I had high hopes for this because I'm a big fan of Seth's work in Baru Cormorant. I can see the similarities, but Exordia’s characters weren’t as compelling. This book is very dense with its jargon. Turns out, that’s not my thing. The plot was great, but so bogged down in the detail and tone shift. It was like Baru but turned up to 11.

We start with Anna and the snake alien that comes to hang out in her apartment. Ssrin is hilarious and wonderfully designed. I loved this charming depiction of first contact. But after the story opens up wider, we never get back to that. There’s too much military techy jargon and general America jargon. And the way everyone speaks is weirdly standard, even though the cast of characters hail from different countries.

After the Big Event, the pace slows down. There's large chunks where the plot take a backseat. Now I am all for dramatic backstory, but the balance wasn't right. I could feel the mystery nagging at me, but there was so much character history to get through first. The big disaster happened too soon - we should have spent more time with the characters before things kicked off.

Instead of a chronological order, we spend a lot of time with minor characters recounting their experiences, and in incredible detail. And because there's so many different groups of people involved, and the timeline skips around to explain their stories, I got confused and bored.

Especially when we’re with the scientists, the technical jargon is super heavy. Hard scifi is not for me, I felt way too dumb for this. It was a lot of very clever people having very clever conversations, but the book didn't do enough to bring the reader into the story. I felt like an observer seeing stuff happen behind a window, but not grasping the meaning.

Every time I got comfortable with the current set of narrating characters, the POV switches away from them. I couldn’t connect to any of them because of this. It felt like the book was just telling me things about them, rather than bringing me into their worlds. The segment with Chaya, Aixue and the other scientists/soldiers really lost me. The body horror scenes were amazing, but they’re in amongst a tonne of science jargon padding.

At around 60% we finally get a breakthrough in understanding the alien structure, plus the characters start talking through the lore in ways I found easier to understand. Not fully, there was still lots of mathematical, technical and military language. But the plot started moving again and we could see light at the end of the tunnel. I was impressed with the drama of the ending. It certainly made me feel things.

Seth had a lot to say with this book, and I did get the overall gist, but it was mostly not my thing. I would consider reading the sequel though, but will check out the reviews first.