjoyable and well executed as the handling of government cover-ups, alien language, and culture.If I had to describe it without giving too much away, I would say this is the best Transformers fanfic I've ever read. Truly, calling it Transformers fanfic is probably unjust, I've never read or dabbled in that fandom to be sure of that statement. However. I have seen the first few movies, and this is a lot better at exploring a similar concept and plot points, but going off in an original direction. A sister-series if you will ;)While the plot and story felt like an elevated, and much more interesting, take on synthetic space alien civilizations coming into contact with humans, I really enjoyed the details in this book. The language and dialogue with the aliens and humans really caught my attention. Ellis doesn't make up a language, or at least words, so it's not like a fantasy Tolkien language the aliens speak, everything is English and understandable. Alien concepts that don't translate (which the alien will point out routinely) do get an English word using different root words and such. My point it, everything is understandable, although it is a bit of work to understand at the beginning. It does get easier as you go. I was super engaged during the middle of the book where the human character have some pretty in-depth conversations.Surprisingly, the humans are pretty interesting in this book. Although we do get a limited number of aliens to compare them too, I did find myself enjoying them. The protagonist's family especially. I would hope we see more of her aunt and mother in the sequel. Her aunt especially. Her father was interesting as well, if not as a character I would like to have as a parent, he's an interesting character in fiction though.The setting actually really works. I really enjoyed the references to the pop culture and goings on in 2007 America. It's funny, I worried they might feel gratuitous, but instead they kind of took me back to the time itself and how things were back then. I never thought I would feel nostalgic for the Bush era, but since things did make me reminisce in the nostalgia.Ellis did a great job of making a likeable protagonist with a very strong voice. The story is told from Cora's POV, and I commend the author for making her likeable, relatable, and interesting. In a cast of CIA, federal agents, and aliens, it is pretty risky to make your Human Protagonist/Audience Stand In so ordinary. But it works. I felt invested in Cora as a person and look forward to seeing her in future installments, along with all the other objectively cooler characters.The character that really stood out to me is Ampersand. I thought of him as kind of weak character in the beginning. He was interesting, but he was so hostile and terse that I found myself, like Cora I assume, more interested in the answers that came from him about his species, language, and people than himself as a person. It's only during the later half of the book that he starts to let his guard down a bit and start to open up about himself that I really started to like him. I was absolutely tense during the Final Confrontation where I admit my heart kind of broke for him. The scene in the desert at night is just so wonderfully written. I highlighted the passage about their discussion about the Great Filter. That was a cool moment for me, realizing what the title of the book meant! I just really enjoyed that entire scene and it feels good that Ellis let's you draw conclusions yourself without spelling things out in text.Speaking of conclusions, I did have to put the book down and absorb a bit of what was being set up in the final chapter. Possibly slight spoilers in this paragraph. If it's not clear by the username, I love aliens in fiction, especially aliens that have human friendships. And I was getting some cryptid!lover energy while reading but I wasn't sure if this book was going there. Let's just say that when it hit me what had happened, which was confirmed a few pages later, I had to sit back and give thanks Ellis was unafraid to explore the softer sides of hard sci-fi.Overall, I enjoyed the hell out of this. I bought this out of loyalty to Ellis, as I've enjoyed her content for years. I went in completely blind as the marketing was pretty cagey on what this was going to be. But I am so glad this was not only decent, but it quickly has become one of my favorite novels I've read this year. I eagerly am waiting for news of a sequel. I'll be rereading it a few times while I wait. If you're in doubt, I would implore you to read it. If you enjoyed Animorphs, Ender's Game, Transformers, or Mass Effect you will enjoy this.

I REALLY enjoy this author’s YouTube content so I tore through this book as soon as it arrived. Boy, oh boy. The fact that it took so many years to get this book off the ground is painfully obvious. I think if she scrapped the whole story and started over fresh with her current critical eye it would have turned out much better. Parts of this story completely fall apart. The main character is barely developed and I never got a feel for her personality or interests, other than a few very superficial details. Her family (both immediate and estranged) could be lifted out of the story and I’d hardly notice. It’s almost hilariously bad that the main character actually acknowledges that she has forgotten about her family halfway through the book after they haven’t been referenced at all for many chapters. The pacing in the last quarter felt like a word limit had to be reached. The same confrontations happen over and over and over near the end. The editing was a little sloppy. Several unique words or phrases would be repeated word for word in the next paragraph or sentence...it gave the impression that sentences were being moved around to get a better flow, but the editor forgot to delete the unwanted text. Despite all this, it’s not the worst book I’ve ever read. The descriptions of the aliens and their culture was fun. I liked Ampersand’s cold, curt, way of communicating and got a couple laughs because of it. All said, though, this book is firmly in the YA category. If you’re looking for a “beach read” sci-fi book, this would be a good choice.

August, 2007. A meteorite falls on northern California. A whistleblower goes public with evidence that the US government has been in communication with an alien intelligence and flees to Germany. His daughter, embarrassed by his behaviour, tries to ignore the unwanted cult of celebrity and get on with things. Suddenly a second meteor falls on apparently the exact same sport as the first, a coincidence so remote as to be effectively impossible, and suddenly the implausible feels very real indeed.Axiom's End is the debut novel by Lindsay Ellis, a popular video essayist and film critic known for her deep dives on the making of film and TV shows. She was nominated for a Hugo for her three-part series on Peter Jackson's deeply troubled Hobbit film project, and also posted an excellent analysis of the problems with Game of Thrones.Fortunately, it turns out she's pretty handy in the realm of fiction as well. Axiom's End is a story about humanity encountering an alien race, only to find the aliens are almost impossible to communicate with due to the total absence of common frames of reference. Early parts of the book, where the existence of the aliens is unclear, are framed like an X-Files thriller where government agents are keeping tabs on a young woman because of what she thinks is her father's criminal activities. Cora gets first-hand evidence that the aliens are real and that pretty much everyone is in the dark about what's really going on, resulting in a satisfying story shift where she gains more power, knowledge and agency because of her own experiences (a nice inversion on the more traditional story where the protagonist is always playing catch-up with the plot but somehow ends out coming on top).There's some pretty cool horror scenes early on, and a vein of humour running through the books which stays just on the right side of dated pop culture references (the alternate-past setting helps with that). Cora's conspiracy theorist father - Edward Snowden fused with Fox Mulder - starts off as an all-knowing sage drip-feeding the audience with hints of greater knowledge via excerpts from his blog, until you realise he doesn't really know anything either and is desperately trying to make himself seem more important than he really is (sort of a budget Melisandre in the story) whilst also falling way behind the curve of the story, which becomes increasingly amusing.The second half of the story feels like it slightly undercuts its own premise. The aliens initially appear almost too different for humans to effectively communicate with them, but ultimately a method of communication does appear which ends up being about as good as Google Translate (i.e. mostly okay with the occasional clunker), which makes the story way more manageable, but some of the unique atmosphere of the story is lost. It is replaced by a more traditional story about people from completely different civilisations trying to overcome apparently insurmountable odds to establish a rapport. This is excellently handled, but it does feel that the story has switched directions from something a bit weirder (think China Mieville's Embassytown or Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life, later filmed as Arrival) to something a little more traditional (maybe Starman with a slightly less attractive and indeed non-humanoid Jeff Bridges).There are still a lot of interesting plot twists and the weirdness of the aliens is maintained through their technology and weapons; when two of the aliens come into conflict, Ellis successfully portrays the idea of humans interfering as being akin to a gnat trying to stop a jet fighter dogfight. There's also another raft of thematic ideas related to first contact that are intelligently explored, from the existence of the so-called "Great Filter" (the puzzle that if intelligent, technologically-advanced life is possible, as we have shown, why hasn't it already colonised the galaxy?) to the dangers incurred when a more technologically advanced species encounters a less technologically-advanced one.Axiom's End (****½) may end up being a bit less strange than it initially promises, but it's still a compulsive page-turner with a nice line in both terror and humour. There will be sequels - the book is touted as the first in the Noumena sequence - but the book has a fair amount of closure to it and no immediate cliffhangers.

The description for Axiom's End makes the story sound like it's about truth, that it'll ask questions of whether or not the public has the right to know everything the government knows. Whilst these are important questions, and ones that the book does address, this isn't what the book meant to me, or what I really took away from it. Anyone who's watched through Lindsay Ellis' videos will be aware that one of the topics that seems to come up a lot is that of monsters, and about loving them. This is probably best explored in her video essay 'My Monster Boyfriend', but is by no means the only time that she talks about it.Monsters used to be surrogates for fears, for the worries of the times when they were made. Whether it's the fear of people of colour taking the 'virtue' of white women that was at the heart of films like Creature From The Black Lagoon, Birth of a Nation, or even King Kong, or the fear of american values being replaced by communism in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, monsters have stood in for real life people for decades. But as long as that's been a thing so has monsters being a source of love. Stories like Beauty and the Beast, to even further back and myths like Eros and Psyche which dates back to the 2nd century AD, tell stories of people falling in love with inhuman creatures.Lindsay Ellis talks about these themes a lot, whether it's when she's discussing Disney movies, or her love of Phantom of the Opera, as such I shouldn't have been surprised to see these themes featured so heavily in her book. But damn it all, she managed to draw me into a monster romance without me realising it.One of the two leads of the novel is Cora, a young woman who's having to deal with the fact that her absentee father is on the run from the authorities, and that his quest for 'the truth' has made the lives of his family difficult to say the least. They're investigated by the authorities, tailed by shadowy figures, and hounded by the press. Add on to this Cora's difficulty with having recently moved back home with her mother, and her trouble keeping a job, and we meet a woman who's dealing with a lot. Because of this, I wasn't quite sure what I felt about her at first.At times I was able to identify with her, I could look at some of the struggles she was having and see similar things from different times in my life. But there were also times she came across as naive and foolish, and seemed to not really have her life together. But then really who does?The other main character is Ampersand. He's a little less easy to describe. He's an alien. And not like any kind of alien that I've experienced before. The way that Lindsay describes him makes him so inhuman, more akin to combination of animal and machine; or as she described in my interview with her, a mix of the Xenomorph and Eva from Wall-E. Yet I pictured him with a strange sense of beauty and almost regalness. I saw this alien creature that at times made me think of an insect, at others he was quite feline, or even deer-like. But through it all there was something about him that fascinated me and grabbed my attention.Much like Cora, when we first meet Ampersand he's not the nicest of people. He can communicate with Cora, but barks orders, comes across as threatening at times, and doesn't seem to have any kind of interest in people beyond using them to achieve his end goal. He certainly never seemed to regard any of them as being worthy of thought or care.But when these two came together something magical happened. Cora had to grow up all of a sudden, she had to step up to responsibility and put herself in a position that would test her beyond her limits; and Ampersand, he had to learn that his initial opinions of humans were wrong, that we're not just violent, animalistic creatures, but were worthy of his attention a,nd care.The relationship between the two of them never felt strange, and the fact that he's so alien helped this. This isn't a girl falling in love with a vampire or a zombie because he's a hot boy, or even something resembling a boy. This is two beings learning to like each other from an intellectual level. They connected through their minds and personalities. Because of this the love that seemed to form between them never felt cliched or hackneyed, it felt real.Whilst they seem to form an attachment like a working relationship, bordering on friendship, there's a scene where Cora is scared and feeling alone, the weight of everything crushing down on her, and Ampersand comes to comfort her. He sees this being that's so alien to him, who he barely understands at time, and he sees that she's suffering and can't help himself from helping her. The tenderness that this alien creature shows this young woman is so genuine and earnest that that was the moment I realised that these two could fall in love. Not a physical love, driven by hormones or sexual desire, but a love for who the other is, driven by a desire to see the other happy and safe.There's something that happens towards the end of the book where it looks like Ampersand might be revealed to be a villain, and it made my heart break. I was so hurt that this creature I'd fallen in love with alongside Cora could have been evil this whole time that when this is proven to be false I was so unbelievably happy. I could't have dealt with that level of betrayal from him. And I'd probably never be able to engage with any of Lindsay's work again either if that had happened as she'd have betrayed me in the worst way.The book ends with the two characters closer than ever, with an undeniable connection that's so akin to love that I couldn't see it any other way. These last moments of the book, with the two of them together, caring for each other made me cry. Physically cry. I'll cry at tv and film all the time, hell, half the stuff on the internet gets me; but a book has never gotten me like this. It's never made such a raw emotional connection with a book before.I spent much of the rest of that night and the day after thinking about this, considering why this story connected with me so much, about why I came to care about Ampersand to the point of desperately wanting to read more about him. I went back and watched the video essay Lindsay made about loving monsters to see if that might help me figure some things out.Monsters are shunned by society. They're seen as ugly. It's assumed that they're threats to the way of life, that they're here to do awful things. And whilst sometimes this is true that's not always the case. Because monsters don't have to represent our fears anymore, they can represent us too. They can act as stand ins for marginalised people, people who are shunned by society, who are seen as threats. I realised that I connected with Ampersand so much because I'm a monster too. At least in the eyes of some people.People like myself, and many others, others who are viewed as 'different' and 'strange' get told that we're not normal. We're told that we're more violent, that we're a threat to women and children, that we're predisposed to violence, that we'll always be alone in the world because we're freaks. For a long while I was alone, and couldn't help but hear those kind of things and believe them. Maybe I was a monster, maybe I was doomed to be alone forever. I never dreamed that I'd find a loving connection with someone and be happy.So when I saw this happening with Ampersand, when he and Cora began to form this friendship, which would go on to blossom into love I couldn't help but project a little onto him. Ampersand means so much to me because I was that monster at one point.Axiom's End became a story that meant something to me. It connected with me on a personal level that I never thought it would. The characters came to mean something important. If I could meet Ampersand in real life I would in a heartbeat. I'd love to see how beautiful he is, to see those wonderful eyes he has, to be held by him like he holds Cora, because I've gone and fallen in love with him and what he represents.Axiom's End might be a story about truth, it might have stuff to say on government accountability and censorship, it might have amazing aliens and an intricate story, but to me first and foremost this book is about love. It's about showing people that no matter how you see yourself, or how others might see you, no one is really a monster, that we're all deserving of and capable of love.I doubt that Lindsay herself will ever read this review, but if she does I just want to say thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. This book is special. It means something. And I love it. Words can't do my feelings on this book justice. It is everything I never knew I needed and more.

I'm a fan of Lindsay Ellis from her YouTube channel, where she explains film theory and produces fascinating video essays. I've always liked her presentation style and when she announced that she was publishing a book, I ordered it without even reading the genre as I figured I would enjoy it regardless. I was right!TL:DR, an enjoyable sci-fi yarn about first contact and existential crises.Slight spoilers below.Axiom's end is an interesting style of sci-fi, narrow in it's focus on a small cast of characters, but broad in its scope and the themes it explores about our place in the universe and what alien first contact might be like. The main character Cora and her relationship with the excellent Ampersand are the focus of most of the book, with their discussions both funny and thought provoking. It's a fairly standard fugitive story, with a sci-fi angle and aspects that have been done before in different ways, but this story takes many good elements and pulls them together into a narrative that rolls along well once it gets going.I have two criticisms though: I initially found certain naming of events and items generic 'the Fremda memo', 'the obelus event' etc. This is later played up as a meta joke, but initially it annoyed me. Also, I feel that the whole Nils character (an Edward Snowden type) and his relationship to Cora could have been removed and the story could have carried on just as well! It feels like his relationship with Cora or his family should have either resolved, or that he should have been more impactful. He mostly serves as exposition, but I feel that this could have been done via Cora's Aunt Luciana, who is also well drawn and their relationship is interesting.Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The main characters are likeable, especially Ampersand and the flaws are minor compared with the positives. If you like Lindsay's videos, you'll like this book. If you like the X-files, Star Trek or Stargate, you'll like this book.

I'm a big fan of Lindsay Ellis, and listen to her pod-cast and enjoy her video essays on YouTube.I bought the book primarily out of curiosity and to support Lindsay.I found the beginning of the book a little difficult to get in to, but once I was hooked I finished the book in three days.The book is excellently paced with questions posed, and reveals keeping the pages turning!I am already waiting in anticipation for the second book.even if aliens aren't your thing, I recommend giving this book a chance, despite its subject it couldn't be more human.

I don't usually write reviews because I can be overly critical and hard to please, so a title of 'pretty good' is actually a rave review from me.I found Axiom's End a little slow to start but once it got into the swing of it I was hooked, literally didn't put it down until I'd finished.Not my usual genre otherwise I'd try and equate it as possible. (I've watched a good few of the Authors video essays and found them amusing and I'm insatiable for new books to read) I'm lacking sources for 'alien encounter'. The closest I can get is beauty and the beast meets men in black.I'll read most things once for the novelty but I'll definitely give this a reread. Not sure yet if it'll make it to the frequent reread pile but I will certainly look forward to more stories from the author!