The audiobook cover of Exordia by Seth Dickinson rendered in tones of mainly bright yellow, but also reds and dark reds showing a round eye looking straight out. The eye is at the end of a serpentine stalk and many serpent coil surround it.Full review, character list, and random notes from:
Exordia by Seth Dickinson

Narrated by Sulin Hasso

Tor, 2024; audiobook: Macmillan Audio, 2024.

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Full review

A brilliantly insane, wildly complex, but also frustratingly challenging story. The main character is a young, snarky Kurdish woman, a refugee and survivor of genocide living in New York City. Then she meets and bonds with an alien. Because of that, she gets mixed up with a couple National Security and Joint Special Ops guys. They are all flawed and haunted characters. Her alien is a rebel fighting another alien over an object (a weapon of some sort) that has crashed into a Kurdish valley. Suddenly, the story now taking place in that valley is overflowing with Kurds, Chinese, Russians, Filipinos, Ugandans, Canadians, Iranians, the aliens, lots of characters who are exploring good and evil, the exploitation of imperialism, the nature of soul, loyalty and betrayal, the mathematical nature of the universe … and pink noise.

Dickinson tosses in first names, last names, nicknames, titles, words, and concepts from all the characters in all their languages, all too often with little or no explanation. I began listening to the story, but quickly needed to supplement that by following along in the ebook, searching terms online, making a character list, taking notes, searching the ebook for when I had previously encountered characters or terms.

  • Areteia, an alien construct that imposes limits on soulless thought.
  • Susmaryosep, Tagalog slang meaning something like exasperated.
  • SsovÈ, an alien term describing the violence of sudden action.
  • Iruvage, an agent of the galactic authority, the Exordia.
  • Atmanach, a "Cultratic construct. A soul retriever with an artificial hell manifold inside. It takes your soul and digests it for analysis. Very rare, very hard to make and to master, restricted to great operants with warship-grade thought turbines."
  • Jineology, the women's science proposed and developed by the Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement, which aims to rediscover women's histories and restore women's central place in society.

The story itself jumps around in (current) time. There will be some confusing event taking place, then a jump back in time to lead up to that same event from another character's perspective, then another's.… Slowly, it begins to make some sense, but I question whether that's really an effective way to tell a story.

And yet, despite all of the frankly exhausting confusion and strange storytelling structure, the underlying story is compelling and kept me engaged.

One thing that helped a little bit is that I had a small insight into the situation of the Kurds from reading a few years ago the book, The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon⩘ .

Another thing that helped was witnessing firsthand via the daily news just how fucked up our real world is. A few reflections of this found in the story:

   People dropping bombs always have some higher reason. Stopping communism. Securing Asian co-prosperity. Defeating Japan. Destroying Kurdish terrorists. But the bombs never seem to hit that reason. They just hit a bunch of mothers and kids.

   But Erik thought too small. Erik was down in the dirt and the blood and he wanted to clean it up one drop at a time. Clayton saw the world entire with the synthetic-aperture-radar eyes of the American surveillance constellation. The entire gushing wound of slow climate collapse, violent demographic change, legislative capture, resurgent tyranny. History hadn't ended. Democracy was going out. Something new was coming in, something that ruled not by the consent of the people but by manufacturing that consent—

   This makes unhappy sense to Clayton. His work at the NRO involved the aggressive use of machine learning (which, out of a sentimental love of science fiction, he refuses to call AI) to find patterns in huge data sets.
   And the universal theme of machine learning is thought without understanding. A properly trained machine learning system can build frighteningly accurate models of economic interdependencies in Southeast Asia, or deduce the spread of an epidemic in Africa from changes in satellite photos of crop fields, or predict political unrest in ex-Soviet client states from seemingly unrelated Google searches in Moscow. But it does not know what Moscow is, or what a human being might be, or even that it exists. It is simply building connections between points of data. The logic of those connections is left to the machine itself to devise. It has no prior knowledge of the universe. (Except anything introduced in the network's initial values, or in data augmentation, but—those are added by human operators.)
   The machine might be absolutely and pathologically insane, with a model of the world straight out of Ligotti. But if that insanity produced useful responses, no one could know.

The story shares one of the better definitions of humans that I've come across:

"No," Ssrin says, crossing two of her necks in a big X of negation. "You are jacks of running and masters of being inbred."

It also shares a view of how the universe began and evolved that made me chuckle:

   Ssrin's heads tussle in agitation, fangs bared. "So. Like this. In the beginning there was Freedom, and all things could become all things. Nothing needed anything, so nothing wanted anything, and all things were the same.
   "And the Architects said, let there be Inequity, the first rule, so that the sameness of all things will break apart into the field of difference which we call a universe.
   "And the Architects looked on their universe, and saw that it would in time give rise to self-replicating life, which would optimize itself to consume and destroy all competition and lead to a universe dominated by total assholes. So the Architects said, let there be an areteia, in which we shall enshrine the desired and objective nature of Right and Wrong. So that many lifes may flourish."

I appreciated the "seven passions of the universe" that is shared by the alien Ssrin:

There are seven passions in the universe, Ssrin tells her. Seven patterns which appear again and again, across species, across time and space. There are many ideas about why. She shares none of them. She only names the passions for Anna.
   Preyjest is the chasing passion, the hunting passion. (Her heads show Anna: one slithering up another's neck, reaching for it with a forked tongue-tip. At the last instant the other slips away.)
   Prajna is the lonely passion. The need for truth. One star in the dark, trying to brighten.
   Caryatasis is the dream of all disciples. The passion that binds students to their teacher. It happens when one soul changes many, and many change toward the one.
   Geashade hurts in the end, and cannot be ended without the hurt.
   Hesper is the warmth of a need unexpectedly met. Generosity from a stranger. Love from a friend. It is associated with silence: things said without speaking.
   Rath is the passion which stole gravity's strength. Like gravity it draws things together to clash, and leaves scars shaped like the enemy.
   Serendure is the last and greatest. It is the unbreakable bond which may be trust and may be dependence. It persists whether it is wanted or not. It is like the force which binds quarks together: stronger when it is pulled. [Serendura is the object of serendure.]
   Each passion, Ssrin says, is a relationship between souls.
   Souls are the letters that make these words.

Or, in the words of the other alien, Iruvage:

   Preyjest is the story of the suit and the chase, as strong as the space between hunter and prey, between lover and beloved. The pursuing passion.
   Prajna gleams alone, a solitary star. The passion of knowing for no sake.
   Serendure is unconditional loyalty, trust that is abuse. The unbreakable passion.
   Caryatasis grows when many change to follow one who doesn't. The disciple's passion.
   Geashade is the falling knife, the love doomed to die, powerful in proportion to its pain.
   Hesper is simple and it makes us warm. The comfort passion: like meeting a stranger, sharing one night, and going on stronger.
   And rath, dear Clayton. Rath the clashing passion. Two stones beat against each other, chipping and cracking, hardening and sharpening. Maybe until one breaks. Maybe forever.”

(It's good to pay attention to these names and meanings, because they are repeated throughout the story as their associated passions shape the unfolding events.)

As end-of-world events unfold, Dickinson tosses in a bit of snarky perspective:

   "This is amazing," Arîn says. "Look, the blasts cover the whole sky! They must have hit the entire hemisphere, at least!"
   "So?"
   "So the power is out everywhere. This could be the intervention we need to break out of the trap of endless growth, Khaje! The end of the Anthropocene!"

The final section of the story is deadlier and full of more destruction than any other fiction I've previously read, almost as extreme as real life. Yet a few characters, including a handful on an alien spacecraft and small group of Kurds high up in Zagros Mountains, never give up the fight to live.

As one of my all-time favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, said in Slaughterhouse Five:

So it goes.

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Character list and random notes

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