Axiom's End

I consider this to be a very good first novel, which explored some aspects of first contact in ways that aren't frequently in the foreground. Once you get over the idea of this taking place in an alternate United States where 2007 unfolded very differently from the one in our world, where conspiracy websites could somehow become the focus of the world's attention, the depiction of the cybernetic aliens and the amoral intelligence agencies is not super hard to accept. And if the twenty-two year old heroine sometimes comes off as behaving more like a seventeen year old one part of the time, it's not that unreasonable considering the heavy weight of the expectations she brought onto herself. There are convenient coincidences for the sake of the plot, a few overly dramatic pronouncements, but I was mostly pleased with the stakes that increased throughout. There are emotional moments and flights of interesting worldbuilding for the non-humans and their society and language that I liked. The ending doesn't really bring the plot to a solid close, but is one hundred percent a character piece involving the two most significant characters in the story.

I thought the book started out slow, with the sections showing the main character and her relations with her family holding only a little interest, picking up only when she takes off for the open road with basically no plan for what to do, picks up speed when she's detained in California and in Cheyenne Mountain. At this point, it felt like the book was going to end, but in the last third it does in a different direction with a different feel. We get the big showdown between the biggest players far away from government agents and military forces, not what I had been expecting. Up till then there was a strong theme about the scariness of government power, and it seemed like this kind of undercut that. My guess is that trying to wrap everything up in the setting which seemed to me to be the intuitive choice might have been rejected because of unpalatable logistical problems.

I think the audiobook format did a lot to make the story work for me, sliding over some of the passages that might have tripped me up on the page and pushing the action forward. I'll be looking forward to the next book in this series which I hope might explain why the author chose this particular alternate timeline.