Science fiction publishing, for all its dedication to bringing you futures, was slow to recognize the massive audience that potential authors have garnered on YouTube. Lindsay Ellis commands a huge viewership on that platform and her novel was very likely to end up a bestseller as a result. Yet, as one of her videos detailed with refreshing honesty, the road to publication was still a 10-year process. That doesn’t change that, in the end, the final push that got her noticed by an agent was still her YouTube presence.

Despite all that, I wanted to separate Ellis-the-author and Ellis-the-video-essayist when I read her novel Axiom’s End (2020). There are plenty of YouTubers who have promoted their almost-always self-published novels to the point of creating a stigma around the whole thing; however, Ellis has through her video essays and other work shown that she has a deep connection to science fiction and fantasy as a reader, and was a Hugo Award finalist for a (very good) documentary on The Hobbit films to boot. I was cautiously optimistic.

After finishing Axiom’s End, I’m sorry to report I couldn’t make the separation.

There were too many issues with the prose and structure for me to take the book on its own terms and approach it the same way I would an unknown author’s debut. If Axiom’s End had been the latter, I probably wouldn’t have finished it. I did, and I’m glad I read to the end, but Ellis had the benefit of being someone I’ve watched for about a decade. Frankly, that’s a detriment to Ellis-the-author.

Axiom’s End centres on Cora, a character painfully Millennial in her situation and outlook, who becomes an interpreter for an alien dubbed Ampersand. It’s a first contact story, but a limited one; for most of the narrative the rest of the world is unaware that contact was even made besides conspiracy theories fueled by Cora’s estranged father. Axiom’s End is an easy read and the setup is compelling, with a lot of thought put into depicting an alien intelligence that humans can almost but not quite relate to.

However, between flat, repetitive prose, some jarring pop culture references, and much less compelling characters, Axiom’s End gets off to a bumpy start. There is a clear theme, but it takes too long to get there through the clunky turnings of the plot. The story sticks closely to Cora, and she just isn’t very well defined through a good chunk of the novel besides family resentment and the clear sense that she’s a beset-upon screw-up at the very beginning. Then the aliens enter the story and she’s just propelled along without much chance to grow or have introspection as she’s flung from one panic-inducing situation to the next.

It’s not until the second half that things take on more weight and we get glimpses of a much better story: Cora and Ampersand have their “two creatures of different backgrounds going across the ice” segment best exemplified by The Left Hand of Darkness. I have a weak spot for depictions of intercultural friendship and Ellis handles it well. Of course, it’s no surprise that a novel about inter-species communication would shine best when exploring these interactions on a personal level, and these were the most positive aspects of the book.

That’s not enough, coming as late as it does, to save a profoundly uneven work.

There are intriguing elements about alien civilizations and relating to otherness that the author could have cultivated and grown into a much stronger novel, but here, they are embedded in a framework that suffocates them instead.

Axiom’s End has promise, but it’s not the kind of promise that makes me want to continue through this series—the sequel comes out this year. I can’t help but feel this was a necessary book for the author to get out of the way on the steps to writing something better, but which should have stayed in the trunk.