Trilogies are great when they have enough ground to cover and importantly if you start reading them once all books are available. I read Axiom’s End, the first part of Lindsay Ellis’ Noumena trilogy shortly after the initial release in 2020, Truth of the Divine (part 2) in 2022 and just finished the recently released last book of the series, Apostles of Mercy.
Even with a perfect trilogy, reading three books spaced apart by years is hard: You lose any connection you might have with the characters and you forget any plot details (which, incidentally, has allowed me to read the Three Body Problem trilogy not just once, but three times: while I very well remember the outline of the story, I was able to rediscover so many of the smaller plot twists each time that the books remained fabulous even in round 3).
Unfortunately, Noumena isn’t perfect: The first book is enjoyable enough (and had me hooked), but the second and third part felt like a bit of an afterthought. Nevertheless, Futureboy is all about books, so let’s talk about the books.
Axiom’s end introduces us to an alternate history, set in 2007 (although the book could just as easily play today). Cora, the main protagonist, is a troubled young adult and daughter of a famous (infamous) investigative journalist. After an alleged UFO crash landing in California, her father, Nils Ortega, publishes details about a long-running government conspiracy to keep secret the existence of a group of aliens on earth. The publication of that story then brings her into contact with one of the (very real) aliens and she ends up being an interpreter for that alien and read into the fact that the US government has indeed had a group of aliens locked up for years.
Axiom’s end is a first contact story with a very alien species, an exploration of the concept of personhood (should the aliens have rights on earth?) and - most importantly - a story of Cora building an increasingly deep relationship with one of the aliens. This is also where the story gets really interesting: Can humans really understand aliens and can aliens really understand humans? As the relationship becomes more and more intimate, we can simultaneously see just how far apart the two species are.
Not all is well in Alien-land, however: Our visitors from space come with a lot of their own baggage and and are bringing some of their own (and very human) conflicts to earth: Racism, genocide, unfair prosecution? Not something only humans are capable of. And when you have all-powerful aliens exporting their conflicts to earth, things can go terribly wrong.
This sets the stage for book 2, Truth of the Divine: Without giving away too much, book 1 doesn’t end too well for Cora. Patched together again by her alien friend, Cora understandably stumbles through the book with a lot of trauma. To me, however, Truth of the Divine is very much a book of its time. Start with a broken character. Add trigger warnings about “post-traumatic stress, depression, addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence, and a wide wide smattering of manifestations of mental illness such as panic attacks [… and ...]. depictions of suicidal ideation, suicidal planning, attempted suicide, completed suicide, and violence self-harm.” As if that wasn’t enough, the author also warns readers of “depictions of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, racially motivated violence, anti-Semitism, and a few incidences of racial slurs”. There is also a lecture on pronouns and microaggressions.
Individually, these themes all make sense and many of them fit with the overall story. But in combination, this feels like the author was trying very hard to make sure all of the topics of the day were somehow woven into her story line.
And that, unfortunately, took away from the underlying action: The aliens are still there, their presence on earth has been fully exposed, and more (and potentially hostile groups of aliens) are on the way. But all of that ends up almost in the background - which is unfortunate.
That all, fortunately, changes in book 3, Apostles of Mercy. Without too much spoilering, we are now in full Alien/Alien/Human adventure. Cora is still a wreck and her relationship with the aliens is strange at best, but other people take center stage in this book as we see different species battling over earth.
It is hard to get to a fair verdict on this series: There is a lot of interesting stuff in the three books, most of all justhow alien our aliens are and how - nonetheless - we might want to consider them persons with rights. (And of course the book makes it very clear that the aliens here also stand for human strangers - we should all be humans living peacefully together.) There are few stretches that are boring in the books. It is just that the series - and especially the second book - feels just a little bit too much built to educate rather than to entertain the reader. Many authors have a mission and it can be hard to strike the right balance between openly proselytizing and weaving your convictions into a strong storyline. Lindsay Ellis, for my taste, didn’t always get this balance right.