- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Because chances are pretty good that the sane government will have bee replaced by people with a mandate to make the belt pay in blood for the death of billions of people on earth.
Babylon's Ashes was just tonally off. It pushes for themes of forgiveness and reconciliation in the midst of mundicide. When Holden rolls his eyes and was about to scold his dad for making a racist comment and when he disarmed the torpedos against Marco I wanted to put the book down. It gave me Abbadon's Gate vibes all over.
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Jan 4, 2017 02:33
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May 3, 2024 17:23
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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I don't think Jeff can save Elvi
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Jan 4, 2017 02:37
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Holden would have spared Hitler for Eva Braun’s sake.
He would tell a jew about to be sent into the oven that not all Germans are bad.
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Jan 4, 2017 02:38
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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In proportional terms, it would be like bombing Bielefeld (a city small enough that there’s a popular joke that it does not exist) to kill Hitler and prevent the War.
I’m not saying it’s the Right Thing to Do, but it would have wild popular support and I can’t blame them. Not in a universe where Michio “butcher of New York” Pa is a Good Guy™ and Chrisjen “turn the other cheek” Avasarala is “Machiavellian”.
Letting Pa lead the spacing guild is like letting Göring lead the Marshall Plan.
Its like Operation Paperclip and Unit 731 amnesty without medical and technological payoffs.
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Jan 4, 2017 04:55
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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This is a spot on review from Goodreads
quote:Two stars is not awful, but it's a definite step down from the ratings I gave to earlier books in the series like Cibola Burn and Nemesis Games. So was this book, sadly. It's not bad, but it's not nearly as good as I was hoping for.
What went wrong?
1. The villain is lame
Marko is the bad guy. In the last book, he destroyed the Earth and killed 15,000,000,000 human beings. In this book, he is the world's least competent military commander and basically just an insecure, loser ex-boyfriend. He doesn't have a single tactical insight, he has literally no strategy, he loses every single engagement, he spends quite a lot of time hiding out in his cabin because he can't deal with his own failures, and in the climactic final battle scene he is defeated without firing a shot. (Turns out he was a puppet, more or less, of someone who is actually a credible threat, but they barely show up at all in this book; not even enough for decent foreshadowing.) You can't build a strong book on a weak antagonist, and I can't recall ever reading of such a pathetic excuse for a villain outside of farce.
2. The good guys are lame
With such an incompetent, impotent bad guy there's really nothing for the good guys to do. A couple of battle scenes that could have been awesome feel pro forma because the stakes are so low. Are we battling for the fate of humanity? Or just trying to deal with Naomi's loser ex-boyfriend stalking her? The fact that you can't really be sure says just how badly Marko warps this book. Holden's really big character breakthrough is uploading cute videos to (the modern equivalent of) YouTube. And, no, I'm not kidding. That's it.
3. The theme is childish
My son's third grade had a play this week. It was about pirates stealing pinatas and forgiveness and brushing your teeth. That's about the level of sophistication in the "people are tribal and demonize other groups" theme in this book. Don't get me wrong: this is true. But it's presented in such a banal, uninteresting, and cartoonish way in this book that it's cringe-inducing. (See above, re: Holden's ameteur videos to humanize Belters to Earthers so they will forgive having half their population murdered and their planet destroyed.)
4. The tone is totally wrong
Stuff gets blown up in sci-fi all the time, sometimes entire planets. But in the context of The Expanse, bombarding the Earth was huge. And the response of the characters in this book is tiny. Partially this is just a repeat of issue #1: it turns out the guy who blew up the Earth is an incompetent loser who never wins another battle. By making him the focus of the book, it turns the devastation of Earth into kind of a sad joke. In addition, none of the bad guys who turn good (I'm oversimplifying) have an ounce of remorse for what they've done. One apologizes to Chrisjen at the end, but it's lame and only for killing her husband. (And son. Never mind 15,000,000,000 other people.) And then Chrisjen is all "It's OK, I understand. We can't hold grudges." This doesn't work. You can't have Bob rape Sue to death and then say the "magic word" (in this book it's "whoops") to Sue's parents and they all sing Kumbaya and that's it. Reconciliation is great, but it has to fit. It didn't. Even a little bit.
There's also the painfully awkward and inappropriate parallels between Marko and the Belters on the one hand and Osama Bin Laden and Muslims on the other. The political analogy doesn't really fit at all, but some specific scenes in the book (especially when Marko shows off traditional Afghan clothes and states he's going to model his military on their tactics) seem to really want to draw that connection. Well, it's a bad one. Bin Laden killed 3,000 people. He didn't wipe out half of humanity, ruin the Earth's ecosystems (all of them), and potentially consign the entire human race to starvation and ultimate extinction. The political angle seems to be: "Americans should go easy on Muslims who supported Bin Laden because the West is an evil empire" but it doesn't work because (in addition to Marko being worse than Bin Laden) most Muslims (at least, those outside the Palestinian territories) rejected Bin Laden and his tactics long before his death. In other words: I already don't have a problem with Islam. I do have a problem with Belters.
For example, the percent of the population with a favorable opinion of Al Qaeda was 21%, 15%, 13%, 6%, and 2% respectively in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey, and Lebanon just before he was killed.. The percent of the population that rejected killing civilians in suicide bombings under any circumstances was 87%, 74%, 65% in Pakistan, Turkey, and Indonesia (also from Pew). By contrast, Marko enjoyed the support of 1/2 the Belters for his (far worse) terrorism, and even the "moderates" in the book never really decried the attack on Earth. If the Belters are supposed to be the political analogs of real-world Muslims, that's a pretty horrific view of Muslims.
(If you want another view of how messed up the politics in this book are, consider this: Holden immediately realizes that it is vitally important to get Earthers (half of whom have been killed) to empathize with Belters (half of whom are celebrating the largest mass murder in human history), but it never occurs to anyone in the book that maybe it's the Belters who need to learn some empathy for the Earthers after, you know, dancing on the graves of fifteen billion innocent men, women, and children. The first-world self-flagellation is painfully overplayed.)
In short: the tone of this book is totally messed up on its own right, and is even worse if you try to read it as a political analogy. (And hey: maybe you shouldn't! I'd rather not. In which case: maybe don't play up that angle quite so much?)
5. Plot holes are huge
What is the #1 threat to Belters? They can't live in high-G, and so a world full of earth-like planets is one that will leave them behind. What is the most important feature of space-combat in this setting? The ability to withstand prolonged exposure to high-G.
So would someone tell me how the hell Belters somehow end up a formidable threat in space battles? Amazingly and utterly ridiculously, the only person in this book to suffer any ill-effects from high-g is an Earther.
The idea that Belters are simultaneously too frail to survive 1-g and yet somehow able to go toe-to-toe against Earthers and Martians in sustained, high-g space combat is farcical.
The long-term solution to this problem is also rather not (a solution, that is.) Holden decides to give the Belters complete and total authority over all the rest of humanity, with basically total veto rights on which colonies live and which starve to death. Because, hey, turning over the fate of earth-dwelling humans to an unaccountable assortment of terrorists who are only marginally guilty for an atrocity so immense and scope that all other mass-murders pale before it might not actually be the wisest course of action. But hey, what do I know?
So, what went right?
Well, Marko's not around, so that's good. (It's almost inevitable that they're going to bring him back, however, and I'm already cursing the day when his incompetent, bumbling rear end comes back on-screen.)
They also resolved the whole Belter Rebellion. That's good, too. Maybe we can get back to, I dunno, alien technology that somehow opened a gateway to 1,100 new worlds? Or the alien menace that somehow killed that alien superpower, and what it has in store for Earth? Or, you know, anything that "The Expanse" is actually supposed to be about at this point? (This entire trilogy feels like it should have been an optional tie-in, like the novellas, rather than core to the plot.)
I also really, really, really loved the subplot about the researcher on Ganymede. That was amazing, and I loved it so, so much. It was, by far, the best part of the novel.
Finally, the writing was quite good. I feel like it's getting better as we go. There were quite a few turns of phrase or images or metaphors where I was like, "That was quite nice."
So--for that reason--I'm going to stick around for the next book. But not with anywhere near the excitement I had going into this one.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1834502520?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1
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Jan 4, 2017 05:21
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Point #4 is well made and articulated a lot of vague opinions I had about the huge tonal disconnect I had with the 15 billion deaths and ruin of humanities's cradle.
On the other hand, I can see people not really comprehending number of deaths beyond 180 in a far of place that at the minimum aggressively don't care about because we are not really built that way. It is why aid agencies focus on individual tragedies to drum up support for relief of mass casualty events.
When Mars got rid of their PM because he failed to stop Duarte I thought they were foreshadowing a backlash against Avasarala. The book had no character that acts as a conduit of Earths grief. The next book really needs to realistically address the repercussions.
Another novel that has the theme of Earths destruction being the catalyst for humanity populating the stars is Dan Simons Hyperion.
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Jan 4, 2017 16:21
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Here's something I missed (or wasn't addressed): what do Marco and his buddies think Duarte is getting out of their arrangement? We know that Duarte is taking a page from the Protogen playbook and just needs the Free Navy to distract everyone, but what does Marco understand the terms of their trade to be? Duarte handed over, what, 10–20 brand new Martian warships, right? Did Marco think he'd just bought Manhattan for beads, or what?
They delivered him the protomolecule from Fred Johnsons office in exchange for the ships. They think he is running tests and will return with new weapons and tech to share.
gohmak fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Jan 4, 2017
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Jan 4, 2017 22:29
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Speaking of that meeting at the end. If Miller were alive I could see Holden point to nominate Pa and Miller putting a bullet in her head.
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Jan 5, 2017 01:49
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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I started to switch off when there was talk of a dyson sphere made of trees populated entirely by plot devices that had traveled back in time to arrange everything and that the shrike was in fact Kassad's soul trapped in a murderbot or something. That was the fall of Hyperion?
The backwards time girl was genuinely interesting though.
Endymion was pure dreck from start to finish. I wish he had writ it in water.
No that's all Endymion you talking about. despite the boring John Keats storyline, Fall of Hyperion is still legit greatness.
gohmak fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Jan 8, 2017
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Jan 8, 2017 01:50
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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I believe so. Duarte didn't disappear until the Free Navy captured Medina. There was presumably a period of overlap where not just ships, but basic institutional knowledge was passed along.
And even then, after Duarte left the Free Navy never had a single victory over an inner planet navy ship.
The Free Navy should have been a hollow threat, outside of their capability as terrorists, and they definitely were. It was an interesting scenario, and I think it played out plausibly.
... Except the whole "holy poo poo literally billions of people are dead" bits. I, having grown up in a flawed 20th century nation state, could not help but cry when reading the statistics in this book that I know is fiction. I can imagine people justifying this to themselves, and people ignoring it and getting on with their lives... but I can also imagine people being reduced to a blubbering mess, or being filled with unquenchable rage and hatred. I've posted about this already, but I'm still trying to pinpoint exactly where the issue is, and I think it might be that. The reactions we saw were plausible, but they should have been part of a wider range, and the total absence of grief and rage was really jarring.
It violates the main thing The Expanse has going for itself. Plausible world building. If they can't accurately depict human reaction to an event of this magnitude everything else in the story just collapses. Space battle tactical realism of belter bodies vs squats pales in comparison.
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Jan 12, 2017 14:43
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Second best book in the series and the Dawes chapter is the best chapter in the series
Are you talking about Babalon's Ashes? I rank it tied with Abaddon's Gate for the worse of the series.
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Jan 29, 2017 11:55
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Actress Cara Gee is playing Drummer in the TV series. Refresh me who the hell is Drummer? I can't remember a thing about the character. What books are they mentioned? What action of note did he/she carry out?
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Feb 8, 2017 16:51
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Isn't Ganymede where all belters gestate and are born?
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Feb 19, 2017 02:41
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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There's no need to be that mean to Eros.
It is the rear end in a top hat of the Belt.
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Feb 22, 2017 04:07
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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I guess I’m one of the few that thinks the show is much better than the books. That being said when is the next one out?
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Nov 6, 2017 13:43
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Persepolis Rising is slated to release on December 5th, aka in just under a month 
Oh goody. I was worried I wouldn’t have a new read after Oathbringer.
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Nov 7, 2017 14:08
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Bobby is in her 50s and has old creeky bones. gently caress this book
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Dec 5, 2017 14:18
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Chapter 14 Avasarala
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Dec 5, 2017 20:30
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Rocky start but this book was good.
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Dec 11, 2017 04:23
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Also I've decided that the main characters being in their mid-to-late 60's is dumb so I'm head-canoning it so that they're in their 40's
Well in a future where the average span in well over 120 that isn’t inaccurate
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Dec 19, 2017 17:31
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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They forshadowed Amos's death and reserection by stating the repair drones where milling about looking for something to do while she wondered into the cave. but I was totatally cought off gaurd when. Duerte loving Tetsuo'd Cortazar.
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Apr 7, 2019 07:30
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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Can we talk about Naomi Nagata getting her Yang Wen-li on? I kind of wish they spent more time on the Laconia campaign. My only problem with the book is not prettending the brat was a hostage to make the escape.
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Apr 9, 2019 20:55
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May 3, 2024 17:23
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- gohmak
- Feb 12, 2004
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There are a lot of possibilities here, but I think that system was a Roman creation (probably one of many, since they're one time use) that could be used to nuke their own systems infected by Goth mindfuckery, giving specifics to the visions Holden got quite a few books back.
Also, we have no evidence the Goths are capable of or have any interest in manipulating matter on our plane of existence in an ordered fashion, like delicately balancing a star to nearly implode. Their style also isn't setting intricate traps that require nuanced counterintelligence-backed strategy. They just seem to get pissed when you gently caress with the laws of physics in certain ways and smack our reality around in response. This line of thinking seems to have been encouraged by the way this book dealt with the prisoners dilemma and the Roman/Goth metaphors -- basically, the humans are being dipshits at worst and full of hubris at best to think our logic and history applies to this enemy whole cloth. (I'm still using "Roman/Goth" here because it's easier to type.)
What the Goths are interested in and are tinkering with is the nature of consciousness with the pesky forms of life that are pissing them off. They kept trying the same mind-attack that worked on the Romans until they realized it wasn't, and are adjusting the attack. This puts a ticking clock on the humans to figure out what the gently caress to do.
Now that I'm already longposting, I'd like to put down some broad poo poo that's been rolling around in my head for a while, coming into more focus with this last book: the series is doing some very interesting work exploring degrees/a spectrum of morality and perceptions of others, ie the Romans/Goths/and the reactions of humans as they learn new information.
We know how humans are. We are emotional creatures wrestling with how to have a functioning society that still values a set of ideals. We're on a moral spectrum, some people with a strong moral compass and others complete assholes. I say this just to set up the rest.
The Romans were Alive, possibly a hive mind, and with a consciousness similar but different to ours. Elvi made the realization that they might not have any concept of childhood. As a result, the Romans seem to be alive but not truly appreciating Living, which colors the way in which they manipulate life with their tech. To the Romans, life is just life to them, to be broken down and reorganized for whatever purpose. It's fine, this new or different thing they made is still alive, right? It's not dead! They're still creating beautiful, fascinating things.
And to many humans, the way the protomolecule works is morally abhorent. To people on the Cortazar end of the spectrum, it is beautiful and the only frontier that matters. To guys like Duarte who are between the two, it's dangerous but if we can understand it safely, we can use it as a tool.
The Goths are the farthest along the spectrum, their approach to life as we understand it is like dealing with a pest. We are watching them experiment with consciousness in real time, because their version of "being alive" is far removed from anything we can conceptualize. They don't give a poo poo, at this point cannot be understood, and so are seen by everyone as a threat. No one is arguing otherwise. Yet. The Goths, from our perception, create nothing. They only destroy.
Explorations of morality and ethics are the blood flowing through the entire series, and they've been toying with it through human characters. Avasarala, Mao, Errinwright, Cortazar, Amos, it's everywhere. It's why Amos getting droned is full of such fascinating possibilities; his morality exists on a very specific equilibrium. From the viewpoint of good theme work, how he changes or doesn't and how his crew reacts to it will speak to the ultimate thesis statement of these novels, whether directly through plot or through metaphor.
My prediction for book 9 is https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Force_of_Nature_(episode) The Goths are intellegences from a different dimension harmed by the gate wormholes. Probably the immense energies required are taken from their plane of existence so they fight back. The conclusion will be for humanity to decide to return to Sol system or remain in distant systems cut off from each other, relegated to relativistic travel. The lessens for humanity will be they can't depend of the roads being built for them.
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Apr 13, 2019 05:58
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Jan 4, 2017 02:33
