James Nicoll Reviews

2021’s Truth of the Divine is the second volume in Lindsay Ellis’s Noumena alternate history first contact series.

Aliens — in the form of a handful of anti-social political refugees equipped with technology far superior to ours — have fled to Earth and US bureaucracy has tried to adapt to new needs. Cora Sabino is one of those adaptations. One of very few humans with whom the aliens will deign to speak, she has a full-time job mediating between the aliens and the US’s various alphabet soup agencies. On the one hand, it’s a secure job in economically troubled times. On the other hand, Cora has to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder (complicated by her mental link with one particular alien). She also has to cope with US security agencies, which are often staffed by … um … difficult people.

Her already fraught existence is complicated by the rise of the Third Party.

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Lindsay Ellis’ 2020 Axiom’s End: A Novel is the first book in her projected Noumena series. 

In a 2007 that never was, Cora Sabino is a shiftless twenty-something, forever pissing off her mother by her lackluster work ethic and tendency to let things slide. But Cora is just trying to cope. Not only did her father Nils Ortega abandon his family when he became a world-famous internet pundit and leaker of dark government secrets, this world’s Julian Assange, he is the reason that they have been subjected to unpredictable but intrusive government surveillance. It’s wearing. 

Cora is working a temp job when a meteor crashes into Angeles National Forest. This unlikely event is the second time in recent history that a meteor has impacted near LA. Nils believes the first, the so-called Ampersand Event, was an alien spacecraft. He also believes the US government is in contact with aliens. It’s a wild claim. 

It’s also true, but not quite as Nils imagines it.

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