[Book Review] Exordia — Seth Dickinson
Exordia is your one-stop shop for first-contact sci-fi novels full of physical and metaphysical mindbending, along with an (un)healthy amount of Alien-esque body horror, neatly wrapped up by a good ol’ fashioned extinction-event apocalyptic threat.
Many in the SFF community will already be familiar with Seth Dickinson’s work, the fantastic dark fantasy series The Masquerade (popularly referred to as The Baru Cormorant series) which has generated quite the cult stir among the grimmer, darker side of fantasy literary consumers for its savage take on hegemonic tyranny and the lengths to which a hyper-intelligent “protagonist” will go to throw off the yoke of the colonizers, sometimes at disastrous costs.
Along with many others, I too was salivating for any news of new material in the The Masquerade universe, or any news at all from Dickinson, having been silent for a few years owing to personal health reasons. So when Exordia was announced, I approached it with cautious optimism, having liked Dickinson’s dense writing style and bleak worldscapes.
Boy, does Exordia have spades of that…
Exordia is a different beast of a book than The Masquerade, and should be evaluated as such, even though many of the stylistic approaches transfer. This is a “standalone” (rumbles of further entries?!) first-contact sci-fi novel set in an alternate present-day, where a member of the alien race Khas makes contact with one of our human protagonists, Jiyan “Anna”, and apocalyptic shenanigans ensue.
Exordia’s first act focuses on the first contact between the futuristic hydra-like serpentine alien Ssrin and our Kurdish refugee wastrel, Anna. Act 1 heavily delves into the philosophical side of sci-fi with themes of parallel universes driven by narrative thought, and toys with the idea of deterministic fate and destiny. A novel take on first-contact stories, elevated by Dickinson’s masterful prose, the buddy-cop relationship between Anna and Ssrin shines through and sets the stage for a truly fun ride, ending on a great philosophically dark cliffhanger.
Sadly, this is where most of us (almost me included) had among the biggest tonal whiplashes in recent memory. The subsequent acts yoink us completely into a different theme, scale, setting, and tone, catapulting us into wartorn Kurdistan, where Ssrin has to protect his vested interests against a greater antagonist, while humanity is caught in the crossfire.
While Exordia excelled in its “philoso-babble”, it really began to crumble under the weight of its subsequent “techno-babble”. As someone hardened in consuming copious amounts of esoteric “sci-fi physics” thrown at me, Exordia egregiously dumps large sections of dense “scientific” exposition, in a way that grinds the narrative momentum to a near-halt, distracting the reader from the overarching story, and taking us further away from the urgency of the basic threat setup.
Dickinson expands the character roster with a diverse, yet ultimately distracting cast of characters, the machiavellian warhawk who would stop at nothing “for the greater good”, the shining paragon of virtue to balance him, the autistic savant scientist, a counterbalance scientist, a near fanatic pilot, and Anna’s mother, to add just enough “real world” war-is-hell gravitas to the story. While these characters do have their moments, a big part of me really feels like Exordia really struck gold in its first act with its buddy-cop motif and struggled under the weight of its own expansion.
What Exordia excelled at is delivering dense dread by hardwiring enough hyperviolence in a non-chalant way to express just how weak our human flesh is against interstellar threats. Where the book began to stumble was when Dickinson reveled in his enjoyment of adding expositional complexity at the expense of writing a tight concise story. The narrative cannot withstand its self-importance. At the end of many lengthy descriptions of space-time manifolds and black-hole powered thrusters, it honestly felt like Dickinson was patting himself on the back at being the smartest person in the room after a particularly complex (yet ultimately boring) info-dump.
From a thematic standpoint, Exordia plays with many different philosophical “grand questions”, but the largest theme centers around “the greater good”. Dickinson throws so many examples of committing nefarious acts in the service of “the greater good”, with both the megalomaniacal Clayton and Anna wrestling with their past demons in this context and all the ethical conundrums such situations create. However, these situations feel heavy-handed at the world-ending scale that Exordia deals with and surprisingly feel more contrived than intriguing.
As a side note, Exordia treats nuclear weaponry like breadcrumbs, I lost count of how many nukes were dropped during the runtime of this story, and it became almost… comical.
Credit where due, it is crystal clear that Dickinson went above and beyond when it comes to due diligence when it comes to creating a solid framework when it comes to re-creating “accurate” military and spy jargon, his philosophical and scientific expositions, while tedious, felt well constructed, and consistent. This takes an immense amount of effort to collate and requires tremendous collaboration with field experts, and for that, he must be truly commended.
Sadly, Exordia falls away from greatness in its pursuit of being bigger than it is. There is an immensely violent, bleak, thought-provoking, fun, and rewarding story in Exordia. Unfortunately, it is buried under so many layers of flabby complexity, that the final product felt bloated.
If you can withstand its weight, Exordia will reward you.
