Cover image for book

This is not a nice book. It’s not a comforting read. I really should have known this going in, given everything that happens in his Baru Cormorant series — but also like those other books, Exordia is very hard to put down, even as more and more horrible things keep happening. Every single character is horrifically morally compromised before the plot even gets properly under way, and then each of them is forced into further terrible moral choices.

It’s perhaps comforting that it’s alt-history: Obama is still President in the book’s timeline, so what is happening is not in our branch of the manifold. There are a couple of hints dropped that make me wonder whether this is a deliberate choice, leading up to a reconciliation with our own timeline in a future instalment.

Towards the end it turns into the darkest Tom Clancy pastiche imaginable, and the rug-pull at the end of the extended scene is literally dizzying. And then it turns out that this is only part one, and there is (at least) one more book to go. I’ll read it, and enjoy it, and then I’ll want to read something else afterwards.

🖼️  Cover image from publisher’s website