Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

Published by St. Martin's Press on July 21, 2020

Nils Ortega is a whistleblower or a nut or a combination of the two. In an alternate 2007, Nils is sort of a Julian Assange except his scoops involve claims that the government is hiding knowledge of aliens on Earth. He’s right, of course, but that doesn’t make life easier for Nils' family members who are harassed by the government or paparazzi or, eventually, aliens.

Nils’ daughter Cora has changed her last name to Sabino and deleted her profiles but still lives under the shadow of her father. Cora doesn’t know what to make of rumors about the Ampersand Event. Maybe an asteroid hit the Earth near Pasadena. Maybe it was an alien spaceship. Witnesses disappear and return days later with no memory of what happened. Some return with brain damage. Nils reported a leaked memo about captive aliens that has gone viral. Some of Cora’s friends think Nils is a hero. Cora thinks he’s a bad dad. She lost her scholarship in linguistics after the memo leaked. The government is working hard to shut down Nils and isn’t afraid to use his family against him.

Cora wants nothing to do with the controversy until she’s contacted by an alien who looks like a really big insect. She calls the alien Ampersand. The alien needs help communicating with humans. Cora, having knowledge of linguistics, seems like a good choice to be an intermediary, even if it isn’t a choice Cora would willingly make. Saving her family and possibly the planet eventually becomes Cora’s driving motivation. Cora’s mother, who knows more about aliens than she ever revealed, assures Cora that the aliens are incapable of communicating with humans. Cora eventually learns that it can be done, but communication comes with a price.

Axiom’s End makes the point that aliens will likely be so different from humans that understanding them may be impossible. Humans don’t even understand each other all that well, particularly when they come from different cultures. The aliens in Axiom’s End have a complex social structure. They aren’t very nice and they tend to be paranoid about potential threats, much as humans are. It may not be possible to bridge those gaps but Cora has the right blend of idealism and pragmatism to give it a try.

Novels about relationships between humans and aliens don’t usually take the topic as seriously as Axiom’s End. It’s as difficult to generalize about aliens as it is to generalize about people, which is presumably the lesson that Lindsay Ellis wants readers to internalize. Some aliens/humans are better than others. Some aliens/humans aren’t very good at all. And let’s face it, if aliens are too much like humans, either aliens will wipe out humans or humans will wipe out aliens because getting along isn’t in the cards. Maybe the only question is whether it will happen in the near or far future. But maybe communication creates at least the possibility of hope.

Through the struggles of both Cora and Ampersand to relate to each other, the novel suggests that it may be possible to have empathy for beings we don’t understand. Ellis made a strong effort to portray Cora as a decent but conflicted person who never knows if she is helping aliens or humans or if her efforts, either way, will make any difference. The alienness of Ampersand is convincing, although making him look like a praying mantis suggests a failure of imagination.

Characterization is the high point of a novel that, in the end, asks more questions than it answers. There’s nothing wrong with that in science fiction, a genre that encourages readers to ponder the unknowable. While Ellis sets up a plot that never quite takes off, the unanswered questions are sufficiently compelling to make the novel worthwhile.

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