James S.A. Corey's LEVIATHAN FALLS

 I finally allowed myself to finish my first read-through of Leviathan Falls, the absolutely perfect concluding volume of the two-headed author monster we call James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, but had my mother not been patiently waiting to read it after me, I might still be dragging my feet and would not yet know that it is an absolutely perfect conclusion to one of the greatest science fiction series I've ever read. Though I had inklings right from the start because Corey hasn't let us down yet, not even a little bit.

I realize there is a bit of a lacuna with regards to this series on this blog because I read its later volumes during my hiatus. I'll write about them someday, especially about Tiamat's Wrath which wrung my heart out completely just in time to drown it in tears, or something, but we're here to talk about endings, how to stick the landing, and how they should now just go ahead and teach this series in every writing class ever.

Leviathan Falls was completed during the pandemic, but this shows in only the best of ways. As the unknown threat that destroyed the Builders* looms ever larger as an existential threat to all of humanity, no matter how far we have scattered via the physics defying technology the Builders left behind, we are reminded again and again, that we are in way over our heads, here. When the Builders began defying physics, they harnessed energies from a whole 'nother universe and damaged it terribly, earning them the wrath of whatever kind of force called that other universe home, and that force wiped the Builders out completely. Now that humans have sort-of harnessed some of the Builders' left-behind technology like a civilization sized John Frum cult, we've inherited the Builder's exterminating enemy as well. But where the Builders actually understood their technology and, to a degree at least, the forces it harnessed, and seemed to have a degree of unity within their civilization-or-species as to look to us like a hive mind, we, as series heroine Naomi Nagata observes several times, are having to do it all with humans. Who have not evolved beyond what they were when confined to just one gravity well, that of good old Earth. Jumped-up primates with brains that weren't even capable of the level of civilization we associate with, say, the Stone Age without a great deal of violence, coercion, kluges and savagery. Why, at the very height of our material culture (late 1950s/early 1960s USA, say), we were still involved in a Cold War with others of our same species, only allowed a minority subset of our population to own property, move freely about the country, hold political power, etc.

I make it sound like there's a lot of preaching in this book but that's not it at all. It's just that the very plight the Expanse's civilizations finds itself in mirrors our own current jackpot of existential threats, and it's the flaws of our individual primate brains that stand in the way of implementing the solutions that people are just barely capable of dreaming up. As people in our own world deny climate change, refuse life-saving vaccines and public health measures, etc, people in the Expanse's world, though many have been kept in the dark about the overwhelming nature of the Big Threat, are also incapable of seeing the big picture and following through on the strategies devised to save it. For instance, it's been known for a few novels now that the Gate system that has allowed humans to colonize distant solar systems within fractions of a human lifetime has its limitations, and a big one of them is the frequency with which it will bear traffic.** Exceed the discovered safe volumes and speeds and some ships "go dutchman", as in the Flying Dutchman, a famous ship from the Age of Sail that disappeared without a trace. While in previous novels, traffic through the gates was controlled, first by the Transport Union (a somewhat ad hoc authority cobbled together out of the remnants of Belter culture to supervise the weird not-space between the Gates) and then by the Laconian Empire (originally a renegade Martian military faction who stole a sample of protomolecule, disappeared through a Gate and emerged years later as a powerhouse of such overwhelming force that its leader, Winston Duarte, wound up being the Emperor of Everything); with both of those forces removed from the board, the Gate network is a free-for-all. Our girl Naomi has devised a brilliant way to manage traffic and keep anybody from dying/disappearing/whatever it is that happens to people when ships "go dutchman" but it requires things like cooperating, giving a shit about other people, being patient and other things that individual humans still aren't very good at, left to their own devices. Sigh.

But while this is going on, Naomi and what's left of her crew are back together on the Rocinante, and while Jim Holden has even more PTSD than he already did after years and years and years as a captive of the Laconian Empire, and while Alex Kamal has his mind on other things from time to time like the fact that out there in the churn is not only his son but a newborn grandson whom he might never even get to meet, and while Amos Burton has been transformed into something kind of unearthly even though he still mostly acts like our favorite Murder Mechanic, it's still the Rocinante's crew and it's as wonderful for us as it is for them to have them all breathing the same recycled air. And beloved characters from past novels turn up here and there, too, notably Elvi Okoye and her husband Fazal, now Science Big Shots for the remains of the Empire, and young Theresa Duarte (heir to the Empire but no she doesn't have blue skin or red eyes) and her aging but still intrepid dog, Muskrat are along for the ride, too, and you KNOW you've always wanted to see what it's like to have a dog in space. In zero G. Oh, man, if your head doesn't explode into candy every time Muskrat is center stage, see a therapist soonest.

We even get to see [REDACTED] again!

We only get to enjoy this a little bit, though, because not only is the Big Threat out there threatening, but so is Winston Duarte, who, through protomolocule monkey business over the course of several novels has metamorphosed from capable miltary officer to renegade leader to founding father of a nation state to immortal dictator of all of humanity and has since become... something even stranger and more dangerous. He poses very nearly as big a threat to humanity as the Big Threat, and is incommunicado unless he feels like manifesting as a sort of super-intense hologram of himself where he's least expected and there were so many times in these last few Expanse novels that I was nearly won over to liking him a bit so even this revelation of his inhumanly inimical intent hits hard in the feels, even before his daughter Theresa comes looking for him.

All of this is resolved satisfactorily, which would be awesome just for this novel, but also the whole giant series, which has covered the Rocinante's crew's entire adult lifetimes into old age, is also resolved more than satisfactorily. Even as I sat there sort of guarding myself the way someone anticipating a gut punch flexes her stomach muscles, I was in awe of how well all of this was being accomplished before my eyes, even as, a few times, I shook my mental fist at the two-headed author-monster for emotional distress inflicted on the way. So while I swore in the months before Leviathan Falls was finally released that I was not ready to see this go, no, not ever, I am pleased that it was ended so perfectly.

And I'm busily trying to carve out time to read the whole series again from the beginning as one, big expanse of novel, someday. Amidst all my other projects.

It's worth it.

*The eventual name of the civilization-or-hive-mind that were the original creators of the protomolecule that has been wreaking havoc with humanity since Leviathan Wakes first graced our literal and electronic bookshelves a decade or so ago

**Not can: will. For all we ever learn the Gates can handle whatever we throw threw them, but the Big Threat notices if our traffic through them gets too dense, and it strikes when it notices.

James S.A. Corey's NEMESIS GAMES

While the planetary adventure on Ilus kept Cibola Burn interesting and lively and was a logical expansion (heh) of the overall storyline of James S.A. Corey's series, it also all but fridged Naomi and, to a lesser degree, Alex, while Amos was mostly relegated to being Holden's smarter-than-he-looks-but-still-basically-a-thug thug, and so left this reader a teeny bit dissatisfied when the dust had settled.

And while the return to the confines of our own solar system might make Nemesis Games seem like it's backing off from the bigness of the Expanse's story, it also brought a welcome focus back to the characters we've traveled through four novels with: the crew of the Rocinante, Avasarala and Fred Johnson. But really, it's the Rocinante Four who shine here. And it's about damned time.

Having barely made it back to Tycho to get their beloved gunship repaired, the crew now look to be stuck for a while; it's going to be a good six months before the Rocinante flies again. A nice and well-deserved rest is great and all, but it doesn't make for much of a story -- or a life for people who are used to being on the move and at the center of system-spanning events. Which is to say that they get bored with hanging around the space station and so...

They split up.

Ordinarily, this would annoy me, because generally when the crew has broken up it's become the Holden show with the rest of the crew just sort of appearing here and there as supporting characters. But not this time; this time all four crew members get to be the central figure in their own stories, all of which are exciting, challenging and at times heartbreaking. We see their resourcefulness, learn more about their backgrounds, and while each of them quickly comes to regret their decisions to leave Tycho for a spell, we, the readers, most certainly do not.

The novel still manages to explore the consequences of what has gone on before -- the opening up of the rest of the galaxy or universe to human exploration and colonization via the protomolecular Gate -- as the "land rush" commences. Mars threatens to become a ghost planet. Earth might have to struggle with being the seat of an ever-larger empire (or give up on hegemony). And as for the Belters, well, who's going to need them? There are thousands of habitable exoplanets within reach now, with all the resources humanity could want for centuries to come. Who needs a bunch of malcontents, barely adapted to life in space (just enough to make life down a gravity well pretty much impossible for them), who only know how to live in tin cans, mine asteroids, keep junky spaceships flying, and carefully husband resources that are no longer scarce?

What population like that has ever gone down without a fight, though? Look at our current political situation in the U.S. (and, increasingly, elsewhere): superfluous labor, unwilling to be sidelined and forgotten, has lashed out and is (yes, along with misguided Christian fundamentalists and short-sighted plutocrats) largely responsible for putting a terrifyingly incompetent narcissist in control of the nuclear football.

So, too, the Expanse. The Belters aren't going to take things lying down, and they have a handsome, charismatic, possibly Alexander-caliber leader in (eyeroll) Naomi's ex-lover Marco, who unleashes about ten different kinds of hell and devastation on the Inner Planets (Earth & Mars) and on the legacy power center of the Outer Planets Alliance (Fred Johnson and Tycho -- and the Nauvoo Behemoth Medina Station. Except... He's really kind of a self-appointed leader. Those in his personal orbit of course follow him gladly because hello, but the rest of the Belt? Was everybody down for the kind of massive attack he and his coterie unleash here? It's a question not really addressed in this book, which is concerned chiefly with the buildup to this attack and the experiences of the Rocinantes in trying to reunite, but I'm really hoping this doesn't get dropped the way the "Mormons are going to be pissed" got dropped when their generation ship was appropriated to try and redirect Eros way back when, IYKWIM.

But anyway, our heroes once again manage to find themselves at the centers of all of these plots in some fashion, though some more than others. Amos just gets an escape plot but Naomi and Alex both wind up playing crucial roles in the unfolding disasters and humanity's response to them, and well, of course Holden and Fred and Avarasala do. I'm done fussing over the unlikelihood of this same small group of people always winding up with the fate of human space in their hands, though. I just give up. It shouldn't be allowed to spoil my enjoyment of these very enjoyable books. And stuff.

I might pause for a while before picking up the current last novel in the series, Babylon's Ashes, though. I'm not ready for the experience of having to wait for more. This way I can pretend I'm somewhat in control, you know?

James S.A. Corey's CIBOLA BURN

"Apocalyptic explosions, dead reactors, terrorists, mass murder, death slugs, and now a blindness plague. This is a terrible planet." -- James Holden

After three novels taking place inside asteroids and moons and space stations and vast bizarre alien artifacts, and aboard spaceships plying the void between all of these things, at last we come to the surface of what most people would think of as a planet. There's breathable atmosphere, sort-of-normal gravity, a close-to-normal day/night cycle, something like plants and animals, and even buildings and food.

Only it's not Earth. Or Mars. Or something settled via a generation ship like the Mormons were building in the first Expanse novel. Oh, no.

It's in another star system altogether. Only we don't really know how far away it is. Or how the technology that gets us there works.

So now we're sort of in Frederick "Heechee" Pohl territory as events unfold in Cibola Burn, the fourth Expanse novel by the two-headed alien we call James S.A. Corey. And we have the protomolecule that has wreaked havoc in three prior novels back in our good old Sol system to thank for it, but that's all we know; we done passed through the gate that was built for us, but when we got to where it led us, there was nobody home. Ruins that might be described as Lovecraftian if not Cyclopean, yes. Aliens (except for the flora-and-fauna analogs found on the first planet we settle), no.

It's refreshing, this being on a planet business. But lest we think this is just going to be a novel of exploration and discovery... Have you read the other books in this series? Or at least the epigram above? Yeah...

So this planet, called New Terra by the Earth-based corporation that claims to own it but Ilus (as in an early name for the city of Troy) by the people who first settled it* is quite a place, but not a great one for human habitation for all its abundant clean, breathable air and fresh liquid water. The local life forms' biology is incompatible with ours, for a start (much is made early on of bugs that persist in biting people, only to drop dead minutes after feasting on human blood). Crops have to be grown in soil imported from our system, etc. All in all, seems like more trouble than its worth, except for two things: scientific curiosity and mineral wealth in the form of vast and easily mined deposits of lithium (the stuff that makes the batteries in most of our consumer electronics work).

Before you can say "space opera", Ilus is at the center of a major conflict, as the colonists try by various and violent means to fend off the corporate/scientific mission that is just landing there as the novel opens. The colonists don't want to lose their colony; the scientists don't want to lose the opportunity to study a fresh and uncontaminated new ecology (oops); the corporation wants to assert ownership and control.

Ut oh.

Enter the crew of the Rocinante, whom our old friends, UN muckty-muck Crisjen Avasarala and Outer Planets Alliance honcho Fred Johnson, have dispatched to mediate between these parties because Holden is the only moral high-horse riding uncompromising asshat for the job, they both agree. Holden is not thrilled with this, but the protomolecular ghost of [REDACTED] wants him to go, too, and is capable of haunting even Holden's dreams, so yeah, off they go.

All this alone would make for a pretty interesting story, especially with its two new viewpoint characters, colonist-turned-reluctant-terrorist Basia, corporate security dick and former partner of [REDACTED] Havelock, and brilliant biologist Elvi** keeping things interesting, but this is an Expanse novel, so it's never just going to be about human politics. The protomolecule is still very much a thing, and the long-vanished aliens who made the protomolecule also made the gate through which everyone gets to Ilus -- and left a lot of ruins on the planet.

And a lot of stuff inside it as well. Stuff that is triggered by the arrival of Holden and protomolecular puppet [REDACTED].

Cue epic shitstorm eloquently described by Holden above. It's a terrible planet, you guys.

I'll confess to having occasionally been annoyed at some aspects of Cibola Burn, most notably how the vast world of the Expanse still seems to contain a paucity of characters. Did [REDACTED]'s old partner really have to be the guy on the corporate spaceship? Wouldn't it be more probable that an entirely new guy held that role, since there are billions and billions of humans out there now? Of course, by that same argument, mightn't that vast human Expanse also contain someone more qualified and capable than Holden, Amos, Naomi and Alex to handle the powder keg of politics on Ilus? Not that I don't love these guys. It's just getting increasingly less probable that these same four people are at the center of every major develop in human history, over and over again. But I accept that this is a probably a bow to the necessities of series writing; few readers, I expect, would want to read a series that realistically kept throwing new figures into the forefront with every plot development. We read sequels for the characters, most of us, way more than for the world-building. What happens to so-and-so next is more important to us than what happens to all of humanity next. We're just wired that way. Dickens knew this without having been told by science. So do we.

Now the Rocinante and the rest of humanity is poised for yet even more difficulty and adventure. That gateway didn't just offer up Ilus to us, but thousands of other planets. All of which, as Avasarala points out, don't need to be terraformed to be habitable, like poor old Mars. Who's going to want to stay there now that it's so easy to go somewhere with free air and water and shelter from radiation? But then, what happens to Mars' formidable arsenal of heavily armed spaceships and missiles and nukes when there's just a skeleton crew left behind on Mars to govern them and their use? Collapse of the USSR anyone (insert your favorite Red Planet joke here)?

So yes, onward to Nemesis Games very, very soon.

*Who are themselves refugees from the disaster on Ganymede that was the centerpiece of the second Expanse novel, Caliban's War, refugees who were turned away from every human population center they tried to stop and and so finally just sailed on through the gateway and started their own illicit colony on this new planet.

**Which, I've run into a lot of reviews online in which people complain very loudly about Elvi, because she is portrayed as falling hard for Holden and letting it cloud her judgment to a dangerous degree. They don't like that she has this weakness and regard it as regressive and anti-feminist that so much of her story seems to revolve around this. And I can see their point, as I rolled my eyes a bit at her, too (even though she fully recognizes her feelings as dangerously distracting and unprofessional). But I say this rounds her out nicely. AND I'll point out that, as a friend of hers correctly diagnoses, what is really going on isn't that she's fallen in love with Holden, but that she's spent two years on a spaceship without receiving any physical affection (by her choice; she's declined to participate in the partner swapping and teepee creeping behavior of her fellow scientists) before crash-landing on an alien planet just in time for ALL THE CRISES TO HAPPEN and, being a mammal still, what she really needs is some intimate human contact. Which her friend is happy to provide. Which clears her head just in time for her to do the important work, have the important breakthroughs, that basically save the day. In conclusion, I'd like the point out that this is pretty much exactly the same situation Randy Waterhouse finds himself in, in Cryptonomicon, and nobody complained about sexism or stereotypes or regressive gender attitudes in that book.

James S.A. Corey's LEVIATHAN WAKES

So, a lot of people who are talking about these books and the rather good television adaptation they've recently spawned* seem to be very interested in having the argument over whether Leviathan's Wake and its sequels count as Space Opera or not. And maybe I should wait until I've read further into the series before I form my opinion, but I have an early contender for an answer to the question, and that is: it's not. Because it's its own thing, and the two-headed monster that writes as James S.A. Corey already done named it: it's Belter Punk.

At least this first book is. There are hints throughout, of course, that the series as a whole is going to have that galactic sweep and scale and sense of awe and alienness that people go to Space Opera for, but this book right here, this is Belter Punk, which within the text of the novel refers to a genre of (presumably) grungy and loud and unlovely but passionate music favored by residents of the asteroid belt/minor planets out between Mars and Jupiter, where they live inside hollowed-out rocks and aren't quite self-contained but sure do try but meanwhile they're still dependent on Earth and Mars and various shipping vessels to make sure they don't run out of air or water. It's an unglamorous life out there in the Sol system, and the people who have adapted to it have gotten a tad strange, and not just because a general lack or low level of gravity have made them tall and skinny and big-headed and knobby-jointed and a tad resentful.

But so it's mostly Belters we're dealing with, here at the beginning of the Expanse series, chiefly in the persons of James Miller and Naomi Nagata, he a terse, embittered gumshoe straight out of a Dashiell Hammet, she a tech wiz who starts out her novel-life serving on the crew of a space-freighter hauling water to Ceres, the minor planet in/on which Miller has spent his whole life...

But there are planetary types, too, out there among them, including Earther Jim Holden, the Executive Officer of the freighter on which Naomi serves, who grew up in some kind of official polyamorous group marriage in Montana and was supposed to take over/save the family's ranch there someday but instead headed for outer space; Amos Burton, also an Earther, and a smarter and more useful (and even more quotable) version of Jayne Cobb if ever there was one, who serves as a mechanic on the freighter; Alex Kamal, he of East Indian descent and Texas accent that mark him out as a guy who grew up on Mars and quite the pilot; and Fred Johnson, he of the colorful military past who is now the somewhat shady "unofficial prime minister" of the Outer Planets Alliance.**

It's a not-too-surprising combination of noir detective plot (enacted by Miller) and a mystery/assassination/perils of Pauline plot (enacted by the freighter crew) that bring them all into each other's orbits, as both investigations eventually lead the parties to the same place, where they make a creepy and potentially system-shattering discovery involving the secret origins of one of Saturn's moons and a nasty "protomolecule" that is a sort of weaponized version of the noocytes of Blood Music (Greg Bear) fame.

There are lots of space battles and starship chases and space station explosions and squicky evil to enjoy as the plot tosses the characters around, making this a fun as well as a politically interesting read, but what really sold me on it was the character of Miller, the washed-up detective who is tossed a case that's pretty much meant to be unsolvable but decides to give it his all anyway, with melancholy as well as explosive results. He's in every way a literary cliche that should make one yawn, but his background as a guy born and raised in space gives him just enough freshness to make all that old, sad stuff feel new again. And I'm not just talking about the fungal whiskey he drinks (though maybe more than a bit is due to what watchers of the TV series have waggishly dubbed the "Space Fedora of Justice" even though it is very clearly named several times in the text as a porkpie and not a fedora, but anyway). His story is absorbing enough on its own, but when it becomes entertwined with those of the freighter crew members, it all gets wonderfully complex, until there is a moment when the essential natures of Miller and Holden so perfectly clash and transform each other, and with that the plot, and I just sort of sat there stunned for a while and had to stop reading and unpack more boxes (I recently moved to a new house).

I have no idea if the other four books in the series so far are going to hold my attention as well as this one did because of [REDACTED], but the way my Own Dear Personal Mother is tearing through them (she's already on the fifth novel and sort of tapping her foot at me, but hey, she still hasn't read any of the Song of Ice and Fire yet, just seen the TV show, so, you know, that.) I'd say it's an even money bet at what's left of the casino on Eros that they will. I've already started on Caliban's War...

*And yes, once again, the TV people caught me flat-footed. I've had this series on my to-read radar for years now, but kept getting distracted by shinies, and now they've gone and made the first half-or-so of this novel and chunks of later ones into a whole season of high-quality TV! It's The Last Kingdom all over again. D'oh!

**One of several factions rubbing up against each other and not-quite-fighting over resources in this human-settled Solar System, with Earth and Mars the inner planet superpowers, the Belt a somewhat chaotic mess of colonial outposts and outright corporate properties, and the at-times seemingly terroristic Outer Planets Alliance, aka OPA serving as a catch-all for further flung outposts' interests and meddling a good bit in the affairs of the Belt, too. Which is to say that if you don't like a lot of political plottery in your sci-fi, these books might not turn out to be your favorites, but I'd still give them a try for the reasons I've outlined above.