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.

More on Heinlein

So, I am going to bast through this one because I am feeling pretty ambivalent about it and I want to get this done before I change my mind.  This novel, like others of Heinlein's I have read, has some interesting aspects to it and is a generally good sci-fi novel but also presents some elements more difficult to swallow.  Really, it is difficult to separate these difficult bits out because they are thoroughly baked into the entire narrative.
Here it is: The Day After Tomorrow is about a small military base in America attempting to resist an occupying force (Panasiatics) after they have defeated the American military and taken down the government.  Heinlein doesn't describe the war, he is just interested in the aftermath.
The base is well-hidden under a mountain and those remaining have access to a new scientific discovery called the Ledbetter effect.  This idea is pretty cool because it exploits expansions of the electromagnetic spectrum that link it to nuclear and gravitic forces.  The colonizers have no idea that this power exists and the Americans seem to be able to do pretty much anything with this new power.  This is the first cool idea.
The second cool idea is that those remaining decide to create a fake religion in order to organize a resistance against the Panasiatics.  They see that religious institutions are left alone and they exploit this to open churches across the country and recruit patriots to fight with them.
So far, so good.
Heinlein consistently dehumanizes the "Panasiatic" enemy and describes ways that the Ledbetter effect can be used to single out individuals based on race.  They can "tune" the effect to work only on those he calls "Panasiatic."  They also use the effect to shield the churches, barring anyone not white from entry.  Heinlein specifies this exclusion, essentially erasing other people of color from America, or at the very least excludes them from participating in the resistance.
The characters in the novel also use a variety of slurs against the "Panasians" that don't bear repeating.
In a previous post, I wrote about the morality that I perceived in Heinlein's work and the difficulties that I have with it.  In this book, he extends these problems.  He celebrates individualism at the same time that he wants everyone to know their place.
I do enjoy many elements of his work and believe him to be a sci-fi visionary in many respects.  This element keeps popping up and it makes it harder to enjoy otherwise meritorious novels.

Heinlein's moral universe

All of my familiarity with Robert Heinlein's work comes from the last few years.  I have often heard the name and the associations with it, but I did not really have any first-hand knowledge until I came across a copy of Farnham's Freehold (1964) in a small, secondhand bookstore in Cleveland.  The book is Land of the Lost-ish and somewhat entertaining for what it is, but is presents some troubling elements.  The eponymous Farnham is a strong man figure who out-wits and out-matches all those around him, even winning the hand of his ineffectual son's girlfriend as a replacement for his own wife.  There are some standard atomic war fears with a touch of time travel technology thrown in.  Simply, Farnham is transported to a distant future in which a non-white race has risen to power and whites are enslaved.  However, all of those in power are inept and are prejudiced against science, which Farnham uses to his own advantage to gain prominence despite his alien status.

What is more interesting about the book is the way that it interacts with Heinlein's other work.  

The second novel I read by Robert Heinlein is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), which is a vastly superior novel.  In this book, Heinlein describes a settled moon whose inhabitants share a neocolonial relationship with those still on Earth.  The people living on the Moon are exploited to provide a better standard of living for others and have little say in their own fate.  The protagonist, with the help of an advanced computer, develops a de-centralized network of revolutionaries to free the Moon from the imperialist hold of the Earth.  Whereas Farnham was positioned as a powerful outsider who gains insider status through his novelty and sheer force of will, the protagonist in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress gains power through his anonymity.  He is unsuspecting and only partially in control of his own fate (his computer friend does much of the actual planning and organizational work).  In some ways, Heinlein has flipped the source of power from the strong man to the loose network, or, from the single source of power to the collective.  This latter rendering of power was at odds with my expectations of Heinlein; it seemed out of line with the paternalistic, quasi-authoritarian that I had read about.

Most recently, I read Starship Troopers (1959) with my sci-fi book club and was equally torn over where he actually stands.  Having seen the Paul Verhoeven adaptation of the novel, I was uniquely positioned to understand that this is a novel about guys in space fighting bugs.  Actually, the movie does pick up on some other aspects of the novel that I am not really interested in commenting on at the moment aside from the Michael Ironsides character (I think he plays Sgt. Zim.  I am writing this whole thing from memory, so bear with me on this).  Throughout most of the novel, Rico is a seemingly reluctant soldier who excels in the infantry.  His motivations for joining the armed services is nominally to gain citizenship but are actually more murky.    Rico spends most of the novel in school or in training and it becomes very clear that, in this world at least, that discipline and corporal punishment have replaced touchy-feely liberal values to create a better, more ordered world.  In a class called History and Moral Philosophy, Rico and his classmates learn about the days when social workers would try to understand the reasons people commit crimes, which led to roving gangs and a world on the edge of breakdown.  Their instructor reassures them that floggings have really taught thugs their place and everyone is better off.  The nature of citizenship and the right to franchise are also discussed.  Rico's instructor informs the class that it is right that only those who have served in the armed forces should gain full citizenship and the right to vote because they are the only ones capable of putting the needs of the nation above the needs of the individual.  

This last bit is where I lose the thread, again.  Restricted right to the vote and full citizenship seem more in line with the paternalistic Heinlein but his reverence for community-mindedness (not nationalistic, but more communal, as described in the novel) turns the corner back to the Heinlein I recognized in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  

This is a post without an end, an analysis without a conclusion.  I partially think that Heinlein is all of these things, that he believed in a mish-mash of philosophy and instinct that does not always add up.  Another part of me thinks he might just have adopted different ideals for different books in the service of the stories.  Because sci-fi is a speculative genre, he was able to play out different scenarios based on what he was thinking at the time.  Another part of me wants to give up trying to piece together an over-arching view of him as a writer and just take the books as they come.  But where I finally come down, as my training compels me, is to two conclusions.  The first is easy; I need to read more Heinlein.  Beyond this question about his politics, I do like his writing.  The second conclusion is a bit more complex.  There is a tension between the strong individual who wishes to take control of their own fate and the place that the individual has in a collective.  Farnham is a strong individual who struggles against a world that doesn't make sense to him to return to normalcy.  In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the protagonist feels allegiance for the community on the Moon against the community on Earth.  He creates a world that relies on the collective power of many individuals united together against an outside foe.  Finally, Starship Troopers demonstrates the extent of the tension in the infantry.  Service to the collective becomes service to self.  Heinlein seems interested in the way that self-interest knocks against other motivations.  He seems to recognize that self-interest sometimes dictates agents to band together or even sacrifice themselves for something bigger than themselves.  This is the central tension that these novels seem to share.