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The 3rd is probably the weakest, but I still enjoyed it. But you have also people on here insisting it's irredeemable trash, so as with all things I suggest reading it anyway and deciding for yourself. 4 is good and 5 is great, so there's that to look forward to as well. I get that Babylon's Ashes was delayed due to the show, but I still miss my yearly summer releases. 
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Aug 21, 2016 19:01
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Captain Fargle posted:Abraham and Frank announced today on Twitter that they've started the first draft of Book 8, apparently to be titled "Persepolis Rising".
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Sep 28, 2016 23:09
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Ah, okay. Wasn't trying to nitpick, just wanted to make sure I hadn't missed something.
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Sep 29, 2016 03:27
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Aren't there things that appear to the crews of the vanished ships in their last moments? I guess that depends on whether they qualify as "living" (or "aliens", if they're some sort of artificial construct).
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Feb 8, 2017 17:54
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The Muffinlord posted:To the inners, yeah, basically. Though beyond Saturn there aren't a lot of dense colonies, from what I remember.
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Feb 18, 2017 20:25
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Was the whole "Earth is extremely vulnerable to dropping an asteroid" thing played up as much in the earlier books? The show seems like it's been foreshadowing it really hard, though a lot of that is probably hindsight. In particular, I noticed a bit in the last episode where one of the military guys is quoting predicted casualty figures that are identical to the ones given in Babylon's Ashes.
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Feb 25, 2017 04:36
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Isn't that a thing with Marco's ship in the last book? In the real world also, acceleration along the axis of the spine (such as you'd get standing in a gravity well) is a lot less tolerable than acceleration along the front-to-back axis (like in a crash couch), since the heart needs to work a lot harder to pump blood along the entire length of the body in the former case.
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Feb 25, 2017 05:04
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Sarern posted:Those are the ones I remember, but there could be more Continuing my reread: LW is interesting in that despite Earth playing a major role in the plot, we don't get a perspective from there, and they're almost portrayed as antagonists. In fact, I'd forgotten just how mysterious they make Earth and its motives there; they keep silent throughout a good part of the book while Mars and the Belt do their thing, and one of the big plot twists halfway through is that the stealth ships are from Earth. Earth really only starts becoming more of a friendly presence once Avasarala steps into the picture, and while I get that it's better to introduce her earlier in the show, it does eliminate a bit of that "What the hell is Earth up to?" feeling that's present throughout LW. When I first read it, I didn't care much for the back half of LW. The first half is a hardish sci-fi neo-noir conspiracy thriller, and then the back half becomes about fighting nasty aliens. At the time, that was disappointing, as it felt like all the interesting political and social stuff was being set aside for a more stock sci-fi plotline. Of course, in retrospect the series never really abandons the political and social aspects, and eventually comes back to them in a big way in the recent books, so rereading it I enjoyed it a lot more. It still feels oddly episodic, though; we get the big events on Eros halfway through (and that was certainly a surprise to recall that it takes place so early), then a sidequest to the Anubis, then everyone goes to Thoth Station, and then back to Eros for more alien shenanigans. I think that really helped it play well on TV, though, especially compared to the slow burn of the more serialized first season. Miller really is a depressing sad sack in the books. Tom Jane's portrayal might not be entirely book accurate, but it was more entertaining to watch. Just started Caliban's War, and oddly, I remember almost nothing about this book.
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Feb 27, 2017 17:37
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Yeah, the Donnager sequence feels really truncated in the book. I generally didn't mind the pace of S1, but I know that was a criticism for a lot of people who hadn't read the books that things don't really get going until Episode 4.
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Feb 27, 2017 19:15
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Finished my reread of Caliban's War. Thoughts: This is an interesting one to reread, because despite the high ranking it usually gets in the series, it wasn't one of my favorites at first. It felt like it was retreading a lot of the same ground as Leviathan Wakes, with the same bad guys engaging in the same evil plot while we wait for the protomolecule to do its thing on Venus. But four books later and with the larger structure of the series in sight, I can see it now not as a rehash, but rather Leviathan Wakes Part II. And in that sense - wrapping up plot points from LW and expanding upon the setting it established - it's quite successful. Despite starting off with two chapters featuring alien encounters, CW gets us firmly back into the political part of the series, addressing that concern of mine from the end of LW. It expands our perspectives, giving Earth, Martian, and a different kind of Belter POVs in addition to Holden returning. It expands the narrative universe itself, taking us to Earth, Luna, Ganymede, and Io. Earth is one of the biggest additions to the series here. LW is mostly focused on the OPA, with Mars as deuteragonists and Earth as a shadowy semi-villainous presence; here, the OPA and Fred are basically bit players, and Earth gains a major importance to the plot that it'll carry throughout the rest of the series. The Corey duo are also a lot more comfortable with characters here. Outside of the two POV characters (who are pretty much archetypes anyway) characterization is a little thin in LW. CW isn't making massive leaps - Bobbie could have stepped out of any war movie, for example - but it does a nice job in expanding the range of personalities we deal with. Alex is still a cypher, but Amos and Naomi get some development. Avasarala is an entertaining character, but also gets some decent depth outside of her main personality tic. And Prax is probably the highlight; for someone that could easily have been a one-note stereotype, he ends up as one of the better side characters in the series. I love shadowy conspiracy stuff, so the plot of CW (and the early parts of Leviathan Wakes, and Nemesis Games) can't help but be my poo poo. There's this nice omnipresent sense of corruption hidden just under the surface. The bad guys in LW used stealth ships and hidden stations and appeared in person like once in the whole book. The villains in CW are always around, hiding in plain sight - they're just through the unmarked door on Ganymede, they're among the staff of the UN, in the end they're just a moon away from where the whole thing started. It creates the sense that this is a society and government where people like this don't even have to hide, because those in power will condone them anyway. One of the eeriest revelations of the book is that the attack that kills dozens on both sides and starts a system-wide war is just a weapons demo. The people in charge know what's happening from the very first page and just don't care. On that note, we get a mention at the end how the Martian faction bidding on the protomolecule got forgiven and the whole thing was pushed under the rug. We don't get any idea who was involved, but what do you want to bet Duarte was part of that? Also, a thought on the overall structure of the series: we get two books with Earth factions playing the role of the bad guys. Then two (more or less) standalones, followed by two books with Belter factions as the villains. Given the hints about Duarte and whatever's going on in Laconia, it makes sense to complete the set and have a Martian faction as the villains of the next two books. e: Wait, I got it, Bobbie is Ripley in Aliens. Right down to fighting the alien with power armor at the end to save a little girl. Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Mar 4, 2017 |
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Mar 4, 2017 04:54
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Reread Abaddon's Gate, scattered thoughts: Okay, I know this is a disliked one. I never particularly hated it, but I thought it was the weakest at the time I read it. But honestly, rereading it, I don't know why, because I enjoyed it a lot this time. To be fair, it's a very different one from the two that preceded it. If later books had continued in the same direction, The Expanse would be a very different series. As a one-off, though (well, a two-off; Cibola Burn shares a lot in common with this one), I think it's an interesting experiment and a break from the usual. In fact, I think one of the strengths of this series is how each book tries something new; Leviathan's Wake is inspired by noir, Caliban's War a political thriller, and Abaddon's Gate is straight up Arthur C. Clarke. As a kid, I was a big fan of Clarke, and one of my favorites of his was Rendezvous with Rama. Rama is part of the "Big Dumb Object" subgenre, wherein characters encounter a mysterious, often massive object and the plot is mostly about interacting with it and encountering the mysterious wonders it provides (the monoliths in 2001 are another Clarke example). There's a lot of that DNA in Abaddon's Gate (and Cibola Burn). But a major difference is that in Rama and 2001, Clarke is about the mystery itself; the characters are thinly sketched and mostly passive observers for the weirdness that happens, and what plot there is is focused entirely on the object, its exploration and what it does in response. But this is The Expanse, and The Expanse is about the people inhabiting this universe. If there's one consistent theme in the series, it's that no matter how far they spread, what worlds they adapt to, or what strange things they encounter, people are still people - the same smart and stupid, tolerant and bigoted, peaceful and violent people they've been for all of human history. But it doesn't seem like that at first. The first half of AG is a fairly standard Big Dumb Object story - the characters all gather at the weird thing, explore it, and learn its rules. Holden gets most of this plotline, as he gets to explore the Ring Station and experience a legitimately cool  sequence where he watches a billions-year-old civilization rise and die. But then, AG goes in the opposite direction from Leviathan's Wake - where the latter started off as a small-scale mystery and ended up with alien craziness, AG starts off as big weird science fiction and ends with a gunfight and a woman seeking redemption. It takes its time to get there, though. AG is not a particularly plotty novel - the major plot points can be boiled down to a handful, and the rest of the novel is a lot of characterization and thoughts on the nature of humanity and how it interacts with the unknown. How much you like the latter I supposed depends on how much you like the characters and their journey.Bull I can take or leave - he's basically a pair of eyes onboard the Behemoth, and he does that job fine, but doesn't really stand out in any way. I think Pa might have been more interesting here instead. Holden is still Holden, and while a big part of his arc is admitting his faults to himself, how much you like that I imagine depends on how much you can tolerate him until he gets there. Anna I actually enjoyed a lot, which surprised me because I didn't remember much about her from the first read-through. And that leaves Clarissa, who is not only easily the most multi-dimensional villain in the series (which to be fair isn't saying a lot), but also probably one of the most developed arcs of...anyone in the series, I figure. Holden is the only other one really in contention. Either way, I enjoyed Clarissa's arc a lot. Together they make for a good cross-section of personalities and points of view - Clarissa (at first) gives us the side of Ashford and Cortez, the cynical view of humanity as frightened apes attacking things they don't understand, while Anna (and Holden, eventually) is the side of humanity that sees wonder in the universe and tries to make the best of a bad situation. I talked before about how the book starts big and ends small, but that narrative structure is also reflected very literally, in a way that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the series. The characters all start off scattered and converge - and then keep converging, as both the physical scale of their separation and the scope of the plot itself narrow further in from many worlds, to many scattered ships, to many ships in close proximity, to one ship, to a single room. It's not, of course, the first or last time that characters or plotlines converge, but the continuous shrinking of the scale of the novel and the way that's reflected in many aspects of the narrative makes for a unique and interesting structure. Some thoughts on overall series structure: The Expanse is interesting in that there's two overlapping patterns. There's a typical three-act structure, in which LW-AG form the first act, about the arrival of the protomolecule to humanity and what comes of it, leading to the opening of the gates; then CB-BA are the second act, about how the gates change humanity and how they choose to react to it, which ends with the agreement at the end of BA on the new political order; then finally, I imagine the last three will be about that new order and what it means for the future. But on top of that, there's a series of duologies - LW and CW, and NG and BA, are basically two parters, with AG and CB forming a more thematic duology about how people react to the unknown. These are smaller-scale, heavier on the alien stuff, and more standalone from the larger political plot. Again, I can see why this could be alarming without knowledge of the next two novels; AG and CB at first look like a move away from the grand hardish space opera. In retrospect, it's for the better that the series doesn't go entirely this way, though as I said I enjoy the break of something different. Finally (and sorry for all the words), this book is going to be a hell of a thing to adapt. We have no Earth plot, and in fact, nothing plotwise outside of a handful of ships and the station. And unlike Leviathan's Wake, there's no real room for an outside plot, as a big part of the novel is everyone being cut off inside the slow zone. You could have the occasional cutaway to Avasarala wondering what the hell is going on, I suppose, and I suspect Bobbie will be on one of the Martian ships in the show. CB is an even bigger challenge, but I'll wait until rereading that to speculate.
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Mar 6, 2017 23:12
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Man, I hope we get to Cibola Burn in the show if only to have alien insect robot Miller.
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Mar 16, 2017 17:37
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Affi posted:Also the end of cibola burns. What happened? I could not follow that. Alien warp gate invisible to Miller somehow did something to kill the planet? Miller throws stuff into it until it chokes? Help.
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Mar 27, 2017 18:27
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We haven't heard anything about Elvi since CB. Miller seems to have been entirely deleted/killed by the alien weapon shard thing.
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May 1, 2017 23:20
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I liked Cibola Burn on reread (and, to be fair, the first time too), though I think the disaster movie it switches to halfway through unfortunately cuts off the much more interesting Belters vs. Inners plot in the colony. It's all about the cyclical nature of violence, a theme running through the series, and I think does a great job of creating a conflict where both sides have legitimate points, but also assholes among them interested only in keeping the conflict going. The second half, while a step back on that front, has a nice little medical mystery, some fun space action, and a bunch of crazy alien poo poo. But yeah, AG improved by far the most on rereading for all the reasons you said.
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May 6, 2017 18:03
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Arcsquad12 posted:So the protomolecule is basically an alien bio weapon/terraformer/teleporter, I take it? Target an earth like planet, wipe out its population and then use its biomass plus radiation to build a giant fuckoff Stargate to their central hub? Abaddon's Gate posted:It killed humans, therefore it was a weapon. But radiation killed humans, and a medical X-ray machine wasn’t intended as a weapon. Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.
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May 26, 2017 19:04
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Platystemon posted:I don’t remember what the numbers were for the change (if they were even given), but if some of the passengers survived the velocity change, the walls can definitely survive flying paperweights. It’s not railgun velocity.
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Jul 31, 2017 18:22
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Syzygy Stardust posted:Holy poo poo. Didn’t see that coming. 
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Nov 20, 2017 21:35
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Finally got around to reading Strange Dogs. Extremely  , in a good way. According to the authors' Twitter, it's just a "sneak peek" at the weirdness of the last books, so I'm looking forward to seeing where that goes. I wonder if we'll get any direct follow-up to the novella characters, though; I'm interested to know what becomes of Cara.
Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Nov 26, 2017 |
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Nov 26, 2017 16:52
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Prologue: Duarte's become God Emperor of 
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Dec 6, 2017 02:36
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Finished the book, and I liked it a lot. Definitely my favorite since 5. It'll be interesting to see what the focus of the final book is like. Everything's being set up for the aliens to be the final boss, but this series has always been about the people and human societies more than weird alien poo poo, and I doubt that'll suddenly change in the last book. Maybe some sort of big effort by the Roci crew to get all the different human groups working together for one big final push, like the end of Abaddon's Gate on a larger scale. For a moment I thought that Cortazar was going to give himself the Duarte treatment and become the big bad, but, well... Between this book and the last I really like how Laconia has been portrayed. I felt while reading the last book that they were coming across as way too powerful, but with this one we see they're really kind of a paper tiger. They have a few badass ships, but like a lot of other imperial powers, once they get past the shock and awe phase holding onto that territory becomes a whole different matter. All their apparent strengths have become weaknesses. Their entire basis for power projection is the Magnetars and Medina Station, and the moment they lose those the whole thing comes crashing down around them. Not to mention going around poking in PM tech; they've so thoroughly swallowed their own bullshit about being masters of the universe that they can't even consider that it could backfire on them. It's like that line in Jurassic Park about being like a kid who found his dad's gun. These are guys who found some 2 billion year old tech made by beings of incomprehensible power and killed by even more incomprehensible beings (sidenote, that bit near the end about how they discovered Laconia with a half-completed ship still in the construction platforms is a really cool image), switched it back on, and decided that made them unstoppable badasses. They might be intelligent people, but they were never smart.
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Apr 7, 2019 21:12
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It's crazy that Leviathan Wakes came out only a month before A Dance With Dragons and the entire series will be done next year.
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Apr 16, 2019 14:25
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iTrust posted:The first example that comes to mind because of how recent it is is that I felt like Amos’ death was just drowned out by the fact the repair creatures were just constantly referred to and made out as if a huge neon sign was above them saying “these guys can fix anything!!”  Have you read the short stories/novellas? They're pretty good too.
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Aug 18, 2019 16:51
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Ending with the next season is disappointing, but at least the end of Book 6 is a natural stopping point for the story (assuming the next two seasons basically do Books 5 and 6), so hopefully it'll feel complete.
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Nov 24, 2020 19:05
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I just finished it and really enjoyed it, and thought it was a satisfying (if not necessarily mind-blowing) ending to the series. Slow start as people have been saying, but once all the plot threads start coming together it really picks up. The character endings mostly all worked (Alex kind of got short shrift, but that's par for his character throughout the series), and while the overall ending (specifically the rings being destroyed and humanity going back to being isolated) was pretty much what I've expected for a few books, there were enough surprises in how it was executed along the way that it didn't feel like it was just going through the motions. I particularly liked Holden injecting himself with protomolecule, which was both a twist at the moment but also a totally loving Holden move. One thing I particularly enjoyed and wasn't expecting is that it actually manages to give a lot of answers about the weird alien poo poo without overexplaining it or making it less weird or alien. It's been a lot of fun reading these books over the last decade. Looking forward to seeing the final short story when that comes out, and hopefully we can get an adaptation of the last three books onscreen at some point.
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Dec 9, 2021 18:51
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I got the impression that going Dutchman wasn't even a conscious thing the dark gods were doing, just an accident of overloading the ring space system by using too much energy too quickly, and that they don't start actively going after humanity until the Laconians accidentally poke them in the eye by loving around with their fancy new weapons.
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Dec 10, 2021 23:10
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