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Nemesis Games, Chapters 1 - 4 Nemesis Games begins really well, although the focus on continuity makes it feel like more of a sequel to the first three books than the fourth did. It also features what might be one of the best chapters the Coreys have written. Chapter One: Holden Nemesis Games, Chapter 1 posted:A year after the Callisto attacks, almost three years after he and his crew had headed out for Ilus, and about six days after they’d gotten back, James Holden floated next to his ship and watched a demolition mech cut her apart. Nemesis Games, Chapter 1 posted:Holden thought of Sam’s impish smile and habit of tempering her criticism with silliness, and felt something clench behind his breastbone. It had been years, but the grief could still sneak up on him. In a PM conversation, Omi had the thought that Nemesis Games may have been the first novel written after Abaddon's Gate had been out in the wild and the first novel written with knowledge of how long the series was really going to be. So, some of the unresolved or undercooked story beats get brought up and addressed -- much like the main cast themselves, do ho ho. Fred adjoins things to his office. Holden supposes its because the old man hadn't bothered fitting his spacesuit catheter. I think I've brought this up before but, man, one of the things I did not expect on this reread was the references to going to the bathroom in space. It feels like a few times a book. Holden and Fred drink coffee. Holden reflects that the OPA is beginning to construct its own warships. It'll be six months or so and that may be too late to do anything with them, given the diaspora going on. They recount the core point of the Cibola Burn plot: Avasarala sent Holden out to scare people out of colonizing, he failed, and Fred is happy he failed because it means the OPA will end up in a strong position. Everything that wants to go out to the new systems must go past Medina, and Fred is ensuring that anyone who goes out there gets cheap supplies and so on, trusting that people will return the favor when the time comes. Nemesis Games, Chapter 1 posted:“Yes,” Fred said, leaning back in his chair. “The Outer Planets Alliance has always meant everything past the Belt. That’s still true. It’s just… expanded a bit.” Later, Holden returns to his quarters. Naomi is there and tells Holden that the Rocinante will be out of action for twenty-eight weeks -- seven months. Both of them think that Sakai is not as good as Sam. Amos returns, Alex wakes up from where he's snoozing on the couch, and they eat food. It's a nice scene. There's a brief newscast about the Callisto raid which is blamed on an OPA splinter faction and Holden, even the political scientist, says: Nemesis Games, Chapter 1 posted:“The OPA hardliners are having trouble getting over their ‘us against the solar system’ theology.” And that's about it. Sure, not much happens in this chapter, but it's a nice moment of downtime after everything that's happened. And the Rocinante crew, as thinly sketched as they are, do have some pleasant chemistry when they're together. Chapter Two: Alex Chapter Two opens with Alex reflecting on how he liked long haul space runs because they changed his perception of time. You can see how he's the kind of man who would throw his life on Mars away to be in space. But he's anxious, too. The Rocinante is undercrewed and the crew dynamic could blow apart at a moment's notice -- what if Amos and Holden had a disagreement, what if Naomi and Holden broke up? Alex and Amos are hanging out because Naomi and Holden are hanging out together. Alex likes Amos because he has no subtext -- he's simple, no games. He wonders whether Shed Garvey -- the medic who bought it back in Leviathan Wakes -- would've been as easy to get along with. Shed has not been mentioned since the first book. Like, remember Shed? The guy who showed up for a few chapters in the first novel, died suddenly, then maybe wasn't ever mentioned again and was only included as a nod to the RPG where one of the players needed to leave and the character had to be written out? Remember Shed? Alex mentions to Amos that he's having dreams of his wife, Talissa. He doesn't like how he left things with her and, with the Rocinante in dock for so long, thinks he has the chance to go back and apologize for being a jerk. Amos doesn't care too much. "So go," he says. A call comes in for Amos and Alex heads outside. There's a fair amount of exposition about Tycho Station and its history. He goes to see the Rocinante to tell her he'll be back. Then, he walks in on Holden and Naomi discussing how he took out a whole bulkhead to ensure that Miller wouldn't come back. Alex reflects this about Naomi: Nemesis Games, Chapter 2 posted:Alex had met Naomi Nagata back on the Canterbury. He could still see the rawboned, angry girl who Captain McDowell had introduced as their new junior engineer. She’d hidden behind her hair for almost a year. The three of them mention needing ot find something to keep them busy with the Rocinante in dock. Alex is just about to say he's going to head to Mars but, and it's a good comedic beat, Amos steps through the door and says it first. Amos needs to go back to Earth. Nemesis Games, Chapter 2 posted:Naomi sat at the stool by the breakfast bar. “What’s the matter?” Chapter Three: Naomi Naomi is playing Golgo at the Blauwe Bloom, mentioned as her bar of choice back in Caliban's War. It's been three or four years since she played Golgo but she's doing okay although she misses Sam, as does her friend Malikah. All of the people there are Belters. Naomi thinks that, while she loves her crew, there are some conversations she can never have with them given that they're from Earth and Mars. Holden shows up and Naomi thinks about how he's a big shot celebrity but that 'James Holden' is nothing like the Jim she knows. She heads out of the bar with Jim as she reflects how she used to be a bit of a party girl who enjoyed getting "very, very drunk." As they get into the lift, she says they need to talk. Not as a couple, as an XO and CO. Naomi thinks they need to hire more crew. The ship has been undercrewed but they've been coping due to its automated systems. The current crew has been working on the Rocinante ever since it was salvaged off the Donnager, which is -- if I remember correctly, I'm not checking -- about six-eight years at this point. And what if Amos or Alex don't come back, whether through an accident or otherwise? If they lose someone, they don't just lose the friend, but all their knowledge and skills, too. Nemesis Games, Chapter 3 posted:“I’m not adding four more people to our ship, much less eight,” Jim said, walking into the bedroom. Running from the conversation. He wouldn’t actually leave. She waited for the silence and the distress and the worry that he’d made her angry to pull him back. It took about fifteen seconds. In the end, Holden agrees to interview some prospective crew -- when Amos and Alex come back. They eat dinner and then have sex. Holden's worried because he can't just go and help Amos and Alex if they get in trouble. He asks Naomi who Amos is going to see on Earth, Naomi guesses it's a 'surrogate mom' thing. Holden wonders why Naomi and Amos never got together, which strikes me as a very odd question and maybe one I would've expected to see in Caliban's War or Abaddon's Gate. Naomi explains things: Nemesis Games, Chapter 3 posted:“He’s not staying on the Roci for me,” Naomi said. “He’s staying for you.” Two days later, when Naomi is inspecting the work on the Rocinante, she gets a priority message on her HUD. It's from someone named Marco, who has history in Naomi. Bad history, it seems. He's apologetic but Naomi tells herself to shut it off, that he's a liar, and to forget about it. Marco says that he doesn't agree with Naomi's decision to leave, but that he's always respected it. He's never reached out to her before now, even when she was on the news. Two of his people -- Cyn and Karal -- are on Ceres Station and they need Naomi. Because this message is about Filip, and he's in trouble. Dun dun! Chapter Four: Amos Much like the Alex chapter, and bolstering my idea that Amos/Alex were written by one part of the pair, this chapter begins with heavy exposition that we don't see in the other two: Amos is having trouble processing his grief and he's thinking about his philosophy that one adapts or dies. He heads to the bar and drinks and thinks about how Lydia is dead. Nemesis Games, Chapter 4 posted:He’d spent twenty years thinking about her. The tattoo of her face over his heart was some of that, of course. Every look in a mirror without his shirt on was a reminder. But beyond that, every day had choices in it. And every choice he made started with the little voice in his head asking what Lydia would want him to do. Anyway, Amos hopes Lydia died of natural causes, surrounded by her friends. Otherwise, he's going to kill every single person involved when he gets back to Earth. One of the things I'm just going to mention here, and I think I've hinted at this before, is how the Corey's rather flat, unemotional style of writing really suits the emotionally-stunted, vaguely sociopathic tone of Amos. While Amos is a fun character, I think part of the reason for this isn't just because of who he is but how he's depicted. Not to get too far ahead of myself, but this plays into why I think Amos' this chapter is maybe one of the best, if not best chapters, the Corey team ever wrote. Someone is glancing at Amos from across the bar. Amos ponders taunting him to draw him into a fight, where he'd then be able to "process his grief all over the guy." But, with Holden's voice as his guide, Amos thinks that the guy had nothing to do with Lydia and so he pays for two of his drinks and heads out. Later, Amos is travelling on the Lazy Songbird. He's sharing his quarters, which are very not fancy, with a family of three and an "ancient crone." Nemesis Games, Chapter 4 posted:The crone spent the entire flight high on little white pills, staring at the ceiling all day and tossing and sweating through fever dreams all night. Amos introduced himself to her. She offered him some pills. He declined. This ended their association. But there's a problem on the Songbird. The ship, it appears, has a bit of a gang problem. If you're going to shower, shower when the cleaning crew is in there or the gang will get you for not paying protection money. Eventually, the thugs come by to extort from Amos and the family. Amos tells them that no one in his corner is paying. Amos explains using a lengthy story about a reactor leak and how he had to hold his breath to survive while engaging in intense physical exercise. Nemesis Games, Chapter 4 posted:“So you need to ask yourself, how much damage can I do to you in two minutes before the knockout gas gets me. Because I’m betting it’s a lot.” In the shower, they meet him with six guys. Amos is a little insulted by it, and they talk it through. The six guys have weapons. Nemesis Games, Chapter 4 posted:“I’m not going to disrespect you,” Amos said to him. “I killed my first guy at about your age. Well, a few guys really, but that’s not the issue. I know to take you and that knife seriously.” Afterward, one of the dads is dabbing a cut on Amos' head. Amos didn't kill them, they'll be able to walk out of there when they wake up. The dad says they were prepared to pay. Amos says: Nemesis Games, Chapter 4 posted:“Didn’t do it for you. And Rico? That money goes into the Wendy fund, or I come looking for you too.” Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Sep 1, 2022 |
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Aug 31, 2022 13:55
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quote:The crone spent the entire flight high on little white pills, staring at the ceiling all day and tossing and sweating through fever dreams all night. Amos introduced himself to her. She offered him some pills. He declined. This ended their association. This is genuinely very funny. I read all your posts! I'm impressed you've made it this far in the series when so many projects like this drown early on. I'm excited to see your take on beamNG.planet
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Aug 31, 2022 18:15
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General Battuta posted:This is genuinely very funny. I appreciate that you're following along! Virtually the entirety of Chapter 4 has stuck in my brain ever since I read it. It's got so many good bits -- Amos and the crone, Amos protecting the family, Amos' unsettling ability for violence and how it makes him feel good. Even the beginning at the bar, which is a bit heavy on exposition, reads well. It comes back to that idea of Nemesis Games reining in the worse tendencies of the Coreys -- they have one chapter to get Amos off Tycho and to Earth, so, they better make it a good one. And they do! I even appreciate that they 'cut around' the fight itself which is also something I don't think we've seen them employ before. As a reader, we already know Amos is going to beat the snot out of those punks, so, we don't need to see it. They paragraph break it and move on. This is actually something that sticks out to me about these first few chapters of Nemesis Games, actually. There's a lot of paragraph breaks, things are moving pretty quickly. Looking at some of the chapters in earlier novels, a chapter might have one break like that. Each of those previous chapters have at least one, with Amos' chapter having three. Given they have four separate stories, they have to move them along at a good clip. It feels like a different approach to the first four novels, that have this almost obnoxious 'Holden, a scientist, a security guard, and a reluctant terrorist walk into a bar... I bet you'll never see how they link together!' feeling. The other thing is that I think there's something to say about each book. I might be overly critical at times, but I don't think there's any books in this that are outright bad -- excepting Babylon's Ashes and, more arguably, Leviathan Falls. I'd previously done a retrospective re-read of the online sensation Worm and that was ultimately done and dusted about twenty five percent of the way in because while that author's work was about as long as the Expanse itself is, there's absolutely nothing to say past that point. Even though I pointed out that, ultimately, these novels maybe should not have gone past Abaddon's Gate, both the best and worst novels are still ahead at that point, and the final novel is surprisingly messy and mediocre. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Sep 1, 2022 |
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Sep 1, 2022 06:36
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Got a link to the Worm reading? Also, I kind of feel like the book names are uhh.. kind of lame. And yeah I'm still reading along. I suppose I should read the books myself, but I feel like I get a good understanding from your Let's Read.
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Sep 2, 2022 04:36
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Kchama posted:Got a link to the Worm reading? I don't mind the book titles, but I also agree they have this lame sense of profundity. They all feel very surface level in the allusions they draw and some, arguably, are rather stretched. Leviathan Wakes -- the protomolecule/Eros is the titular Leviathan, into which Miller descends ala the belly of the beast. Caliban's War -- Caliban, the half-monster from Shakespeare's The Tempest, feels like an obvious link to the hybrid monsters, but, how is it their war? Is Caliban Amos? Is Holden? Abaddon's Gate -- it's a gate to Hell, enough said. Cibola Burn -- a reference to the mythical Cities of Gold, or perhaps the first place the Spanish conquered, but I think I mentioned why the whole Americas metaphor fell to bits very quickly in that novel. I feel like Nemesis Games may actually be the best of them, given how it might refer to Marco Inaros and his plots, fateful Belter retribution against the Inners, justice, punishment, fate, a sense of almost divine cataclysm, etc. Like, they're very catchy and memorable, but they also feel lame?
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Sep 2, 2022 10:32
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Nemesis Games, Chapters 5 - 9 Alex is sad. Naomi is alone. Holden is sad and alone. We get to see the customs line of Earth, Mars, and the Belt! Meanwhile, Amos is having the time of his life. Chapter Five: Holden Holden's meeting with Fred Johnson. He reflects that one of his grandfather had spent his youth "riding in rodeos" but by the time Holden had known him had been rendered down into a shadow of who he used to be. Holden thinks Fred has also been rendered -- his muscles are gone and his hair is gray. They joke comfortably about the cost of fixing the Rocinante and reminiscence over Sam and Bull. Fred wants to head back out to Medina Station. Holden says that the leaders of Earth and Mars are having a big sit-down talk and maybe he'd rather go to that. Fred points out that Medina Station is the most important place in the system as it controls access to the entire gate network. He and Avasarala are "back channeling" things so he'll get to keep control of Medina. But OPA extremists are causing trouble. Holden says, oddly naïve, that any problems people have "would be solved by everyone getting their own free planet.” But the OPA extremists believe that Belter culture is a spacing culture and, not only that, Belter society has an economic base that they depend on built around the Sol system. If people start going to a thousand planets, then Fred says it's the "moral equivalent of genocide." Holden, still strikingly dumb in this conversation, is like 'how is that a genocide.' Probably the worst part of this conversation is this part -- it's all stuff Holden should know ("They argue being adapted to low-g isn't a disability, it's who they are") or should realistically be able to assume an guess based on, oh, the events of the book immediately previous. Amid other extremist attacks, Fred points out, one group tried to throw an old freighter at Earth. The UN Navy shot it out one light year out, but Fred thinks someone's planning something bit -- but no one knows what... Holden walks back to his apartment, enduring the friendly greetings and murmuring from all the people who passes him who recognize him as James Holden. In the apartment proper, Naomi's nursing a mug of tea. She announces that she has to "go do something" and he can't be involved in it. When she comes back, she says, she promises full disclosure. She's going to Ceres and isn't sure how long she'll be gone for. Holden's like, what, I let you go alone, and Naomi is like, you let me go or we break up and I go anyway. It's an interesting scene. It feels very out of character for Naomi, which I imagine is the point. But there's still something of a roughness to it that I can't quite put my finger on. The conversation hopefully puts the reader in the same spot as Holden, so that's good. I imagine my little 'hmm' about it comes down to everything else concerning Naomi so far in this novel -- none of it has been foreshadowed or even hinted at. It works, sure. But I think there's ways to have this still put the reader and Holden in this 'what the heck' state while also foreshadowing that this is how Naomi reacts in extreme situations. On the other hand, when would she ever be in a situation similar to this? So, time passes and Holden's alone and he's feeling it. He spends his work days going down to the docks and helping them fox the Rocinante. Holden thinks it's the first time he's ever been alone -- he'd always had a big family, then the Navy, then the Canterbury, and now the Roci crew. He goes to bars to kill time. Alex has been giving him regular updates, Amos has auto-pings letting him know he's in New York and Naomi has sent nothing. He's sent messages to her and she hasn't sent any replies. Monica Stuart -- the reporter from Abaddon's Gate -- gives him a call and wants to run something by him. She's on Tycho and she wants to meet up, so, he does. Holden doesn't like Monica and suspects she has an ulterior motive, but he's lonely and she's paying. Monica shows him what she wanted to talk about : Nemesis Games, Chapter 5 posted:The picture sprang into motion, the freighter burning toward a ring gate at low thrust. He assumed it was the one that led from the solar system to the slow zone and Medina Station, but it could have been any of the others. They all looked pretty much the same. When the ship passed through the gate, the image flickered and danced as the recording equipment was bombarded with high-energy particles and magnetic flux. The image stabilized, and the ship was no longer visible. That didn’t mean much. Light passing through the gates had always behaved oddly, bending the images like refraction in water. Chapter Six: Alex Alex is almost on Mars, sending Bobbie a message to see if she wants to get lunch. We get some big paragraphs about Mars: Alex is going down to Mariner Valley, Alex's parents were one of the three waves of Chinese and Indian colonists, he's an only child, and so on. The dropship does a deacceleration burn and Alex disembarks. He meets his cousin Min in the waiting area. There's a bunch of exposition about Alex's life on Mars that feels like it was drawn directly from his character sheet. Nemesis Games, Chapter 6 posted:They passed down a long access tunnel and then across one of the linking bridges to Bunker Hill. It was the neighborhood where Alex had grown up. His father’s ashes were in the crypt at the synagogue, his mother’s had been scattered over the Ophir Chasmata. The first girl he’d ever kissed had lived in rooms two corridors down from the place Min’s family was in now. His best friend growing up had been an ethnic Chinese boy named Johnny Zhou who’d lived with an older brother and sister on the other side of the canyon. Later, Alex goes to see Talissa -- only she's moved in the years he's been away. When he sees her, Alex thinks the following: Nemesis Games, Chapter 6 posted:Her hair was a rich brown, so free of gray it had to be dyed. Her face was wider, thicker at the cheeks. Time had been kind to her. She wasn’t beautiful. Maybe she’d never been beautiful, but she was handsome and she was Talissa. Nemesis Games, Chapter 6 posted:“Please don’t make me be the bad guy here. I have a rich, full, complex life that you chose not to be a part of. I have a lot on my plate just now that I don’t actually want to share with you, and comforting the guy who walked out on me umpteen years ago because he’s… I don’t know, having his midlife crisis? It’s not my priority, and it’s not something that’s fair to expect of me.” On one hand, this feels like the most heated anyone has gotten in this series so far. On the other, it feels too rehearsed and -- yes, I'm saying it again, Twittery. The fact that Alex gets shot down so brutally is fine, it basically feels like what should happen based on what we know of his past. But something about their confrontation feels odd to me. It's so quick? It feels like a polemic against the author's own deadbeat dad? It's both emotional yet stage-like? It doesn't feel better by the inclusion that, as Alex walks away, he's like: yep, he had been a bit underhanded, he'd wanted it to be harder for her to turn him away so he'd shown up in person. I'm reminded of that particular bit in Leviathan Wakes where Holden had his 'woe is me, I'd take advantage of drunk Naomi and feel bad about it' and it's a little unclear as to whether the authors know they're writing a scumbag or if they want you to feel some kind of sympathy. So, Alex goes off to drown his sorrows and brood on things he could've done differently beyond not walking out and being someone else. Bobbie returns his message and says she's like to meet with him, and she has a favor to ask on top of that. He figures it'd be good to see her and goes off to do it. Chapter Seven: Amos Amos has reached Luna. He says his goodbyes to the family he helped out and heads down to New York. Again, Amos' stuff remains rather humorous: Nemesis Games, Chapter 7 posted:The drop to Earth was short enough that no one tried to run an extortion racket on him, so that was nice. The flight itself was bumpy and nauseating, so that was less nice. One thing about space: it might be a big radiation-filled vacuum that’d kill you in a heartbeat if you weren’t paying attention, but at least it never had turbulence. Nemesis Games, Chapter 7 posted:His ancestors had spent a few billion years building all their internal structures around the constant of one g downward pull, and his organism breathed a sigh of relief at the amazing rightness of it. Nemesis Games, Chapter 7 posted:The salt water flowing in everyone’s veins first pulled from the same oceans right outside the building. The seas had been around longer than humans, had helped create them, and then when they were all dead, it’d take their water back without a thought. Nemesis Games, Chapter 7 posted:Amos raised his hands over his head. “You got me, Sheriff. What are the charges?” Nemesis Games, Chapter 7 posted:“Either I’m not in any trouble, or I’m in all of it,” Amos said with a grin. “How you doin’, Chrissie?” Walking through New York, Amos thinks there's two groups of people -- those who had somewhere to be, the employed, and those who didn't, the ones on basic. Amos sums it up as that the second are "living on the excess created by the" former and, uh, sure, we can go with that. But there's also a third group: criminal elements. He books a random hotel, not needing to care about the price, and has a shower. He brushes his teeth and shaves his head. Then, nude, he sits down and reads Lydia's obituary. He doesn't recognize her surname (Allen) and figures it wasn't an alias, perhaps she got married. Which, the next line reveals, she did and her husband is still alive. Given that the obituary says she passed quietly with her husband at her side, Amos resolves to go see him. If she did die quietly then he'll go and meet the man, say his last goodbyes. If she did not, he'll kill some people. All in all, both outcomes would be the same to Amos -- just fine. Chapter Eight: Holden The missing freighter is the Rabia Bakhi, a colony ship out of Pallas. Holden's rewatching the footage with Monica. Holden thinks there's a lot of reasons why a ship might disappear -- core containment failure, loss of atmosphere, debris strike, radio failure. Monica says that 437 ships have gone through the rings over the last year and thirteen of them have vanished. That's about 3% of traffic. Holden is able to do the math in his head. Is that remarkable? I don't know. I feel like it is, but I'm dyscalculic. Holden thinks that's a pretty high rate of loss. Six times what the UN Navy would budget for -- remarkable for ships that are able to fly to the rings in the first place. He wonders why no one is tracking this and Monica says it's because there's thousands of ships heading out to the gates and most of them never disclosed their flight plan. Monica thinks the protomolecule has something to do with. Holden, who has been best known for his terror when faced with the idea of the protomolecule, just sighs and rubs his face with his hands. It can't be the protomolecule, he says, because he fired the last of it into a star. She brings up all the stuff that happened on Ilus and Holden says it only happened because he took the protomolecule out there in the first place. But Monica brings up something that Holden (and I) had forgotten about -- Fred Johnson possesses the only remaining sample of the protomolecule! Holden's not too perturbed by this, even though I recall his tirade in Caliban's War about it, and Johnson is all 'heh heh' about Medina Station. Monica wants Holden to summon 'ghost Miller' and ask about the gates. Holden says he will not commune with the alien goo and that everyone should leave it alone. Holden says she's fallen for an old joke. Nemesis Games, Chapter 8 posted:“You know the old joke about hearing hoofbeats, right?” Later, Holden's thinking about things as he's working on the Rocinante, if only to distract him from missing his crew. Monica was right, he thinks, but Holden's more willing to assume that OPA extremists are behind it. After all, the OPA was also in control of Medina. The extremists could board the ships, take the supplies, space the crew, and then change the transponders. Possible, considering that the OPA had done it before -- they'd turned the Tachi into the Rocinante, after all. Holden asks Sakai how you'd find vanishing ships. Sakai says to look for ships that have suddenly appeared and they talk about how Monica is 'snipe hunting.' Sakai is like, what, poo poo isn't weird enough for you to believe in snipes? Is this an indication that snipes -- a form of bird -- aren't alive in the Expanse future, or is there another meaning I'm not picking up on? Later, Holden's back in his apartment and gets a message from Alex who fills him in: tearful reconciliation was a failure, going to see Bobbie. Holden decides to go investigate and, in a nice nod to old Detective Miller, wishes he had a hat. He meets with Fred and asks him if they've looked into the missing ships at all. Fred says no, they're too busy to look into it and some ships going missing seems like an obvious thing. Holden tells Fred that Monica thinks it is the protomolecule, and that she knows Fred has it. Which means there's a leak in Fred's organization somewhere. Moving past that, Holden thinks it's "that radical extremist faction of the OPA" as they've already launched two attacks -- maybe they're going after the colony ships, too. Fred is like, well, there's a problem with that: the ships go missing on the far side of the gates. The only way that could happen is if someone is, say, planting bombs on the ships. Holden supposes that there's people on Medina assisting the extremists but Fred isn't certain -- he's put his best and most loyal people there. Nemesis Games, Chapter 8 posted:“It means that the most violent, hard-line, extremist faction of our group controls the choke point of the entire galaxy.” Fred thinks Holden's just bored and looking for something to do and advises him to fix his own ship and get his crew back together. The missing ships aren't his concern. Holden won't drop it but says he'll keep Fred in the loop. Chapter Nine: Naomi And we're back on Ceres. Naomi's just cleared customs. Ceres appears to be about the same as it was back in Leviathan Wakes. There's a reference to the smell of "dried piss" being like "an old friend's smile" to Naomi and, uh [generic comment about prose featuring space peeing.] We also get our first reference to the "red kibble" a food Belters eat and which, if memory serves, will be drilled into us over the next four books. As Naomi moves through the crowds, she notices someone following her -- perhaps multiple someones. The last time she was on Ceres, she was thirteen but she thinks she still knows the place well enough to lose them. She evades the man following her and then flags down a cart to take a route up three levels to an open park. Naomi thinks about Marco. She met him when she was sixteen on Hygeia Station, a shithole run nominally by an Earth corporation but in reality by desperate Belters. He was part of a salvage and mining crew but they may have also been pirates. Naomi had been living with Tia Margolis and doing unlicensed work. I'll pause to mention something that will be much more obvious in Chapter 14, but these books haven't really established any of this, which is why it needs to be so awkwardly told in big paragraphs. Marco had been a bit of a dreamboat -- good eyes, hair, pretty mouth, and a nice beard. He may not have been old enough to buy drinks but was charming enough to get people to bend the rules. The other members of his crew -- Big Dave, Cyn, Mikkam, Karal -- all outranked him on the ship but followed him when they were in port. Naomi just sort of fell into their orbit and became part of their crew. Back then, Naomi had thought she'd follow him anywhere. She would've said it wasn't true now -- but here she was. Naomi ends up in a bar which, it appears, is the next bar that the guy following her just so happens to walk into and report to someone. A big man comes out and Naomi's tail is apologetic and seems to think he'll die for it. But then the big man spots Naomi -- and it's all okay, because the big guy is Cyn, one of Marco's crew. Well, okay. Ever since reading the series, I've thought that Naomi's solo chapters tend to be some of the worst -- and we're not off to a great start if it turns out this is the drama we're going to get. It's like, oh Naomi is scared she's being followed, she goes to a bar, her tail just so happens to show up, and his boss just so happens to be her old friend, and maybe she knew it all from the start? It's just awkward. A chapter where Naomi knows she's being followed by someone known to her old crew and so she toys with him and proves she's still got it, maybe showing off skills that Holden doesn't know about, before heading back to his bosses' bar -- who she knows is Cyn -- and is like, hey, your guys are slipping? Sure, that might be fun. But we go from to "bright metallic taste of fear" filling her mouth as she narrowly evades her pursuer to, well, that. Anyway, Cyn greets her as Knuckles which is... an interesting thing. Maybe I'll talk more about it if we learn more about it, but the idea that Naomi decided to use her nickname from Marco's crew with Sam feels a bit odd. Cyn takes her to meet three others -- one of them is Karal but the other two Naomi doesn't know. She wonders why they're being so secretive, but Cyn says "there's OPA and then there's OPA" and Naomi deduces that he belongs to the other one -- hello, extremists. Naomi mentions that Marco didn't tell her anything and Cyn lets slip that they can't be anywhere someone can reach them when things come crashing down. Naomi's like, sorry, what? Nemesis Games, Chapter 9 posted:“Well,” Cyn said. “It’s these pinché ring gates. You know better than anyone. Another thousand inner planets, and a whole new set of reasons they may as well gently caress the Belt, que si? And half the Belt sucking the Butcher’s cock and making themselves out noble and official and political. So we, and by we I mean Marco, yeah? We decide about two, three years ago—”
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Sep 10, 2022 04:44
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Nemesis Games, Chapters 10 - 14 Nemesis Games continues to move along at a good clip. While Amos makes ripples on Earth, Holden and Alex find themselves dealing with shadowy threats. And Naomi may be in much more danger than she realizes. Chapter Ten: Amos Amos has just stepped off the rail station in Philadelphia. There's a brief aside that, essentially, despite Earth's general society, the world is still divided on the basis of income. And even among the people who have money, there's people with money. Amos finds it weird that he might be in that second group. After a brief encounter with a street kid, where Amos appears to want to help the kid and/or beat up his pimp, Amos finds his way to Lydia's house. It's in a low-income block which Amos finds interesting as Lydia used to live in government housing and she couldn't have gotten job training. So, who'd marry someone like Lydia? Amos rings the doorbell and Lydia's husband answers and gets the ol' Amos amiable smile, which worries him enough that he steps back. Amos says he's an old friend and, over tea, Lydia's husband -- Charles -- notes him as Timothy. Timothy is Amos' old identity, something which is detailed in The Churn. All we really get at this point is that Lydia looked after Amos after his mother died. Charles asks how this goes. Amos says he can let him take some flowers out to lay on his grave, or her can just do it because no one will live in the house anymore. Charles says that Lydia died of an ascending aortic aneurysm. Amos doesn't believe it, but lets Charles talk, and decides he does. As an aside, I really like this little discussion between Amos and Charles. Amos is a fun character but the joy of reading him is so much better when he's placed into situations with people who aren't used to him. There's a problem, though. Someone was funding Lydia, a man named Erich, and now that she's dead, Charles will be back on basic and in government housing. Amos knows Erich though and decides to go ensure that Charles can keep living where he is. For Lydia. Amos heads to Baltimore. It looks much the same as it did the last time he'd been there, which was two decades. It's interesting to compare it to Alex's chapter where Alex revisiting his home came off less as someone noticing similarities and differences over time and more of someone going down a checklist. My thought was that the authors had split it Holden/Naomi and Amos/Alex. I'm not sure of that anymore. I think it's now Holden/Alex and Naomi/Amos. Maybe. Anyway, Amos orders some food from a girl working at a food cart and he reflects that he'll be paying triple for it because of the fees converting from Ceres New Yuan to UN dollars and, hang on. Ceres New Yuan? That's not right. If I crack open my copy of Abaddon's Gate, which was where Ceres' currency was first mentioned (sort of), then it's the Ceres New Yen. Cibola Burn also referred to it as 'new yen.' Have they changed the currencies again? Did the Coreys mess up yen and yuan because they have the same symbol? After a brief confrontation with a teenage girl and a mountain of a man, Amos is led by the latter to Erich. Whoever Erich is, Amos appears to suspect the possibility of a violent confrontation. Erich calls him Timmy -- he's a middle-aged man with a shrivelled left arm and a limp. "So," Erich says, "Let's chat." Chapter Eleven: Alex It's three days after Alex went to see Talissa and had a meal with Bobbie and now he wants to go home. But he'll go see Bobbie first. We flashback to three days ago -- and this is what I'll talk about more in Chapter 14 -- where Alex first met up with Bobbie. He goes to her place, which is big and fancy, and then she takes him out to a fish shack with local beer. Bobbie tells stories about working for veterans outreach and then Alex tells stories about what he's been up to since going through the ring. You're not missing much, because it's covered about as quickly as I'm doing it here. Alex wants to get back to the Rocinante, but Bobbie asks him to do a favor for her -- she needs someone to ask about some issues that's happening at the Hecate military base. Lots of naval gear is going missing and ships are getting scrapped, or going missing. It's not just a favor for her, though, but a job from Avasarala. So, that was three days ago -- now, Alex is on his way to tell Bobbie that he's not going to help her. But there's something wrong. Someone's broken into Bobbie's apartment. Alex alerts the authorities and rushes in. Inside, there's four men and one has a gun at Bobbie's head. A fight breaks out and, well, Alex isn't much of a fighter. It would've been easy to give Alex some cool moments but, well, he's a portly middle-aged dude who sits in a pilot's chair all day. He gets kicked in the testicles and goes down, but Bobbie saves him although she was shot "a couple times" in the process. Alex says he'll stay and help her and asks her if this was about her black market stuff. Bobbie says she doesn't know -- because the men were only asking her about him. Chapter Twelve: Amos Back to Amos. Erich sends his guards away and the two get to talking. Amos notes that if he's sending his guards away then Erich has something that can kill him, although he can't tell what it is. Erich knows Amos is still with "that crew" so isn't sure what he's doing back on Earth. If he's got some beef to settle, Erich says and drawing a gun on Amos, then he'll leave the office in a body bag. Amos says that Lydia isn't all dead -- her husband is still alive and that he gets to keep the house until he dies. Erich is like, what's in it for me, and Amos says he doesn't kill him, his guards, and tear down his organization. Erich agrees, if only to keep 'Timmy' out of his hair. After some polite conversation about how much things change and don't change, Erich tells Amos to get out of his city or it's open season. He also mentions that the gun was empty -- what was actually the threat was a hidden flechette launcher with poisoned darts. He gives Amos a box of tequila and lets him go. Amos rents a room in a flophouse and goes for a walk down to the docks. He sees a sign for Belgian sausages and realizes he doesn't know where Belgium was, pretty sure it wasn't in North America. A sign of Amos' lack of education to be sure, but does Belgium even exist in the future of The Expanse? A few teens try to accost Amos and he warns them off. Amos thinks that while everyone just thinks he's from Earth he's actually from Baltimore. Once, he'd been a man who knew how Baltimore's underworld worked, but now he's a man who knows how to keep a fusion reactor running and doesn't care anything about Baltimore's streets anymore. Once he leaves Earth, he'll never come back. The next morning, however, Amos figures he should do one more thing before he goes. He calls up Avasarala's office and asks what happened to Peaches -- Clarissa Mao. Chapter Thirteen: Holden Holden's still trying to make sense of the missing ships. We get the basics of space travel from him: to travel legally, ships needed to declare a flight plan and travel with a transponder. But sometimes ships may power down for repairs, get decommissioned or simply have systems fail. Old ship parts could end up in new ships, especially in the Belt. So, Holden thinks, if he's right about this, then seventeen ships have gone missing and should be in the Sol system under new names. But he needs to hire someone to go through the data. But Naomi still isn't answering and he can't do it himself -- but he does have money. So, he goes to hire someone who can do it. He finds Paula Guiterrez who has the elongated body and slightly-oversized head of a "low-g childhood." Wonder why Holden doesn't just call her a Belter. Paula takes about 15,000 New He goes to see Monica, who is renting expensive rooms in Tycho's visitors' level. They are not as good as the rooms that Fred gives Holden and his crew to live in. They discuss the missing ships -- Holden thinks there's missing ships but it's not an alien conspiracy and he's looking into it as an issue with "this hard-line OPA wing." Monica isn't interested -- she made her name with alien wormhole gates and protomolecule stuff, not people being terrible to each other. Holden's like, look, the OPA won't just throw ships away, they'd recycle them and so he's getting someone to run through the data to track any new ship names to their origin point. Monica is like, what the gently caress Holden, you involved Fred Johnson, Sakai, and some data hacker in this? What on Earth made you think that was a good idea? Holden says that he's "not a guy who hides things" which is, y'know, kinda asinine if noble and that he doesn't think Fred is a bad guy (despite his fear of him and Fred's obvious politicking for control of the most important strategic location in mankind's history), but if Fred is a bad guy then they'll know by his reaction. Nemesis Games, Chapter 13 posted:“The roaches don’t like it when you start shining a light on them.” By the next day, the data from Paula is flowing in. Holden goes through it: there's a lot of ships coming out of Mars and Earth but anything there that Paula's flagged seems to be a paperwork issue. Next. There's suspicious ships in the Belt. If the OPA was stealing them, then the logical place would be to hide them there. There's the Gozerian, a small mining ship, but it doesn't have an Epstein drive nor fit the profile of any missing ships. There's the Mouse Pie, a gas freighter, but there's no matches. The Vento but he appeared too early to be one of the missing ships. The Blasphemous Jester doesn't have an Epstein drive. He's not finding anything. He isn't sure how Miller coped with being a detective. There's this line I bring up because... Nemesis Games, Chapter 13 posted:Pounding the pavement, as the gumshoes in Alex’s neo-noir movies might say. Anyway, Holden does spot a ship that seems like it might be a match -- the Pa Kent. Sorry, Pau Kant. It was light sighted at the asteroid 434 Hungaria near Mars orbit. And beyond that sighting, it doesn't appear to exist anywhere else. Holden can't determine anything about the ship -- description, size, owners, nothing. (As an aside, I'm not sure there's a single ship name in these novels that I've liked. They always feel strange to me. They're not interesting, funny, or memorable. I'm tempted to say even the Rocinante is merely okay. A Ghostbusters reference? Come on. I can't help but think the Coreys know that The Culture novels have memorably weird and funny ship names, and so maybe they should have unconventional ship names... but they just kinda suck. Like I've said before, I sometimes think all the spaceship-related parts of this space opera are some of the weakest parts.) Could 434 Hungaria be some sort of terrorist staging point? Holden thinks it might be, so, he decides to... call up Alex and ask him to grab a ship and go out to 434 Hungaria and see if he can find a ship by the name of Pau Kant. Holden figures he'll call Monica to let him know he's found something, but there's no answer. He leaves a voicemail and goes to sleep. The next morning, he calls her and there's still no answer. He drops by her apartment and she's not there. He calls Tycho Security who tells him that she never signed out of the station -- and that her hand terminal hasn't been on the station network since the day before. What if, Holden thinks, they went after the other person who was shining a light? They send a security team to enter her apartment. It looks like the place has been ransacked. Monica's hand terminal has been crushed but there's no sign of blood. Holden calls up Fred. Nemesis Games, Chapter 13 posted:“It’s me,” he said as soon as the OPA chief answered. “You’ve got a bigger problem than radicals on Medina.” Chapter 14: Naomi I've made a lot of comments about Naomi's backstory not really fitting well with what we're learning so far, and it's always something Nemesis Games was going to have to handle more directly than the other characters. So, here it is. Chapter 14. What can best be called the Naomi Backstory Flashback Hour. Flashbacks are an odd thing. I've criticized them before, notably back in Cibola Burn when it relayed us Elvi's whole backstory. While I've said I don't like flashbacks, I don't think I've mentioned why: it's because I feel they reflect sloppy storytelling. If you tell your story the best way possible, you won't need to disrupt the story to fill in backstory. You're also going to run into issues where, like with Alex's love for neo-noir films, it simply isn't there when you go back looking for it. For example, this whole chapter. I've noted which parts occur in the past and which in the present. This is a rather dramatic departure in storytelling norms for the Corey team, which I think only reinforces my general argument. PAST: There was a time where Naomi knew of a dream of a "Belter home world" called Terryon Lock. Some members of Marco's crew wanted to build it. Ganymede security shut it down before it got beyond plans and schematics. Now, this adds a very interesting dimension to Cibola Burn, doesn't it -- if only anyone had mentioned it then! Anyway, Naomi thinks that the loss of Terryon Lock would come to define her. PRESENT: Naomi reflects that Filip was eight months old when the Augustin Gamarra, a freighter, had died. The fusion core broke containment and vaporized the ship. The investigation had never turned up if it was an accident of sabotage. They're in a private apartment. Naomi can't really match this more mature Filip to her memories of him as a baby. Filip wants to know why she didn't bring the Rocinante. Naomi mentions that Marco didn't tell her they wanted the ship, and neither does she seem to think that it's a very odd question to immediately ask. PAST: Naomi gave birth to Filip on Ceres. She and Marco lived in a cheap rental. She'd been a "child having a child." PRESENT: Naomi and Filip discuss what Filip needs -- they need to get sixteen people off station, no cargo. Filip can't seem to meet her eyes. PAST: Ceres had still been under control of Earth then and Marco called it "humanity's largest shrine to Stockholm syndrome." Marco would often go out drinking and leaving Naomi alone. PRESENT: Naomi asks where they need to go and Filip doesn't want to tell her -- he says Marco said to tell her once they're off station. Again, Naomi doesn't really seem concerned by any of this. Filip mentions there's a rendezvous point and a time. Soon, he says, very soon. PAST: Naomi knew there were hardcore factions of the OPA on Ceres. The birth had been hard -- thirty hours of labor and she almost died in the process. Filip was born at 5AM. Marco wasn't there. PRESENT: Filip says they're heading for -- you guessed it -- the Hungaria cluster. A ship, the Pella, will arrive in a few days to pick them up. After that? Naomi asks. Filip shrugs and turns away. PAST: As Naomi recovers with Filip, Marco brings her engineering problems to solve. She worked on programs for water recyclers, shear force detection units, and software overrides for fusion reactors. Just like the ones that would fail on the Gamarra. PRESENT: Naomi says they can charter a ship but Filip refuses, saying they can't be traced. Naomi thinks it means that people with guns would come after Filip, Cyn, and the rest. Naomi says she would've looked for Filip if Marco had let her. Filip doesn't seem to care much. Naomi says she'll have it sorted out in one day. PAST: When the Gamarra blew up, Marco celebrated. He says they got even for Terryon Lock and they'd stood up for the Belt, for their family. The Gamarra had been killed with her code, Naomi realized at the time. PRESENT: Naomi rents a place by the port and cries. She ignores Jim's messages, if only to keep him from riding on in and trying to fix everything. PRESENT: Even in the past, Marco was a leader and was able to make everything seem like he'd planned it: Nemesis Games, Chapter 14 posted:The trick, he said, is to have a simple plan that more or less can’t go wrong so that you always have something, and then stack your risks on that. Have another alternative that won’t work but maybe one time in a hundred, and if it happens, you look like a god. And then one that won’t work but one time in twenty, that if it lands you look like you’re the smartest one in the room. And then one that’s only one time in five, but you look like you knew you could do it. And if everything else fails, you’ve still got the one that would always win.
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Sep 11, 2022 08:19
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Now, with that said about Chapter 14, it's actually not a bad chapter. It builds up nicely to the reveal of the Gamarra and Naomi's unwitting part in it. It doesn't quite handle Naomi looking past Filip's sketchy behavior, especially with her pre-existing knowledge of Marco's twisted, manipulative behavior, but it's okay. The issue is purely on that meta/series level. It's a chapter that exists because the Coreys decided that Naomi was now an unwitting terrorist with a radical ex-boyfriend, a teenage son, and a past she'd tried to put behind her. I'm not sure we get too much more than this on Naomi's background -- at least, I don't remember it. The Expanse wiki doesn't seem to indicate anything further and doesn't seem to have attempted to try reconciling -- or even listing -- the various tidbits we've learned over the previous novels. After this stuff with Marco, Naomi will go on to:
One thing I do like, even if it's overly dramatic, is that Naomi's 'no kids' thing comes from everything she went through with Filip -- knowing that she had a son out there who was under the thumb of her terrorist ex. Problem is, it really felt more (and is arguably better to Naomi's character) that she just didn't want kids because of the danger giving birth meant to a Belter woman (as this chapter even illustrates.) With that said, Nemesis Games is easily the best Expanse novel so far, even if a lot of it is being carried on Amos' shoulders. Everything moves along at a good clip and the characters are feeling like they have, well, character. While not requiring you to understand any of the four previous novels to follow it, there's enough little continuity nods that it feels like not only the characters exist in the world but you get additional context and appreciation if you've read the previous stories. This just makes the little things, like the Yen/Yuan thing, a little bit more baffling, however. I also appreciate how, if you've read the next books, you get the irony of Holden insisting it's not space monster magic shenanigans. The ships disappearing is space monster magic shenanigans, but Holden is also correct that there is an OPA element involved, too. I also like how this book feels like it's weaving the characters and their plots together a bit more elegantly than before. The only weak bit (not contrived, just odd) is when Holden is like, ah yes, a mystery ship that may be tied to people who are trying to suicide attack Earth -- I'll get my friend Alex to rent a ship and go find out. But then again, Holden's an idiot. Still, it's a good development that Holden calls up Alex to go check it out, and then we know that he's right because Naomi's terrorist 'friends' are heading there -- oh no, Alex! Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 11:10 on Sep 11, 2022 |
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Sep 11, 2022 11:08
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The ship names are ugly, but maybe they're ugly in the way real ship names are ugly? But no, real ship names are all like "Valiant Venturer II" and "Galaxy Leader" and "Gay Viking". But maybe that's the result of Anglophone dominance, and things have changed in the Expanse. I don't know. I like it when they just name ships for ordinary sounding people, especially military ships. That's very plausible. (But - is there any difference between Earth and Mars military ship names? That seems like a missed opportunity.) I can't believe the real protagonist of the series (red kibble) doesn't show up until this book!
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Sep 11, 2022 13:44
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General Battuta posted:The ship names are ugly, but maybe they're ugly in the way real ship names are ugly? But no, real ship names are all like "Valiant Venturer II" and "Galaxy Leader" and "Gay Viking". But maybe that's the result of Anglophone dominance, and things have changed in the Expanse. I don't know. I like it when they just name ships for ordinary sounding people, especially military ships. That's very plausible. (But - is there any difference between Earth and Mars military ship names? That seems like a missed opportunity.) I haven't paid too much attention to the ship names that've shown up, if only because we haven't seen too many. Let's see. There's the MCRN Donnager, which is just a fictional name, of the Donnager-class of dreadnought (also referred to as Donnager-class battleships.) The Barkeith which will show up in Nemesis Games is likewise another Donnager with a fictional name. Other classes mentioned include the Corvette-class, of which we've only seen the Tachi (A Japanese blade.) There was mention of an Earth ship that's equivalent to the Rocinante, the Phantom-class, in Leviathan Wakes. Caliban's War gave us the UN Truman-class battleship. Abaddon's Gate gave us the UN Xerxes-class battleship/third-gen dreadnought and, of course, the Behemoth-class ship. Nemesis Games has also mentioned the Pella, which we'll soon learn is another Corvette-class ship and presumably renamed by its captain. A brief search through the first four novels seems to indicate that almost every ship is named for a person, on both sides. Guy Molinari (a freighter), Charles Lyell (a science ship), Scipio Africanus (Martian destroyer), Agatha King (Earth battleship), Edward Israel (RCE), Kennedy (Earth), Tanaka (Earth), Bernadette Koe (Earth), Dyson (Earth), and the Thomas Prince (Earth battleship.) Earth has the Triton and the Ravi but I'm fairly sure Mars also has mythology-themed names in the books. Both use names from history -- Arboghast/Arbogast, Darius and Aristophanes of the UNN and the Hammurabi of the MCRN. Anubis was a Protogen craft. Perhaps one of the most interesting names is the Iani Chaos, a Martian ship, named for an area on Mars. Oh, and of course, the Nauvoo. There's been some Asian-inspired names, such as Seung Un (Earth destroyer), Harman Dae-Jung (Mars Donnager-class) and Xinglong (Belt rockhopper). I think ships with name-names outnumber ships with 'ugly/generic' names like Weeping Sonambulist, Mouse Pie and Blasphemous Jester. I don't think there's any pronounced difference in Earth and Mars military ship names, which is a very missed opportunity, yeah. As generic as some might think it is, a UNN that used Earth locations and historical figures would do a lot of subtle worldbuilding when set against, say, a more martial Martian naming scheme and maybe a more eclectic OPA naming scheme. Or, for Mars, something that reflected the East Asian/Indian history the novel's told us the place has. I think the TV series was actually a little better about this. Maybe it's an attempt to make Earth and Mars seem like two sides of the same coin? But I just feel like it's something the Coreys didn't think about. It might be the literary version of counting rivets, I don't know, but I think it's cool when you can list off half a dozen ship names and your reader can peg which faction they're from. Tantive Four, Home One? Rebel ships. Devastator, Executor? Imperial. One of the things I liked in Babylon 5 was how the Earth Alliance military ship names changed over time, although I think this is mostly fanon. Older ships, including the relatively new Omega-class, bore names from Greek or Roman mythology. But newer ships bore names from United States history and geography which reflected the changing attitudes of the Earth government over time. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Sep 11, 2022 |
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Sep 11, 2022 15:08
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To bring up ships from a universe I'm familiar with, Gundam (Universal Century for this conversation specifically) has the various factions have different main draws for ship names (but this isn't absolute). Like the Federation mostly has their ships named after mythological/historical figures and places (Pegasus, Alexandria, Jeanne D'Arc, Salamis, Argama), with some oddballs for named for various reasons, like the General Revil (a famous Federation general), or Ra Cailum (could be a corruption of something? Sounds Egyptian). Zeon favors presumably made-up words with mythological monsters mixed in, like Garuda, Endra, Rewloola, and Musaka but also odd stuff like the Lily Marleen, named after a German love song, or Zanzibar, named after a real-world location. Not a lot of naming after people, outside of the General Revil and a few others named after war heroes. But Gundam cares about the ships a surprising amount for a show that doesn't focus on them, so there's endless details and tons of named ones.
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Sep 11, 2022 15:32
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Nemesis Games, Chapters 15, 16, 17 On Mars, Alex and Bobbie try to track down the missing ships. On Tycho, Holden and Fred try to track down Monica. Both realize that whatever's going on, it reaches into high places... Chapter Fifteen: Alex Alex and Bobbie have just arrived at hospital. Alex is in a lot of pain but mostly okay. Bobbie, on the other hand, is not doing so well. Time passes. Alex goes to see Bobbie in her hospital bed. Bobbie's told the police the truth: a bunch of thugs broke into her room, beat her up, and kept asking about Alex Kamal. Alex isn't sure why someone would've come after her because of him -- as far as he knows, he doesn't have any enemies on Mars. Bobbie thinks it's because of his connection to Holden and, through Holden, to Fred Johnson and Avasarala. While she hasn't told the police about her investigation into the missing gear, she thinks it's connected to that, too. Bobbie thinks they have to keep digging. Bobbie says the big problem is ships. We get a bit of info on the two big Solar system navies, although I don't think it's news to us -- Mars has the newest, best ships. Earth may have more but they're "generations old" and often made up of old retrofitted frames. Both have taken heavy losses in the last few years. From what Bobbie can tell, the seven "Donnager-class ships" (call them battleships, come on, both Bobbie and Alex are the type to know this, Coreys!) are all accounted for. But their corvettes like the Rocinante-- Wait. Yes, yes, I know. This is a small thing but I'm going to hammer it every time it comes up because it honestly bewilders me every single time. The Rocinante is not a corvette -- it's a Corvette-class frigate. This is what it is called in Leviathan Wakes. In Caliban's War, there's a screw-up where Amos calls it a Frigate-class corvette -- and that seems to be what the books are continuing with. Both Abaddon's Gate and Cibola Burn have called the Rocinante a 'private corvette' or just a 'corvette.' I didn't point that out at the time because, honestly, I didn't notice it at the time. Okay, so, the Rocinante is now a Frigate-class corvette. Except that sources like The Expanse wiki, the roleplaying game, and the general fandom all call the Rocinante a Corvette-class ship. Google says there's 513 results for '"frigate-class" Rocinante' and 5820 for '"corvette-class" Rocinante"'. Similar to the Sam Rosenberg thing, I just don't understand how you can make this error -- and I especially don't understand how you can't keep it consistent! The Rocinante is the hero ship! Admittedly, frigate and corvette are similar, and I've mentioned before that there's no need for space navy designations to match blue water designations, but I think frigate generally matches closer to what we know of the Rocinante -- corvettes aren't generally able to go for long voyages, frigates are the smallest class of ship that can do so. Sigh. Whatever. So, the Donnager-class ships are easy to keep track of, but the ships they carry are not. One corvette, the Tsuchi assigned to the battleship Bellaire, was scrapped after Io. But then it showed up at Europa one year later. The supply ship Apalala had been retired from service -- then, seven months later, was running supplies to Ganymede. Supplies thought lost during Abaddon's Gate showed up at Hecate Base, then vanished. Bobbie thinks someone is doctoring old reports, forging the loss of ships and supplies and then erasing them -- or trying to. For every hiccup in the data she's found, there could be many more that she can't see. She wants Alex to find out who's changing the information and then she can look into them. They're interrupted by the arrival of Bobbie's brother, Benji, and Alex leaves. Alex has a whole segment where he sort of reflects on one of my least favorite tropes in genre fiction (despite just about every agent asking for it): the found family. I feel like it's a discussion outside the scope of this Let's Read but, basically, I think the 'found family' trope reflects some kind of issue within familial units, divorce rates, estranged parents, etc. Basically, Alex feels like the Roci crew are more his family than his actual extended family is -- which, okay, maybe that's true. But it's also coming from the guy who has shown a pattern of ditching his family to pilot ships. Alex gets Holden's message about 434 Hungaria. He replies to Holden with details about what happened, but leaves out anything that might "scare" Holden or detail Bobbie's investigation. Afterward, he gets a call from Bobbie and mentions that he has to get a ship to look into the 343 Hungaria thing. Bobbie is like, hey, I have the perfect ship: Julie Mao's old racing ship, the Razorback. Turns out Avasarala gave it to Bobbie and she's kept it ever since sucking dock fees. Chapter Sixteen: Holden Holden and Fred are looking through security footage to see who may have attacked Monica. They spot two people coming out of her room with a large crate that could fit a woman or a woman's body. Whoever they are, Fred doesn't recognize them and they're not in Tycho's system. At one point, they catch their crate on a corner and Holden says "Doors and corners." The two men enter a warehouse and shove the crate into a pallet with other matching ones. Mech drivers stack it away. The two men enter a lavatory and don't come out -- seemingly vanishing into thin air. The crate, it appears, is still in the warehouse. Holden thinks that whatever they find in the crate, it's his fault. Which is, y'know, fair given the circumstances. They find the crate, open it. Inside, it's filled with raw fungal protein but not body. They check a bunch of others but still don't find anything but raw protein. So, Fred says, they either switched the crates or doctored the feed and either one means they have someone high in the command system. Fred promptly locks down the whole station until he gets some answers. Fred and Holden check Monica's quarters again. Chief Engineer Sakai is pissed about the lockdown -- there's ships unable to dock and a lot of contracts due. We also get, and this may surprise people who haven't read the novels, our first mention of TV favorite Drummer. Nemesis Games, Chapter 16 posted:She was a thin-faced woman Fred called Drummer, but Holden didn’t know if that was her first name, her last, or just something she went by. Holden mentions that it's related to the missing ships, something he mentioned to only a few people, and maybe he shouldn't have. Fred says that whoever has done this has tipped their hand -- if you have eyes so deep in someone's organization, you don't do anything to let them know you've compromised them. Unless the stakes are very high or your enemy isn't going to be around much longer. Fred isn't sure which it is. Holden spots something on the terminal and presses a button. Nemesis Games, Chapter 16 posted:“What did you do?” Fred asked. Chapter Seventeen: Alex Alex has gone to Hecate Base. He watches all the young soldiers going about their day and realizes they're just kids who don't really know what they're doing. He'd married Talissa at that age and, so, he's not surprised it didn't work out. Alex goes to a coffee place where he regrets that "Captain Holden" (not Jim, not Holden, Captain Holden) is not there to smell it. Alex meets up with his old friend Fermin. Alex is known as the first pilot through the ring -- or, as Alex corrects him, first living pilot. Fermin's arranged a meeting with Commander Winston Duarte who is the aide of Admiral Long. It wasn't hard to setup as Duarte really wants to meet the celebrity Alex Kamal. Winston Duarte looks like Edward James Olmos. At least, that's what I picture I'm reasonably sure it's the vibe the Coreys were going for: Nemesis Games, Chapter 17 posted:The man himself fit in the space like he’d been designed for it. Half a head shorter than Alex with acne-pocked cheeks and warm brown eyes, Duarte radiated politeness and competence. With a moment's unease, Duarte says he doesn't know of any missing ships. Then, with some prompting, he says that to talk about it would be to break the chain of command. He's running his own investigation for the Admiral. Alex says they can help each other out. "What have you got?" Duarte asks. Missing weapons, medical supplies, ships. Duarte asks for a name and Alex mentions the Apalala. Duarte's been looking into that one, too. Duarte's not sure what it means, especially with the attacks that've been going on. Someone hit Callisto and they did so with precision and firepower and for what, to loot a shipyard? He's not sure what they took, if anything, because the inventories are so poorly maintained. In order to prevent loss of face to Earth and the OPA, Duarte says, Mars is covering it up. Right now, Prime Minister Smith is heading to Luna to tell the UN Secretary-General that everything is fine. But as far as Duarte's concerned, Mars is a permanent Christmas to the black market. Duarte opens his desk, producing a silver pen and paper and writes down a name: Kaalo Henderson-Charles and his address. Duarte says he was working on coordinating the databases and was the first to see problems in the data but isn't sure if he'll help Alex, and he won't order him to -- and he's going to report this whole conversation to the Admiral. Alex heads out toward Kaalo's address. It's on base so it's not far. He knocks on the door and it opens and Alex smells cordite and rotting meat. Turns out that Kaalo is dead, blood splattered on the wall and ceiling, the pistol in his right hand. Alex calls the MPs. He meets with Bobbie and mentions what happened. The MPs interrogated him for eight hours but Duarte gave him a solid alibi, so, he's fine. Fermin, however, has vanished off the network. Maybe he killed Kaalo. Maybe whoever got Kaalo got him too. The two decide that the investigation is pretty much over -- but maybe they can go find something at that asteroid Holden told them to check out. Even if it is, as Alex says, it's probably nothing. I just want to say -- I really like the scene between Alex and Duarte. I try to avoid getting into discussions about things later in the text, but I can't really go past this. Duarte is the man behind it all. He's the antagonist behind the remainder of the series and is one of the better characters in the series -- for the most part. It skipped my mind entirely that Alex is in the same room with him and it's a wonderful little scene where Alex just kind of blabs everything he knows to the bad guy, someone conducting something truly awe-inspiring behind the scenes. But more on that later. Still, like a lot of things in Nemesis Games, it's really a bit of a step up or two from the series' usual fare.
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Sep 13, 2022 12:55
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Now begins the greatest mystery of the series...how to pronounce Winston Dwart
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Sep 13, 2022 21:01
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Why Julie Mao's racing ship? That seems like a very odd thing to do. Also  that Holden really just goes "oooh, shiny" and press random buttons without putting any thought into it. I'm also not sure why Fred trusts him so completely since Holden's the type who'd kick off deadly wars because he's an easily manipulated idiot.
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Sep 13, 2022 22:46
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General Battuta posted:Now begins the greatest mystery of the series...how to pronounce Winston Dwart In my head and my heart, it is Winston Do-art. Kchama posted:Why Julie Mao's racing ship? That seems like a very odd thing to do. I'd say it's just to have another moment that's acknowledging the stories that've come before -- there's been a bit of that in Nemesis Games. It also gives Bobbie and Alex access to a ship that doesn't require them to risk exposure to the Martian conspiracy, I guess. Honestly, though, it's been years and surely the Razorback is worth a pretty penny -- I would've thought Bobbie would've sold it pretty early on.
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Sep 14, 2022 00:06
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:In my head and my heart, it is Winston Do-art. But isn't it like, a universally-famous and renowned racing ship that use to belong to one of the central figures of the Martian Conspiracy? Even if it's been taken by the UN, it still seems like it'd attract a lot of the wrong attention.
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Sep 14, 2022 01:14
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Kchama posted:But isn't it like, a universally-famous and renowned racing ship that use to belong to one of the central figures of the Martian Conspiracy? Even if it's been taken by the UN, it still seems like it'd attract a lot of the wrong attention. That's a good point. It's an interesting plot development given how much of the novel has been focused on the lengths people are going to hide 'missing' ships. I wonder if the Coreys will do anything with it? This isn't me being cute, I generally don't recall if it comes up! The Martian Conspiracy isn't related to Protogen and the Mao family, however. That was all Earth. While the TV series did have Mars have some knowledge of what was going on during the Ganymede incident, I don't think Caliban's War did. Either way, it's a ship that's been tied to both the Mao family and Bobbie who is working for Avasarala and asking questions. But the bad guys probably know all that. I guess if the bad guys are already on to you, there's no harm in taking the fastest ship you have access to.
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Sep 14, 2022 02:30
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:That's a good point. It's an interesting plot development given how much of the novel has been focused on the lengths people are going to hide 'missing' ships. I wonder if the Coreys will do anything with it? This isn't me being cute, I generally don't recall if it comes up! Oh, I got my wires crossed on the Martian Conspiracy, you're right. It's been so long I kept thinking they were Martian, not Belters. Though, I wasn't actually thinking the bad guys, but other people who would notice a famous ship belonging (even if it was 'use to') Belter corporation that directly caused untold havoc and destruction in the system. Also I can't imagine that a racing ship would be particularly amenable to using as a 'get around' ship, considering that it'd probably be stripped down to the bear minimum in everything so as to make sure it was as far as possible.
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Sep 14, 2022 02:47
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Nemesis Games, Chapters 18 - 21 The conspirators begin to show their hand as plotlines converge, and the Sol system will never be the same. Chapter Eighteen: Holden While Holden and Fred are getting ready to investigate the container that may hold Monica, I'm going to pause and look at a single line that leapt out at me in the first paragraph. Nemesis Games, Chapter 18 posted:Ships hung in their berths in all states of undress, the Rocinante just one among many. Holden and Fred float out to the container. It's awaiting pickup but there's no data for what ship it's awaiting. The container may be booby trapped but Monica's feed doesn't seem to be showing anything -- but, of course, the trap could be behind the camera. Without anyone else to trust, Fred's enlisted Holden to help him open the container up and take a look inside. Fred cuts into the container and Monica's feed lights up -- they've found the right one. Holden heads in. Inside, there's Monica and a cheap autodoc that's pumping her full of sedatives. Nothing else. Holden pulls the sedative tube out and gets her. She's stable but sedated. Three hours later, the three of them are hanging in a Tycho medical bay. Fred asks her how she ended up in the container. Monica says that two men burst into her quarters and abducted her. She didn't open the door for them, which Fred knows is another point of evidence for them having access to station infrastructure. She mentions that they were Belters. Monica thinks that the OPA is behind the missing colony ships. But from this point on, she wants to be included in the investigation. In exchange for two interviews and "fair warning" before she goes public, she'll give them everything she has on the colony ships and her abduction -- even the stuff she didn't tell to Holden. What that turns out to be is more something Holden didn't understand to look for than didn't know per se. When ships go missing, they go missing when multiple ships were going through the vicinity of Medina Station -- five or six or so. Something happens at the Rings and Holden thinks it's something doctoring footage to conceal their movement. If ships go in and out of the rings, they can look for that discontinuity in the various rings. But has it happened to the Sol ring? Could ships be sneaking back into Sol? Fred and Holden are chatting in a security office. Fred's been checking in with Anderson Dawes, who he doesn't think has turned against him. Fred brings Holden in with him "as a prop in a little play" as he goes into the interrogation room. Soon after, in comes Drummer with Sakai. Sakai immediately implodes. "You know what? gently caress you." Nemesis Games, Chapter 18 posted:“You arrogant loving Earthers. All of you. Out here in the Belt leading the poor skinnies to salvation? Is that who you think you are? Do you have any idea how loving patronizing you are? All of you. All of you. The Belt doesn’t need Earther bitches like you to save us. We save ourselves, and you assholes can pay for it, yeah?” Fred tells Sakai that he's given up his life and the lives of people he cares about to protect and defend the Belt. I won't get too much into the politics of the noble Earther descending into the muck to be the big hero of the OPA but, y'know, you can't really go past it either. Fred orders Drummer to throw Sakai in an isolation cell and keep him alive. Meanwhile, they'll audit everything he's done, everywhere he's gone, and everyone he's talked to. But the station will remain on lockdown. Holden says he'll need to check on the work they did on the Rocinante. Monica says it wouldn't be the first time a leader is targeted by the extreme wing of his own side. Fred agrees -- but that's not what bothers him, what bothers him is that they're feeling secure enough to tip their hand. Chapter Nineteen: Naomi Naomi's having beer with her Belter buddies -- Cyn, Karal, Miral. It reminds her of her time on Ceres. They exchange stories and Naomi's getting a little lost in nostalgia. Filip, however, is choosing to sleep in the next room -- or is just pretending to. Naomi asks her buddies how Filip has been. Cyn and Karal are a bit cagey. Naomi's not sure whether they're trying to protect her from the truth, or Filip and Marco from her, or maybe they just don't want to get involved. Karal says Filip's smart and focused and is kept safe by Marco. Karal says they told Filip the truth. Cyn says that, when Filip was old enough to ask, Marco told him that things had gotten too harsh and Naomi had stepped away to pull herself together. So, Naomi thinks, Marco has established her as the one who is "too sensitive" and "too weak." They ask Naomi what's it like on the Rocinante. "Steady work," she says. "No room for promotion." Jim's messages are still reaching her but she's not listening to them. Instead, she calls Outer Fringe Exports and asks about the ship she's arranged. They tell her that it's ready to go but the title transfer hasn't gone through and she can't leave port until that's happened. Naomi says that's fine and gets the berth details -- dock six, berth nineteen. Everyone moves out and heads to the ship. The Chetzemoka is a transport skiff that lacks an Epstein drive, barely one step better than "getting EVA suits and a bunch of extra air bottles." Naomi's little crew numbers a fair few people -- not just the previous four, but three others she knows and more she doesn't. Naomi finds Filip and gives him the ship and tells him that she didn't come back to join back in with them. She came for Filip and won't be a part of anything Marco wants to do. Filip says it's disappointing but Marco said it would happen. Naomi suggests she comes with him back to the Rocinante but Filip counters that he's in the middle of something. Naomi says there'll always be a room for him on the Rocinante, and thinks it'll be "weird" to explain to Jim. Karal and Cyn suggest that Naomi come with them but she says that she's the trapped wolf and Filip is her paw: she's not whole without him but it's the price she has to pay to be free. Cyn hugs her and says it didn't have to be this way, and Karal jabs her in the thigh with a needle (like many writers, the Coreys mean syringe.) As she viciously fights only to pass out, Cyn says that it was the plan and always had been, and Naomi sees everyone watching and no one helping her, all of them with empty faces. Even Filip. Chapter Twenty: Alex Alex is thinking about how his sense of body comes to encompass a whole ship when he pilots. The Canterbury handled with a "massive, stately heft" whereas the "fast-attack frigate" Rocinante had been like turning twenty years younger. The Razorback is more like "strapping onto a feather in a thunderstorm." It's barely a ship. The Razorback consists of a blister the size of the Roci's operations deck strapped to a fusion drive. What passes for an engineering compartment is only accessible from the outside of the ship. Inside the ship is a head, a food dispenser, one bunk and -- strangely -- two crash couches. Honestly, the crash couches feel like a concession to the fact that the story needs Alex and Bobbie in the ship. The ship can't even recycle food, just air and water, which makes one wonder where Alex and Bobbie will throw all their half-finished noodles. Nemesis Games, Chapter 20 posted:He knew if he spent enough time to get used to her, the Roci would feel sluggish and dull when he got back. But, he told himself, only for a little while. Until he got used to it again. The thought kept him from feeling disloyal. For sheer power and exuberance, the Razorback would have been an easy ship to fall in love with. Meanwhile, Avasarala has sent a message to Bobbie. She's going to meet with the Martian Prime Minister when he reaches Luna but she tells Bobbie to stay out of trouble because if Holden's also trying to figure out what's going on, Avasarala thinks he'll just make it worse. Bobbie and Alex chat for a bit. Bobbie mentions that the work she does doesn't get her paid per se, just favors and "carrots." They commiserate about missing the marines and navy. We get a very Expansian phrase: "Things change, and they don't change back." We get an expositional chapter where Alex mentions his fears about Holden and Naomi's romance, and the nightmares he's had since killing someone. I honestly can't recall when Alex has killed someone in these novels and, unless I'm wrong, he was only ever a transport pilot. He also mentions a "brief affair" he'd had while flying for the Navy and while I assume he means someone separate to his wife, it's interesting to read it as him thinking his wife was the affair. Eventually, they arrive in the vicinity of Hungaria and the Razorback pings them a warning -- someone's targeting them. Alex gets the active sensors going and basically goes, hey, we're just out here by ourselves, what's with the targeting lock? We'll just cut thrust until we hear from you, okay? Okay. The Razorback takes them longer to get a match on the ship than the Rocinante would. It's not the ship Holden sent them to look for, it's not any of the ships Holden sent them data on. The Razorback thinks it is, with an 89% certainty, a "Martian naval corvette." And there's six other ships with it. Alex goes to activate his point defense guns, only the Razorback doesn't have any. Now, I'm going to pause here and return to our favorite topic: Martian Corvettes and Frigates: What Do They Do? Do They Do Things? Let's Find Out. I believe, although I'm not skipping forward to check and I may be entirely wrong, that the ship lighting the Razorback up is a Rocinante. I think either this book or the next will reveal that Marco has in his possession three Rocinantes, including his flagship, the Pella. Yeah, a bit on the nose, huh? If that's the case, then we'll chalk up another frigate/corvette bit of confusion. For what it's worth, the Expanse wiki does say that, yes, the Andreas Hoffer -- the ship that fired on the Razorback -- is a Corvette-class frigate. Which means we've had corvette and frigate used interchangeably in this chapter for that class of ship aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Well, the Martian naval corvette/frigate fires two missiles. As nimble as the Razorback is, the missiles are quicker for one simple reason -- they don't need to support a fragile human body. In hours, the missiles will strike them. The Razorback has no countermeasures and no PDCs. Still, Alex pushes the ship to ten gees and runs for it. He could get the missiles behind him and drop the fusion core, but that'd leave them at the mercy of a second shot. He's about to do it when Bobbie tells him to head for the Prime Minister's flotilla. By Alex's calculation, they may just make it inside the window of the flotilla's point-defense. If the Martians realize what's going on. If they fire their interceptor missiles. He pushes the ship to fifteen gees and puts Bobbie to sleep on account of her wounds. The Martian fleet fires on the missiles and Alex wants to warn them about the unknown ships out there but he can't -- the gravity is too much. The Martian missiles won't reach them in time. Alex has to drop the core, and he does. One of the missiles goes up but the second passes it -- still, it's enough time for the Martian point defence to nail it. But Alex has already lost consciousness. Chapter Twenty-One: Naomi Naomi's awake and is pretending that her abduction is just something that happens between friends. And everyone's treating her like Knuckles, the girl she had been. I still really don't like this aspect of that nickname because now I really don't get why Sam was calling her that. Turns out when Marco had taken Filip from her, calling her crazy, he'd passed the young boy around people like Karal which turned their community against her. There's a little moment where Naomi consults her internal Amos for wisdom, who says actions speak louder than words (yes, really), and it makes me think about that point that, to the Coreys, Amos is basically the ideal individual. They've arrived at Hungaria where the Chetzemoka docks with Marco's ship, the Pella. As they step aboard, Naomi realizes that not only is the Pella a very new ship, it's a Martian ship. In fact, it appears to be the "younger brother" of the Rocinante. The ship is filled with people in uniform: gray jumpsuits with the OPA split circle. Then, as they reach the bridge, we get our first look at Marco Inaros. Nemesis Games, Chapter 21 posted:He was beautiful as a statue. Even now, she had to give him that. She could still remember when those lips and the softness in those eyes had made her feel safe. Lifetimes ago, that was. Now he smiled, and a strange relief spread through her. She was with him again, and unquestionably in his power. Her nightmare had come true, so at least she didn’t have to dread it anymore. Nemesis Games, Chapter 21 posted:“In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful. That’s why Fred Johnson was useful. He was already iconic of an authority that the authorities understood.” Marco says he got his ship from "friends in high places." He looks hurt when Naomi calls it setup bullshit, but it's not genuine, according to Naomi. Marco says that he's brought her to the Pella to keep her safe. Something's coming and the stakes are the lives of millions of Belters. Naomi doesn't believe him. Marco thinks that she and Holden killed the Belters the moment the gates were opened. Naomi says that not all Inners hate Belters. Marco replies: Nemesis Games, Chapter 21 posted:“Some that pretend they aren’t, yeah?” The accents of the Belt slipped into his voice. And a rattling anger with them. “But they can still go down the wells. There’re a thousand new worlds, and billions of inners who can just step onto them. No training, no rehab, no drugs. You know how many Belters can tolerate a full g? Give them everything, all the medical care, the exoskeleton support mechs, nursing homes? Two-thirds. Two-thirds of us could go be cripples on these brave néo worlds, if the inners pulled together and threw all their money at it. You think that’s going to happen? Never has before. Last year, three pharmaceutical plants stopped even making their low-end bone density cocktails. Didn’t open the patents. Didn’t apologize to any ships don’t have budget for the high-end stuff. Just stopped. Needed the capacity for colony ships and all the new ganga they’re making with the data coming back from the rings. Still, it wouldn't be a discussion with an Expanse antagonist without a Twitter burn. Naomi wonders if Marco wanted the Rocinante or Holden. "Did you want to show off in front of my new boyfriend?" she asks, "Because that would be kind of sad.” Before Marco can reply, one of his crewmen report that one of their ships -- the Andreas Hofer -- has picked up a racing pinnace. With "twenty-seven minutes" until "trigger impact", Marco tells his people to destroy the pinnace. And to launch an assault on the Martian ministerial flotilla, too. Today, Marco says, everything changes. And as we'll find out next chapter, it really does.
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Sep 27, 2022 12:43
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Chapter Twenty-Two: AmosNemesis Games, Chapter 22 posted:“Reports at this hour are that a massive asteroid has impacted northern Africa. The Oxford Center in Rabat, five hundred kilometers west of the event, is estimating eight point seven five on the Richter scale at the epicenter.” Nemesis Games, Chapter 22 posted:“— unseen since Krakatoa. Air traffic is being severely affected as the debris plume threatens both civilian and commercial craft. For further analysis of the situation on the ground, we are going now to Kivrin Althusser in Dakar. Kivrin?” See, one thing these novels have generally failed to do is establish stakes that feel realistic. In the sense of that something bad might actually happen. Our characters always save the day and make it through with nary a scratch because the bad guys are dumb and easily foiled. Amos seemingly dies in Cibola Burn, only to be revealed that he's okay. Okay, sure, there's a clandestine plot that seems to be reaching to the highest echelons of the OPA and Mars -- surely our heroes will stop it before anything bad happens. Well, this plan has been in the works for a while so, no, our heroes don't get to stop it. They've maybe only really understood the danger about twenty minutes before Marco Inaros fastballs one straight into the home of humanity. The bad guys have just set up Earth for an extinction level event, and there was nothing our heroes could do to stop it. Just where the hell is this book, this series, going to go from here? Having Earth take an asteroid to the gut is remarkably ballsy for this series, especially given that the series prides itself on a sort of 'semi-hard' sci-fi realism. Amos is sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair, one that he guesses was made to be the worst weapon possible. He's in a waiting room in North Carolina. He's somewhere "the kind of place he had never hoped to be." Nemesis Games, Chapter 22 posted:“The shock wave hit Dakar just under an hour ago, and authorities are still taking stock of the damage. My experience is that the city is devastated. We have reports that many, many of the local structures have not survived the initial shock. The power grid has also collapsed. The hospitals and emergency medical centers are overwhelmed. The Elkhashab Towers are being evacuated as I speak, and there are fears that the north tower may have become unstable. The sky… the sky here —” Amos takes an elevator down into the prison -- the Pit -- and we get some funny lines: Nemesis Games, Chapter 22 posted:Two guards apparently lived in it, going up and down whenever it did. So that seemed like a lovely job. Nemesis Games, Chapter 22 posted:Something beeped twice as he stepped into the hall, but none of the guards tried to shoot anyone, so he figured it was supposed to do that. Clarissa is basically being kept in a medical clinic turned prison cell. Amos thinks she looks worse than she did when they took her back from the Behemoth -- she's incredibly thin and her facial features are sunken and gaunt. Three long tubes lead into her veins. Clarissa says that everyone in The Pit is "modified" like she is. It's a prison for people like her. The prisoner who was in a brawl, Konecheck, could leave if he wants to. They could take out his mods and he could go to a nicer place. But he doesn't want to and they can't just remove them without his consent. In her case, however, Clarissa explains that they can't remove hers. It'll be worse than what she's got going on right now. It's why her mods were discontinued, after all. But she seems okay with it: Nemesis Games, Chapter 22 posted:“Sometimes you don’t get redeemed,” she said, and her voice made it clear she’d thought about the question. Tired and strong at the same time. “Not every stain comes out. Sometimes you do something bad enough that you carry the consequences for the rest of your life and take the regrets to the grave. That’s your happy ending.” An alarm goes off. Clarissa wakes up, and it isn't one she recognizes. Amos' escort enters and says the place has been put on lockdown. Marco hasn't just dropped one rock, but multiple -- this one has gone straight into the Atlantic and there's tsunami warnings from Greenland to Brazil. They're on lockdown until they know whether the rocks are still coming. I love this bit where Clarissa asks Amos where the first one hit: Nemesis Games, Chapter 22 posted:“Do you remember anything from the news?”
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Sep 28, 2022 06:59
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Oh my god, Dakar? Is this really a Gundam reference? I know I mentioned Gundam earlier, but that was just as a joke. For context, Dakar is where Fifth Luna (a large asteroid) was intended to be dropped on Earth in Char's Counterattack, targeted because that's where the Earth Federation's political HQ was located. EDIT: Also I'm been thinking about the Rocinante and how they got it. It was a ship the Donnager just carried in an internal bay with 7 other similar-sized ships? That's pretty wild since the Donnager's 500m long. The Roctinante/Tachi can't be THAT small if it can fit at least 9 people with some comfort and have a bunch of weapons and be able to be a completely independent craft, so it'd be using up a very appreciable amount of ship space to carry fully independent vessels. Kchama fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Oct 3, 2022 |
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Oct 3, 2022 22:59
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I think the Rocinante is about fifty meters long as per the show model. I don't think a size is ever given in the novels. The Donnager-class carrying so many parasite gunships has always struck me as a bit odd, honestly. Especially when those gunships are capable combatants with their own Esptein drives and long-range operational capabilities. If I remember my teenage years debating the worth of sci-fi battleship-carriers, it's always better to just settle on one side of the line. All that space they're using to cart about half a dozen gunships can give you more missiles, guns, engines, etc (or just not use the space and be a smaller target by removing it from the design.) We don't really know much about the naval doctrines of Earth and Mars, but I feel like a generalist battleship-carrier is more like an Earth thing whereas Mars would have, like, hyper-specialized, cutting-edge designs designed to defeat their opposing number. Overall, I'd say it's just one of those roleplaying conceits. It wouldn't be the first time some worldbuilding element just kind of gets dropped in and forgotten, such as Avasarala bringing up Mars' prototype photon cannons or whatever. Having been aboard a 90m long submarine, I feel like a fifty-meter long warship with a crew complement of up to thirty would be absolute hell. I'm not sure how long I've ever thought the Rocinante to be, but that fifty meter length means it's shorter than a 747. I would've guessed maybe a hundred meters. It doesn't strike me as being particularly cramped or anything, either. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Oct 4, 2022 |
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Oct 4, 2022 04:26
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 This is what the wiki shows as its schematic for the book version, which honestly makes it seem quite big and spacious if it can fit ten fairly large rooms. If the Tachi hadn't been a fully independent ship able to go on long-range journeys on its own, it wouldn't be TOO weird if it was a carrier that acted as a battleship too, but the fact that it carries a complement of full-sized independent warships in its hull is very weird. Kchama fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Oct 4, 2022 |
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Oct 4, 2022 04:44
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I just finished the last book and my main takeaway is that everyone’s face is ashen
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Oct 5, 2022 21:38
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:I just finished the last book and my main takeaway is that everyone’s face is ashen  Nemesis Games, Chapter 23 - 27 While Amos tries to free himself from someone else's prison, the conspiracy makes a move on Tycho. Alex and Naomi talk in and around spaceships. Chapter Twenty-Three: Holden In Fred's office, Holden's reeling from the news from Earth. One rock might've been a natural disaster, and it was bad enough that the Prime Minister of Mars was under attack, but a second attack reveals it to be an attack on Earth itself -- and Holden thinks the two events are connected. Holden immediately pleads with Fred to tell him that he's not part of it. Fred says what's probably the most reasonable response: "gently caress you." Drummer calls Fred. One of the ships outside has just targeted locked Tycho's engineers and habitation ring. Fred asks if the defense grid is online, which sticks out to me because I don't think anyone has used that term before in The Expanse. I'm pretty sure it originates from Babylon 5. Before Drummer can respond, three people enter the office. Holden's realizing that this is another element of the system-wide attack as they open fire, hitting Fred. Fred and Holden fire back and get two of them, the third retreating. Nemesis Games, Chapter 23 posted:“Things got a little loud here. Holden! Secure the goddamn door.” Nemesis Games, Chapter 23 posted:He looked at the gun in his fist. I think I just killed someone, he thought. And someone dropped a rock on Earth. And then they tried to kill Fred. It was bad. It was all just bad. Fred grabs Holden and drags him out of there -- someone's fired a torpedo at the station and, specifically, at Fred's office. The bad guys are trying to take engineering and the defense grid is down. Two more torpedoes have been fired at Tycho's engines. Fred's face is Holden and Fred head from the habitation ring to the construction sphere. Drummer reports that hostiles have shut down main engineering and they're holding auxiliary engineering with about twenty well-armed people. The first torpedo strikes Tycho's drive cone. The second hits the ring but fails to detonate. Fred asks Drummer if they can shut down the air in engineering. Drummer can't spare people to do it. But Fred and Holden have run into a Tycho technician and therefore can do it. Drummer says there's an access on service deck four at "Delta-Foxtrot-Whiskey-slash-six-one-four-eight.” Holden says that the attackers have vacuum suits and so it won't matter. Fred says that'll at least put them on a timer. Holden, weirdly pessimistic, says it's not going to work -- the bad guys will figure it out and just cut through a bulkhead. Fred says: Nemesis Games, Chapter 23 posted:“You know the difference between a code and a cipher, Holden?” The enemy falls for it and come streaming out five minutes later. They try to block off the fire from Drummer's team, which only opens them up to Fred's ambush team. Again, very strange for Holden under the circumstances, he fires on them although "aware that he wasn't trying very hard to hit anyone." Who is this person? Did we stumble through a time vortex and this is, like, Jimmy Holden the navy rookie in his first firefight? Anyway, the fight is over in about thirty seconds and the attacking torpedo boat bugs out fifteen minutes later. Drummer gives the damage report: Tycho's drive cone is busted and they won't be going anywhere. Holden says it's a good thing the other torpedo didn't blow the habitation ring and Drummer is like, yeah, about that... Turns out the torpedo was modified to carry a salvage mech as its payload. The mech ran in and stole "half the wall" of Fred's office. Fred realizes that they weren't after him at all. They were after his safe. Holden's like, but surely they have any sensitive information already? But there's one thing they didn't have, which is now in their possession -- Fred Johnson's sample of the protomolecule. Chapter Twenty-Four: Amos Clarissa and Amos are watching the reports of the rocks hitting Earth again and again. Millions of people are already dead and billions more will be dead in the next few weeks -- basically, it's the end of the world. No one saw the asteroids coming until they entered the atmosphere. Amos uses that to make the argument that someone had coated the rocks in something that absorbed radar. Clarissa wonders whether, had her father been able to control the protomolecule, if the attack would've ever happened. Something blasts the prison and throws Amos around like a ragdoll. If they're ten stories underground, Clarissa wonders, and that's how it felt, how bad must it be up top? While the door and window were damaged in the strike, Amos can't kick his way out. So, he calls for help and one of the guards opens the door as best she can, just a few centimeters. Amos is like, we need to get out of here, she's like, hey, the place is in lockdown. Nemesis Games, Chapter 24 posted:The escort licked her lips. Her gaze cut to the right. He tried to think what would convince her the rest of the way, but the best he came up with was punching her in the jaw and hoping he could push his way out before anyone shot him. They head for the stairs. Amos whistles to himself and gets under the skin of Konecheck and the guards. When they reach the stairs, it turns out they're caved in and no one will be getting out that way. The guards say there's no other way up. Clarissa suggests that they could climb up the elevator shaft. "This," Amos says, "is getting to be a long loving day." Chapter Twenty-Five: Naomi Naomi's watching the news feeds, too. Everything is secondary to Earth -- the attempted coup on Tycho, the fall of Ganymede, the attack at Mars. All secondary to that the Earth is dying. Perhaps the most notable new bit of info is that the UN Secretary-General has been killed. Marco's people are cheering it on. Naomi just feels numb and she's weirded out by how similar the Pella is to the Rocinante. She meets Cyn in the galley and acts like one of them, offering to check the ship stores, which Cyn goes to help her with. Naomi knows that Cyn is her jailer, although he's trying to be her friend. Cyn thinks that Marco's attack has changed everything. Earth will start to care about what they do to the Belters. Okay, sure, stealing Filip was wrong -- but maybe she's spent too much time with an Earther to forget she's a Belter. Interestingly, while Naomi thinks that she hasn't forgotten her past, she's not sure if that's true: Nemesis Games, Chapter 25 posted:There had been a time when she could have cheered the deaths on Earth. But Jim was from Earth. And Amos. Alex from Mars, which from a Belt perspective was more or less the same thing. And what was she? Their pet Belter? The one that didn’t belong? She didn’t think so. So then, she was something else. She gets out of the awkward conversation by channelling Amos again. "Well, Cyn," she says. "That's one way of looking at things, ain't it?" It confuses him enough to put an end to it. Later, by dinner, it looks like the attacks have concluded. Fred Johnson is on the screens, talking about how he thinks he's the primary target of the attack. This makes some of Marco's people very upset. Then, Monica turns the camera on Holden. Naomi knows he's lying when he says that the attackers were a small team and Fred was never in danger. When he says it was just a failed coup, Naomi knows he's still lying. Filip is like is that the guy you left us for? He's handsome. He tells Naomi, somewhat proudly, that everything on the feed is him. Marco gave him the mission to get the stealth coating as a present. Without it, the attack could never have happened. Naomi says Marco put blood on her hands, too. Filip thinks it's better that she ran away, then, if she couldn't handle the work. Naomi tells Filip she tried to kill herself by throwing herself out an airlock on Ceres and part of me feels like the Coreys have forgotten that this conversation is happening in a busy mess hall with people sitting on either side of Naomi. Unfortunately for past Naomi and maybe fortunately for present Naomi, the airlock had a failsafe and wouldn't let her do it. But she knew then that Filip could have a dead mother or a vanished one. Filip says he didn't need to be saved. Naomi says he's just killed a quarter of a billion people and that someone should've stopped that from happening. "Before you kill yourself," Naomi tells him, "come find me." Jesus, Naomi! Filip calls her a whore and stalks off. Cyn is like, wow, harsh words for his big day. Naomi reflects that Marco isn't finished yet. Whatever his grand design is, it isn't over yet. Chapter Twenty-Six: Amos In this chapter, we get a little Coreyian flourish that we haven't seen for a while. The old 'catchy line to open a chapter, then explaining how we got there.' Nemesis Games, Chapter 26 posted:Sullivan died when they were about fifteen meters up the shaft. There's one weird thing, though. In these prison chapters, Amos keeps looking at the guns the guards have and reflects that he doesn't know what kind of weapon they are. Then, early in this chapter, Amos is like, oh, those guns shoot real bullets, not the gel rounds they use in space. Which, given Amos grew up as a criminal legbreaker, I feel like he'd know what a conventional firearm looks like? They use the guns to shoot some holes and then use Konecheck and his augmented strength to open them as fingerholes in the door. They need to climb the ladder and then open each door up as they go. Given that the guns are biometrically linked to the guards, Sullivan has to go up with Konecheck. Suddenly, Sullivan screams and falls. Konecheck calls down that he slipped. One of the other guards, Rona, is about to shoot him when Amos is like, hey, we need him to open the doors. Amos inspects Sullivan's body -- his gun is out of ammo. Amos thinks Konecheck murdered him the moment he was no longer useful but tells Rona that he slipped. Nemesis Games, Chapter 26 posted:Rona’s teeth were chattering with rage and fear. Amos smiled and nodded at her because it seemed like the kind of thing people did to reassure folks. He couldn’t tell if it was doing any good. Clarissa has grabbed Morris' hand and made it fire the weapon. Amos kicks Konecheck hard enough that he figures he castrated him (drat) and sends him back down into the Pit. Amos looks at Rona as she tries to take in the devastation: Nemesis Games, Chapter 26 posted:She was crying and turning slowly, taking in the devastation all around them with disbelief and horror. The woman’s hands flapped at her sides like she was pretending to be a penguin. Rona goes off to find someone named Esme. Amos realizes that he and Clarissa are hungry, thirsty, drenched with weird possibly-toxic water, and unarmed -- the only gun they have requires a dead man to shoot it. Clarissa thinks they should head to Luna. It's that or die when everyone on Earth runs out of food and water. Se knows where her family keeps their yachts, which is a little odd because I thought everyone in the Mao family had been taken by the UN, but whatever. Nemesis Games, Chapter 26 posted:“It’s funny,” Clarissa said. “Most of human history, going to the moon was impossible. A dream beyond anyone’s imagination. And then, for a while, it was an adventure. And then it was trivial. Yesterday, it was trivial. And now, it’s almost impossible again.” Chapter Twenty-Seven: Alex Alex wakes up inside a Martian medical bay. He's okay. A doctor tells him that Bobbie's being debriefed and the Razorback is being refuelled. We've jumped back in time a bit, it seems -- the Martians haven't engaged Marco's vessels yet and half a dozen of Mars' finest warships are en route to assist them. The doctor informs Alex about the attack on Earth. Afterward, Bobbie and Alex meet up. Alex reflects to himself about the attack on Earth -- it's basically what we've seen in the other chapters. Planet's hosed, millions dead and billions more on the way. The new bit of info is that Earth is recalling their navy to defend Earth against other possible strikes. Bobbie says no one knows who the bad guys shadowing them are -- they have no transponders operating and no threats or demands have been made. Bobbie mentions that she told the Martians that they were out there looking for missing ships hiding under new transponders because of a tip from James Holden. Alex agrees that, yes, that does not sound great. She also told them about the black market issues and the various things that have resulted from that. Someone comes in and neither Alex nor Bobbie recognize him. Turns out, he's Prime Minister Smith. He wants to know why the Earth government is asking to speak with Bobbie. He wants to know if she was working for them and Bobbie says she's just a friend of Chrisjen Avasarala. Well, it turns out that Avasarala is now the de facto head of Earth's government. Smith wants to know what she would tell Avasarala. They tell Smith everything. They put Alex in his own quarters for the night. He tries to avoid watching the news but can't. Mars is pledging to drop supplies to Earth. Ganymede is back under control of the lawful authorities and they're sending shipments to Earth -- huh, maybe we didn't go back that far at all. Alex calls Bobbie. Bobbie's sparring and mentions that the Martians are going to loan her a suit of power armor. They head down to the mess hall and talk about things. Turns out the pursuing ships are and have been fighting with the escort ships, but also not. It's odd. Alex thinks it seems like a pretty bad strategy. Bobbie thinks that they provoked the bad guys into moving too early and they may have saved the Prime Minister because of it. Even so, Bobbie wishes that there were more than six ships coming to help them. Well, seven. Six and a half, she says. Six and a half, Alex asks. Bobbie says that the relief ships picked up a commercial hauler somewhere -- a non-military ship going by the name Chetzemoka... Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 6, 2022 03:53
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We're just over halfway through Nemesis Games at this point, so, I think it's a good time to pause and consider the story so far. All in all, it's pretty good. I think it deserves its title for best book in the series. I've mentioned the effectiveness of the rock-drop on Earth, which is a definite highlight, but the story's focus on each of the Rocinante crew is pretty effective, too. I think the story is capturing that sense of being caught up in something bigger than any individual person pretty well and it's fun seeing Holden, Alex, and Naomi each feeling a different part of the conspiracy element. The stories are separate but related enough that you hope one of them will crack the case, at least in the case of Holden and Alex. Amos might not be solving the case but he's down in the mud on Earth, giving a street-level view of the worst apocalypse in mankind's history. Naomi provides some important perspective on what's going on, but feels generally weaker. So, when it comes to the viewpoints in this story, the clear leader of the four is Amos, for basically the reasons I've outlined before -- he's fun, he's straightforward, and his detached mindset plays nicely with the Corey prose. The idea of Amos' story involving him going back for one last goodbye, then getting caught in the end of the world is very cool. Perhaps Amos feels a bit too much like a comedic caricature at points but that's about the worst thing I can say about his chapters. Holden and Alex are likewise generally okay, although I'm not sure which one edges out the other to settle into second place behind Amos. Holden is sort of operating in Miller's shoes but generally out of his depth as he tries to figure out some conspiracy on Tycho, which is pretty fun. Given all the history Fred and Holden are said to have had, it's good seeing them together for an extended period. Some of it is a little on the nose, however, such as Holden asking Fred if he's not involved in the attack on Earth and Fred telling him 'gently caress you.' But it's fine. Holden's tendency to blab things coming back to bite him in the butt via Sakai is a nice, understated touch. Alex's return to Mars is similar. It's fine, it's fun enough, and on a re-read you can see how the pieces are slotting together. One thing that has stuck out to me is the complete absence of Alex's son. Sure, Avasarala mentioned that Alex doesn't know about his son back in Caliban's War, but it sticks out to me that Tali says "walked out on me" and not "walked out on us." Given that Alex's son factors much more into the TV series, I feel like saying that the Coreys just forgot that aspect of Alex's backstory. That, or Tali was deliberately doing everything she could, selecting her words so very carefully, to prevent Alex from knowing that he has a son. But it's nice seeing this development from what Alex told us in Cibola Burn even if it leaves Alex feeling like a bit of an rear end in a top hat. The weakest of the four is, unfortunately, Naomi. She hasn't quite hit the point of some other characters in previous novels -- say, Havelock or Basia in Cibola Burn -- where they're just actively boring and arguably irrelevant, but she doesn't feel far from it. I appreciate how her story sets up the 'flying bomb' threat of the Rocinante, however. I also like how Amos imagines he's Naomi and Naomi imagines she's Amos, it's a nice indication of the depth of their friendship. But that's really all I can think to say about it. The problem is, I think, that this is all new to the reader. Filip, Marco, and every other element of Naomi's past, hasn't even been hinted at. This is what really holds back Naomi's part of the novel, because the story needs to establish all of her backstory and then quickly develop it. There was a whole chapter where it was dumped on the reader in flashbacks which is always an awkward storytelling device at best. Compare it to Alex and Amos where we have a pretty good idea of their backstory already, so, the story can just go ahead and build on it. Additionally, the refusal of Nemesis Games to engage with the tidbits of Naomi's past that were told to us in the first few books leaves it feeling a bit off-kilter, such as the nickname of her terrorist past, Knuckles, also being Sam's term of endearment. I don't see Naomi telling Sam that unless she tells her the full context and Sam didn't strike me as someone to use it if she knew that context. Additionally, it hasn't come up with, say, Cyn calls her Knuckles to explain why Sam did. Like, okay, Naomi has had one less chapter than the others at this point (everyone else has had seven, she's on six) but that isn't why her story is weaker. All in all, though? Yeah, the first half is pretty solid. It definitely feels like the Coreys are firing on all gears. Will the second half match up? Hopefully! Will the TV series, accustomed to knocking the adaptation of each novel out of the park, manage to make the story even better? The tragedy of the TV series is that it doesn't and, in fact, botches it. But we'll talk about that when we reach the end of Nemesis Games because there's a lot to discuss about how Season 5 went so wrong. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Oct 6, 2022 |
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Oct 6, 2022 07:12
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Nemesis Games, Chapters 28 and 29 Fred quotes poetry and I spend too much time on it. We get our first real look at Marco Inaros and the next step of his master plan: crashing this frigate-corvette, with no survivors. Chapter Twenty-Eight: Holden Back on Tycho, Holden's griping that Monica called them out about the attack possibly being cover for some kind of theft. Since the attack, Tycho Station isn't so much siding with Earth as much as it is standing away from the OPA, whom a lot of the crew seem to think was responsible for the attack. Holden thinks Monica should've known better than to say something like that, given that he and Fred just saved her life. Fred points out that they lied to her. Holden thinks: Nemesis Games, Chapter 28 posted:It wasn’t something he’d have done, just a few years before. Then, he’d have told the truth, the whole truth, and let the chips fall wherever they fell. He didn’t know if it bothered him more that he’d changed or that he hadn’t noticed it until someone else pointed it out. Nemesis Games, Chapter 28 posted:“ ‘Be angry at the sun for setting if these things anger you.’ A poet named Jeffers said that.” Given that he had also lived through World War 1, you can probably see where Jeffers got such confidence in his deterministic fatalism from. The last three stanzas of the poem, however, advise the reader to "observe" all the silly business with the soldiers and politicians and put aside their meaningless struggles for power. "Yours," Jeffers writes, "is not theirs." Jeffers believed that no matter who won World War 2, the world would remain much as it was -- politicians would send people to die, the rich would continue to be in control, people would continue to fuel the myth of a good war, animals would continue to be abused and experimented upon, etc. He's also perhaps one of the few poets to live by his ethos -- Jeffers lived in relative solitude and built his own house out of stone. Despite being anti-war and anti-imperialism, people said he wasn't anti-capitalist enough, that he was anti-modernist, and possibly even a fascist. So, yeah, an interesting figure and and interesting one for the Coreys to bring up in this novel. I feel like Fred's being a bit pithy by quoting him to Holden in that manner -- I don't think Jeffers would be so glibly dismissive of such realpolitik, the poem that is being quoted illustrates that it's a very dumb thing for humanity to believe, even if it has been a constant in every empire from Greece and Rome to America. Don't get angry that it's America doing it, get angry at the concept of doing it -- get angry at imperialism, get angry at our inhumanity, realize that you're completely insane if you care about it still. "Sane men," Jeffers wrote, do not "feel pain outside their own skins." I'm not really sure why I felt the need to go on a bit of a tangent here. Perhaps it is because Holden is not someone Jeffers would think highly of. Neither is Fred. Perhaps it's the irony in Fred using it to calm down Holden. Perhaps it's the idea that Holden is probably the sort to think he's someone like Jeffers. Perhaps it's that if we transported Jeffers into the world of The Expanse, he'd find it a nightmare. Perhaps it's just another notch in that sense of political blindness (or left-lib platitudes) that the Coreys express. I don't know. It's an interesting poem to bring up given the themes of the series and the content of this novel alone, where someone drives Earth into an extinction-event. Anyway, they return to Fred's office -- or his new office down by the brig. Avasarala's putting together a diplomatic conference on Luna and she wants someone, Fred, to represent the "slightly less batshit" wing of the OPA. He plays a message from Anderson Dawes. Dawes says he didn't sanction the attack on Earth but the people who did it were true patriots and it's time for the old wound between various groups in the OPA to heal -- all he needs to show that Fred will play ball with "the new age" is the return of William Sakai. Holden suggests throwing Sakai out the airlock. Fred says that's not possible. He's got an invite to two political tables -- the inner planets and whatever new leadership is happening within the OPA. Holden's like, sure, but they're mass murderers. Fred says, yes, but they can find out who they are if he plays pall. Trade Sakai to Dawes and learn who was behind the attack on Earth. Fred says he'll throw in without everyone can do the most good in the long-term. While he holds Medina, he says, he's a very powerful figure. Holden says it sounds like "post hoc realpolitik rationalizing bullshit. Sir." Fred says he's right but, if he's going to go to Luna, will Holden take him on the Roci. If he wants to go see Dawes at Pallas, then he can do it himself. Nemesis Games, Chapter 28 posted:“I try to do the right thing, Holden. But there are times when it’s not obvious what that is.” After an odd little moment where Holden realizes he could have sex with the waiter if he wants, and then that he's homesick for the Rocinante and his crew, Fred summons him back to the security office. Well, turns out Medina's gone dark -- and now twenty-five Martian military ships are burning hard for the ring. Fred thinks they're OPA and therefore he won't side with them. They're heading out to Luna then, in five days. Holden returns to his quarters and records a message for Alex. Chapter Twenty-Nine: Naomi Naomi's feeling suicidal. Not in a compulsive way, but she's noticing her brain paying attention to the airlocks, power conduits, ways to overdose. She's trying to distract herself by attending to tasks around the Pella. While everyone celebrates their attack on Earth, Naomi's trying to figure out how similar the Pella is to the Rocinante -- and whether she can jury-rig a way to broadcast a message. Her plans might even work, if her handlers don't immediately put a bullet in her. While she's working on something, Wings comes out and says: Nemesis Games, Chapter 29 posted:“Hey, y’all,” Wings said in a fake drawl. “Víse mé! Bin Marteño, sa sa? Howdy, howdy, howdy!”  I suppose it survived however many centuries into the future. What about Cow Tools? Naomi overhears that Marco's people have a plan to recover Sakai -- or are they? Sakai, Naomi knows, is the guy handling the Rocinante's repairs. She thinks that even if Marco may have wanted their ship, it's likely Sakai passed on that the ship wouldn't be coming. But what does Marco really want? Naomi goes to see Marco and I'd say this is our first real look at him. Marco Inaros is an unfortunate character -- despite his obvious political aims, he's painted as vain, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, insincere, and an idiot. There's no drama in this. Marco the bad guy isn't just hurting people -- he's repugnant on every level. There's so much potential in Naomi Nagata's ex-turned-revolutionary but it's just wasted. It's that, I don't know, Twitter Didactic style where the antagonist can't have anything compelling, interesting or sympathetic about them. You don't want anyone posting #inarosdidnothingwrong or anything. I think it's easy enough to point out that Marco's a pretty bad character, and that a lot of the weakness of Naomi's part of the story lies with him and how the Coreys depicted him. Anyway, Naomi wants to know why Marco brought her to the Pella and why she's turned Filip into a child soldier. Marco says he brought her there because she's Filip's mother. Naomi calls bullshit. We get this interesting metaphor that I'm going to interrogate for a bit because it's sort of like the usual metaphor you get in a lot of books -- sounds nice but is a little meaningless and doesn't reveal much about the character in question. Nemesis Games, Chapter 29 posted:She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be. Naomi asks if it was about Holden, if she's there as insurance against him. Marco, of course, angrily snaps that he's not afraid of her "Earther gently caress buddy." Naomi says she's right and that he's so scared of Holden that he wanted him dead before anything began. And then we get this: Nemesis Games, Chapter 29 posted:“Do you know why I’m with him?” Later, Naomi's eating dinner in the mess hall with Cyn. We get a Coreyism of dropping half-finished meals in the recycler: Nemesis Games, Chapter 29 posted:She put her tray and the rest of the brick into the recycler and walked back toward the lift. Back in her quarters, Naomi reflects on what she knows and what she's learned. Marco's tried to assassinate multiple people, but only managed to get the UN Secretary-General. He tried to get the Rocinante but failed. He has Martian ships and weapons yet no sign of cooperation with the government itself. Then, Karal said that they weren't going to pick up Sakai -- they just needed him to not talk. And Marco implied that Holden's still in danger, and she'd be the one to hurt him. Marco had failed to get Fred and Tycho and Holden. What links them together? The Rocinante. Just like the Augustin Gamarra, it's been rigged to have it's magnetic bottle to fail and its reactor to detonate. The software she's written a lifetime ago is going to kill everyone aboard the station. And she has no way to stop it. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Oct 8, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 05:17
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Oct 8, 2022 07:45
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What is the Status of the Martian Navy? Or: Another drat Donnager-class Derail Now that I've looked a little more closely at it, I can't stop thinking about the space navy/military worldbuilding in these novels. It's kind of sloppy, isn't it? Despite the idea that's been floated since the first novel that Mars has quality, Earth has quantity, it's really difficult to determine what that means in practice. I promise, this will be my last post in sci-fi spaceships. The issue is that worldbuilding -- good worldbuilding -- tells a story in and of itself. The Expanse's worldbuilding isn't bad per se but it is simplisitic. It's great for a roleplaying game which is, as I've noted before, why such similar settings were all over sci-fi forums like Spacebattles back in the late 90s and early 00s: A stagnant if not declining Earth, a cutting-edge Martian power, and an assortment of exotic outer planets. But what does this mean for the story? Well, one of the biggest ideas that's been floating around the novels when it comes to the worldbuilding is the idea of Martian superiority. We don't know how many more ships Earth has than Mars, but the Martian ships are said to be of higher quality and actually designed for war. Holden has said of the Phantom-class, Earth's rough cousin of the (sigh) Corvette-class, that his ship is better in every way. When Holden is aboard the Donnager, he immediately notices that Martian warships are just built better. Avasarala mentions to Bobbie that Mars has newer ships, better ships, faster ships and possesses "high-energy proton cannons." These proton cannons are never mentioned again. Things get hazier from there. In Nemesis Games, Bobbie mentions Mars has seven Donnagers. In Cibola Burn, Avasarala says Mars has "sixteen battlecruisers" and "who the gently caress knows" how many other fighting vessels. We don't at all know how this compares to Earth. We know that the Battle of Io was something of a ragnarok situation according to Holden, which involved approximately forty vessels, including multiple Donnagers and Earth Truman-class dreadnoughts (an older battleship model.) However, those were only isolated elements of the two navies, Nguyen's part being explicitly what he got put together on the sly. I'm sure the Coreys would say this stuff isn't important, that someone like myself is paying too much attention to the elements of the story they aren't concerned with, they'd rather focus on the plot and characters -- but these elements directly inform the plot and characters. Is Mars actually better? What will a fight between the two powers entail? What does it mean for Holden? What does it mean for Bobbie? We know some elements of Mars' rhetoric isn't strictly speaking true (Bobbie realizes they can't take Earth with an invasion, for example) but we also know that there's no need for Mars to put troops on the ground if they control the stars. And, again, this Martian rhetoric doesn't just come from Martians, Holden and Avasarala are familiar with this stuff. The other thing is that, by the time of Nemesis Games, I don't think the Coreys' argument holds up. The story is directly engaging with elements of the Martian military and the breakdown of Martian society is basically at the front of the text. We have Marco being given Martian warships. Duarte is fomenting what might be a coup. Maybe for the first three novels, sure, there was little point in getting into the space navy nuts and bolts -- but now? I also think one can cheekily point out that the Coreys love providing information that isn't strictly relevant to the plot and characters. So, let's look at the Donnager-class battleship. Something that bothers me about the Donnager-class is that they're the only Martian battleship we ever hear about. Because of this, it sort of encapsulates the Martian navy as a whole. Even then, we aren't told much about it. We get a length and a total mass, some idea of its armaments, and Holden reflects that it's built better than an Earth battleship. We know that Mars is generally seen as being technologically superior and that their ships are considered just better warships than their Earth counterparts. I would've said that, pound for pound, the Donnager-class is simply better than it's Earther equivalent. If it's anything like the Rocinante and its Earther counterparts, a Martian battleship would be faster, more armed, more armored, and just generally more capable. But is it? Well, first we have to identify the Donnager's equivalent. There's two possibilities. The Truman-class from Caliban's War, which Holden seems to think is roughly the same, and the Xerxes-class from Abaddon's Gate. We don't know much about the Truman-class, but the Xerxes-class is called a third-generation dreadnaught/battleship, indicating that the terms are basically interchangable as far as Earth is concerned. But that's about all we get on the Xerxes. Given that the Xerxes-class is responable for carrying the delegation to the gate and how much it's talked up, I think it's of the same generation as the Donnager-class. But that's nothing! So, we might have to look at some other sources. I bought a copy of the Ships of the Expanse book from the Expanse roleplaying game. I think it's safe to consider this secondary canon, and ultimately irrelevant to any reading of the novels, but it can be interesting to see what people 'bolt on' to the world of any given universe. Ships of the Expanse contains information on the Donnager, Xerxes, and Truman models of warship -- and more besides! Honestly, it's really disappointing. For a roleplaying book with an audience of sci-fi nerds, there's no fun, crunchy lore about space warships. It's all so generic and bland. "The Xerxes-class was named after a Persian king of renown." "The Donnager-class battleships are among the largest and most efficiently built ships in the Martian Congressional Republic Navy." There's no real fun stuff here, nothing that provides any insight, nothing that makes you think people were happy to add to the setting. Nothing remotely comparable to, say, Freespace: Blue Planet's Threat Exigency Initiative. So, let's see. Despite being the "most efficiently built ships" in the MCRN, the Donnager-class is also "incredibly difficult to make" (what) which is why only eight of them were constructed during the events of the first few books. As for the Donnager-class itself, it's much like what I've mentioned before: an odd do-anything battleship. It's a bit smaller than its UNN counterpart, the Xerxes-class, and that's about all it has going for it. When it comes to armor, it's less armored. When it comes to weapons, it's also lacking. It has the same amount of railguns (two) and while its railguns are said to have full coverage (an advantage over the Xerxes' fore mounts) the bulk of the Donnager-class' engines clearly prevent them from firing behind it. Speaking of engines, the Xerxes has double what the Donnager has. One advantage may be in the form of the Martian point-defence cannons which are said to have good targeting algorithms, but that's about it. When it comes to torpedoes, it mounts fourteen tubes compared to the Xerxes' twenty-four. It mounts a similar number of docked craft which, as mentioned, is an odd decision to make. This class of ship was designed to "hit harder and faster" but it actually possesses less weapons and engines than the Xerxes-class and no indication is given that either is more efficient than Earth's. Weirdly, the Donnager-class is built with four railgun hardpoints but only mounts weapons on two of them, an odd idea that was apparently so the ship could mount four if technological advancements made it feasible in the future -- look, not to do a Martian think tank's job better than them, but maybe strip out the massive hangar bay and add in another reactor to power them? Even so, I'd question this aspect of the design given that I don't think we've seen a single battle beyond the destruction of the Donnager itself where railguns were ever fired. Additionally, despite being smaller than the Xerxes-class, the Donnager-class requires more crew. If we get down to game mechanics, the lowest form of canon, the only advantage the Donnager appears to have over its two Earth opposing numbers is it's "high-charged railguns" which do a whole 1d6 of extra damage (4d6 VS 3d6.) It also has "plasma torpedoes" (4d6 VS 3d6 for conventionals) which the Xerxes-class does not. However, the Truman-class does have plasma torpedoes. The Donnager-class has a slightly stronger hull than the smaller Truman-class but less armor than the Xerxes-class. So, is the Donnager a better ship? Well, who knows. The people behind the RPG seemed to miss the boat on the idea that Mars has quality, Earth has quantity and created a warship whose main advantage appears to be in its medical facilities. The TV series states, I think, that Earth has something like five times the number of Mars' warships (and I think inflates the ship counts of both sides) but the books have avoided any numbers. Is the Martian navy superior to Earth or is is a paper tiger? Going back to the books, it appears in the universe of The Expanse, ships come in two sizes -- corvettes/frigates and battleships/dreadnoughts. At least, that is all Nemesis Games is concerned with. Perhaps fleet doctrine involves a few mammoth ships that carry around smaller vessels? But that's not true -- cruisers and destroyers featured in the first two novels. Holden said he served on a destroyer and Martian attack cruisers are mentioned in Caliban's War. Frankly, there's no real reason for either Earth nor Mars to build battleships. The reason why we stopped building them in our contemporary navies is that the titans of the sea made easy prey to air power -- planes and then missiles, things that could hit the battleships without them being able to hit back. Carriers made battleships obsolete. Now, of course, The Expanse doesn't want space fighter carriers. They want to go with reasonably hard sci-fi designs. But your massive battleships are still vulnerable to, well, cruisers designed to carry missiles. If Mars wanted to challenge Earth, why would they match them with boondoggle do-anything Donnagers? Why wouldn't they make ships designed to kill Earth's fleet of older Truman-class battleships? Earth's battleships might be a requirement of politics -- easier to sell a few dozen do-anything warships to police the Belt or whatever -- but we're told that Mars has entirely different sets of goals and thought processes. Funnily enough, the RPG indicates this itself: it provides a profile on the MCRN Scirocco-class cruiser that rivals the Donnager-class' command and control capabilities despite being half the size. And, again, despite being half the size it mounts more weapons pound for pound -- one railgun to the Donnager's two, ten torpedo tubes to the Donnager's fourteen. It also requires less than half the crew and can still carry three dropships with their marine complements. It's hull is also almost as strong as a Donnager's -- 4d6+2 versus 5d6+4! I don't know where the buck stops with this precisely. I've mentioned before that I think the Coreys just aren't interested in sci-fi war stuff, and I think that's true. But I think a lot of it comes from The Expanse's 'hard space opera' setting itself. Given that the setting is in something of a technological slow period, how can you demonstrate that Mars is better? Does better point-defence targeting, slightly better railguns, and better medbays really close the gap with Earth? Were this a more relaxed setting, you could maybe have Mars demonstrate something like faster-recharging FTL drives that give their fleets greater strategic manoeuvrability. Or maybe their FTL jumps are so precise that they can drop their railgun mounted ships within a few kilometres of Earth ships, bypassing the threat of missiles and so on, and risking changing the entire calculus of space combat. Maybe Mars' electronic warfare tech makes their missiles almost impossible to jam. Maybe their PDCs are unfathomably good at shooting down missiles and so the trend of space combat is shifting toward railguns. Maybe Mars has been developing frigate-sized stealth ships with miniature railguns and-- Wait, that was an Earth design. It was the whole plot of Leviathan Wakes. poo poo. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Oct 10, 2022 |
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Oct 10, 2022 09:57
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I kind of get the impression that there's a Honorverse-style issue with the ships. When they made the Honorverse board game, according to the devs, they had the issue that very often, Weber's descriptions of the ships didn't actually match the official stats of the ship, or agree with itself. The example they gave was that this ship was described as the most heavily armed of its class, but when compared to the other ships in its class, it actually had the least weapons. Also, I think I mentioned this before, but I'm pretty sure that the setting is based off of the Zone of the Enders, which had a pretty much identical setup (the Enders being people who lived out past Mars, just like Belters), and even did "Mars has quality, Earth has quantity" with Mars using powerful and near-magical Orbital Frames made using new materials that are impossible to come by on Earth, while Earth uses LEVs that are cheap and more 'hard scifi'. I also wonder if Mobile Suit Gundam similarities means it plays a role. The OYW has a similar setup too. Zeon/Mars has quality of Mobile Suits, while Earth has quantity - the units that defeated the mighty Zeon war machines were the GM, a cheap mass production copy of the Gundam which was already obsolete against Zeon's forces by the time the GM is rolled out, and the Ball, a worker pod with cannons strapped to the top. Earth used expert pilots combined with mass numbers to outmatch the super-advanced enemy Mobile Suits piloted by greenhorns. I kind of feel like those things would be in the Corey's wheelhouses and might play a role in why the world-building is the way it is while avoiding the specifics that this sort of thing requires.
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Oct 10, 2022 10:36
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Another small thing I noticed while putting some of this together is that, for all the focus on torpedoes and railguns, the Expanse factions do actually possess formidable laser technology. Protogen has automatic defense lasers powerful enough to cut people in half, Martian gantries are mentioned as being reinforced to withstand lasers. They're common enough that, in Caliban's War, Holden notes that his armor has specific anti-laser plating. Yet lasers never feature beyond anything for communications and electronic warfare, except for Ashford's plan to turn the Behemoth's comm laser into a weapon. This is probably a good thing as some quick calculations I found seem to indicate that ships with Epstein drives could fire lasers that cut through a Donnager from bow to stern in seconds. I wonder if the lasers are some remnant of the original game, which we know had things like robot butlers and such? I know, I know, I'm paying too much attention to this stuff. But part of this is admittedly because of the series' reputation as being hard sci-fi. But sometimes I think trying to stick to this idea of being 'hard' only made the series less exciting?
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Oct 10, 2022 14:06
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Another small thing I noticed while putting some of this together is that, for all the focus on torpedoes and railguns, the Expanse factions do actually possess formidable laser technology. Protogen has automatic defense lasers powerful enough to cut people in half, Martian gantries are mentioned as being reinforced to withstand lasers. They're common enough that, in Caliban's War, Holden notes that his armor has specific anti-laser plating. Yet lasers never feature beyond anything for communications and electronic warfare, except for Ashford's plan to turn the Behemoth's comm laser into a weapon. I wonder if it might be one author sticking in the high-tech stuff and then the other author never letting it be used. It's kind of weird that they wanted to be so 'hard' scifi when all the interesting stuff in the story is the wild magical alien hyper-tech.
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Oct 12, 2022 03:12
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I don't really think the Expanse is 'hard' SF at all, it doesn't really care about the actual details of the technology or materials or ships or guns. It's hard SF as an aesthetic. Which is fine, maybe even better for what it's doing. Especially when one of the things it's doing is 'get one book out a year and don't stop like GRRM stopped'
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Oct 12, 2022 03:49
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Kchama posted:I wonder if it might be one author sticking in the high-tech stuff and then the other author never letting it be used. It's kind of weird that they wanted to be so 'hard' scifi when all the interesting stuff in the story is the wild magical alien hyper-tech. I was going to say that you were on to something, because two of the mentions are in Holden chapters (Franck), but the Protogen man-bisecting lasers are in a Miller one (Abraham). General Battuta posted:I don't really think the Expanse is 'hard' SF at all, it doesn't really care about the actual details of the technology or materials or ships or guns. It's hard SF as an aesthetic. Which is fine, maybe even better for what it's doing. Hard sci-fi as an aesthetic is a great way of putting it. Otherwise, yeah, I'd say a lot of the squinting I'm doing at various particulars comes from that 'put out a book a year, don't sweat the small stuff' approach.
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Oct 12, 2022 04:33
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Putting out a book a year is fine as a goal but it kind of just feels more like they didn't really start giving a gently caress until they actually started to have some real successes with the series. Also, "throw it in" can be totally fine, but even 'pretending to be hard scifi' kind of is at odds with that. Aesthetic is a good description. All style, no substance.
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Oct 12, 2022 08:50
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I feel like there's a certain cynical approach to not putting too much effort in until you beginning getting some big successes. Anyway, here's something that'd been rattling around in my head from Cibola Burn in light of the events of Nemesis Games. Havelock says this to Naomi: Cibola Burn, Chapter 32 posted:“Are you and Holden secretly alien spies that blew up the planet as part of a Belter conspiracy to distract the media?”  I don't know if I'd really consider it foreshadowing, if only because the idea of a conspiracy theory is then summed up as basically people trying to cope with the randomness of the universe. But still, something to note.
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Oct 14, 2022 02:09
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From a worldbuilding standpoint, I think it would be much more interesting if 100% of the military stuff was wrong on purpose. Early on you lampshade how inconsistent and incoherent the designations are- maybe show us a small corvette, then a huge one, then show off a battleship that's tiny or something- whatever it takes to get across how nonsensical the type ratings are. Meanwhile in the main story arc, you build the logistics as the real stories did: Earth has lots of ships but they suck, Mars has fewer but they're awesome, blah blah. Then you finally reveal, maybe the first time an actual space battle happens, that nobody has warships. Space is loving terrifying, and small mistakes lead to big explosions. As a cost-cutting measure the space appropriations committee decided to weld cheap weapons platforms onto old hulls, because planning the loss into your bottom line was cheaper than reinforcing a ship to actually take hits. Maybe the threat from Mars is that they're actually building warships, leaving Earth to scramble trying to figure out where they're getting the material and money... except when the Roci crew gets rescued in Leviathan Wakes they learn that it's all a fakeout, and the Great Martian Fleet is, like, two armored warships on camera, fifty barges with grenade launchers taped to the hull just out of frame. I dunno- it's focused on the economics and logistics of war, which I think a general audience might struggle to find as engaging as space lasers going 'pew pew', but it seems like a really easy way to bring the military stuff in line with the novels' stated aesthetic.
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Oct 16, 2022 01:31
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That's mean no Roci though, because the entire thing about the Roci is that it is super top of the line and so advanced that even years later brand new ships only wish they could be as cool. So that'd be a 'no' to that. The only thing I've ever read/seen that gave me a good feeling of 'space is terrifying' was Aim For The Top! Gunbuster. The protagonist's first launch into actual space combat has her immediately becoming disoriented and lost thanks to the lack of gravity and natural orientation and she can only listen in horror as the rest of her squad (including her new boyfriend) is brutally massacred just of sight and she can't find them to come help them even though they're not very far away.
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Oct 16, 2022 10:30
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Nemesis Games, Chapters 30 - 33 Amos and Clarissa trek across the wastes while Bobbie and Alex stumble into a time rift. Naomi does something and Holden cries. Chapter Thirty: Amos Amos and Clarissa are trekking northeast in the hopes that it's less devastated territory. Amos' goal is to reach Baltimore and the failed arcology there. Amos thinks Erich might control it, or some of it. Even if Erich doesn't, then Amos thinks there'll be someone who'll negotiate with him. Beyond the devastation, however, there's a problem -- by Amos' reckoning, there's perhaps three million people between the two of them and possible safety. By himself, he wouldn't be concerned, but he's got Clarissa to worry about, too. She's not doing too well but she refuses to say anything about it beyond she's fine. It's cold, too. Despite the fact it was summer, the damage from the strikes has turned everything to winter and the light never gets beyond twilight. There are camps for refugees but Amos stays away from them given Clarissa's status as a felon. Three days later, Amos and Clarissa run into a man and his tarp of a tent. He's heading west. Amos says they're heading for Baltimore but the guy says that's a bad idea. He also mentions that there's some guy to the east who's just ready to shoot everyone who steps onto his land. They go their seperate ways. It's a nice little scene, where you're not sure if the guy is a threat or if that's Amos' kill-or-be-killed perspective seeping. We get a bit of Amos Wisdom: Nemesis Games, Chapter 30 posted:“poo poo, I grew up like this. All these folks are just playing catch-up. Thing is, we’re humans. We’re tribal. More settled things are, the bigger your tribe is. All the people in your gang, or all the people in your country. All the ones on your planet. Then the churn comes, and the tribe gets small again.” Anyway, they head east, toward the guy who is shooting at people. The compoud is a simple white house and Amos leaves Clarissa at the edge of the property and walks the perimeter to see what's up. A fence, and what could be a sniper in the attic. Or maybe it's a bird. Obvious signs of violence, blood and bullets. Amos calls out to the guy, claiming to want to trade. He says he has a water recycler and wants some guns. The guy comes out of the house and orders Amos to strip, in order to see he doesn't have any weapons. Amos thinks the guy might not have any people with him. Then, after asking Amos where the water recycler is, says he can get it himself. Nemesis Games, Chapter 30 posted:Before he could pull the trigger, something moved through the field of his yard like a gust of wind. Only this wind had teeth. The man staggered back, then yawped in confusion and pain. With her chemical hormone blockers having faded in the days since they left the Pit, Peaches moved too quickly for Amos’ eye to follow. It was like she’d become an angry hummingbird. The man fell to his knees, his assault rifle suddenly gone and one of his fingers broken and bleeding. As he curled to grasp his broken hand, the gun stuttered, opening the man’s chest along the side. The nex tmorning, they leave with gear: professional-grade thermal suits, water and food, rifles, and a pair of well-maintained bicycles. With the bikes, Baltimore is only about nine days away. When they stop for lunch, Clarissa asks if what they did bothers Amos at all -- whether the guy was a murderer or not, they still deliberately went there and killed him and took his stuff. Amos says that both sides of that fight knew what was going to happen, they were never going to trade. Nemesis Games, Chapter 30 posted:“Then we’re not exactly the good guys, are we?” Chapter Thirty-One: Alex Alex and Bobbie are having breakfast. Bobbie notes Alex is in a good mood -- he's happy that Holden's bringing "his girl" to Luna. There's a moment of confusion as Bobbie thinks he's referring to Talissa. They briefly talk about the recent stuff on Mars and the collapse of the grand terraforming project. Another entry for Expanse.txt from Alex: Nemesis Games, Chapter 31 posted:“Amazing how much we’ve managed to do, considering how we’re doing it all with jumped-up social primates and evolutionary behaviors from the Pleistocene.” Anyway, Bobbie mentions that the relief ships are just getting into operational range and that the crews are all green. All the good crews are back at Hungaria covering their six. Again, not to get too space grognard here, but I feel like you'd keep your rearguard screen moving with the rest of the convoy, so they could screen the convoy without abandoning it entirely, not seemingly heading off to Hungaria. Those wily Martians, such incredible tacticians! The pair are still chatting when an alarm goes off and the order is given to go to battle stations -- uh-oh! The PDCs are already firing. They run into Sergeant Park who mentions what you might already be able to guess: the relief ships have opened fire. Alex wonders if they were fake transponder codes but Park notes that, no, they're Martian ships and they're hostile. Bobbie and Alex get strapped into crash couches. What is interesting to me about this sequence is how it feels very reminiscent of the attack on the Donnager in Leviathan Wakes. Our characters are strapped in a room, listening to the battle that's resulted from a bunch of small, unknown ships sneaking up on... Well, I presume it's a battleship. I'm not sure what class of ship they're on, if it's even been named (a quick search didn't turn anything up) but I imagine it's probably a Donnager? The ship's drive takes a hit and they go weightless. Like the events of Leviathan Wakes, it appears that the bad guys want to board the ship, and Martians come by to grab the two of them. They head up to the bridge and the captain (a woman, just like Captain Yao) gives them a sitrep: they're being boarded and their original escorts are now under concentrated attack (they weren't before?) and they've put out a distress call and, wow, I'm wondering if these chapters have fallen madly out of sync with the others. It was Chapter Twenty-Two that mentioned that the Martian ships were under attack and in need of assistance, broadcasting distress. Either way, the captain does not think anyone will be able to arrive in time to assist them. To that end, Alex and Bobbie will be put in an escape pod and launched, hoping that the bad guys will simply overlook them. Alex says, rightfully, that it's a lovely plan. Bobbie mentions they could just take the Razorback. The captain says the Razorback is for the Prime Minister, his escort, and a pilot. Bobbie is like but he's a pilot and I'm an escort! Okay, so they'll do that instead. The Martian ship will try to cover them with PDCs as long as it can, but Alex points out missiles can outpace the Razorback and there's nothing to hide behind. Well, the captain says, guess you'll have to figure that one out. Alex asks the captain to launch a bunch of missiles linked to the Razorback's comm laser so they can use it to paint any incoming missiles with it and shoot them down. Okay, they do it. Then, a message comes in from the command ship of the attacking ships -- the Pella. Not demands for surrender. Not a broadcast. Not even a tightbeam. Nemesis Games, Chapter 31 posted:An audio feed clicked on. Thick static crackled, vanished, then crackled again. Someone grunted, and it sounded like pain. When the voice finally came, it was focused and serious. And it hit Alex like a kick to the belly. Chapter Thirty-Two: Naomi Back on the Pella, Naomi is much as she was before. Upset, despondent, aware she's "James Holden's tame girlfriend" brought back as a trophy. She guesses they're getting ready to go into battle and, specifically, battle against Martians. There's a lot of bad stuff on the news but nothing out of Tycho, which she figures is a good sign. After some work with Cyn, she and him end up strapped into crash couches. Cyn talks about the danger of being out a couch when undergoing battle manoeuvres. Naomi realizes he thinks she's suicidal, which is a fair call under the circumstances -- and perhaps he's right. Soon enough, they're in battle, and Naomi gets out of her crash couch. She moves forward when she can, braces herself when she can't. She finds a toolbox and grabs a variety of tools. She's haunted by visions of the Rocinante detonating. It keeps her going. She uses a torch to cut her way into an access panel and grab a handset. Using her knowledge of the Rocinante, she basically hacks the diagnostic channel so she can send out a message. Nemesis Games, Chapter 32 posted:“If you receive this,” she said, pressing the handset close to her lips, “please retransmit. This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. Message is for James Holden. The software controlling the magnetic bottle has been sabotaged. Do not start the reactor without reloading the hardware drivers from a known good source. If you hear this message, please retransmit.” Chapter Thirty-Three: Holden Holden's thinking about maps. Most of human history had static maps. The continents always stayed the same. Apparently, however, France is called the Common European Interest Zone in the time of the Expanse. Mention was made of the West African Shared Interest Zone in Cibola Burn. Holden thinks that only when humanity reached Mars and the Belt that distance became a matter of time instead of, well, space. I don't think that's true. I think distance has always been a measure of time. Things like roads, cars, planes, etc. have always served to reduce 'distance' by allowing you to get further quicker. Strangely enough, I feel like Holden has it backward. The orbital patterns of the planets isn't a question of time at all -- it is actually distance, the distances between planets and stations actually change! Anyway, Holden's preparing to head to Luna. I like that he grabs Amos', Alex's and Naomi's stuff too. It's a nice little beat that'd be easy to overlook. I like the bit where Holden very carefully packs away a model of a Martian combat mech, even though he has no idea if it has any meaning to Naomi. As a reader, however, I don't really know why she has a model of a Martian combat mech, which is a little disappointing. It doesn't really seem like something Naomi would be into, y'know? A Bobbie thing, maybe. Or Alex. Holden can't quite put it from his mind that maybe no one will be there to see him on Luna. He's heard nothing from Amos and nothing from Naomi. He drinks a bunch of bourbon and cries and Fred calls him up and is like, wait, why are you drunk and not wearing any pants? Well, sober up because I'm sending the flight crew over. Uh-oh. Fred mentions that the Martian Prime Minister is under attack. The ships Alex found were decoys and the new escorts have opened fire. Much like the Donnager battle, too, Fred's been watching it but doesn't have much intel yet. Fred wants to launch ASAP before someone takes another shot at Tycho. Holden thinks they can do it in two hours. Drummer brings in eighe people -- six Belters, two earthers. She assues them that they're good people who she's vetted herself. One of them is Captain Foster Sales who feels like Holden doesn't see any resemblance in: Nemesis Games, Chapter 33 posted:The man who floated up, arms braced, looked too young to be a captain. Close-cropped black hair transitioned into a glossy beard that tried and failed to lend the boyish features some gravitas. Drummer runs Holden through the crew. Sandra Ip is an engineer whose roommate was one of the turncoats and she's pissed. Pilot Arnold Mfume has a problem with weapons tech Sun-yi Steinberg. Second weapons tech Gor Droga has, or maybe had, family on Earth. They might not be his family, Holden thinks, but they're his crew and that'll do for now. Fred shows up as the crew begins the warm-up of the Rocinante. By now, the Martian convoy has put out a distress call and the original escort is burning hard to get back to them, but now the ships behind them are engaging them. Not good. Given that Holden might not make it back to Tycho, he goes to see Monica. He wants to apologize for lying to her, but he also mentions that he doesn't appreciate her springing questions he doesn't want to answer on him in an interview. Monica points out that Holden had once been the man who didn't hide anything, and now he's the guy who reads from press releases. Holden says he was doing it for Fred. Monica is like, yeah, and you didn't mention the protomolecule is missing either. That, to her, is the most dangerous thing. Shouldn't people know how much danger they're in? Holden doesn't want to panick people for no reason. I guess he's grown some, maybe? Monica says: Nemesis Games, Chapter 33 posted:“And deciding for people what they should get to know so they do what you think they should do? That isn’t how the good guys act, and you know it. It’s paternalistic, it’s condescending, and it’s beneath you. Maybe not them. The political movers and shakers. But it’s beneath you.” Holden replies: Nemesis Games, Chapter 33 posted:I’m not saying that we were right to put the protomolecule thing under the rug. I’m saying that telling everyone about it – especially right now while whatever the hell this is is still going on – is worse. When we were in the slow zone, you were the voice that pulled us all together. You gave a shape to that moment of chaos. And it made people safer and calmer and more rational. More civilized. We need that again. I need that again.” Then, Monica gets a message from the Martian ships. It's Naomi's warning about the Rocinante. Holden immediately calls up Drummer and what leaps out to me about this is that, despite how we're told that Holden's freaking out, there's zero energy to it. Holden could be ordering coffee. Nemesis Games, Chapter 33 posted:“Drummer here,” his hand terminal said. Crisis averted? For now, anyway.
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Oct 23, 2022 09:27
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Nemesis Games, Chapters 34 - 36 As Alex and Bobbie re-enact the fall of the Donnager, Naomi and Marco re-enact domestic abuse, and Holden and Fred discuss re-enacting the fall of Persia. Chapter Thirty-Four: Alex So, we jump from Holden shutting down the Rocinante to Alex hearing the message for the first time and wanting to transmit it to Holden. Ooh, boy. This throws the whole thing out of whack. Regardless, the Captain says she'll take care of it. Alex realizes that must mean Naomi is nearby, on one of the attacking ships -- the Pella. He has this thought that even if the Pella was as far away from them as "Boston was from Sri Lanka" that's still rather intimate in the vast scale of space. Which is, y'know, fine. Except I don't think Alex would be too familiar with Earth geography. Why not make up some Martian place names? He's from Mars, not Earth, and you'd figure his internal mental process would make track with that. The marines take Alex down to the hangar. It's another of those rather stock Expanse sequences of corridors, moving through intersections, checking doorways and so on. The hangar bay entrance is written in six languages with strikes me as odd for what is presumably a Martian warship. The group is ambushed by a bunch of Marco's people who recognize Alex as "Knuckles' pilot." Alex has no idea who Knuckles is despite having known Sam and Naomi for years and explicitly hearing Sam call Naomi 'Knuckles' in Abaddon's Gate. Bobbie shows up in her power armor and takes out the Belters. They reach the hangar and board the Razorback. Interestingly, Alex calls it an old ship. Not old recently, but old before Julie had died. Feels strange, since it'd been winning races and such somewhat recently. It seems like a pretty cheap way to try and raise tension, since Alex is immediately like, oh jeez, we're flying this through a battle zone? I'd posit that flying any racing pinnace through a battle zone is a bad idea regardless of how old it is. Alex blasts the Razorback out of "the battleship's" hangar. I don't know why they've been so cagey about the type and name of the ship the Prime Minister has been travelling on, but it's funny to note that this is another Donnager getting its butt kicked by smaller ships sneaking up on it. As they flee, Alex repeats what Julie said back in Leviathan Wakes: "You can't take the Razorback. We are gone and gone and gone." And I like this little call-back. As they run for it and Bobbie gets ready to use the ninety missiles (wow) the Martian battleship gave them as an escort, Alex points out the Pella and tells her not to fire on that one. He doesn't know what Naomi's doing there, but he's not going to leave her behind. Chapter Thirty-Five: Naomi When Naomi returns to her quarters, the door locks her in, and she knows Marco is going to come by. Oddly enough, and I couldn't figure this out, a paragraph paints her as being in the empty mess hall, despite a few paragraphs earlier saying she went into her quarters which she "hadn't bothered" trying to leave. Marco shows up to do an actual 'I'm not angry, just disappointed' routine. He says that Naomi has to understand what he's doing, that the gates will result in the Belters dying out. He reiterates that Naomi thinks too much of Holden and that he isn't impressive. Naomi thinks Marco really wanted the Rocinante and mocks him for his unoriginal plan to blow the ship with her reactor hack. It'd be interesting if Marco said, like, why do I need the Rocinante when I have my fleet of Rocinantes but, well, that's just not going to happen. Marco says his plan for the Rocinante was to keep it out of Fred Johnson's hands and keep him isolated which is... such a strange plan that I think Naomi is correct when she says she doesn't believe him. Marco says that destroying the ship is something Naomi pushed him into. My problem with Marco at this point is that he's so transparently an abusive husband stereotype. We're told he's charismatic and intelligent and ruthless, but we don't see it. We just see a petulant man-child running through Top Ten Things Abusive Husbands Say. Continuing on, Marco says he has a new plan -- he's made a fake distress call and has it broadcasting from the Chetzemoka, which he'll aim in the direction of the Rocinante. The fake call is an automated recording similar to the one she made: tell Jim Holden that she's in distress and stuck on a ship with no comms and nav control. When the Rocinante gets close enough, the Chetzemoka will detonate. Naomi's first instinct is to... criticize Marco for stealing that ship from Filip as she said he could have it. "Because of you," Marco says, Holden's going to die. Naomi asks to go down to the medbay and thinks to swear vengeance to herself, that she'll make the Pella blow itself up. She heads down to the med bay where Miral, one of Marco's people, has been put on some kind of... shame detail? Marco reprimands him earlier for "abusing the freedom" he gave him, but as best I can see from a quick search Miral's been a core people of his team and hasn't done anything wrong. Anyway, Miral is just reciting a variety of slurs and insults at Naomi as she's getting tested to make sure she's not bleeding into her brain. Once the medic has told her to take it easy, Naomi immediately attacks Miral. Miral quickly pins her, only for Karal to rush in and grab her and basically go, hey, if Marco doesn't want to beat the poo poo out of her, you don't get to beat the poo poo out of her. Afterward, Karal chats with Naomi. He says he fought the plan to bring Naomi in but that Marco was Marco about it. Karal suggests that maybe Holden won't take the bait and whether there's anything bad about doing what you need to do to survive. Karal leaves. It turns out Naomi used the fight in the medbay to steal a decompression kit -- a panic button to open an airlock and a tiny ampoule of oxygenated blood. She wants to board the Chetzemoka and stop it from being used against Holden. All she needs now is an EVA suit. Chapter Thirty-Six: Holden Holden can't sleep. He checks the newsfeeds. Still silence from Medina Station. Alien activity on the world of New Triton. Ganymede is going neutral citing its importance as a food provider. UN forces are heading toward the racing ship. Holden gets a message from Paula the hacker and goes to meet her. Turns out the Rocinante would've blown at 95% reactor charge and they've fixed up the code to prevent it from happening. Paula also figured out that the code is expressly a weapon, one that can be armed in a bunch of different ways. Key evidence, she says, for thousands of murders that no one even knew were murders. Holden thinks this is what Naomi was trying to keep from him. He goes to see Fred. Drummer is quasi-flirtatiously working on Sakai and, according to Fred, has him almost wrapped around her finger. Nemesis Games, Chapter 36 posted:Holden crossed his arms. “I think you’re overlooking the beat-him-with-a-wrench stratagem. I favor it.” On the Rocinante, Holden wonders if there's any surprises on the ship that they didn't find and thinks it'll be a while before he can trust his ship again. He heads down to find Fred in the galley. Fred mentions that two of the original Martian escort of the Prime Minister have surrendered. Holden's like, jeez, are these guys that good or are we this pathetic? Fred asks Holden if he's heard about the battle of Guagamela. Holden has not. Fred says: Nemesis Games, Chapter 36 posted:“Darius the third, emperor of Persia, had two hundred thousand soldiers under his command. Bactrians, Arachosians, Scythians. Some Greek mercenaries. On the other side, thirty-five thousand soldiers, and Alexander of Macedon. Alexander the Great. Five Persians to every Macedonian. It should have been a slaughter. But Alexander pulled so much of the enemy out to the flank that a gap opened in the middle of the Persian lines. Alexander called his men to form a wedge, and leading with his own cavalry, he pushed through and headed straight for the emperor. There were vast forces to either side, surrounding him. But it didn’t matter, because he saw how to reach Darius. Alexander saw something no one else had seen.” Fred thinks he's Darius. You think you have all the advantages, until you see the cavalry coming at you. Fred thinks Darius lost because he turned and fled. Nemesis Games, Chapter 36 posted:“Maybe. Or maybe Darius would have withstood the charge. Or maybe he would have fallen and his army would have crushed Alexander’s in rage and grief. The end of an emperor isn’t always the end of an empire. I look at Earth and what happened there. I look at Mars. At what happened on Tycho, and what I’m afraid happened on Medina. I’m seeing Alexander’s wedge bursting through the line at me. The same shock as Darius, the same dismay. The fear. But I’m not Darius. And I think Chrisjen Avasarala isn’t either.”
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Oct 30, 2022 04:23
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