The Expanse, part 8: Tiamat's Wrath

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 20^th 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.

The Expanse, part 7: Persepolis Rising

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:

1. Holden is separated from the crew and held prisoner in enemy territory;

2. the Rocinante and crew are in unfamiliar territory with locals who might sell them out;

3. the Laconians, with their advanced technology, have been setback in their attempts to conquer all of humanity but they still have;

4. the Laconians have a weak understanding of the power that they yield and their leader seems disinclined to worry too much about it;

5. said Laconian leader is using the protomolecule to alter his own chemistry and has the ability to see the way that other think (maybe);

6. 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.

 

The Expanse, part 6: Babylon's Ashes

 

Having finished the 6^th installment of James SA Corey's The Expanse series, I have to take a moment to step back a little from the novel itself to consider the whole of the series so far. First, I will say that I have been enjoying the series so far because of the development of the characters, the intricately constructed politics of the solar system (and beyond) that the authors develop and the conflicts between the factions that ensue, and for the local cultural differences that make up these factions. The novels themselves are getting more complex as the series continues as more characters move in and out of the narrative and more story lines weave into one another to form the overarching plot of the novel. Elements and characters from preceding books come back or take on new importance as the series continues, as well. In other words, The Expanse is making good on its early promise.

One of the elements of this series that I enjoy the most is the development of slang, creole, and idioms used by people in different places. Unlike other science fiction novels in which nations still play a key role in economics and politics, the base societal unit in this series is origin. For the characters in the novels – whether they were born in a gravity well such as Earth or Mars, or in reduced gravity such as on the Moon, or in the micro-gravity of the asteroid Belt – where they have lived their lives, and hence what shape their bodies take, is a profound identifying factor. Characters identify themselves and one another by these origins. Those whose bodies have adapted to micro-gravity cannot survive on a planet with stronger gravity or under higher acceleration forces, and this marks them as separate from those whose bodies are adapted to stronger gravitational forces. One of the strengths of this series is identifying this as a source of contention and, eventually, prejudice and discrimination. Because in addition to having, in some ways, more fragile bodies, the Belters (as they are known) have adapted the way that they have because they or their ancestors lived in space and have performed the menial work that permits survival for those living on Earth and the colonies. This new form of colonialism has a new set of victims with grievances that are all too familiar.

This is something that also sets The Expanse apart from other sci-fi stories. There is political strife in a lot of other stories, but they so rarely conceive of a future that seems to be so truly an extension of humanity's colonial past and cultural tendencies. The privileged in this world survive because of the invisible many who provide food, transport, oxygen, and the other necessities of life. Throughout the course of the series the invisible many begin to make themselves seen. Much of the tension of the novels arise because James Holden, captain of the Rocinante and one of the protagonists of the series, is empathetic to the realities that the Belters face. He is from Earth but he sees the iniquities of their treatment and the ways in which his own life has been made possible by the Belters.

The series is getting to the point where the individual novels cannot really stand on their own any more. The first 3 or 4 could stand alone, but too much has happened and there is too much backstory that the reader will need to know to make sense of the story of this novel on its own. Babylon's Ashes opens in the midst of the massive solar system-wide war that had been sparked in the preceding novel. To find the roots of this conflict, the reader will have to go back several novels further, but the immediate causes of the war involved a threat to the survival of the Belters and Marco Inaros' taking advantage of this fact to consolidate a fleet of ships to oppose the powers in place. Specifically, the alien gate that allows ships access to further reaches of space may prove enough to render the Belters obsolete.

As Inaros sees it, and as he pushes to make other Belters understand, their lives hang in the balance of colonies needing their work to survive. Inaros believes that the opening of nearly endless new planets will provide cheap and easy access to resources that only Belters could provide, up to this point. And because the Belters would be unable to survive on a planet's surface, he argues that their way of life and their own purpose is coming to an end. But Inaros is a demagogue, a criminal and pirate who takes advantage of the Belters' actual plight in order to make a name for himself and to build his own power. Inaros' true power seems to be his own rhetorical mastery. He successfully mythologizes himself and the Free Navy, as his fleet of pirated ships in known. He also deftly re-narrativizes events and shifts his plan so that even defeats are recast as feints or deceptions meant to lull his enemies into a false sense of security. Inaros keeps his goals abstract so that he can never be pinned down to specific aims. He is defeated in the end, but his actual fate is unknown due to an anomaly the gate's physics. He isn't nor definitively dead, which means that he may still return.

Inaros is an interesting villain because his motivations are at least partially noble. But he is also vain and petty to balance out a bit. What makes Holden appealing, then, is also what makes Inaros appealing as his foil. They both are complex reflections of human nature. They both intermingle their private and selfish desires with their broader aims. They both mix in just enough of bad with their good, or good with their bad to inspire common identification with the reader. Corey draws naturalistic character traits for these characters to heighten the drama of the series. This does tend to keep things interesting.

In the end, this novel is enough to keep me reading the series. I recently wrote a post about sci-fi series and the trouble that they can run into when the source material has seem to run its course. This series is not there and the strands that are coming together are enough to make me think that the entire arc of the series has been more carefully drawn than I had initially thought. I suspect that the authors have in mind where this is going to end up and are deliberate in their choices in taking us there. This, for me, is a great place to be as a reader. This feeling of trust that I have in the authors is exciting because I don't know where it is all headed but I think that I am going to like where it leads. This is something that may also separate the good series from the bad.

Foundation, Part 7: Prelude to Foundation

 Nearly a year and a half ago, I undertook to read through Asimov's classic sci-fi series, Foundation, and write about the books. This is one of several sci-fi series that I decided to read, including Frank Herbert's Dune series (which I bailed on after 4 books), Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series (which I also bailed on after 2 books), and James SA Corey's The Expanse series (of which I am currently reading the sixth book and will likely continue). One of the major differences that I see in these series are those that were planned to be series of novels (or even novels to begin with) and those that were not. Corey's series was planned to be a long-running series from the start, and the novels show it. Each novel is more or less complete on its own, but they also build to a broader arc across the novels. The novels serve more as episodes than as simple stand-alones, meaning that you could read just one of the novels without the others, but it would make more sense to read them together.

These other series, though (I am necessarily leaving out a lot of other series and authors I could include, but this is the choice I am making), seem to be caught by surprise by their own sequels. That is, the sequels must pick up after a conclusion has been reached in the predecing book, and not always convincingly. Both Herbert and Asimov get around this problem by jumping hundreds or thousands of years into the future. This way, there is no messy character continuity to keep up and any narrative gaps can be explained by the chronological gap. The exception to this is that Herbert keeps bringing Duncan Idaho back from the dead for some reason.

When I catch myself wondering if I am being overly harsh in judging these authors for returning to worlds that may be personal or fan favorites, and may well have proven lucrative as well, I just keep remembering all of the series I have quit reading for one reason or another. I also think about the nose-dives that some of these series take. Redezvous with Rama, for example, may be one of my favorite golden era sf books, but Rama II was enough to stop me in my tracks. Likewise, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is a personal favorite while Forever Peace is merely okay and I haven't yet tried to get into Forever Free. I also think about the series I have loved. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and the book of short fiction that followed remains among my favorite novels. The same is true for Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past series. So it isn't the form of the sequel itself that is bad. There are a lot of writers who can beautifully pull off continuing novels in a fictional world.

To bring this back to my original topic, Asimov must have felt a bit like Arthur Conan Doyle resurrecting Sherlock Holmes after killing him off in returning the galaxy of Foundation. After all, he had written the series to an end in Foundation and Earth that was, if not completely satisfying, at least conclusive. Prelude to Foundation takes up Hari Seldon's rise to prominence on Trantor and his early adventures. Some of it is good and, as a stand-alone novel, it has its charms. However when taken in the context of the rest of the series, it leaves a little wanting.

Prelude to Foundation takes place first chronologically in the Foundation series, but it was written second-to-last. At the beginning of the novel, Seldon has traveled to Trantor and delivered a paper on psychohistory. This immediately catches the attention of Cleon I, emperor of the Galactic Empire. Seldon presentation proved the science of psychohistory as theoretically possible but Cleon thought that this meant that Seldon could predict the future and brings Seldon to him in order to gain his services. Hari resists, explaining that there is no practical application for the science and that it might take his entire lifetime to actually apply it.

Disappointed Cleon lets him go but instructs his right-hand to keep tabs on Seldon so that they can take him back when they can use him. Seldon is rescued from his surveillance by a friendly stranger who then helps to keep him in hiding for most of the rest of the novel.

Seldon ends up traveling to varied parts of Trantor to stay ahead of imperial reach and there is a lot of local flavor type interactions that haven't aged well. Seldon creeps on women and he meets a kid whose speech wouldn't be out of place in a Horatio Alger novel. In the end (no worries, I won't spoil it), Seldon already knows where things will end up in Foundation and Earth, even though this takes place several thousand years after his death.

This is the problem of prequels. There is no real tension in the danger that Seldon faces because I have already read five novels in which he plays a major role and know that he doesn't die yet. Granted, he dies in the opening pages of Foundation, but by then his mark is made and his influence extends millennia. Next, Asimov retcons “foreshadowing” of events that take place far in the narrative future, but which the reader has already experienced if they are reading in publication order. This generally doesn't read well and it seems more like an aging rock group begrudgingly playing the hit they wrote 30 years prior than an authentic narrative embellishment. There are then also the connections that Asimov wants to make between Foundation and his Robot series. This connection seemed unnecessary in Foundation and Earth and it leads to more phony foreshadowing in this novel, too. I haven't read enough of the Robot series to know how this affects that series, but perhaps I will head to those books after this series is done to find out for myself.

Also, and most damningly, Asimov tries to be funny in this book. For all that I admire in Asimov's writing, it is never for his wit. See, on Trantor there is a rival faction to the Emperor and that is Wye sector. More than once, a character will mention the name “Wye” and the interlocutor will proceed to give an unneeded and unasked-for explanation, thinking the first character was asking, “Why?” They are homonyms, get it!

I've shit on this book enough. There are things that I liked about it. Hari Seldon has been a force in this whole series but he has been distant. As I mentioned, he dies very early in the series and he just keeps showing up as a pre-recorded hologram. But here, he is an actual character, and he is one of Asimov's more dynamic and round ones. Beyond this, he is a moral character who wants to both do the right thing and stand by his science. The narrative itself is cohesive and shows Asimov's inventiveness in creating these different sectors with different traditions and styles. There are a couple of genuine surprises that kept the novel interesting and it ended up being an enjoyable read.

I won't say that this is my favorite in the series, but it was serviceable. I have one more book to go before I can put this series to bed and I'm not sure what to expect from it. I suspect that it will be a grab bag, a little like this novel is. I know that it follows Hari's story between the end of this novel and the beginning of Foundation, but I don't know what time period it covers. I am hoping that there will be a bit more explanation of psychohistory and I am really hoping that it doesn't go in a direction that undoes what made Foundation great.

The Expanse, part 5. Nemesis Games

 So I just finished Nemesis Games, the fifth book in The Expanse series by James SA Corey. This book changes tactics in a couple of ways from the first four books. The dynamics are different and the story feels fresher for it. Before getting into that, though, I have to say that this series has been good keeping a forward momentum while also hitting a lot of the same beats. What I mean by that is that the first four books, and to some extent this book too, have hit a lot of the same narrative beats. Some disaster takes place in the solar system, Holden and crew get involved somehow, the original disaster turns out to be a part of something bigger that leads back to the government of Earth, Mars, Luna, or the Outer Belt Alliance, and then with some help from one of these factions Holden, et al. manage to resolve the crisis. The narrative paths differ somewhat within each of the novels, but they all tend toward this basic plot arc.

The first major difference that this book adopts is separating the crew. After the last adventure on Ilus, the Rocinante is docked at Tycho Station for some much-needed repairs. Aside from Holden, the crew are all drawn from Tycho to various points for their own reasons. Amos heads to Earth on a mysterious mission, Naomi heads out to try to help out a son that the reader discovers she has, and Alex decides to go to Mars to find closure with his ex-wife. Holden is left alone on the station, feeling unmoored for the first time in the series. For maybe the first time since the opening book, we are reminded of these characters' histories. In Leviathan Wakes, all of the characters aboard the Canturbury are there because of something dark in their histories. Holden was dishonorably discharged from the Earth Navy, same for Alex, Amos had something dark in his past, and we never really knew much about Naomi. Now these personal histories pop back up for the crew and it reinforces the idea that they have become a family by choice, that there is nothing in their past to tie them together. This adds some complexity to the characters that was not there before. It brings more depth to Amos and Naomi, in particular.

While the crew is separated, disaster strikes in the solar system. A terrorist attack on Earth leaves millions dead and changes the power dynamics of the entire system. Coordinated with the Earth attacks are strikes on both Tycho Station and on the Prime Minister of Mars' convoy. All of the important people live, but the alien protomolecule is stolen during the attack on Tycho Station.

Here I am going to gloss over big chunks of the book because, for a while, things will shake out as they do in most of these books.

All of this adds up to the next big shift from the preceding books. That is, we are left with an unknown at the end of the novel. Most of the pieces have been wrapped up: the crew is re-united, those in power have mainly figured out what happened and why these coordinated attacks took place, but the gap that we are left with at the end of the novel is what has happened to the protomolecule. For maybe the first time in the series, we have a cliff-hanger. In the first four books the end has always been left open and there may have been some lingering questions to follow, but this is the first time that it seems that a novel is purposely leading into the next one.

I'm not sure what this means for the series. I didn't mind that this happened, it just seemed to be an interesting change from what the series had lead me to expect from the books. I think that this left me a little more excited to get to the next book. The protomolucule was part of the inciting action in the first novel and it has been in the background of the story for the entire time. It will be interesting to see how it will re-enter the narrative.

Reading, Writing, Fatigue, and Times of Quarantine

Last week I finished reading James S.A. Corey’s Cibola Burn, the fourth book in The Expanse series.  Originally, I had envisioned reading and writing about a number of different sci-fi series as a part of this blog.  So far, it had worked and for the last couple of years I have read a lot of great books that I have been meaning to get to.  There have also been a few not-so-great books in there, too, but I don’t mind that so much.

The Corey book was good.  It was an entertaining read and continues to develop the series on a good trajectory.  But when it came time to begin writing about it, I just couldn’t seem to make myself do it.  I have generally been pretty good about motivating myself to write since graduate school, but this just wasn’t happening.

There are a couple of reasons that I just couldn’t seem to get myself over the hump and write it.  The first reason is just time.  The longer the span of time between finishing reading and beginning writing, the more I put it off.  I was losing little bits of plot and details about the characters.  I write most of these posts from memory and with minimal notes.  I will occasionally draft little bits while reading or note particular passages, but I don’t get overly studious about it.  

I write most of these posts within a day or two of finishing a book while it is still relatively fresh and while it is still on my mind.

I hadn’t gotten a chance to write about this because my job has been working massive amounts of overtime for the last 3 months since the Covid 19 quarantine started.  I work in a warehouse in inventory control.  My job is not super physical but I am on my feet all day.  It can have physical elements to it at times.  As our working days increased in length, I just didn’t have it in me to come home, shift gears to think about writing, and still have time to spend with my wife, eat, and have time to relax.  I just ran out of time.  This meant that the things that I would normally do during the week after work would get pushed to the weekends and the time I would normally spend reading and writing then dried up as well.

In fact, this is the first bout of sustained writing that I have done in nearly that whole three months.

The reason, then, that this all caught up to me is that I had been writing a backlog of posts for about the last year.  At one point, I had about 6 months’ worth of posts pre-written and scheduled for a weekly update.  Just this month I ran through my backlog and am up to current.

This made me question the future of this blog.  Did I really need to post weekly?   It was my own schedule and I can really do what I want.  No one really reads this anyway, so what was the difference?

I still don't have an answer to these questions.  There is a part of me that wants to chuck this whole blog and concentrate what time I do get to another project.  But then again, I am loathe to give up on something that I have, essentially, been doing just for myself all along.  So I miss a post here and there.  No one cares.  I can pick up whenever I want.

I think that I will keep going.  Maybe I can focus on shorter posts, or maybe I can find a different way to carve out some extra time.  I do like thinking and writing about books.  

Here is the point of all of this: work is fatiguing, even when it is work that we want to do, and particularly when it is work that we do not want to do.  I can’t take a break from my day job right now but I may be able to take a break from this for a little to recharge and refocus.  I do have other projects that I want to work on, or maybe I can just let things run fallow for a spell before trying to take anything on.

Either way, the regular posts are going to stop and I will plan to continue as I get the opportunity and inspiration.  I am a little disappointed to disrupt the series I have started, but this may just become a future opportunity to circle back and write about some of these books at a future time.

The Expanse, pt. 3: Abaddon's Gate

This post is going to be a little off-the-cuff because I finished this book about a week ago and I am beginning to lose some of the details.  I won't get too bogged down in the specifics of plot and so forth, but will stick to the broad themes and my impressions.
This is the third novel in The Expanse series and it does begin to feel like it is settling in.  The first novel, Leviathan Wakes, sets the stage for a densely populated and fast-paced sci-fi/adventure/detective story.  These elements seemed to be a little crammed together until I had a realization about the series that I will come back to in a bit.  That first novel was very satisfying and showed a lot of potential.
The second novel, Caliban's War, opened with a bang and started off very strong.  It got a little logy and recycled some plot elements from the first novel in a way that was not quite as satisfying as it could have been.  Familiar characters played their familiar parts in a satisfying way and the introduction of a few new personalities kept it fresh. 
The third novel of the series, Abaddon's Gate, takes a bit of a turn in a way that helped to renew the series' direction.  This book veered away from the lost-little-girl MacGuffin of the first two books to pursue a new course.  In the first two books the reader is introduced to the protomolecule, a piece of alien bioware that was first weaponized by humans and then seemed to become sentient.  At the opening of the third novel, the protomolecule has stationed itself as a gate among the outer planets and seems to react to a ship flying into it.
What follows is a three-way standoff between the forces of Mars, Earth, and the Outer Planets Alliance as they each attempts to cordon off and, ultimately, control the portal.  Holden and his crew, having been framed for sparking a hot war, are the first to enter the gate in their attempt to evade the other forces.  This is as far as I am going with plot summary.
The entry into the gate is the first major departure from a relatively realistic sci-fi world.  So far in The Expanse, the alien protomolecule is the only thing to really push the boundaries of suspension of disbelief.  There are the standard near-relativistic speeds that are currently out of our grasp and other space technologies, but these are part and parcel of most mainstream sci-fi and don't push credulity too much.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is hard sci-fi, but it keeps things pretty restrained. 
Here is the big difference for me: once the Rocinante passes through the gate, it experiences different physical laws of the universe.  The protomolecule is able to alter laws of physics, and this is a major shift from the preceding books.
In this regard, this series reminds me of Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy in which humans make contact with alien civilization who are able to alter physics.  That trilogy, like The Expanse, remains relatively realistic up to this point (Liu includes some medical/cryo tech that strains suspension of disbelief, but I mean this in a general way). 
For both series, the turn from realistic, if still fantastic, sci-fi, also marks a turning point for the characters in the story.  For Liu, this marks, literally, the end of the world as the characters perceive it.  For the characters of The Expanse, the future is less certain.  There are still a lot of books to come after this and this changes the nature of the world within this fiction.  I leave this book more interested to see where the series will go than at the end of the second book.

So, here is the realization that I hinted at earlier.  While listening to an episode of Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders' fantastic podcast Our Opinions are Correct about pulp fiction, I realized what it is about The Expanse that is simultaneously engrossing and a bit frustrating.  This series, it seems to me, takes many of its cues from adventure pulp.  James Holden, so far the central figure of the world of The Expanse, is a no-nonsense captain of a certain type.  He is unflaggingly tied to his sense of ethics and is a steadfast friend to his crew.  He plays a sort of moral center in this world that is largely built on his notions of integrity.  He maintains this sense of morality even as he kills and steals.  The books do recognize his flaws, but he persistently overcomes, and then reverts back to his own personality.  This is an energizing narrative to read.  He gets into jams with his crew, and they fight and cogitate their way out.  The serial nature of the books lends itself to the pulp aesthetic, as well.  I know that there are a lot of books left in the series and though I am not positive that Holden and his crew will continue intact through them all, I sort of suspect that they will, or that most of the characters will remain constant.  At a certain point, I would think that the appeal of the characters and their dynamic is as much a part of the appeal as the sci-fi elements. 
I have more books to go to see if this prediction bears out. 
Of course, none of this is to say that the books are worse, or weaker for it.  This just helps me to contextualize the world in a different way.  The series has been good so far and I will continue to read these for as long as I enjoy them.  In a way, I hope that I am wrong and that I will find in these books what I found in Liu's, but I am okay just enjoying the adventure for what it is for now.

The Expanse, pt. 2: Caliban's War

Caliban's War, the second novel in James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, hits a lot of the same notes that the first novel does.  The crew of the Rocinante returns, with a few new additions, to continue their battle with the protomolecule. 
The novel opens with the crew fighting space pirates at the behest of the OPA, the newly-legitimized Outer Planets Alliance.
At the end of Leviathan Wakes, the protomolecule has crash-landed on Venus and no one really knows what it is doing there.  Of course this doesn't last long and there is a new threat for the new book.
Holden and his crew adopt a similar mission to the first book, seeking out a lost daughter.  Mei, the young daughter of Praxidike Meng, had lived on Ganymede and was kidnapped by her doctor with other immuno-compromised children.  The structure of the novel is similarly shaggy-dogged as the first novel as the authors juggle many different players in the game.  The crew of the Rocinante is always central to the action, but the stakes remain very high with cold-warring colonial factions and a threat to humanity.
The alterations to the protomolocule work well for the new novel and Corey manages to keep all of the players more or less clear.  I was a little dismayed that the second novel in was already recycling a lost-daughter plot, but it ends up working out well as a motivating factor.  The wider world of the Expanse now knows who the central characters are, so they are able to use this to their advantage in funding their mission. 
As I write this, I am finding it difficult to summarize the plot and to organize my thoughts about it.  This is partially because there is a lot going on in this novel and I don't want to get too bogged down in details.  This is also partly because I think I want to like this more than I do.  The books have been enjoyable and I don't have any real complaints about them, but something is keeping me from diving into the series a bit more fully.  I haven't figured out what that is yet, and I know that this makes for bad writing.  For now, I am going to continue reading the books.  I am interested in ferreting out what it is that is blocking me. 
So  stay tuned for another lack-luster installment in this blog series that muddles through a novel that probably deserves better.

The Expanse, pt. 1: Leviathan Wakes

James S.A. Corey's Leviathan Wakes is a big book that is a part of a big series.  The scope of the novel is equally big.  There is a lot about this author (a pseudonym for two authors working together) and the series (that is currently being adapted into the series The Expanse by Amazon) that merit attention, but I am just interested in this novel so far.
It must have been a few years ago when I started dedicating a lot more time to reading and writing about sci-fi that I started seeing these books.  Initially, I thought that this was an old series because there were so many of them.  Each of the book covers features similar cover art and the same lettering style.  It looks a lot like a reissue of a recovered series.
But this novel, the first in the series was just published in 2011 and the books have been coming out nearly every year with the total up to 8 and a new novella just announced.  So, I had missed the boat a bit until now.
The book opens with a prologue that narrates a terrifying scene of a woman trapped in a storage locker aboard the spaceship Scopuli after it had been forcibly boarded by a hostile raiding party.  Julie, the woman trapped in the locker, will become the center of a shaggy-dog detective narrative around which the sci-fi narrative is wrapped.
The novel's two main characters, Holden and Miller (a disgraced naval officer and disgraced police detective, respectively), carry two separate narrative strands that eventually merge as the case of the missing girl evolves from a wandering daughter case to massive, interplanetary political upheaval.
The exact details of the plot dissolve into the background as the story unfolds.  There is an ancient alien virus, tribal conflict between humans of different colonial origins, and futuristic hardware.  The world built in the novel is one that is familiar to fans of contemporary sci-fi.  That is, a world that is similar to our own in its lived-in qualities.  This is not the glossy world of Star Trek where everything is military-grade and state of the art.  The ships and gear range from the bleeding edge of technology to patched-together, aging industrial haulers.
There is a lot going on in this novel, too much to cover here, but I will say that this was an enjoyable read.  Corey's matter-of-fact description of inter-faction conflict is reminiscent of Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  In the world of this novel, colonialism travels into space along with humanity as people living in space stations in the and outside of the asteroid belt, on Mars, the Moon, and back on Earth compete for resources and jockey for political power.  The descriptions of the bodies of human that are born and live in different gravities echoes the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, who so frequently muses on the effects that deep space will have on human evolution.
When my recently pared-down sci-fi book group decided to read this novel, I went and bought a box set of the first three novels.  I look forward to continuing this series and seeing what the authors can do with the world they have created.  I am a little torn about whether I want to begin watching the series just yet.  I may hold out until I get further into the books.