A sardonic twist on alien contact
Bungling U.S. president is noteworthy character in YouTube star’s novel
Lindsay Ellis, formerly known by her nearly 1 million subscribers as “Nostalgia Chick,” is a cornerstone personality on YouTube.
With a wet wit, Ellis regularly pokes at problematic tropes in American media on her selftitled channel, thoughtfully and hilariously condemning “Rent,” “Game of Thrones” and Disney’s “Pocahontas” through longform video essays.
After years of deconstructing other people’s stories, Ellis is telling her own with “Axiom’s End,” a germane aliencontact novel set heavily in California during the George W. Bush era. The book was released Tuesday, July 21, and Ellis is scheduled to talk about it in a Bookshop Santa Cruz virtual event with Vox critic Emily VanDerWerff.
“Implementing things you’ve learned ... is much easier when you’ve applied the same theories to other people’s works,” Ellis told The Chronicle. “Axiom’s End” is about the U.S. meeting an alien race for the first time, but instead of making it a mythologized event as in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” she focuses on bureaucratic foibles of our political leaders.
The hero is Cora, a college dropout and daughter of an Edward Snowdenlike figure who keeps leaking the American government’s knowledge about aliens. Cora wants to escape the shadow of her absent, narcissistic father, but she’s drawn into the drama when one of the aliens, a “Fremden” the humans call Ampersand, abducts her. Granted the ability to understand the Fremden language, Cora becomes a translator between the government and the alien.
The novel grew out of Ellis’ dissections of geek culture. As her videos progressed into more esoteric topics, such as her “My Monster
Boyfriend” essay exploring the social allegories of bestial love stories, it colored and empowered the relationship between Ampersand and Cora.
“In the previous life of this book, their relationship was much tamer,” Ellis said. “But back then I was too chickens— to actually go where I wanted to ... because I thought that would get a big ol’ ‘yikes’ from readers.” Guillermo del Toro’s Oscarwinning film, “The Shape of Water,” about a cleaning lady who falls in love with an amphibian humanoid who isn’t depicted as a monster, helped Ellis evolve her story.
In a sense, the book is policy porn. Where Max Brooks’ “World War Z” showed society responding to a zombie outbreak, “Axiom’s End” imagines a world in 2007 where the Bush administration badly bungles trying to keep a pack of alien refugees a secret.
“Honestly, I started down that road because I thought it was funny,” Ellis said. “One thing I hadn’t really seen done in firstcontact fiction before was that, instead of first contact being this profound existential moment, it’s an embarrassing political blunder that accelerates a financial crisis that was already in motion.”
Much of the book takes place in California, where Ellis lives, in Long Beach. She turns the Golden State into a hothouse of wild conspiracy theories and racial prejudice, which serves as a backdrop for Cora and Ampersand’s first adventures, including a failed infiltration of Google’s campus in Mountain View.
Ampersand comes out of his shell like a cosmic Mr. Darcy, and the fate of two races hinges on his and Cora’s ability to trust each other. At one point, Ampersand asks to be taught how to comfort an upset Cora. Before coming in for an embrace, he asks, “Do you consent?” The phrase becomes a metaphorical talisman between them for the rest of the book, a wholesome light amid the world’s wreckage.
Unable to completely divorce herself from her YouTube fame, Ellis said fan expectations do weigh on her.
“I’ve been thinking about ‘death of the author’ a lot lately, and I feel like it’s interesting to be on the other side of that question,” she says, referring to her July 6 video responding to the social media backlash against “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, who has been criticized for tweets seen as transphobic.
In the video, Ellis argues that a “death of the author” philosophy (where an artist and their art are judged separately) ignores Rowling’s unique power to harm others through her mainstream influence. “If you really don’t want to support the author, you might just need to let ‘Harry Potter’ go,” Ellis said in the video.
As a newly published author, Ellis discovered a paradox: While she would prefer to have “Axiom’s End” judged on its own merits, “It’s becoming harder to get published without an existing platform, personal brand and all the parasocial relationships that come with it.”
“I hope that people won’t buy the book because they know me from YouTube, but because it’s its own thang,” Ellis said.
“Would I, as an author, like to be ‘dead’? Very much so, but ... I think that’s becoming less and less feasible.”