Exordia

"Exordia is set precisely in 2013. It’s a very recent book, it came out this year. It’s a political techno thriller with aliens – which does not make it sound nearly as horrific as it actually is. I want to tell everyone to read this book, and I want to tell everyone to go in with eyes wide open, because it is brutal. It’s also very funny! It’s not a slog to read at all. But it is a book about genocide, nuclear annihilation and other forms of civilisation-wide collapse. It is a book about making impossible moral choices. And there’s also some body horror that got even me, and I read and write horror ! So be warned, and then go do it anyway, if you’re a person who feels like having that experience, because it is worth it. The basic plot of Exordia is that the protagonist – or one of the protagonists – is a woman named Anna, who is a Kurdish expat living in America at the beginning of the story. She has had a truly traumatic childhood in some of the Kurdish-Iraqi wars, and she has survived her childhood, but very much not unscathed. She’s working a dead-end job in Manhattan, and she meets an alien in Central Park. “I look for books that deal with the psychological impact of trying to work through a political event or system” The alien is named Ssrin. Ssrin says, essentially, ‘I am your spiritual soulmate. We are linked together by destiny, and we are going to save the world.’ So far this sounds like the opening to an anime, and I think in some ways that Seth was thinking about that – but the story does not stay in that genre. It rapidly becomes a military thriller, in which both Anna and Ssrin end up back in Kurdistan, dealing with multiple nation states and their interests in Ssrin’s crash-landed ship, and what it might entail. There’s an opposing alien named Iruvage, who is also doing geopolitics. The geopolitics are both the very everyday kind – negotiating with different ministers or cabinet secretaries or squad leaders in an army from China or Iran or the US or the local Kurdish groups – and metaphysical. This is a book that’s deeply concerned with existential value. Like, why is there existence instead of no existence? And why do people notice things instead of not noticing them? Those sound like very bedrock philosophical questions, and they are, but they’re also very much tied up with ideas of whether people, alien or human people, have free will – and what they should do with it if they do. I think that is the deepest question that Seth is playing with. He does it through this lens of really examining a conflict-ridden place in the real world. I know the degree of research and cultural work that Seth did to write this book, and I’m incredibly impressed by it. Oh, she’s not every day at all, actually. She is someone who was involved in military conflict at age eight. So she’s attempted to make herself into an everyday protagonist, but failed. One of the things I find very interesting about her is the amount of absolute relief she finds in bad things happening again. She knows how to operate in a world which is all high stakes, all existential crisis; she didn’t really have much operating capacity in a world where that’s not happening to her. She’s aware of that, a little – enough to be slightly worried. But not really enough to say no. I’m not sure it says anything good about me, but I think I find it relatively easy to identify…! Yes, so: of the people I’ve listed so far… I’m not sure of C. J. Cherryh’s academic or professional background. But Max Gladstone lived and worked in China for a while, and did translation; and Malka Older worked in humanitarian aid, in Sri Lanka and Japan and some other places. Seth Dickinson is a sociologist, I’m a historian who now works in energy policy. I think there might be a type!"

"At one level, this is a very fast-paced science fictional thriller about an alien invasion of Earth. But also at another level, it’s a very deeply philosophical story about the nature of sin. The primary viewpoint characters are all sinners. I don’t mean sinners in the, “Oh, we’re all sinners” way – I mean, these people are murderers and enablers of murderers, each terribly burdened by guilt in their own way. This is partly what draws them together, the shared sense of sin and guilt. And it’s also what leads to them being used as pawns by the imperial alien invaders, and the alien resistance. There are aliens on both sides of this – an alien empire and an alien resistance – and one representative of each side has come to earth, and each has picked its pawns among humans. This is very much a book about empire in general – it’s about hegemonic imperial adventurism, both American and alien, because a lot of the viewpoint characters are enmeshed in the American military-industrial complex or the government end of it. So their guilts and crimes are contrasted against this much bigger and much more dangerous alien empire. This is of course a classic science fictional trope, the persecution flip: what if an earth empire had to deal with a much more powerful alien empire that treated it like it treats, you know… everyone. So that part is there, but that’s not the main thrust of this story. What makes it science fantasy in particular is that it turns out that the aliens, with their superior technology and their much higher-order science, reveal to the humans that sin and souls are real, and consequential. Not only sin and souls, but heaven and hell and damnation too, are actual real things that you have to deal with. That narrative itself can be weaponized and is one of the fundamental forces of the universe, that there are seven great passions, which have literal physical and political meaning. The seven great passions are each a way that sentient beings can relate to others. Each one is basically a different kind of doomed love. The alien empire retains its power over all its subject colonies by asserting narrative control over the souls of the people it’s conquered: they call it ‘pinioning’ the souls of the conquered people. This means that narratively, any uprising is doomed to lose: that’s what it means to be pinioned. The humans haven’t been pinioned yet because we are the backwater, and this is the first encounter we’ve had with the empire. Theology, physics, narrative form, and interpersonal drama are all united into this single framework, which is how this book works, and its fascinating to me. It’s also hilarious – almost laugh-out-loud funny, despite how violent it is. It is very violent. I’ve never seen so many nuclear bombs go off in a single story before. But this is also a book where you can’t make the spaceship go without the power of a deeply tortured love-hate relationship. So there are levels at which factors like emotions and souls, and also like things like damnation – literally you die and you go to hell where you’re tortured, that kind of damnation – these factors play into this techno-thriller war-with-the-aliens scenario. My favourite character is this Chinese scientist called Li, a woman whose dedication to the objective truths of pure mathematics is the only thing that keeps her alive. It makes her very strange, but it keeps her alive. She’s continually beset by these other characters who are having very Hollywood moments at her while she’s trying to do her research; and she’s like, “Please, I’m working.” And people are saying, “We’re in crisis, there’s a war, aliens are dropping bombs on us…” At one point, they have less than three hours until human extinction, and they need a breakthrough now . And she’s like, “I don’t care, I’m working on theory”. I just had to stop and laugh! And it turns out that she’s right – she did in fact need to work on theory at that particular point. Mathematics in this world is the platonic realm of higher reality – our world is an expression of mathematics. So ironically, the mathematician who is working on theory gets to the important realizations faster than the realpolitik-obsessed bureaucrats and soldiers. Yes, it’s a very funny approach to take to things, in general. Something about genre collisions naturally lends itself to humour. Unusual juxtapositions are a big part of jokes anyway – and these stories are full of that kind of thing. There’s a fighter pilot who eventually gets to pilot the alien spaceship, and his entire worldview is structured around the movie Top Gun . He essentially gets the aliens to build him the Top Gun cockpit because that’s one he knows. And that’s just really funny – and it’s also a pop culture reference, like the memes in the Locked Tomb books. It’s a way to lighten the whole death and destruction and murder and damnation angle of it all with humour. Though I have to say, Gnomon and The Old Drift were not particularly funny… Yes! Tolkien finds it harder to be funny than – well… Anyone!"