Ever since I began reading The Expanse series, I have made a point to avoid reading too much about it and I have not watched more than a couple of episodes of the television series. I wanted to experience the series without a critical context. In a way, I wanted to read the novels from a fresh perspective and without any exterior expectations.
Because of this, I was unaware of the major changes that would take place in the series in the seventh novel. In the last installment of this series, I recapped my impression of the books to date. Now I think that I may need to revise my overall impression. Here is the short version: books 1-6 are good, inventive hard sci-fi. They do some things incredibly well and most everything else is at least satisfactory. I have never really experienced any disappointments in reading the novels. I also wrote that I thought that there was a grander plan than I had suspected. Now I am certain of that.
Persepolis Rising is a novel that takes a lot of risks. First among them is a time leap in the entire series. Up until now, it had been difficult to gauge how much time had passed in the narrative. I had thought that this was actually a narrative device to get around the months spent in transit between space stations and planets. Time can get really tricky in novels like this when characters can travel at not insignificant fractions of the speed of light. Once time becomes relativistic and it takes, potentially, months to travel between destinations, keeping narrative chronology intact, and maintaining a sense of urgency may become very difficult.
But this novel does something else. It skips over 30 years between the end of Bablyon's Ashes and the beginning of Persepolis Rising. This is a gutsy move. The preceding novel didn't really wrap things up in a way that would leave the next 30 years uneventful. But Corey just sort of skips that time frame without too much of a mention. In fact, I had to reread the first chapter to make sure that I hadn't missed something. There was no explanation.
Two things happen at the beginning of the novel that will have major impacts throughout the novel. The first is that Holden and Naomi announce their intentions to sell their shares in the Rocinante and retire, leaving Bobbie to become the new captain. The second is that a massive ship with advanced technology appears through the gate and begins taking shit over. This second occurrence sparks the narrative arc for the rest of the novel as the new political orders that were established at the end of Babylon's Ashes struggle to deal with it. I won't get too deep into the politics of all of this now because a lot of this has been building for quite some time and is pretty involved.
This ship that appears is a part of a fleet that was built on Laconia, one of the outer worlds that had been inhabited by heretofore Martians who escaped from Sol system after the collapse in the preceding novels. Using technology garnered from the protomolecule, the Laconians have built ships that are nearly indestructible and the leader has used it on himself to achieve a post-human state (if you aren't up on the series, the protomolecule is a holdover from a long-dead alien civilization that showed up in the first book and has caused problems off and on ever since. Characters in the book have used it to reverse-engineer technology that is far advanced from where humans are at that time.).
Once the Laconians have used their superior technology to take over the system in what they hope will be a bloodless coup, the rest of the novel turns into one of intrigue and insurrection. The crew of the Rocinante reunite and join forces with other rebels in their attempt to fight against the occupation. It is during this plot that the authors again demonstrate their careful planning and understanding of political alliances. The Rocinante crew walk a tight line in their actions because the want to throw off this new power but they want to avoid emboldening less-careful factions, avoid harming as many people as possible, gain the trust of those who have not trusted them, and try not to provoke excessive retaliation. The more thoughtful on the crew also begin to see how their role at one time matched the role of the new power. All of this occurs while Holden inadvertently supplants Bobbie, the new captain, and Amos reacts against all of it. The narrative really is delicately and complexly layered at this point. And this is the benefit of the series: the characters' personalities are already written and the reader has some reasonable expectations about how the world works. The authors can use all of this stored knowledge and rely on subtler cues to evoke larger meanings.
So, a number of plots ensue and the crew is finally able to reboard the Rocinante. But in the series of events leading to this, Holden is captured by the Laconians while he is attempting to draw attention away from one of the group's actions. By the end of the novel, Holden is still in Laconian custody and the Rocinante has escaped through the gate to the Freehold, a world they had to visit at the beginning of the novel. In amongst all of these plot points, another element emerges that had popped up in a prior novel. We find out that whatever alien civilization had created the protomolecule, there was another alien civilization that had stopped them and contained the protomolecule. We had seen evidence of this on the planet Ilus, or New Terra. In this novel, when the Laconians attempt to use a technology that they do not fully understand the whole system blanks out for a few minutes. That is, everyone across the system loses a few minutes, they black out or blink out and then back into existence. No one knows what this is or why this has happened but the way that Holden puts it is that the civilization that created the protomolecule is orders of magnitude more advanced than humans and that the civilization that stopped the protomolecule is orders of magnitude more advanced than them. He really wants the Laconians to stop messing with the protomolecule because there is no way of know what it is capable of or what others might be capable of doing to stop it.
The major things happening by the end of the novel are:
Holden is separated from the crew and held prisoner in enemy territory;
the Rocinante and crew are in unfamiliar territory with locals who might sell them out;
the Laconians, with their advanced technology, have been setback in their attempts to conquer all of humanity but they still have;
the Laconians have a weak understanding of the power that they yield and their leader seems disinclined to worry too much about it;
said Laconian leader is using the protomolecule to alter his own chemistry and has the ability to see the way that other think (maybe);
Clarissa Mao has died and this has left Amos a bit unhinged.
There is more going on, but these are just the major things that popped into my head as I am writing this. The table seems fully set at this point. The stakes have risen considerably since the opening of the novel and the authors really have risked a lot in the narrative to bring the characters to this point.
I have really enjoyed the series up to this point, but I have to say that this is the first time that I have felt really excited to continue reading. I have Tiamat's Wrath on my shelf and ready to go.
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