Our Take

Seth Dickinson spent years building one of the most intellectually demanding trilogies in contemporary fantasy — the Baru Cormorant books, which weaponized economics, colonialism, and political betrayal into something genuinely unlike anything else in the genre. Exordia takes that same unsparing intelligence into science fiction and blows the doors off. The novel operates in multiple registers simultaneously: it's a propulsive military thriller with the pacing of a Crichton novel, a piece of Lovecraftian cosmic horror that gets under your skin, and a morally serious examination of what individuals do when survival demands they compromise everything they believe. The "dark forest" framing — a universe where civilizations must annihilate potential rivals to survive — gives every action scene a philosophical undertow that most SF action never bothers with. Anna is the ideal protagonist for this material: someone who has already survived the unsurvivable, who understands that the world is brutal and that good intentions rarely determine outcomes. Her bond with Ssrin, and the return to Kurdistan, give the cosmic scale an intimate anchor that keeps the novel human even as it reaches for the intergalactic. Fans of the Baru Cormorant trilogy will find everything they loved here and more. Readers who responded to the moral complexity of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest or the propulsive dread of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation will find a natural home in Exordia. A ferocious, extraordinary debut.