Exordia

by Seth Dickinson

“Anna, I came to Earth tracking a very old story, a story that goes back to the dawn of time. it’s very unlikely that you’ll die right now. It wouldn’t be narratively complete.”

Anna Sinjari―refugee, survivor of genocide, disaffected office worker―has a close encounter that reveals universe-threatening stakes. While humanity reels from disaster, she must join a small team of civilians, soldiers, and scientists to investigate a mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror. If they can manage to face their own demons, they just might save the world.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Queer, Science Fiction Fantasy, Audiobook

532 pages, Hardcover

First published January 23, 2024

About the author

Since his 2012 debut, Seth's fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Analog, and nearly every other major science fiction and fantasy market.

He's a lapsed student of social neuroscience, where he studied the role of racial bias in police shootings, and the writer of much of the lore and fictional flavor for Bungie Studios' smash hit Destiny. In his spare time he works on the collaborative space opera Blue Planet: War in Heaven.

THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT is his first novel.

Reviews

[The Speculative Shelf · Rating 2 out of 5]

The opening act of Exordia is extraordinary. It’s witty, engaging, and sets up a super intriguing first contact alien scenario. What follows that cracking start is a dense, technobabble bonanza that prioritizes impenetrable science abstractions over story and character.

It’s frustrating because I’m fairly certain Seth Dickinson is brilliant. But he’s so brilliant that most of what he was writing about went well over my head. Or maybe I’ve just outed myself as an unlearned, poorly-read student of science fiction literature – but that’s for me to grapple with.

I wish I had put this down and chalked it up as one of the many books that are “just not for me,” but the promise of that opening section left me hopeful that the story would eventually sink its teeth back into me. I lost the plot and never got it back as Dickinson dove deeper and deeper down a cosmological rabbit hole that I just could not follow (literally, figuratively, metaphysically).

There will be a bloc of readers who love Exordia, and I wish I could count myself among their numbers. But consider me among the lesser mortals who could not connect with the frequency at which Dickinson is operating here.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf and follow @specshelf on Twitter.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very excited for this but dear god please please finish Baru first.


Edit: holy shit

This book sucked my brain from my skull, digested it and injected the chyme back into my head via my eyeballs. One of the most ambitious sff I’ve read and I think I’ll spend the next few years rereading and unpicking it.

[Finchie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"History has suffered an intervention."

Reading Exordia felt like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle while being chased by wolves, if the puzzle pieces were defense industry contractors and the wolves were also defense industry contractors who were laughing at you. This is not a fun, easy read. It's a book about hard truths and hard lies and the way everyone needs to believe they are the hero of their own story. It's violent and unsettling, but sometimes beautiful, and often darkly funny.

Exordia follows the same characters as Dickinson's short story "Anna Saves Them All," but expands far beyond that original story. Anna and Ssrin, bound together by fate, set off with a ragtag group of scientists and soldiers to save the world. Unfortunately, "save" and "world" mean different things to everyone involved.

It's difficult to talk about most of the content of Exordia without spoiling anything or needing essays worth of context, but be aware that this book focuses heavily on traumatic subjects like genocide and the military-industrial complex alongside its discussion of more abstract concepts like metaphysics and the nature of moral action. I expect other reviews will address these elements in more detail.

There were some characters I didn't like (Erik and Clayton almost made me put the book down), some I liked, and some I absolutely loved (Chaya and Aixue!!), so I appreciated the way the POV changed frequently. I didn't have to spend too much time in anyone's head(s) in particular. I was deeply drawn into the mystery and took more notes than I've ever taken on a first read before, and then immediately went back for a second read to find layers of foreshadowing. Exordia also happened to reference a lot of my favorite mildly obscure works of speculative fiction (Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, Interstellar Pig, etc.) so I may just be the exact target audience.

Recommended for fans of The Library at Mount Char, Annihilation, The Andromeda Strain, SCP files, Roadside Picnic, and the web serial Worm.

I received an advance e-copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

--
wow. will share more specifics than "wow" closer to release date.
--
just got an ARC, review TK -- very excited because Anna Saves Them All is one of my favorite short stories!!

[Rachel (TheShadesofOrange) · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 Stars
Video Review: https://youtu.be/Kri0TLzmctk

This one started out strong with a quirky beginning. It was just weird, but in a good way. However as the story continued I fell more out of love with this novel. I think it was just too much for this long unwieldy book. Perhaps this narrative would have worked better in the short format. I'm not sure this book accomplished what it set out to do.

I adore the author's other books that start with The Traitor Baru Cormorant. However I personally wouldn't compare the two worlds. The works are incredibly different and I don't think they will necessarily appeal to the same type of readers. I don't think I would have known they were written by the same author if I hadn't seen the name.

Disclaimer I received a copy of this book from the publisher.

[Blue Cline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seth.. my man… what the fuck

[Rebecca Roanhorse]

As others have said, this started out with a weird, quirky and absolutely charming bang and then gets lost in the philosophical and geopolitical weeds. Some of the voices of marginalized characters are also a bit disconcerting. I'm not sure why, and if that's a testament to Dickinson's craft or something else. Anyway, I DNF'd at 35%. It may work for someone looking for a little more of a hard sci-fi read with a lot of strong opinions about the state of the world, but, alas, it didn't work for me.

I received a free ARC which in no way impacted my honest review.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seth Dickinson you marvelous marvelous man. I went into Exordia having barely read the (extremely vague) summary, but putting full faith in one of my favorite authors to take me on a journey, and he damn well did. Exordia has already marked itself as a contender for ‘Top Books of 2024’ and the year has barely begun.

First off, this book is NOT a standalone. I thought so too. Now onto the review.

Exordia, broadly speaking, is the story of humanity’s last hope against an imminent hostile alien invasion. Through the eyes of characters from extremely different backgrounds and upbringings, we follow the events of a few tense days as military groups from around the world race against the clock to prevent an alien agent from acquiring a mysterious super weapon that would spell humanity’s demise, while ever-present and extremely real threat of nuclear bombardment looms in the background. If this sounds vague to you, that’s okay! The overarching plot is surprisingly simple, but the magic of this book is in the details.

What will make or break this book for most readers will be the writing. The opening chapters are about a girl and her eight-headed snake monster alien gf and the joys of finally having enough money to shop at Trader Joe’s. In an utter tonal-whiplash, the rest of the book is this incredibly dense, at times slow-paced, non-linear military sci-fi novel that goes deep into concepts from pure math and quantum physics to shape both alien technology and philosophies of morality. Dickinson uses technical terms and mathematical concepts to describe his world the way another author would use the sights and smells to describe a food market. The prose is unafraid to make the reader think and trusts that you can, slowly, put two and two together. If you liked The Three-Body Problem, you will love this book (and vice versa).

While I can’t speak to the full accuracy of physics and mathematical concepts used, as a roboticist I can say that the one time a quadrotor was used, Dickinson did slightly miss the mark (no one says ‘PID software’ lol). However, I will forgive that transgression on behalf of the beautifully placed Lie (pronounced ‘lee’, not ‘lai’) Group pun.

As expected from the author of Baru Cormorant, there is an incredible depth Dickinson has given these characters. There are certain books you read where the main cast has been constructed in a way that feels so extraordinarily human and Exordia is certainly one of them. The majority of this story is set in modern(ish)-day Kurdistan (Hannibal season 2 hasn’t aired yet, apparently), and given the story’s military nature, the backgrounds of the cast reflect this decision. Through these characters, Dickinson openly interrogates themes of colonialism, morality, genocide, and the US military-industrial complex and its actions in the Middle East during the Bush administration through the inner monologues and actions of these characters. I think anyone reading this will have their own ideas and moral framework challenged, in a way that’s thoughtful and nuanced. I loved the occasional usage of untranslated Chinese for the Chinese characters, as well as the well-placed Chinese slang. 10/10 usage of ‘tongzhi’.

What really made me fall in love with these characters is the underlying current of Queerness running through each of the POV cast that color their characters. Anna with Ssrin (said eight-headed snake monster alien gf), Aixue and Chaya’s growing connections, whatever Clayton’s borderline-homoerotic constant desperation for Erik’s approval despite their long and tempestuous history of betrayal against each other. Even Erik, who swears up and down his heterosexuality, has some slowly unraveling Extremely Unexamined dependencies wrapped in military comradery with Erik. (Can you tell who my favorites were?) Objectively, each one of these characters are terrible people (although some more than most), but have shaped a moral framework to justify their actions and future goals in a way that makes their interactions so messy and fascinating to read.

Despite its length (over 210k!), Dickinson manages to develop and keep such incredible tension throughout the entire story. There are times, especially during the beginning when no one knows what the hell is going on, that feels like a borderline horror story, with unknown horrors awaiting at every turn. I genuinely felt that at any moment, the entire cast could get wiped out, game over, GG. And yet, I found myself laughing an inappropriate amount, given the story unfolding. There is some incredible dark humor from the Jaded Military Types^TM, situational irony with certain characters’ own hypocrisies (how many times can Erik complain about someone being manipulative right after manipulating Clayton yet again?), and just hilarious tangents characters go on that make for great out-of-context screenshots to friends.

Exordia is certainly not a book for everyone, but for a reader who’s willing to think as they read, they’ll find themselves rewarded with an extremely clever story full of beautifully crafted worldbuilding, meticulous prose, incredibly well-explored characters that portray many facets of the Queer experience, and new contemplations on ethics and morality and math to ponder on for days after. Overall, I rate this book a 5/5.

___

What a book to end 2023 with. Surely there's a sequel right??? Right????? It's rare to find a scifi where an author can both write in dense tech-jargon (but written oh so beautifully, with some hilarious black humor sprinkled in) and also incredible character work. The queer yearning and anger between these characters does what 100 tiktok romances could never. Definitely not a book for everyone, but man was this freaking phenomenal.

[nisa esen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“ "I know you have no reason to believe me. So here are some things only the aliens could have told me. When you get to Tawakul, you're going to find a lot of destroyed Iranian tanks. You're going to find some dead Russians too. You're going to find a laboratory site constructed around the Blackbird.

"You're going to find corpses in that laboratory. A lot of corpses.

"And then something's going to start killing you. Something you can't fight. And I hope you’ll listen to me then.” ”

and

“Brother we killed white people.”



autistic STEM lesbians and homoerotic friends to enemies to ?, also the best description of aliens I’ve read in a long time.

Song on loop: Sorcery - The Toxic Avenger

[alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t think “Michael Crichton meets Venom” is SO off base, but to me this felt like if Hideo Kojima got a physics degree and then wrote a spiraling examination of the trolley problem in the form of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, for all the good and bad that entails. Seth Dickinson do NOT READ THIS REVIEW!!!!!!!

I wanted to like this book SO bad. I love the two Baru Cormorant books I’ve read, and I think Seth Dickinson is genuinely just SO fucking smart. He is clearly putting in the legwork and thinking harder about shit than 99% of writers out there. His cultural world-building is on par with Ursula K. Le Guin, and comes from such an obviously deep compassion for and understanding of humanity. When a Seth Dickinson character says some faux-deep BS about mankind, I fucking BELIEVE it. I fucking INTERNALIZE that shit.

Unfortunately, Exordia’s contemporary 2013 Obama administration setting really emphasized, at least for me, the things that other people didn’t enjoy in his Traitor Baru Cormorant series. “I didn’t like the characters >:(“ isn’t very meaningful criticism by itself, but some of the character writing is SO heavy-handed. I simply could not suspend my disbelief around the 40-year-old special-ops national security advisors. My best advice is that you should imagine every scene featuring military personnel as a cutscene from Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. You MUST be imagining Ocelot’s Mount Rushmore of Snakes, Mei Ling on her battleship, and Vamp doing a bunch of weirdly sexual backflips, because at a certain point conversations are going to play out like it’s three Otacons in a room arguing nuclear ethics and Chinese lesbian sexual dynamics with each other.

The pacing was also surprisingly rough. I wasn’t in love with the first ~thirty pages/Act One, but it has such a compelling and open ending that I felt like ANYthing could happen. By the time I was on page 250 out of 544, though, I realized oh god this is fully what the rest of the book is going to be. If you thought the extended people’s army guerrilla warfare sequence in Baru was boring, this book will move at a snail’s crawl in comparison. Not to mention the non-linear narrative sacrifices a lot of momentum in favor of gradually developing a larger scientific theory that will completely bounce off of 50% of readers. I’ve only read Cixin Liu’s short stories, but from what I’ve heard of it, this book probably has a lot of overlap with The Three-Body Problem.

My biggest unreasonably bitchy opinion though is that I just really didn’t like the pop culture references. Seth Dickinson clearly uses them to highlight commonality in people across cultures, to hold the reader’s attention and keep it light during slow segments, but primarily to pay homage/openly acknowledge his influences. The problem is that since all 9(ish) main characters, each of differing age, race, sexuality, scientific and military background etc, end up with the same overlapping nerd taste, it flattens all of them.

Two different characters mention Neon Genesis Evangelion. Three different people reference X-Files, Diana Wynne Jones, and Star Trek. Two guys joke about Metal Gear Solid 2. Someone uses Call of Duty to describe guns. I have no problem with the occasional subtle in-joke, but I think it makes him look like a way worse writer than he actually is when a character points at some cosmic unknowable event or whatever and thinks “wow this is just like that scene from [MOVIE TITLE HERE]”.

I dunno. The interesting stuff was REALLY interesting. I think I’m mostly just disappointed. It ends with a big obvious sequel hook, and I WOULD read the sequel. Also I’m not a heartless monster, so of course I wanted the two women to fall in love.

Also also, at a certain point I accidentally started imagining the Neopets Hissi species and never quite pulled myself back together.

[Heather M · Rating 2 out of 5]

seth dickinson is very important to me for a small handful of reasons and i will probably try anything they ever write. however. there is a shift in tone and scale that happens REALLY early on in exordia that i'll never get right with. i feel betrayed and respectfully i think the story buckled under its own weight.

it's not like seth didn't do the same thing in the baru series, but the difference is it didn't happen until after the first book which set up such intense emotional stakes and character work that i would've followed the story anywhere. and i did. exordia is like if the whole of traitor baru cormorant had been squeezed into the prologue of the second book.

probably this is revealing my lack of experience with reading dense hard scifi or military scifi but on the other hand if i had been interested in reading that before now i would've, and so maybe this just isn't for me and will be perfect for someone else! but the first act sets up a fucky bitey incredibly fun first contact between a woman and a cunty snake alien in new york, and then turns into a sci-fi military shooter that loses all its character and narrative momentum and contains so many US government acronyms, so many nukes, SO many quips, and so much pseudoscientific babble that even my steminist brain was exhausted. not to mention a steady flow of new characters, all with their own flashbacks and lore drops, and the HUGE ask of getting invested in a trolley problem about american intervention and murder thru the lens of two men. yes there is also a hot butch but at what cost.

it's clear that seth has a lot to say and a huge brain but all i asked for was both the protag and her mom to resolve their trauma by getting ****** by a snake hydra. im sorry i had to do it seth. seth where is baru

[The Captain · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ahoy there me mateys!  This novel deals with first contact and I was so ready for it.  Sadly I abandoned ship at 48%.  The first 20% or so was great.  Anna is a survivor of genocide and a former refugee.  She lives in NYC and frankly has a rather uninspired life.  Until one day, she goes to Central Park and finds an alien that apparently only she can see.  I loved the entire set-up of Anna and the alien's relationship.  Of course two aliens are at war which leads to trouble for the humans.

After the excellent start, an alien artifact ends up being in Kurdistan, which just happens to be where Anna is from.  The alien goes to get the item and leaves Anna behind.  Anna gets drawn right back in.  Then the book turns into a military sci-fi where aliens are barely present, lots of nuclear bombs fall, and all the human factions are fighting with each other.  There are multiple POV switches and flashbacks which made me lose track of the narrative.  The massive info-dumps about "cool" science ideas and physics did not help and only substantially slowed down the pacing.  The many, many added characters were rather two-dimensional.  It was also strange in that it felt the story was supposed to take place in modern day but then randomly would talk about Obama as president.

I ended up getting more and more frustrated even though I wanted to see what the Space Empire was going to do about the renegade aliens.  Apparently this book was also expanded from a short story, ends on a cliff hanger, and is the first of a series.  Would I have gotten the answers I wanted if I continued reading?  Not sure but mateys this was sadly a slog.  Arrrr!

[literaryelise · Rating 5 out of 5]

An expansive sci-fi saga slash political science slash philosophical thought experiment that somehow still has enough time to develop characters worth crying over. An alien whose species is unquestionably, irrevocably, ontologically evil meets a woman who believes her choices prove she too is unquestionably, irrevocably, ontologically evil. But is that true? What does it mean be ontologically evil? Can one become “unforgivable.” Are we what we do? And if we are evil, and like the aforementioned alien, doomed to a capital-h Hell, how do we navigate the complicated world?

33.33% commentary on Obama’s Middle East policy, 33.33% alien space war, 33.33% trolley problem on steroids. 100% weird and beautiful and groundbreaking. 100% characters I want to love and hold on to and never, ever let go.

And yes, the philosophy tome did make me cry what about it?????!!!!

[Lindsay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aliens from the Exordia, a galaxy-spanning interstellar civilisation, come to Earth with competing missions that put the entire human race in the position of collateral damage. One of them, a rebel from the Exordia enlists the aid of a Kurdish refugee now living in the US.

Much more in the summary would be very spoilery, but I will talk a little bit more about the content. The aliens have technology based on morality and souls, including the concepts of heavenly judgement and damnation to hell. The aliens themselves are serpentine (actually hydra-like with a central body that is also serpentine) and all of them are damned from birth. As a result, the Exordia that the aliens dominate, is completely evil: oppressive and cruel without justification.

I wanted to hate this book, and the endless waffling of each individual character being put through one or another iteration of a trolley problem is certainly grounds for that. That's a good 70% of the book unfortunately, bookended by two decent pieces at the start and end. It was the first 20% that kept me reading, but after that it was just really bad, only to be picked up by an interesting end section that leads to a sequel that I almost certainly won't read.

That 70% is just a horribly convoluted mess, with non-linear story-telling, multiple points-of-view, and as said before, seemingly-endless reiterations of the trolley problem.

Not recommended. The good bits do not outweigh the bad, and the overall book is a downer besides.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

You are a philosopher, asking abstract questions about the nature of Reality, and Good, and the relationship between cause and effect all the way back to Aristotle's Prime Mover, that which created the universe we live in.

You are standing at a switch next to train tracks with a unstoppable trolley barreling down towards you. Five people are tied down in the path of the trolley. You can pull a lever to save their lives at the cost of one person tied to the other track. Now it's your father and your brother and your place in the world on the alternative track. Did your answer change? Now the trolley is coming at the 8 billion people on Earth, all the humans who ever lived and ever will. Did your answer change?

You are a turtle basking in the sun on a rock in Central Park. An alien with eight adder-like heads picks you up with a pair of its eight elegant white-gloved hands, effortlessly cracks your ribs from your back shell and scoops out the bloody meat inside. You are delicious. You are dead.



We begin with Anna in New York in 2013, when she meets Ssrin, an alien eating turtles in the park. Anna is a 30-something Kurdish war orphan, a tough woman who doesn't fit into America and can't ever go home because she pulled that trolley problem lever when she was 7, shooting her father and brother and four other villagers in the head at the behest of a sadistic Baathist officer to save the rest of the village. Ssrin drops a bunch of truth bombs on Anna: Anna is special, her horrific past has bound the two of them together on a quest to save the universe. The quest matters because narrative has a privileged place in the universe. Souls are real, the afterlife is real, good and evil are objective truths.

Ssrin is a renegade from the Exordia, an empire which has used their mastery of technology and magic to pinion all significant species into a narrative framework in which successful rebellion is impossible. While humans are not significant (inbred apes who are decent persistent hunters and like to watch each other have sex), a powerful narrative is written on all our human souls, offering a way to break the Exordia. Ssrin is being hunted by Iruvage, a cop from her species, who's own version of the quest offers a chance for salvation for Ssrin and Iruvage and their entire species of khai, because uniquely among the galaxy's sentients, the khai are damned to hell from birth.

And then the situation goes off the rails entirely. Anna and Ssrin conjure from some hidden dimension a jetliner-sized starship, codenamed Blackbird, in the remote valley in Kurdistan that Anna hails from. Three days later, an Exordia cruiser arrives in-system and announces its presence with actual bombs, a grid of high-altitude nuclear detonations, causing a civilization destroying EMP. The shadowy intelligence apparatus of the US government activates its contingency plan, MAJESTIC, a first-contact effort lead by Deputy National Security Advisor Clayton Navarro Hunt, with its military XCOM contingent of special forces operators lead by Major Erik Wygaunt.

Clayton and Erik have a History with a capital H. They went to school together, they're in love with the same woman, Rosamaria, though Clayton was the one who married her, and they ran a blacker-than-black assassination program called Paladin. Erik used Paladin to bring to justice criminals who operated in the legal gaps of the war on terror: US military contractors who committed severe human rights abuses. Clayton took a bigger view, that there were bad people making the world worse, and utilitarian calculus required their deaths to bring about a better future. The two disagreed, they went to Rosamaria, she told them to go to hell for doing this and confessing it to her. Both men have a very clear idea of what the right thing to do is and an overriding need to convince the other before they die, most likely at each other's hands. Erik knows for certain that Clayton is itching for a pretext to sell out anyone and everything in the name of some nebulous greater good and his own power. Clayton is convinced that Erik's rigid deontology will doom them all, and that standing up for an illusion of justice is pointless if it everyone saved dies tomorrow anyway. Oh, and Clayton is working for Iruvage, in the same way that Anna is working for Ssrin.

If you've read The Traitor Baru Cormorant (why haven't you read Traitor?), you know the kind of tension that Dickinson is able to produce. So believe me when I say that everything I've covered in this review is merely the first 20% of the book, and it is as tense as the last 20% of Traitor. I read the whole novel in one compulsive gulp of a day, stopping only to swear under my breath and take a long walk in the sunshine to remind myself that it's just science-fiction.

The narrative does slacken slightly as the protagonists arrive at Blackbird to find the remains of the previous teams of investigators from Russia, China, Iran, and Uganda. The technothriller tropes of contamination suits, scientific investigation, gun-toting bad-asses, and quarantine by flame and bullet are entirely inadequate against an Outside Context Problem who's very existence is incompatible with the narrow range of environmental and ontological circumstances that allow humans to live. People die by the score, killed by each other, by the ways that Blackbird warps flesh and soul, and by Iruvage's willingness to expend human beings like we expend laboratory mice to achieve his agenda.

This book fires on all cylinders, with compelling characters, a provocative central conceit, thoughtful examination of the consequences of (American) imperial power, a propulsive plot, and crackling writing. I have to give particular kudos to the alienness of khai psychology and the nature of Blackbird's power and danger. Both of these things are very much not human, but this is no empty mystery box, and the book reveals clear reasons for why they are like they are, and why it matters.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.
This was incredible.
Seth, are you okay?
Cause I'm not sure I am.

[Geonn Cannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yeah I'm not gonna finish this. So promising in the first (checks) 7%, but then it becomes a complete and utter slog. Characters are pretty much interchangeable. The weird, fun, unique first contact story that started the book is completely dropped in favor for a generic scifi invasion story full of characters I didn't care about. They spouted math and science exposition in a way I'm sure the author thought made him seem smart but just made the book drag on and on. The poor narrator tried her best but eventually it was all just white noise and I gave up.

I wish I knew why the author spent so long on that first section just to waste it. Dude just wants to be Michael Crichton so so bad. So much potential just dropped in favor for Soldiers and Government Operatives Doing a Mission and an incredibly odd obsession with name-dropping Obama at random points. I felt like I was gearing up for a great read. Instead it was just a bait and switch.

[alexis]

If someone is out there: please, anyone - I don’t know how to get advance reader copies but I would do Anything for this advance reader copy

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

For about the first quarter of this book I felt like I was reading what might be the best hard SF novel of the year. At about the half-way mark though, Dickinson really goes off the rails, as what started as a domestic first-contact story has become a military thriller meets cosmic horror, and I'm not sure that the whole exercise doesn't start collapsing from its own weight; though I know that I found the whole train wreck fascinating to watch. I can't help thinking that this novel made me respect Neil Asher even more, as this sort of thing is his bread and butter, but with a lot less angst. The biggest issue though is that this novel winds up on a somewhat dispirited cliff-hanger, and Dickinson has made it clear that there is no guarantee that he'll get to write a follow-on book (which he has the raw material for), and I really want to read that book!

[elle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came for the snake woman yuri and did NOT expect the polyamorous US army triad. In general this book could've done with more editing, because there is a far better book inside it just waiting to be polished, and that book had far less sluggish musings about the imperialist evils of realpolitik blah oh no are we the bad guys?? blah. However, every time I was tempted to DNF something truly batshit happened to keep me interested. Had a blast with the snake lady and Anna's mum. She IS the town drunk of the feminist commune and I love her for it

[Brianna G · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been just about a month since I finished reading my Netgalley ARC of Exordia. I have had difficulty summarizing, or even providing a slice of my feelings and experiences reading Exordia. It has infected my brain, and if I'm being completely honest I preordered a number of copies for friends who I believe will love this book. Dickinson's The Masquerade was so electrifying that I returned to reading sci-fi and fantasy. Exordia continues to light my brain on fire in the same way The Traitor Baru Cormorant did five years ago.

Seth Dickinson is an extraordinary author who juggles a dazzling number of extremely high concept ideas with compelling and hurt (so hurt!) characters. Exordia is another stellar example of Dickinson's work. I've seen it blurbed as "Michael Crichton meets Marvel's Venom," but I think a more accurate summary would be "Independence Day meets Annihilation." In part for the context of an extraterrestrial encounter, but much more for the phantasmagoric explosion of body horror, fractal imagery, and connection and conflict between people of radically different upbringing and culture trying to work together in apocalyptic circumstances.

The book isn't just rich in ideas, it's smart. The book leaps from perspectives and events to others explosively, dropping the reader in radically new settings and the book expects readers to keep up. It starts off dizzying, but by the midpoint of the novel the reader should be comfortable with the way the narrative shifts its attentions and focus. The novel is a challenging read, and to effectively cover its subject matter, the novel has to be challenging.

Exordia doesn't shy away from challenging themes. Central to the plot is the Kurdish people and their repeated experiences with exploitation and genocide. Many characters are deeply traumatized, having experienced some of the worst things that humans can experience. Other characters are responsible for similar exploitation and genocides. There are elements of body-horror that are troubling, and nauseating, but necessarily powerful.

But even more than the novel is challenging, or smart, or phantasmagoric, it is fun! There were times I was cackling with laughter or joy. In the midst of apocalyptic battle, certain characters take the time to admire the beauty of fighter jet design. (In fact, the love for fighter jets is one of the most thrilling and fun components of the whole novel) At times both characters and narrative seems terminally online, making pop-culture references a mile a minute, that never feel out of place so much as they feel representative of weird, off-putting, empathic, loving, real people. Much of the second half of the novel is fun, bold, and insane in a way that's hard to quantify without heavy spoilers.

The book won't be for everyone, nor will any masterpiece. There will be readers who struggle with the narrative shifts, the elegantly complicated plot lines and ever-expanding cast of characters. But the novel's character doesn't make it any less of a masterpiece, just less of a universal read. While I assume Exordia will actually be more accessible and broadly appealing than Dickinson's The Masquerade, Exordia will still be an acquired taste. But for those who can enjoy it, it is singular in its appeal.

Exordia is a masterpiece. It's so frenetic, explosive, and elegant that I can barely scratch the surface. I would need 6 months and a research team to track down all the references and implications, before I could even begin to write a review that praises Exordia in the way it deserves.
For now, I'll say this: If high concept, character-driven, science fiction is up your alley- if you love Annihilation, Dune, or other such fare, then there's a good shot this will earn a spot on your favorite novels. It's just that good.

[Siavahda · Rating 5 out of 5]

WHAT

WHAT

WHAT

My mind is SO BLOWN. That was phenomenal. My GODS!

Proper review to come if I figure out how to be coherent about this freaking book!!!

ACTUAL (BUT WOEFULLY INADEQUATE) REVIEW:

HIGHLIGHTS
~souls + science
~add narrative to the list of universal forces
~an evil space empire
~I ship the snake-alien and the war-orphan
~how hard would you fight for your world?

I CANNOT EVEN.

WHAT.

WHAT.

WHAT.

I really had no idea what to expect of Exordia – I adore Dickinson’s Masquerade series, so obviously I was interested to see what he’d do with sci fi.

But THIS!!! There’s not knowing what to expect – and then there’s getting hit with THIS, this LSD-cocaine combo with medusa-aliens and sapphic science geniuses and honest-to-gods paladins (that’s a pun, and you’ll get it when you read the book), all racing to save the world and the galaxy and the souls of an entire species. (Maybe the souls of more than one species.) Exordia is a high-octane religious experience, a blockbuster of an action-movie that is achingly profound, with alien weaponry that shreds souls and the secrets of the universe hidden in pink noise, a tenderly merciless dissection of humanity and morality that still manages to make you giggle-snort at the most inappropriate moments. Dickinson plays the threads of the reader’s nerve-endings like a modern bard on the strings of an electric harp, and the result is a rock-n-roll-meets-death-metal concert of a story, complete with pyrotechnics and enough heart to have you screaming your throat raw.

What will she say to the alien? She has not planned that far. “Take us so your leader”? No, the alien’s supposed to use that one. “We come in peace” has the same problem, and would, anyway, be a lie. Anna has no peace to offer. “Invade us, I beg you.” At least this would resolve the problem of her Argentina-sized debt.

You sure as hell won’t know who the fuck to cheer for, but you can’t help loving every character at least a little bit. (Except Iruvage, that fucker.) And they might all be queer??? Dickinson is definitely doing something with queerness that I’m not smart enough to articulate – check out the review I linked for a better breakdown on that. (And honestly, a better breakdown of the whole book, really!)

And yeah, parts of Exordia go heavy on the physics, but if I, who slept through my entire last year of physics classes when I was 16, can make it, so can you!

Oh, and this is another excellent review that says it all so much better than I can, please read it too! Whether you need more convincing or not.

Push comes to shove, I feel like the only thing I can say is – just dive in, head first. Make sure you have water bottles ready to keep yourself hydrated, because once you pick this up, you will be GLUED to the pages. Things like eating and sleeping will become so much less important than what happens next. This is the sort of book you inhale and it has left me with such a book-hangover, I don’t know how I can possibly read anything else again after this. What can compare???

My first six-star read of the year, easy.

[Siona Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was soooooo cool. At times I didn’t feel smart enough to understand some of the concepts, and other times the humor was so dumb it was eye-roll inducing. And I loved every second of it. I cannot wait to see where Seth Dickinson takes this series (but I hope he finishes Baru Cormorant first!!)

Serendure is definitely a word in my vocabulary now too

[charlotte, · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rep: Kurdish mcs, Ugandan Filipino lesbian mc, Black Mexican American achillean mc, achillean mc, Iranian mc, Chinese lesbian mc, Chinese gay side character, Latina bi side character

CWs: gore, body horror, violence

[Nic · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars, approximately, rounding up for enjoyment! I just finished reading and need to marinate, but also this book took me on a goddamn ride. Thank you to Tor Publishing via Netgalley for the review copy of this book! All opinions are my own.

And you know what a soul's made of, right? Oh, yes. A soul is made of stories.

Exordia is mostly a book about international militaries responding to threats of the destruction of Earth via alien nukes. Mostly. It's also about: the shape/structure/purpose of the human soul, narrative and story on the meta level, family and reconciliation, what it means to "do the right thing", and, in its own way, how love makes us simultaneously better and worse at any given moment. Oh, and a lot of theoretical math and physics (not kidding, Dickinson does not hold back here). Dickinson packs this story with themes alongside rich, complex worldbuilding and massive moral questions.

What Dickinson sells, I buy. The Traitor Baru Cormorant was one of my favorite reads of last year, an out-of-the-park swing at historical fantasy, genocide, imperialism, queerness, sacrifice, and, of course, betrayal. Exordia touches on a lot of the same themes, but from a wildly different angle. This is hard sci fi. Like I said: aliens. And also nukes.

The text is a monster of meta. If you're not interested in stories about story/narrative/structure/etc then you will find this boring, and probably verging on obnoxious and soapboxy. I, however, am a narrative therapist, and also a writer, and am obsessed with the way Dickinson incorporated the idea that stories have power into such a complicated war story.

I noted in one of my updates while reading that the sentence-level prose in this book is fantastic. I think it's deeply quotable and frankly brilliant in terms of how it structures specific revelations and introduces us to characters. I couldn't believe how quickly I came to care about some of these people, including POVs we only jumped into briefly. This book takes into a LOT of people's heads and takes its turns between limited third person perspective, omniscient third perspective, and some very creative first person perspective too. I like experimental writing so that all worked for me, but it could be disorienting I think.

Dickinson writes large-scale conflict the way litfic writers approach relationships. We're so zoomed out for so much of this story, but still rooted so deeply in character motivations. Dickinson sweeps us through combat decisions, specific battles, strategic maneuvering, to the point that I found myself holding my breath with every new development. I can find war stories boring. This one was not, and probably because the stakes felt so real. Exordia doesn't hesitate to kill off characters. No one has plot armor, every threat is real, and the enemy is terrifying and smarter than you could ever hope to be. I had no idea where this book was going for the entirety of the first.... 60 percent, maybe, but by the end I found that everything made sense.

I do understand the critiques that the pacing was wonky and the second half of the book didn't live up to the setup. I don't really agree, but I also am just a huge fan of Dickinson's writing! I loved this, sue me! Elements of the second half of this book made me cry, gasp, text outraged things to friends, and stare despondently at the wall. I had a lot of feelings!!! I think they were all earned by the story!!! Sorry for the exclamation points I just think certain characters deserve the world and also that it kind of rules that me thinking that didn't make me think they were any safer or less safe from the dangers of this plot just for being great. I do want to acknowledge, though, that the first ~5-10% of the story does not set you up to expect what comes later. The story takes some pretty drastic turns! If you're in it for a more domestic and fantastical spin on things, you may be disappointed by how grounded and grimly clinical a lot of the rest of the book ends up being.

Overall, Exordia was a win for me. I definitely thought it was a standalone (it does not appear to be from that ending!), but I'll be sticking around for book 2 because I'm burningly curious, and at this point I trust Dickinson's writing to take me wherever it wants.

This book is a hard sell as a recommender (queer military-oriented borderline grimdark hard sci fi with lots of body horror and physics/math descriptions, close to 700 pages in my ebook version), but I think it can find its readers, and I am definitely one of them.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tried so hard to be an epic scifi that it flew directly into the sun. More physics concepts than a college textbook. Great ideas, but such a poor execution I wish I could personally yeet this book into said sun. Proof that sometimes you CAN try too hard.

[Susanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to Tor Publishing Group and Netgalley for providing me the eARC in exchange for my honest review. The title will be released on January 23, 2024.

2.5 STARS

Exordia started with so much promise! Anna Sinjari is a bold, unapologetic woman still dealing trauma from her childhood as a Kurdish war orphan. One day in the park, she stumbles upon an alien, who recruits her to help save the world and humanity's souls. Unfortunately, the book did not continue with Anna as the protagonist--at least not the only one. The POV shifted, shifted, then shifted again. In the latter half of the book, the POVs rotated even faster. It was jarring and did not help me get immersed in the story.

“She realizes that her image of her own soul is not very different from the way she imagines hell.”

I think Exordia's strengths are often its weaknesses. The author spread the story too far and tried to tackle too much. Exordia contains so many types of stories mashed into one: alien first contact, doomsday countdown, black ops mission, and a bioterrorism/quarantine story. The interesting, action plot points are unfortunately packed in with dense explanations and information. While there's some beautiful character writing, there's also tons of technical jargon, metaphysics, and alien terminology. The author worked a lot of socio-political commentary into the story, as well as moral and ethical discussions. However, it never became clear to exactly what the author intended to say.

“The problem is that the good always seems so fragile. And the evil you’ve done sets on you like cement.”

There are glimmers of excellence in Exordia, but the end product would have made me DNF had I not been reading an eARC. I wish the book had been cut down 200 pages, streamlined the POVs, simplified some of the language and clarified concepts, and tightened the pace of the storytelling.

[Theta Chun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you want to read a book about 7 different Queer people, all of whom need therapy but are “too fucked up and badass for any mere human therapist” like Batman? Yeah? Then this is the book for you!

The devil can tempt you, but it is your choice to succumb. It is your choice to keep feeding the snakes two lives a day, instead of standing up and saying “no more.”

Exordia’s a hard to explain book. For one there are 5 acts to the book, each somewhat a novella unto themself. Perhaps I could say that Exordia’s a book about a Kurdish War Orphan (kinda) and her predestined-to-be-evil Lesbian snake lover. Or perhaps I could say it’s about two military men in a homoerotic friendship, fighting over their third best friend by way of a semi-government sanctioned assassination program. Or even further I could tell you it’s about a bunch of losers on a spaceship trying to fight fate itself. Or even just as a military science fiction novel, similar to that of the 3 Body Problem, about scientists studying an unknown alien phenomena that is killing people in horrific fractal ways. However I’ll describe it like this:

Exordia’s a gay-as-fuck military science fiction novel that clearly has a bone to pick with the concept of predetermination of the soul, Obama’s drone program, and the casual cruelty that people often act with.

And it’s fucking excellent.

This meat is Blackbird-imitation Chaya thigh muscle. The appetizers are sweetmeats from various organs in her body, to guarantee they get a full vitamin spread. If it’s good enough for Jesus … but did Jesus ever take communion of himself? She can’t remember. Did he eat the bread at the Last Supper? There’s no Bible to check. Maybe there never will be again. Maybe all that lives of scripture lives in her.

Now, to be fair, I am a giant fan of Seth Dickinson’s work. Ask my friends, check my goodreads, you’ll probably spot that I’ve never rated a book of theirs less than 4 stars, and that I recommend it anytime anyone asks for a book rec. I am a curator of lesbian political SFF, if they’re brown? All the better. However, Exordia is a masterpiece beyond belief, though perhaps that’s simply just my adoration for Dickinson’s ability to put to words feelings that I myself struggle to. This book does that just as flawlessly as the Baru Cormorant series.

“My operations are more humane and more effective than those of our military. A military we both know has normalized violence toward the very people we claim to liberate. If you are repulsed by the idea of my program killing a single target, how could you accept the everyday reality of Iraq? Scared teenagers racing across the desert in Humvees, blasting “Bodies” and slamming Rip Its, uncertain what they are doing or why, watching for any reason to shoot. Which is actually more humane?”

Seth Dickinson, as always, is concerned with colonialism and morality. What it means to make a choice and carry it through. Perhaps more than that though, they’re concerned with the idea of a soul.

In Calvinism, a branch of Protestant Christianity, people believe that from the moment everything began, your fate is determined.“For I know the plans I have for you” and all that BS. What this means in practicality is that if you’re going to hell, you were always going to hell. Exordia’s trying to spit in the face of the Calvinist god. In Exordia, Ssrin’s species are said to be evil, truly evil. That their souls are damned to hell. Yet throughout the book we see characters trying to avert that, to contend with it, or as Ssrin herself says “Pretend to be good, so you can be good.” Outside of Ssrin and throughout the book we’re shown character after character whose made what is very possibly an evil choice, and yet they possess “non-evil souls.” Perhaps the shiniest trick the book. Manages to pull off though, is making it so that the magic of something like a soul, and the hard science of something like, oh IDK, blackbody radiation being emitted from an unknown object, are compatible, and make sense together.

Across the book another conversation that plays out is a conversation about American militarism. While the book fails to delve deeply into the overwhelming hegemony of it, you can nevertheless feel its shadow over everything. What does it mean to exist in a world a government that abandons its allies rules? And rules by overwhelming nuclear force? Now what does it mean to exist in a universe where that’s true as well? I’m honestly not quite sure what to say on this part, but I wanted it to be noted. It felt nevertheless important.

She crosses “main street,” the unspoken divide between the Chaya-Davoud-Khaje pragmatists and the Aixue-Erik-Clayton flagellants.

All of the characters in this book are a combination between flawed and trying their best, and absolute fucking assholes, so your mileage with any one of them will vary. Personally, I was an enormous fan of all of them.

Anna and Khaje, her mother, are Kurdish women who survived being Anfalized earlier in their lives, and made harsh choices because of it. They are fucked up, and irreverent and hilarious. They’re also trying their best to reconstruct their lives outside of a single tragedy that they feel has defined their lives. Ssrin on the otherhand is Anna’s evil (like predetermined to be evil) lesbian snake girlfriend who wants to try and do something like being good. Anna, Ssrin, and Khaje are kind and sorrowful, and cover a story about what it means to be shaped by genocide and horrors beyond your control. Their story is one of colonialism and doing the necessary thing hoping it’s the right thing.

““What the fuck did you do?” Erik shouts. “Clayton, what the fuck did you do?”
“I played La Malinche,” Clayton says. “I signed up with Cortés.”

Erik, Claryton, and Rosamaria make for a tragic trio who are almost predetermined to end in a train crash and fire from the moment they’re introduced. Yet you can’t help but think ‘maybe not?’ as the book tries to demand that fate is not prewritten. They are all horrible hypocritics however. Their fight is played out over the US Justice system and a secret assassination program in the DoD, all willing to bow and bend to the US for a scrap of power that most of them are aware they will likely never get.

Finally Aixue and Chaya are perhaps the kindest of the bunch. They’re slow-burn Asian lesbian scientists trying their best to survive and solve the mystery of whatever the fuck Blackbird is. I love them and their autistic-ass brains.

What really helps cement all of them as loveable, as another reviewer noted, is the fact that all of them are disastrous, and all of them are queer. It’s that train wreck of being young and queer and in societal and moral pressure cooker that forces you to make some horrible and addictive decisions. No one here except for Aixue and Chaya are in anything approaching a healthy relationship, and that toxicity is clearly impairing their judgement throughout the story. But each of them are trying their best to be unequivocally good even if they know they aren’t.

“It’s very elegant! It turns out that each kind of symmetry implies a law of conservation. For example, rotational symmetry turns out to imply conservation of angular momentum. Translational symmetry implies conservation of linear momentum. Time symmetry implies conservation of energy.”

The pacing and jargon of this book is… intense. Not only is it long, Exordia’s fucking dense. If you’re a fan of Baru Cormorant, expecting it to be understandable in the ways that Baru Cormorant is, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. This book isn’t understandable in that fashion. There are dialogues of biology that I struggled to understand (though nisa attests that they are painfully accurate), and I’ve likewise been told the physics and math was a struggle. Though, personally, I found them delightful and understandable. I also am finishing up a BS in math-physics. So do with that what you will. That being said, the intensity of what was there, was enough for me to still put the book down for a few months because reading this sometimes felt like reading my textbooks. If you struggle with that, and struggle with that density, I honestly can’t fault you. It’s an understandable reaction to a diatribe on the Riemann hypothesis.

That being said, and I will say, the math and science is not so arcane as to not be understandable by someone without 99% of a degree in math-physics or biology. This isn’t a textbook, far from it, and explanations are abound and detailed well enough to be comprehensible. (As a small note, the math and physics, by and large, are incredibly sound. I’ve seen some people asking if it was, and I assure you that it mostly is. The one note I would give for anyone asking, is that pink noise is not a thing. The universe is a sad beige color in reality, and pink doesn’t exist on the EM spectrum. However, due to its significance to the plot. I’m letting it slide)

“The cosmos is flesh, and I am its portioner. I am tooth in tissue. I am the cutter of cuts. O knife! Be my soul thy blade, be my spine thy hilt!”

Final notes that I cannot fit into this review, or have at random at later points:
- Fantastic use of Chinese slang. Literally 10/10. I too am a comrade. I too am grass.
- I cannot express how much I loved the homoerotic military tension between Erik and Clayton. Like how juicy it was, how much you can tell they both want to kiss, and how much they also hate each other because they’re like 40 year old men who work for the DoD and have fucked each other over and manipulated each other so horribly a hundred times. It’s beautiful like the way I imagine an exposed singularity to be. You simply just can’t look, and yet you really really gotta.
- SORRY THERE’S A WHOLE PRAYER IN NAHUATL IN THIS BOOK. IT’S REALLY FUCKING COOL.
-The mention of Hilbert made me almost cry. Not out of joy, I actually hate Hilbert because I still don’t know what a Hilbert space is.

TLDR; If you like slightly unhinged treatise on the idea of if you can be born evil, an inditement of American militarism, some hard fucking physics, and disastrous gays, then this is the book for you. I think this book will have a little bit of something for everyone, though it will not be for everyone. So proceed with caution. Also I think this will be the easiest Seth Dickinson book to convince people to read, which is hilarious because the other 3 are the far easier reads.

[Laika · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I have been looking forward to for quite literally years, from someone who is easily one of my favourite working authors. I also read the short story the book was expanded out from before I even knew it was going to be a book, and so went in spoiled on the broad strokes of what turned out to be the climax of the whole thing. All to say my opinion on this is unlikely to match that of the typical reader, I guess.

Anyway, Exordia is a glorious spectacular mess that has no right to cohere anywhere near as well as it does. It’s target audience is small, but I’m certainly somewhere in it. Please ignore all the marketing it’s so bad you have to wonder if someone at Tor just has it out for the author.

Exordia is a, well, a profoundly difficult book to give any sort of plot summary for. The first act involves Anna, a 30-something survivor of the Anfal Genocide now living a rather unimpressive life in New York City, until one day in the early 2010s she sees an alien eating the turtles in Central Park. Then there’s a cat-and-mouse hunt between terrifying alien snake-centaurs for the future of free will in the galaxy, and the plot jumping to kurdistan, and six more POV characters from as many different nations, and nuclear weapons, and oh so many people dying messily. The first act is an oddly domestic and endearing piece of table setting, the second is (to borrow the idiom of the book’s own marketing) Tom Clancy meets Jeff Vandermeer or Roadside Picnic, and the third is basically impossible to describe without a multi page synopsis, but mostly concerned with ethical dilemmas and moral injuries. It’s to the book’s credit that it never bats an eye at shifting focus and scale, but it does make coming to grips with it difficult.

This is, as they say, a thematically dense book, but it’s especially interested in the fallout of imperialism. The Obama-era ‘don’t do stupid shit’ precise and sterile form of it in particular – the book’s a period piece for a reason, after all. The ethics of complicity – of being offered the choice of murdering and betraying those around you or having an alien power with vastly superior destructive powers inflict an order of magnitude more misery to you, them, and everyone in the same general vicinity to punish you for the inconvenience – is one that gets a lot of wordcount. It is not an accident that the man most willing and able to collaborate with the overwhelming powerful alien empire in hopes of bargaining some future for humanity is the National Security Council ghoul who came out of organizing surveillance information for the drone wars. It’s also not a coincidence that the main (if only by a hair) protagonist is someone with a lot of bitter memories over how the US encouraged Iraq’s kurdish population to rebel in the ‘90s and then just washed their hands and let them be massacred (the book couldn’t actually ship with a historical primer on modern kurdish history, so it’s woven into the story in chunks with varying amount of grace. But it is in fact pretty thematically key here).

Speaking of complicity, the book’s other overriding preoccupation in (in the broadest sense) Trolley Problems. Is it better to directly kill a small number of people or, through your inaction, allow a larger number to die? Does it matter is the small number is your countrymen and the larger foreigners, or vice versa? What about humans and aliens? Does it matter whether the choice is submitting to subjugation or killing innocents as a means to resist it? What about letting people around you die to learn the fundamental truth of the cosmos? Does the calculus change when you learn that immortal souls (and hell) are real? This is the bone the story is really built around chewing on.

All that probably makes the text seem incredibly didactic, or at least like a philosophical dialogue disguised as a novel. Which really isn’t the case! The book definitely has opinions, but none of the characters are clear author-avatars, and all perspectives are given enough time and weight to come across as seriously considered and not just as cardboard cutouts to jeer at. Okay, with the exception of one of the two aliens who you get the very strong sense is hamming it up as a cartoon villain just for the of it (he spends much of the book speaking entirely in all caps). There definitely are a couple points where it feels like the books turning and lecturing directly at the reader, but they’re both few and fairly short.

The characters themselves are interesting. They’re all very flawed, but more than that they’re all very...embodied, I guess? Distracted with how hot someone is, concerned with what they ate that morning or the smell of something disgusting, still not over an ex from years ago. Several of them are also sincerely religious in a way that’s very true to life to actual people but you rarely see in books. The result is that basically comes as being far more like actual humans than I’m at all used to in most fiction (of course, a lot of those very human qualities get annoying or eye-roll inducing fairly quickly. But hey, that’s life). Though that’s all mostly the case at the start of the book – the fact that the main cast are slowly turning into caricatures of themselves as they’re exposed to the alien soul manipulation technology is actually a major plot point, which I’m like fifty/fifty on being commentary on what happens to the image and legacy of people as they’re caught up in grand narratives versus just being extended setup for a joke about male leads in techno thrillers being fanfic shipbait.

Part of the characters seeming very human is that some (though by no means all) of the POVs are just incredibly funny, in that objectively fucked up and tasteless way that people get when coping with overwhelming shock or trauma. It’s specifically because the jokes are so in-your-face awful that they fit, I think? It manages to avoid the usual bathetic trap a lot of works mixing in humour with drama fall into, anyway.

Speaking of alien soul manipulation technology – okay, you know how above I said that the points where the book directly lectured the reader were few and far between. This is true for lectures about politics or morality. All the freed up space in this 530 page tome is instead used for technobabble about theoretical math. Also cellular biology, cryptography, entropics, the organization of the American security state, how black holes work, and a few dozen other things. This book was edited for accuracy by either a doctoral student from every physical science and an award winning mathematician, or else just by one spectacularly confident bullshitter with several hundred hours on Wikipedia. Probably both, really. I did very much enjoy this book, but that is absolutely predicated on the fact that when I knew when to let my eyes glaze over and start skimming past the proper nouns.

The book has a fairly complete narrative arc in its own right, but the ending also screams out for a sequel, and quite a lot of the weight and meaning of the book’s climax does depend on followthrough and resolution in some future sequel. Problematically, the end of the book also includes a massive increase in scale, and any sequel would require a whole new setting and most of a new cast of characters, so I’m mildly worried how long it will be before we get it (if ever).

The book is also just very...I’m not sure flabby is the right word, but it is doing many many different things, and I found some of them far more interesting than others. I’m not sure whether Dickinson just isn’t great at extended action scenes or if I am just universally bored by drawn out Tom Clancy fantasies, but either way there were several dozen pages too many of them. The extended cultural digressions about the upbringing and backstories of each of the seven POVs were meanwhile very interesting! (Mostly, I got bored of the whole Erik-Clayton-Rosamaria love triangle Madonna complex thing about a tenth of the way into the book but it just kept going.) It did however leave the book very full of extended tangents and digressions, even beyond what the technobabble did. Anna herself, ostensibly the main protagonist, is both utterly thematically loadbearing but very often feels entirely vestigial to the actual, like, plot, brought along for the ride because she’s an alien terrorist’s favourite of our whole species of incest-monkies. The end result is, if not necessarily unfocused, then at least incredibly messy, flitting back and forth across a dozen topics that on occasion mostly just seem unified by having caught the author’s interest as they wrote.

It’s interesting to compare the book to Anna Saves It All, the short story it was based on – quite a lot changed! But that’s beyond the scope of this already overlong review. So I guess I’ll just say make sure to read the book first, if you’re going to.

[Zan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

Gone is the Seth Dickinson of Traitor Baru. I mourn for him. After the sequels and this, I'm not sure I'm confident he'll deliver as razor honed a book as that again. But if the only thing bad about a book I really have to say is "well it's not quite as good as Traitor Baru Fucking Cormorant," well we're on to something here huh. No, this Seth Dickinson is evolved beyond mortals. His hippocampi swelling to enormous proportions, he looks down at us with his distended psychic cranium and laughs.

(And if your experience with Traitor Baru Cormorant was to find it plodding and dull, just run away from this book entirely. Trust.)

No, instead this Seth Dickinson is painfully smart, and wants you to know it. This is sheerly impressive, a joy to read, and also aggravating, in turn. Exordia is absolutely packed. Seth Dickinson knows physics. He knows Biology. He knows the worldwide political intricacies under the Obama administration, he knows religious beliefs of Kurdish refugees, he knows nerdy trivia from the 2000's, he knows military callsigns and technical details of battleships, he knows existential philosophy and narratology. Moreover, he wants you to know it all - not necessarily that he knows it, though in part it does become more self-serving that you'd hope - but because it all combines, coalescing into this marvelous messy ball of thought, of pattern, of culture, of detail, and creates.... well I'm not quite sure in the end if the juice is worth the squeeze, but you bet your ass I'm going to be thinking about this book for ages.

This is a modern book, with modern characters, a range of people, beliefs, truly world-wide in a way many stories claim to be and fail at, and Dickinson manages to sell it believably. There are two main drawbacks here - one, because it's a modern book, there's that annoying tendency to drop in callbacks to cultural in-jokes and memes (There's a damn 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams' pun I groaned at), and depending on your taste for this, this book could certainly be very annoying. I think he's aware, and managed a good balance overall, but, still, more than I'd like personally. Secondarily, this is a book full of Smart People Talking. All the topics in that previous paragraph - science, philosophy, and what not? Everyone in the book discusses them at length, continuously and constantly, to the point where your eyes will glaze over a bit, and all the characters become just a *bit* more samey than you'd like. Ah well - the thing is, what he does with it is genius.

This is an alien invasion story, and one of the coolest things is he treats the aliens, and their inherently unknowable being as... just another topic to expound upon. Rather than having the affect of trivializing them, it instead makes them as real as anything else, forcing you to really come to grips with whatever the fuck horrifying technology they have next- whether that's an electron thin, kilometer long sword, or (literally) Narrative Destiny.

... and yeah, it's all building to talk about stories. How we as a people interact with them, find ourselves as the heroes, villains, or expendable bodies in each others stories, and the ways Dickinson plays with that are incredible. The ways he presents alien body horror and the hell of warfare are incredible. The ways he brings together a truly wonderful international cast that you root for (even at the expense of each other), and then absolutely destroys them... incredible. This book will make you feel as big brain as Seth Dickinson, and have a blast along the way... as long as you can keep up with the rambling at the same time.

The last note I'll make is basically that I hope this is a standalone? Not because I want more Baru (I do) but even though we're left on more of a cliff-hanger than you'd typically like, I don't know that this story will work to continue... Drawing out the conflict... what will it add? I'm not sure if there's more there. But Seth Dickinson has proven me wrong before.

[johnny dangerously · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would like to thank NetGalley for allowing me to read this ARC in return for an honest review:

This is an excellent novel, both thrilling and conceptual, literary and human, serious and fun.

It is also going to piss a lot of people off because it does not automatically reveal all the kinks and knots in its worldbuilding. This isn't to say the worldbuilding is particularly cryptic or difficult. It's just extremely detailed. Even then, it's structured in such a way that the important parts are almost always re-explained as soon as they become relevant. But a lot of readers, especially SFF ones, immediately break at the thought that something isn't immediately, transparently obvious. It's okay, guys. You're not supposed to understand everything. The people explaining are aliens and quantum physicists. Be at peace.

If you can get over that hurdle, you'll find a highly emotional and philosophical and fun story about humanity, colonialism, failure, pain, moral philosophy, and love. The moral philosophy part was a particular treat for me, because it slapped me in the face. I've said before that moral philosophy is 'the most useless' philosophy because its main purpose seems to be obfuscating theoretical models of behavior for the amusement of privileged old men who will never have to face those choices. This book gave me the finger. It points to the ways those theoretical models are in fact real and are faced by real people daily. I love it when books prove me wrong.

My only substantive complaint is the pacing, though I am personally extremely sensitive to pacing because my attention span hasn't been the greatest since COVID. The... second eighth of the book? There's a bit of a lag, when we're jumping between timelines, that feels a bit like this novel was at one point a novella or a novelette that was elongated. But I am also just personally not a fan of switching around in timelines and POVs too much. And it's a credit to this book that the switching POV didn't turn me off completely.

All and all, I'd love it if this became the new SF, especially MilSF. I want more morality in my space battles, more questioning the fabric of existence, more reckoning with America's seedy colonialist past and present and, let's be real, future. More military SF should question the military industrial complex. Shake the foundations of the genre! Feed me good food. This book was a feast.

[Daniella]

dnf p. 207

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor for providing me an eARC to review!

Unfortunately this just really wasn't up my alley. The first 40 pages or so was completely incomprehensible (say it with me - being inaccessible does not make a book good or smart!), and then it took a 'military thriller' turn which just isn't my genre at all.

It's obvious Dickinson has done his research, but it also just feels like he's desperate to show you how much of it he's done, cause he really crams it all in there! It also at times was reminding me of what I didn't like about Tress of the Emerald Sea, where I felt it kind of read like "hey I'm a man but I'm woke to women's struggles!!".

I think this is for a very specific audience - maybe fans of Ascension, Chris Hadfield and Blake Crouch would enjoy, but sadly I am just not in this group.