So famous YouTuber (and pre-youtuber video maker) Lindsay Ellis has written and published two sci-fi novels. Axiom’s End and Truth of the Divine. Together they’re referred to as the Noumena series. If there’s a third book in the series coming, it has not been announced and the ending of Truth of the Divine really felt like a “you imagine what happens next” kinda ending so I’m gonna treat this as a Duology rather than an incomplete Trilogy. If there is a third book in the series it could only be extremely fucking weird.
When I picked up Axiom’s End on a whim I was expecting it to be a wacky parody of a book full of references and in-jokes similar to a Nostalgia Chick video. I expected it to be primarily a humorous book that was heavily derivative.
Absolutely not the case. These books are absolutely fantastic. It’s shocking how good they are and when you get to the end and see the photo of Lindsay Ellis in the back it’s like a surprise like “wow damn that Lindsay Ellis wrote this??? what???”
Axiom’s End ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Axiom’s End reads like a very fun 00s sci-fi action movie that never existed. It’s E-T meets Twilight except a lot more philosophical and more serious than that description would make it sound.
The year is 2007. Cora Sabino’s father is basically Julian Assange, a high-profile leaker behind The Broken Seal (Wikileaks) who is living in exile and long-ago abandoned his family. He was also just a shitty dad overall and has left Cora’s family in the lurch, struggling to get by financially and torn apart by trauma. Cora’s life at the beginning of this book is depressing. She’s a 20-year-old college dropout who is struggling to even keep a job at a temp agency.
After her father leaks documents implicating that the US government has had alien life in captivity, Cora begins to notice that she and her family are definitely being followed by feds. In her attempts to flee the feds, she ends up getting entangled with one of the aliens on the run, a giant 9 foot tall terrifying xenomorph-type alien named Ampersand.
Through circumstances she becomes the designated interpreter and intermediary between Ampersand and the US government, as she gets way in over her head trying to survive the many moves made by the different acting parties of the story: Ampersand, The CIA, The Military, An alien faction called Obelus, and a group of alien refugees called the Fremda Group.
The primary running theme of this book is what make’s someone a person. The Amygdalines (aliens) are extremely, extremely alien at the beginning. Everything they say is incomprehensible nonsense about Dynamic Fusion Bonding and Symphiles and Superorganisms. But over time you start to understand them. No matter how weird and different they are, the best way to understand them is always to begin with the assumption that they are people just like we are. Even when they are terrifying and trigger alien flight reflexes in us, if you insist that they are people and are just as diverse and complicated and messy as we are, then everything makes sense.
This book was a lot of fun for sure, but really it’s all just set-up for Truth of the Divine which is just, so much better.
The scene that stuck with me most was Cora running through the woods carrying a little alien creature she can’t communicate with digging into her back as she tries to protect it, which it doesn’t understand, while she forces herself to think about carrying her little sister to bed and repeats “This is a person, this is a person, this is a person” to override her animal instincts. It was so powerful.
My five-star review of Truth of the Divine after the cut
Truth of the Divine ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
HOLY SHIT this book was good. Axiom’s End felt kinda pulpy, like a 2007 action movie, but Truth of the Divine was just astoundingly original and clever and strong.
Truth of the Divine is still about aliens, and how we see those different from us as humans, but it’s also about mental illness and xenophobia and humans in a very deep way.
Truth of the Divine takes more time than Axiom’s End to really get going, but once it gets going it really fucking gets going and I struggled to put it down until I was finished. The part when it gets really good is once Kaveh Mazandarani shows up as our second POV protagonist. Through Cora’s eyes, we see a big confusing overwhelming world that is way over our head. Through Kaveh’s eyes, we see politics, we see mental illness, we see a direction and passion and values. They’re both very likable protagonists but I think involving Kaveh really broadens our vision of how people exist in this world. In addition to Kaveh we also get a second primary Amygdaline to focus on, Nikola, who has an entirely distinct personality and wants and desires from Ampersand. Moreso than in Axiom’s End, the Amygdalines really feel like very different and unique people who see the world differently and are not some monolith. We see how none of them are representative of how the entire species is. Nikola is an outcast among his society. He is a bit of a hippie scientist type. He has his own mental illness. I love him so much.
It’s definitely a much darker book but I think it’s only to its benefit that it is. Mental illness is handled in a really full and real way that makes the entire world and story feel so very real. Nothing about the story is predictable and all of it feels justified. It starts slow because Cora doesn’t really know what she’s working towards until Kaveh shows up. The motivations of the characters are evident in the way their chapters are written. Oh it’s just so fucking good.
There’s so many lines that just stuck with me from Truth of the Divine. I think the one that stuck with me the most was Ampersand saying “I am burdened with the truth that you are people. All seven billion of you are people. Despite all of the horrible things you to do each other, and to your planet; you are still people, not just tool-using animals. It is painful and a burden to think about, to know you are people and to know where your superorganism is headed.” That empathizing with each other, insisting on not dehumanizing each other (or depersonizing) can be painful when we have to recognize that people can do horrible things we don’t understand, and yet they too are people, complex and full of inferiority, and still decide to act the way they do. Yet we must still insist upon seeing others who are different from us as people too.
Axiom’s End is already a fun read but it’s worth reading just to read Truth of the Divine, which is a truly beautiful work of science fiction that has no right to come out of someone known for video essays about disney movies. Lindsay Ellis is an incredibly talented author, even when she does not try to be funny.