Spoiler-Free Synopsis

Sure, whatever.
I don’t want to be in your story anymore.

Act 1: A cool sexy snake alien narratively attaches herself to Kurdish War survivor, Anna, explains incredible truths of the universe to her, and builds incredible chemistry sure to carry this story to the stars and beyond.
Acts 2-5: The female protagonists are sidelined for the rest of the story and we focus on how two men in the US government are going to set aside their love-triangle bromance/polyamory trauma to bumble about and save the world without whinging too often about the woman they love.

Full Review

Rating

2/5 Writing Style
2/5 Overall Plot
1/5 Characters
3/5 World-building

Style

“You’re a species of gangly distance runners, adapted to sweat and throw stuff. You like watching each other fuck. A few million years ago you developed culture in the form of survival techniques, and whoever learned culture the fastest could have the most babies. Your brains started to swell and reorganize themselves for cultural learning. The development of culture and development of large brains drove each other in a feedback loop. Your brain grew as large as they could before exhausting the mother’s supply of calories—”
“I thought it got too big to fit through the hips.”
“A myth, as far as I can tell. You could have much juicier hips. Don’t interrupt.”
[…]
“We’re not unusually stubborn? We’re not particularly diverse? Experimental? Curious? Willing to take risks? Jacks of all trades but masters of none?”
“No,” Ssrin says, crossing two of her necks in a big X of negation. “You are jacks of running and masters of being inbred.”

–Exordia pg. 17-18

The style is incessantly flippant, and it definitely can be funny. It outlasts its welcome by the last half of the book however, but overall this is a stronger suit for Dickinson.

Each chapter is written in 3rd person from the perspective of one of a few of the main characters, and the writing style shifts to reflect that character’s mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, and it’s generally pretty solid. I appreciate how the chapter’s POV is prefaced by the information most relevant to that character (military time, current altitude, etc.).

In the end I feel that the style actually drags down the weight of the story. A loose, candid Act 1 writing style that feels out of place for the grittier more serious war & tactics story of the majority of the story. And I think the style tries to make up for characterization, and it fails to do that and instead just pads the story length unnecessarily.

Plot

Somewhat standard Sci-Fi premise: relatively low-tech humanity/earth has inexplicably become of sudden high interest to a heretofore unknown galactic power, and we follow the plucky group of people of our story as they try to navigate and underdog their way out of the mess.

The most unique aspect of Exordia’s plot is the “high value” McGuffin, which actually involves some intriguing pseudo-philosophical linguistics diatribe. As well as some surprisingly robust body horror.

The philosophy/linguistics bit reminds me of how similar pseudo-intellectualism was used to push the plot of Snowcrash forwards. I think it really works here.

As my book club friend Jasper pointed out in our discussion, the horror elements were easily the most compelling parts of the story. The overarching story was set dressing that got blissfully interrupted numerous times with suspense and horror.

Unfortunately the plot ends up too long in the tooth with a very obvious pivot towards an impending “better read the sequel!!” ending. Alien worldbuilding and cool horror-exploration steadily faded into the background until all we were left with was limp attempts at building character chemistry via half-hearted military sci-fi engagements and promising a more interesting non-Earth focused future conclusion.

Side note: by about 75 or 80% in I realized how much Exordia’s plot reminded me of Eric Nylund (of ‘the first three Halo novels’ fame)’s book Signal to Noise, which very similarly ended on a “guess you’ll have to read the sequel!” ending; one I’d say felt more earned because the climactic final events ratcheted up in a much more surprising way than Exordia’s.

I ultimately enjoyed that book (and its sequel!) much more than Exordia due to the fascinating character cast, and more genuine and empathetic attitude towards the grand threat against humanity. So, maybe a lateral book recommendation?

Characters

“Pretty out here,” Mike Jan remarks. “Looks like a Windows desktop.”
Of course Mike has never changed a default desktop wallpaper in his life.
Erik takes a knee and scouts out the camp around Blackbird with his rifle’s optic. It’s really hard to see through the MOPP mask and the scope.

–Exordia pg. 79

Absolute face-plant from Dickinson. At the top of the book we have Anna and Ssrin, human and alien respectively, and they’re pretty awesome. Their chemistry was instantly fascinating, and the way Dickinson tied their relationship into larger world-building was so genuinely so audacious I couldn’t help but be engaged.

Ssrin is your classic intense intelligent anthropomorphic alien make-plot-happener. She’s interesting, coy, unknowable-yet-familiar, and often presented to us in a vulnerable state where we feel we are reasonably fed information about her and her world.
Post act-1 she is by and large off-screen for all action.

Anna ended up being tokenized for everything post Act 1 (pg 38). Her identity as a traumatized Kurdish child forced at gunpoint to murder her father and brother is established well, and then diminished in order to establish her as a moral foil for the true protagonist, goody-two-shoes macho military hero, Erik.

Erik is the white knight, and Clayton is his CIA dark horse counterpart, both within a friendship/love-triangle and from a morality standpoint. The vast majority of the story is about Them and how They think They should solve this problem, and how they’re always in conflict, yet always connected. Ok.

World-Building

“Move objects faster than light by passing them through moral manifolds. Inject illegal physics through computations in living brains. An art called operancy, which I practice: construct the correct thoughts, bend your soul into the proper configuration, and you can assert your will over physics.”
“That doesn’t sound so horrible—”
“Souls copied and enslaved to drive machines: the æshadi my people make. Evolutionary selection for pathological psychologies which can exploit breaches in aretaic security. Weapons that mark their victims for damnation. Entire species consigned to eternal torment in a broken afterlife manifold, because the areteia mangles their souls.”
“What the fuck,” Anna breathes. She tries to imagine her soul running on JavaScript. This makes her shudder so hard her crossed legs knock at the ankles.
“Yes. What the fuck. That’s what everyone said at the end of the Cessation Age, when all of this became common knowledge in galactic civilization.” Ssrin laughs: a dark, desperate sound, but wry. “My people built the first aretaic observatory. We were the first to see how the areteia extracted and recorded souls after the long unraveling of death. The first to discover the seven afterlife constellations, curled up in the universe’s extra dimensions. Or at least the first to see them and share.” Exordia pg. 21

–

The universe that Act 1 builds is so cool it’s almost criminal. Nearly none of this comes up ever again throughout the rest of the story. It’s absolutely the most compelling reason I might consider the eventual sequel.

There’s real juice here. A universe intentionally bound to narrative rules about relationships between sapient creatures. That’s great! Dickinson draws parallels to Dualism and Zoroastrianism at points, and I don’t think it’s unearned. This is clearly his strong suit, but I think I’d rather just read the wiki than search for the next set of interesting 15 pages hidden inside 400 boring ones.

Recommendation

I don’t recommend this book to anyone unless you’re already a fan of Dickinson. It has some neat ideas, and some fun prose, but the length and density of a mostly predictable story where all the best characters are given a shadow of the limelight they deserve is just too consistently disappointing.

It really feels like the whole book (and especially its ending) are jockeying for a slick sequel or series extension, and having already read Exordia I’ll probably read the sequel just to see if this goes anywhere. But even then, I don’t think a book earns a recommendation just because the 400+ pages eventually lead to a more interesting, 2nd book.

I can’t even recommend the book for its military sci-fi chops. I’m a huge fan of the writing of John Ringo¹ and David Weber². They do an excellent job of painting their unique universe through the eyes of genuinely interesting characters. Characters feel intelligent, intriguing…and if neither of those, cleverly made up instead with really fucking good action sequences. And it works! Plus they’re really funny.
Dickinson’s military writing just isn’t exciting. It feels like he’s either going halfway on talking tactics or weaponry, if even trying at all and I don’t think it works. It ends up feeling like the military-adjacent plot is just *happening to the characters* and it’s not engaging.

Huuuuge recommendation for the Looking Glass and Council Wars series from Ringo. Unique, fun, with great depth and tactical intrigue :3 ↩
Honorverse for Weber hands down. But also he wrote with Ringo on my favorite Ringo books, so you’re also safe just reading the Looking Glass series UwU ↩

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