I follow a number of YouTube channels, many of which either focus on some form of cultural criticism, ranging from the joke-filled ones that point out flaws in an MST3K sort of way that I find funny to the more serious-minded deep dives into cinema or modern America. On the latter side of that analysis, though also rather funny in her own way, is Lindsay Ellis. Ms. Ellis used Michael Bay’s Transformers movies to explain different types of cinematic critical theory, and I rather enjoy her video essays when they come out.
And then she wrote a sci-fi novel that, though it took me a lot longer to finish than I had planned due to my own real-life obligations, I did read and now I have some thoughts of my own.
Cora is a young woman whose life seems to be a bit of a dead-end. A college drop-out, she lives with her single mother and two younger siblings where she can’t quite seem to hold down her job or keep her own car running very well. It’s 2007, and her biggest claim to fame is also something she’d generally rather never happened: her father runs a WikiLeaks-style website with a dash of Edward Snowden’s “right to know” beliefs tossed in, and years earlier he released a memo that revealed the U.S. Government was well aware of alien life from other planets. The “Fremda memo” doesn’t say much about where these beings came from or where they are at the moment, but it does appear the government maybe sort of has them in some sort of custody. Cora would just assume not deal with her father anyway.
Then one night an alien shows up at her house, and from there, Cora goes on the run to get away from government spooks she thinks were following her anyway, and then the alien itself, a being she dubs “Ampersand”. Ampersand is a large being with a mixture of organic and mechanized parts, completely foreign to anything Cora can claim to have ever experienced, but then the strangest thing happens: Ampersand starts talking, and though the communication is rough due to very different biologies and cultures, Cora becomes Ampersand’s interpreter, the only human on the entire planet who can tell the others what he’s saying and act as some kind of go-between as Ampersand completes his mission. He’s something of a fugitive, it seems…
Most of the better sci-fi novels out there often use sci-fi concepts to comment on our own world rather than, say, an alien world or the future or something along those lines. Ellis’s novel is no different. If you’re looking for an action-packed roller coaster ride of thrills like something out of, say, Star Wars, this is not that sort of book. To be sure, there are a few action scenes, but they have less to do with the overall themes of the novel than anything else. No, Ellis’s book is about language and what it would mean to really communicate between two intelligent species. The short answer may be that, on many levels, they can’t. The net result is Cora has only a vague idea what’s happening many times over.
That helps with the characterization of Ampersand. He isn’t human and doesn’t perceive the world in the same way as humans do, something he reminds Cora rather frequently. Furthermore, the lack of understanding of cultures extends both ways. Cora may not get Ampersand, but he doesn’t really get humans either and would just assume not bother with them. True, he seems to have made some rather astute observations on humanity as a whole and how it treats members of its own species, let alone others. Though the book ends with a sequel hook (this being the first of a planned trilogy), it’s a smart sci-fi novel, a little rough befitting a first time published author, but it does contain the level of observation Ellis deploys to her video essays. If this is a first novel, I would hope she improves from here because she does have an interesting voice of her own.
Grade: B
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