Exordia is an English language science fiction novel published in January 2024 by American author Seth Dickinson, who also wrote The Traitor Baru Cormorant and its sequels. It is in the first contact subgenre of sci-fi, depicting a scenario in which the various militaries and space agencies of Earth scramble to gain control over a mysterious alien artifact in the mountains of Kurdistan. China, Russia, America, and several other interested nations disagree on whether the object should be quarantined, researched, seized as a likely weapon, or destroyed. The situation swiftly spirals into chaos as the Exordia, a colonising imperial force of hostile hydra-like aliens attempt to seize the artifact for themselves.
The book follows a rotating cast of point-of-view characters, including Anna, a Kurdish-American war orphan collaborating with an alien insurgent to resist the Exordia, Li Aixue, a Chinese mathematician trying to unravel the artifact's secrets, and Clayton and Eric, a pair of American national security operatives whose personal differences serve as a microcosm for exploring deontology and utilitarianism as opposing philosophies.
Dickinson posits a universe where morality is an objective universal force, and souls, narrative tropes and archetypes, damnation and Hell, are all empirically real and provable phenomena, exploited as weapons by the Exordia in their conquest of the cosmos.
I recommend Exordia to anyone who has enjoyed the novella A Short Stay in Hell, the film Arrival (or the Ted Chiang short story it is based on, titled Story of Your Life), or Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. Exordia features an extreme abundance of body horror, so it is likely not appropriate for very young readers, both for that reason and because of its highly advanced reading level. Seth Dickinson is a splendidly erudite writer, his style reminiscent of Peter Watts of Blindsight, Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex, and Sam Hughes (Everything2's very own sam512, known elsewhere as qntm). I can definitely recommend Exordia to anyone who enjoyed reading Hughes' Ra and Fine Structure, and many of the themes will feel very familiar between these works.
This is a very dense novel, but the pace is breathless and constantly escalating, always zooming the action outward to greater and greater scales of danger. It keeps the reader on the edge of their seat, but it also keeps the reader always on the back foot, unable to fully settle into the perspective of any one character. All of them are presented with their flawed (and often very extreme) moral philosophies on display, and those morals become increasingly uncompromising over the course of the novel, as the characters' personalities are forcibly fossilised into unyielding dogmatic new identities by their exposure to the alien artifact. This book has a lot to say about the politics and ethics of colonisation and proxy war, and it's currently one of the strongest pieces of writing by an author who is already well-established as a powerhouse of philosophical narration.
Iron Noder 2024, 06/30