Exordia

Michael Crichton meets Marvel’s Venom in award-winning author Seth Dickinson’s science fiction debut"Like a Michael Crichton thriller on psychedelics." ―Booklist, starred review"Magnificent. . . . A science fiction action juggernaut." ―Tamsyn Muir "Anna, I came to Earth tracking a very old story, a story that goes back to the dawn of time. It’s very unlikely that you’ll die right now. It wouldn’t be narratively complete."Anna Sinjari―refugee, survivor of genocide, disaffected office worker―has a close encounter that reveals universe-threatening stakes.While humanity reels from disaster, she must join a small team of civilians, soldiers, and scientists to investigate a mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror. If they can manage to face their own demons, they just might save the world. "Dickinson brings the same richness of characterization that made his Baru Cormorant series (The Traitor Baru Cormorant, 2015) so compelling, but this one reads like a Michael Crichton thriller on psychedelics―in a good way." ―Booklist, starred review"Magnificent. . . . A science fiction action juggernaut." ―Tamsyn Muir, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Locked Tomb series"Seth! Jesus f***ing christ, Seth, you can't fucking keep doing this to me, I have a kid who's going to get up at 7 o'clock tomorrow morning no matter how late I stayed up reading, again, it's been days, I can see time." ―Max Gladstone, co-author of the New York Times Bestselling This is How You Lose the Time War"Exordia is an avalanche: an inevitable, overwhelming, pell-mell landscape-scale transformation of a book. Dickinson uses science fiction as an ethical scalpel, and the results are breathtakin viciously funny, vivid to the point of horror, and entirely profound." ―Arkady Martine, Hugo Award-winning author of A Memory Called Empire"Adroit . . . Dickinson skillfully puts the cosmic scale of the Exordian rebellion into manageably personal terms. With cool alien technology, admirably hopeful heroes, and SFF pop culture references littered throughout, this will have readers hooked." ―Publishers Weekly"Exordia is a comprehensive taxonomy of violence at every level, from the subcellular to the intergalactic, as well as every possible scrap of pain, pleasure, and connection that might result from it. It's an apocalyptic chanson de geste, with a dizzyingly fractured Round Table who experience damnation not just spiritually but literally, formally, communally and visibly, as well as a comprehensive study of natural history, moral lessons, spiritual and cultural translation, and the hierarchy of all possible passions. There's a deeply original spiritual order in this universe that sharpens the significance of every moment, and I found myself wrung out and exhilarated as I came unwillingly to the end of it." ―Daniel M. Lavery, author of The Merry Spinster"Beautiful, introspective, and unbelievably tense. It feels like being in a hospital waiting room in the best and worse sense, the suspended moment right before you find out what's going on." ―Cassandra Khaw, USA Today bestselling author of Nothing But Blackened Teeth"Conceptually mindblowing. Viscerally horrific. Hofstadter meets Lovecraft during a really bad acid trip, but better written.” ―Peter Watts, Hugo Award winner