Mats's Reviews > Axiom's End

I should begin by mentioning that I was not predisposed to charity when reading this book, so please consider the following criticism with that in mind. The reason for this was that I learned that the author is a youtuber. I was not familiar with her work on that platform, but some quick research verified my original misgivings. Youtubers, in my opinion, are emblematic of a certain strain of decay in modern internet culture, where people are content to give their money to personalities for middling―often inoffensive―analysis of culture products they might have easily managed to unpack themselves had they only invested some small intellectual effort. For this service, youtubers, often through the website patreon dot com, are occasionally paid far more than teachers, nurses, or physical labourers. This, then, I charge, is both a symptom of late-stage capitalism, which grossly under-values certain professions, as well as being an aberration in fan culture, which is inherently parasocial and vastly over-values mediocre academic work as long as it is personality-driven and presented in an easily digested video.

My soapbox spent and discreetly put away, I did not like the book.

The first reason for this became apparent rather quickly. The prose, in an attempt at naturalism, is ludicrously informal. Sounds are spelled out (engine goes woosh) and sentences often mimic the worst parts of the american vernacular. There are so many instances of repeated phrasing over a few pages, I wonder if there was a robust editorial process here at all. (St. Martin and Titan Press both release a lot of mediocre fiction, so perhaps the issue lies with them.) Occasionally, the internal mental processes of the characters seep into the prose itself―albeit not in an interesting or good way―, resulting in sentences such as «And if it meant getting bitched at by her mother and an indefinite period with no car, then oh well.» This is lazy and poor writing, but also characteristic of the problems inherent in media that is primarily character driven. In service to the character, the first ballast that is jettisoned is the prose, which must first shed all traces of lyrical sensibilities, and the tone needs be placed as close to the mouthpiece as possible, which often sounds like the sentence just quoted―trite, dull and soul-suckingly average―, or it becomes quippy and laden with an ironic detachment.

Characters read as though they were made to inhabit certain character traits rather than having naturally evolved into these traits through the writing process (see Eli for the text’s first example of this, but not the last). I am reminded here of Mikhail Bakhtin and his thesis on Dostoyevky’s dialogic novel and the steering hand of the author: «Dostoevsky, like Goethe’s Prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him.» Ellis, undoubtedly, is a Zeus.

The second ballast to be jettisoned, is a finer thematic sensibility. There is an attempt here, for which Ellis deserves some measure of credit, to tie the narrative into some overarching themes about truth, authoritarianism and linguistics, but it becomes lost in the wash of confused prose, bland, flimsy characters and a political thrust that is probably well-intentioned but ultimately impotent.

If you read this specifically looking for SF about linguistics (like I did), consider instead reading China Miéville’s Embassytown. This book, I can only presume, was released because the publisher realised the author came with a pre-established audience.