Some books are best characterized by a self-referential quote from the same book. Exordia is one of these books:
“This makes no fucking goddamn sense at all! I don’t have the background. Can you help me?”
Unfortunately, that’s how I felt while fighting my way through Exordia by Seth Dickinson. The book certainly holds promise in the beginning: A young New Yorker with a troubled past meets a hydra-like alien in Central Park. What could possibly go wrong. And there are hints of a really interesting take on the universe. What if - in addition to the laws of physics - the universe was governed by some weird set of stories and if souls were real (and could be copied, stolen, and consumed)? And what would this say about the origin of the universe? Are we all just part of a narrative?
But then Seth Dickinson - at least for my taste - got lost in trying to create a really complicated plot. There is an alien spacecraft rammed into a mountainside in Kurdistan (and apparently another alien warship somewhere in orbit). There is our first alien, then another one, and a soul-eating monster. There are Chinese, Russian, Iranian and American soldiers and researchers on site (and dying or going crazy one by one and seeing their brains outgrow their skulls). And there is a lot of complicated talk around prime numbers, numbers being the foundation of everything, frequencies, formulas, and souls.
Let’s start with Kurdistan: If you place your story in Kurdistan, you obviously need to talk about the Kurds and you need to have a local backstory. But this part reads like Dickinson has read one or two longer news pieces about Kurdistan and tries to bring it all into his story. The Peshmerga, female fighters, the American betrayal of the Kurds and Saddam Hussein’s attacks on Kurdish group. None of this really adds to the story though.
On the American side, we again have a complicate back-story and love triangle. And again, the value to the story is largely unclear (with the exception of the two main American actors having a bit of a history and one acting to always provide checks and balances to the other’s uber-rational but disgracefully inhuman instincts.
Then there is the question of what’s actually going on here. Is there really a starship? Is this thing even real or just a mental construct? What’s going on with everybody’s souls? This is where Seth Dickinson dumps a lot of complex vocabulary on the reader: Kolgomorov complexity, fractals, pink noise, the distribution of prime numbers - for Dickonson all of these work together to explain what’s going on. Only none of this makes any sense to the reader. Dickinson may have done a lot of research or he may just be producing pages of gibberish. But either way, the result reads like a strange hallucination of a conspiracy theorist who sees connections where there are none and the many pages of pseudo(?)-scientific talk appear to bury any thread of an interesting story.
In the end, Dickinson has tried too hard to write a story about the grand questions of the universe and has unfortunately failed to write a gripping story. What does shine through is an exploration of whether it is ever appropriate to commit horrible crimes in the interest of a real greater good. But even on that question, for me the book fell short.
If you have always wanted to read a book where most of the worlds nuclear arsenal is used within hours, this might be just your novel. But for everybody else, I cannot recommend this book.