I have finally caught up with the series that I started back in October of 2019. All things considered, I don't think I made a bad job of it. I read 8 novels that are all around 500 pages long in the space of a year and a half. When I first started Leviathan Wakes, I had bought a set of the first three books in the series. As I finished the first one and moved into the second, I thought that I would finish these three and see what happens, not really planning on going beyond those three books anytime soon. But it turns out that I read these pretty well back-to-back over that time since. (This isn't really true. I was reading this series concurrently with the Foundation and Dune series. I had them going one after the other to give myself some breathing room in between them.)
The scope of the novels has grown increasingly larger since the very first one. The nature of the conflict changes, the political context in which the characters find themselves shifts nearly constantly, and the technology changes over the course of the entire series. Sometimes all of these things change at once in an instant, and quite dramatically.
What this series does well is to give us a lot of variation on the influence that the large-scale changes have on individuals. There are some hugely catastrophic things that take place that the characters seem to take in stride while other events can change everything down to the way a character lives everyday life. I realize that I am being very general here and I will get to specifics in a moment. The reason that I single out this aspect of the novels is that I think that this is true to life. There is something honest about the presentation of everyday life in a world that is constantly bombarded from all directions.
In this series, when a vast unknown force, the Laconians, emerges and takes over all of known human existence with alien technology, there is a fundamental shift in political interactions. Former enemies band together, some allies split from one another, things such as trade agreements that had previously meant the difference between life and death fall into complete irrelevance, and repercussions just reverberate through all known quadrants of life. But on the small scale, for the Belters and other groups who were already marginalized, all this meant was resisting a different master. For the protagonists of the series, the current and former crew of the Rocinante, things turn in a different way. The crew is broken up and scattered. The plotting is pretty dense, so I won't get into specifics here. But what happens after the split is that the members spend a lot of time thinking about their lost members but they continue to serve the same functions. Their relationships repair with different groups of people but they all proceed in the direction that they were already headed.
This novel was originally published in March of 2019, but I think of this book in a lot of ways as a plague book. This notion that we can face catastrophic change in our lives that is simultaneously Earth shattering and mundane seems very familiar to people who have lived through a year plus of quarantine due to the Coronavirus pandemic. This also makes me think about living through the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In some ways, everything changed. Or enough changed that it had broad influence throughout our lives. Some of the change was personal and psychological, other change was political and only touched most people in a theoretical or ideological way. But in both cases, for as much as things changed, there were large swaths of our lives that were just the same as they have been.
Moving to the smaller scale in this book, there are two things that really stood out to me about how this story was told. First is that the narrative is even more split than it had been in any of the previous books. In every one of the novels, the chapters are structured around a particular character's perspective so that the overall novels achieved a sort of kaleidoscopic quasi-omniscience. Each of the character's perspectives is limited, but when taken all together, there is a collected perspective that is much broader. It isn't really omniscient. This would properly be called shifting limited perspective, but the authors do something that some authors at the turn of the 20th century (Henry James, most notably, but Edith Wharton and some others) used to good effect. That is, occasionally the reader gets a moment from one character's perspective and then we see the same moment narrated from a different character's perspective. Narration of one event will talk back to itself within the novel and the reader gets a different point of view of the same idea or same action. It's a neat trick.
This leads to the second big thing that struck me about this book, which is the extent to which it uses re-narration throughout. There are a number of instances throughout the book in which this narration and counter-narration happen. This broadens the already broad perspective of the novel. It shows the shades of disagreement and misunderstanding that happen between the characters, and it also shows reciprocated emotion in a novel way. But what is particularly effective about this device in this novel is that it allows the authors to describe their established characters again from a new perspective. New people see these characters differently. And the fact that these characters from the first novels are now 30-something years older than they were when this all started means that not only have their outward appearances changed, but their conceptions of self and interactions with each other have changed as well.
The problem is that this can get a little confusing and distracting. There is just so much going on in this novel that I found myself re-reading passages or checking up on wikipedia to make sure that I didn't misremember something from a previous novel. There is a lot going on.
Which makes me a little nervous about the final book. Or, at least what is reportedly the final book which is due to come out this year or next. I am uncertain where everything is going and the authors have shown themselves willing to kill off characters, make significant shifts in the setting and events of the novels, and even to change the laws of physics in their books. This means that pretty much everything is on the table. This is exciting for a fan because it could lead to something really inventive and it will certainly be surprising. But it is nerve wracking for the same reason. Finales don't always have a great track record. I have high hopes for the conclusion to this series and I look forward to reading the spin off novellas once they become more widely available.
I'll just have to wait to see what the rest of the story looks like.
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