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Tiamat's Wrath -- In Closing I'm not sure how I feel about Tiamat's Wrath. I've said before that I feel like it has a lot of promise but never really managed to realize it. When I read it the first time, it was definitely the novel that made me wonder where this series was going, whether the authors had a plan, and how it was possibly going to end in one more book. Upon a re-read, my feelings remain similar to that. Tiamat's Wrath was the novel where, in discussions with General Battuta, it became clear that the series was just 'talking in and around spaceships.' You know how Return of the Jedi has a bit of a problem where, in order for the main plot to begin, the heroes need to rescue Han Solo from Jabba's Palace? And it's fun and weird, but ultimately a diversionary consequence due to the ending of The Empire Strikes Back? Tiamat's Wrath feels similar: the authors need to get Jim Holden back into the Rocinante so the final novel can go ahead. It just lacks the dread, fun and weirdness of Jabba's palace that makes it feel less like a diversion. Tiamat's Wrath feels like it covers a ton of ground, and yet ultimately does very little beyond knocking over what has just been set up. Laconia is all-powerful, now it isn't. Amos is dead, now he isn't. Bobbie dies. Elvi finds a giant space diamond which has clearly been dropped in to impact the final novel in some way before she's shoved over to do palatial intrigue. Duarte was yanked off-stage, despite being a warm and charismatic presence in the novel. The Goths are getting serious, but they haven't done anything yet (beyond destroying Medina.) It's not exactly filler, but it certainly doesn't feel like the penultimate novel in an epic series. I think it has one of the weaker climaxes, too. It's more enjoyable than Perspolis Rising and much better than Babylon's Ashes, but I still think it falls short of the first three. It suffers from this feeling of the authors just wanting to get to the end of their nine-book series, yet are all-too-aware that they've got no roadmap to doing it, that they need to somehow thread this needle of character-focused drama and apocalyptic cosmic space opera in a setting that does everything it can to eschew melodrama. Strangely enough, the Teresa part of the novel is the one I'd rate the most highly. Unsurprisingly, Naomi's chapters are easily at the bottom. I think I'd put Alex and Bobbie above Elvi, if only because Elvi's whole thing is just to be setup for the Big Mysteries of the final novel, and to be folded into the awkward 'Holden: Teresa's Murderer or Savior?' plot. Not that Alex and Bobbie's stuff is particularly great either, being this weird little plot silo that seems to accomplish little else than ensuring Bobbie won't be hanging around on the Rocinante for the final novel. Seeing Holden 'from the outside' is an interesting choice, but I don't think the Coreys really accomplished it as well as they could have. Persepolis Rising ended on the promise of a showdown of the minds between him and Duarte, and Tiamat's Wrath skips over it and leaves you wondering if they ever really met. Duarte himself is a great bad guy, but doesn't really do much beyond make a series of bad decisions. See, that's kind of a big strength of the authorial pair -- they're great at writing an epilogue that catches you and leaves you hanging. Tiamat's Wrath continues the trend: Amos returning from the dead as the harbinger of the apocalypse is a great moment to end on. It's really ominous! But at the same time, by Tiamat's Wrath, I think it's pretty clear that these books keep writing cheques the authors don't know how to cash. As mentioned, Amos' resurrection ends up being little more than fan service, and it ruins one of the novel's most powerful moments. While I've always been (pedantically) critical of the space warfare/opera aspects, Tiamat's Wrath feels like the novel where the Coreys have just decided to jettison the 'hard sci-fi veneer' for something closer to a fun-over-realism space opera. The Siege of Laconia isn't great. Nothing really has any meaning. Time and distance become fluid in a way that I don't think the earlier novels would've put up with. But there's one element that I also find disappointing about Tiamat's Wrath, and that's the protomolecule itself. Ultimately, I think the protomolecule was most interesting when it was body horror space Lego. It was a tool designed to build a gate to connect back to the ring hub and it was going to do it with whatever it could find, leading it to create a terrified gestalt consciousness of Julia Mao. I was never a big fan of the protomolecule hybrid beast-soldier-children, and I think they were practically a part of the 'vomit zombie' idea: slow zombies and fast zombies, right? The idea of Duarte dosing himself up on it for cosmic insight is interesting, sure. It gels with what we've seen of, say, the Julie Mao gestalt and the Miller ghost. But it granting him the ability to kamehameha people out of existence is... less so. We're getting into act-of-plot space magic territory. I also think Tiamat's Wrath is interesting because I think it marks the moment where the Coreys were writing for the screen. The crowning jewel of the Builders? A big green diamond. The massive sprawling Siege of Laconia? Practically a two-part episode where there's no big fleet battle to eat up the CGI budget. The story feels like it takes place in the following sets: Laconian State Building and surrounds, Amos' Cave, Rocinante, Gathering Storm, Falcon, Callisto. It's not bad but it feels notable here. That said, I would be curious to see how they'd adapt this part of the story. Would they really have kept Steven Strait off the screen? I hope that we get to see this on the screen one day because I think Tiamat's Wrath is a solid concept that'd shine with the adaptation process the story got as a series. It'd be interesting to see what they might do for Duarte like they did for Jules-Pierre Mao. I do think it was a missed opportunity to not let Duarte be a bit more intelligent. Perhaps Duarte realizes what's truly going on, wants to slow things down, but the Goths brain zap him before he can tell anyone but Elvi or Holden and Trejo and the military go, well, my last orders were to keep sending the bomb ships/Duarte was weak/Duarte isn't human anymore. But maybe that'd be too complicated for the series' depiction of evil. Anyway, that brings us to the end of the penultimate book. I'm going to take a little break before diving into Leviathan Falls. Over the past few days, I was thinking of how I'd rate the novels and, going into the Leviathan Falls, I decided on this ranking:
Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 10:59 on Feb 13, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2024 10:50
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If I were constructing a construction platform for invincible regenerating ships, I would simply make it out of invincible regenerating shipstuff. But then (as you point out) they'd have to Hit The Antimatter and it'd be the Death Star. But that would give some meaning to Bobby's earlier sacrifice, she's demonstrated the great weakness of the Laconian stuff and how to exploit it.
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Feb 13, 2024 15:13
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Book 9: Leviathan Falls Here we are, at the end of The Expanse. Leviathan Falls is the final book in the series and, when we're done, we'll have covered everything except the novellas and short stories. After it, I think I'll poke around that James S. A. Corey Patreon to see if their creative process lines up with my theories and beliefs but otherwise we're in the final stretch. I didn't like Leviathan Falls much. The ending of Tiamat's Wrath makes it clear, I think, that there was still a lot of ground to cover to get a strong ending. What Leviathan Falls gives us is an ending that's adequately average. It does exactly what you expect it to do. On Goodreads, I called it the most boring epic conclusion I could remember reading. But the thought that stuck with me about it was a comment I saw on Reddit: "You can't go wrong with an ending that isn't a total dumpster fire, right?" It's ending that simply whelms. That's my main problem with Leviathan Falls -- it's boring. I also think the writing and plotting is sloppier than the previous novels. It doesn't take chances or risks and doesn't really expect that the reader has been following the previous eight books. Which is why, a few days before Falls came out, I sat down and penned a bunch of predictions.
All that said, I'm not sure if that was always the direction Leviathan Falls was heading. I think there was potential for this series to end in a very different fashion, but we'll discuss that when it feels relevant. Structurally, Leviathan Falls follows the trend of the previous eight novels with a rotating cast. There's Holden, or as he is called in this novel, Jim. With the exception of Amos, all of the Rocinante crew get a chapter. Then there's Tanaka, a Laconian marine who briefly showed up in Persepolis Rising and may just take the crown of the series' worst perspective character, and Elvi, who is still investigating the mysteries of the Protomolecule. Then there are a variety of one-off chapters, echoing the worst parts of Babylon's Ashes, and some odd chapters featuring Kit that were gruelling to read on my very first readthrough. There are also a number of interludes featuring The Dreamer/s, The Lighthouse, and The Keeper, and we'll get to those when we do. Prologue That's right. A prologue without a character attached. Huh. Leviathan Falls, Prologue posted:First there was a man named Winston Duarte. And then there wasn’t. The prologue recounts Duarte's part in Tiamat's Wrath. He'd been going over reports, he knew about Teresa sneaking out, and he'd just told her about his ambitions to have her join him in living "perhaps not forever but at least indefinitely" and reign for ten thousand years if he could push back against human complacency and defeat the "darkness on the third side of the ring gate." Third side? 'Truth is a three-edged sword', anyone? Anyway, this third side thing has come up a few times: Cibola Burn, Chapter 27 posted:“Take what blessings you can, I suppose. What about the third side?” Nemesis Games, Epilogue posted:Many shapes, neither light nor dark, but some other thing, some third side of that coin, passing through the spaces between the spaces. Babylon's Ashes, Chapter 19 posted:Bertold pressed a palm to his forehead. “No third side to that coin?” I'm not sure what it means. I did a brief Google search to see if anyone had an idea, but there wasn't much beyond excerpts of this prologue and people mentioning the "third side" is where the Goths come from. Does it mean anything in the context of the third side being a third way out of a binary choice? Has that been a recurring theme of this series? Does it relate to Third Way politics and policies? Honestly, that seems pretty on-brand for the series, given the Transport Union and so on. The earlier truth comment comes from Babylon 5, where the grand conflict between the alien arbiters of order and architects of chaos comes to a head when heroic John Sheridan tells them that there's the side of order, the side of chaos, and the third way -- the truth, radically throwing both sides out. "There's your side, their side, and the truth. And the truth is, we don't need you anymore." But what does it mean in the context of the series? Does this 'third side' idea have any resonance? If it's just that idea of Third Wayism, which I think is pretty apt given the socio-political leanings of the series, what does it mean when the aliens also come from that third space? Is there going to be some marriage of ideas there? Or is it just a phrase the writers thought was neat and so kept shoving in? Doors and corners, amiable smile, tribes and tribals, once is never, half-finished meals... Leviathan Falls, Prologue posted:Everything changed everything that had come before. It was the least surprising thing in life. Eventually, Duarte -- or something that may or may not be Duarte -- settles back inside his mind and begins to piece himself back together. He remembers Teresa begging him to save her from Cortazar, so, he waves at Cortazar and blows him away. "There," Duarte thinks. "That was fixed." He remembers being a man who raised a daughter and this pieces his psyche back together more than his ambition to build an empire. Leviathan Falls, Prologue posted:The sword that slew a billion angels had only inconvenienced the primates in their bubbles of metal and air. And a man named Winston Duarte, halfway between angel and ape, had been broken but not killed. The shards had found their own way. Leviathan Falls, Prologue posted:The storm in the other place was loud and soft and loud. That was connected. He was supposed to save them from the things in the storm, that were the storm. I also think it's because Leviathan Falls is the novel where it's most obvious that the Coreys are really stretching their chapters out, and it starts in this prologue. Anyway, Duarte returns to awareness. He asks Kelly to bring him some tea. it's raining outside but he can feel Teresa somewhere. It's been weeks or months since the end of Tiamat's Wrath, and Duarte consults some reports -- it's going bad for Laconia. Leviathan Falls, Prologue posted:His awareness of the ring space was clear now. He could hear the echoes of it in the fabric of reality like he was pressing his ear to a ship’s deck to know the status of its drive. The rage of the enemy was as apparent to him now as if he could hear its voices. The shrieks that tore something that wasn’t air in something that wasn’t time. Duarte calls for Trejo, and, somewhere, Trejo startles. Then, we swap over to Trejo. Interestingly, this is a break in standard Expanse conventions (and not the only time this novel will do it) in having a chapter from more than one perspective. I'm not sure why they did it, beyond that it gives them the ability to have Trejo reflect about Sol. It doesn't feel neat. I feel like breaking storytelling conventions like this lead to some of the strongest moments of any given work or series, but here it just feels like it was thrown in 'just because.' Anyway, Trejo. He's in Sol, five weeks into his reconquest of the system. Mars is dragging their feet in getting their orbital shipyards up and running, thinking they'll make themselves targets for the underground because they don't think Laconia can provide security. In the end, they agree, after Trejo thinks about glassing their planets. Then, Duarte shows up in Trejo's quarters. Leviathan Falls, Prologue posted:Winston Duarte stood near the foot of his bed, hands behind his back. He wore a loose casual shirt and black trousers. He wasn’t wearing any shoes. His hair was mussed, as if he’d only recently woken up. He looked like he was actually there. (Also, we're back to beds in space after the previous few books switched from beds and bunks to crash couches?) Trejo orders a security scan and, of course, there's no one there -- yet there is. Duarte, as warm and pleasant as ever, tells Trejo that he's done well in holding the empire together and, when Trejo says he's not here, remarks that here is a very flexible notion now. But now Duarte knows what they need to do. Leviathan Falls, Prologue posted:Duarte shook an amused and melancholy smile. “We built an empire that spanned the galaxy, you and I. Who’d have imagined we were thinking too small?” And that's the prologue! It certainly grabs attention: Duarte's back, and now he can see and act through time and space! In this chapter alone, he's sensed Teresa over a vast distance and knew she wasn't in distress, and he's appeared aboard Trejo's ship in the Sol system, and he appears more intimately aware of the Goths and their designs than ever before. Well! How well the Rocinante crew get out of this one? What's wily ol' Duarte planning now? The guy can sense his daughter and apparate like a dang wizard! Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 05:49
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I really can't escape the feeling that this story's RPG roots are showing, hard. More after work.
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Feb 28, 2024 14:38
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The stuff about the angels is weird. Are the Angels supposed to be the Builders? Then why is Duarte thinking about the Builders in such a way if he, infected by the Protomolecule, is suppose to be a terminal to rebuild the Gates and bring back the Builders? I guess he's suppose to be Goth'd up or something, but it seems weird.
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Feb 28, 2024 22:08
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I really can't escape the feeling that this story's RPG roots are showing, hard. More after work. I'll be interested in hearing it! Kchama posted:The stuff about the angels is weird. Are the Angels supposed to be the Builders? Then why is Duarte thinking about the Builders in such a way if he, infected by the Protomolecule, is suppose to be a terminal to rebuild the Gates and bring back the Builders? I guess he's suppose to be Goth'd up or something, but it seems weird. A lot of the explanations we get throughout Leviathan Falls are cloaked in metaphors that are easily decoded but don't really reveal much of interest--in my opinion, anyway. It's something I've mentioned before with the titles of some of the books and the Roman/Goth nomenclature. I'll put together a glossary when we hit the interludes, but for now... Yes, the angels are the Builders. From what we know, the so-called Romans were an ethereal species that may not have had physical forms or even individuality like humans do, which made them vulnerable to the Goth consciousness bombs. Why angels? Well, that has to do with that theory: that the protomolecule engenders feelings of awe within its hosts and therefore makes them amenable to following its ideas. So, the builders are presented in the dreamscape as divine beings as part of a psychological ploy. (But is that the best metaphor to reach Duarte with, if it is external manipulation? Is it the one he would reach for if it is internal?) I don't want to get too much into this theory before the end of this novel, but the two big holes in it I don't think I've seen the proponents properly explain are that, one, we've never really seen the protomolecule enrapture people so it's hard to buy it as strong evidence of a long-term plot thread (the Julie-being was confused and terrified, the Miller simulation was a prisoner that wished to die, the supersoldiers were nigh-feral, Amos and the two kids are basically neutral, edit: and who could forget the vomit zombies? I did, hence the edit, edit: and the Catalyst...) and, two particularly that the protomolecule got someone aboard the ring station back in the third novel, and nothing happened. (How does this play with Cortazar's beliefs that the protomolecule is rebuilding things and that Cara and Xan and Amos aren't 'real?') Now, the idea is that the plan depends on someone existing in a state like Duarte, that is someone who managed to dose themselves up with the protomolecule safely, but the unlikelihood of that... We'll cover that later. Basically, the theory works great within the sole context of the final two books, but doesn't hold up to what the whole series has showed us. Which is possibly why Tiamat's Wrath and the prologue of this novel have started not so much assembling the pieces that were already there, but cutting a whole set of puzzle pieces at the eleventh hour. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 11:33 on Feb 29, 2024 |
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Feb 29, 2024 06:54
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I'll be interested in hearing it! And I completely forgot I posted that after getting pummeled at work. Before I begin, I should stress it's been a while since I read these books and I stopped at maybe 7 or 8 because that's what was out at the time. Milkfred E. Moore posted:Like I've said of a a lot of these novels, it feels like the bit the Coreys came up with and then built the story to get us there. I was going to go into a whole thing about how the siege of Laconia reminded me of a Dungeon Master scrambling to not have to get the rules for mass spaceship battle out, but I think this sort of thing really illustrates the point better. Bobbie's last stand isn't an organic event, it's something that happens because Bobbie's player had to quit after this session and wanted to go out in a "cool" blaze of glory. Now, I don't know whether or not the Expanse was gamed out like Malazan (ugh) was, but a lot of the wasted potential feels like a DM flailing around trying to figure out how to run political intrigue and just kind of reacting to the players ideas. "Yeah, you have, uh...3 Donnager class ships. I know I talked a lot about the Laconian gate defenses, but that's gonna take a bunch of time so...uh...I rolled a 1 and they're dead." It's also very reminiscent of book reddit's obsession with "moments". You wander over to the Wheel of Time subreddits or Brandon Sanderson and people keep talking about the time Rand fought with swords in the sky at Falme or whatever. Given that that's the target market of the fantasy industrial complex it doesn't shock me that the Coreys desperately want to build up to big moments such as Bobbie's death.
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Mar 2, 2024 04:04
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I was going to go into a whole thing about how the siege of Laconia reminded me of a Dungeon Master scrambling to not have to get the rules for mass spaceship battle out, but I think this sort of thing really illustrates the point better. Bobbie's last stand isn't an organic event, it's something that happens because Bobbie's player had to quit after this session and wanted to go out in a "cool" blaze of glory. Now, I don't know whether or not the Expanse was gamed out like Malazan (ugh) was, but a lot of the wasted potential feels like a DM flailing around trying to figure out how to run political intrigue and just kind of reacting to the players ideas. "Yeah, you have, uh...3 Donnager class ships. I know I talked a lot about the Laconian gate defenses, but that's gonna take a bunch of time so...uh...I rolled a 1 and they're dead." The only stuff we know that was gamed out was the first half (or two thirds, people involved cite different numbers) of Leviathan Wakes. But it could be that Franck's inexperience as a writer versus gamemaster had a role in how they plotted things out -- everything feels a little 'clean', like a series of gauntlets where dice are being rolled (Alex rolls a 20! Critical success! The Laconian shipyard detonates!) There's nothing wrong with writing for moments to hit -- really, most novels probably begin with cool ideas like that, scenarios and images -- but it's more than just putting them in as part of a chain of events. Ideally, it'd feel like 'Okay, so, this is the book where Bobbie dies, we want her to have a big moment, how can we build her character arc and general narrative to it?' But yeah, the moments thing is real. When I was looking up what people thought about Tiamat's Wrath or the general arc, it felt like pages of 'Okay, but Bobbie charging the Tempest was loving sick though, right?' That said, there's something neat about how the second book introduces Bobbie and Avasarala and the second-last book takes them off the stage, but I don't think that really makes up for it. I think they just wanted Bobbie out of the picture to get the focus back on the original crew. I would've just given Bobbie the Tanaka role.
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Mar 2, 2024 08:52
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:The only stuff we know that was gamed out was the first half (or two thirds, people involved cite different numbers) of Leviathan Wakes. But it could be that Franck's inexperience as a writer versus gamemaster had a role in how they plotted things out -- everything feels a little 'clean', like a series of gauntlets where dice are being rolled (Alex rolls a 20! Critical success! The Laconian shipyard detonates!) There's nothing wrong with writing for moments to hit -- really, most novels probably begin with cool ideas like that, scenarios and images -- but it's more than just putting them in as part of a chain of events. Ideally, it'd feel like 'Okay, so, this is the book where Bobbie dies, we want her to have a big moment, how can we build her character arc and general narrative to it?' But yeah, the moments thing is real. When I was looking up what people thought about Tiamat's Wrath or the general arc, it felt like pages of 'Okay, but Bobbie charging the Tempest was loving sick though, right?' I've mentioned before how the Bobbie charge just reminded me of a weaker version of a basically identical scene in an anime, which I mean it probably would have hit harder here if Bobbie had been like, a main character and not someone hanging off to the side for like, half the books.
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Mar 2, 2024 09:31
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Leviathan Falls, Chapters 1 - 4 It's a few months post Tiamat's Wrath. The Rocinante crew are on the run from a (surprisingly) resurgent Laconian Empire. We are introduced to Aliana Tanaka, who is terrible. And Elvi is still doing space science to try and establish enough puzzle pieces to make this novel work. Holden has PTSD. Everyone is sad. The world is ending. Chapter One: Jim Perhaps to make the reader feel closer to Holden, his chapters are now 'Jim' chapters. A break in convention that' worth noting, although I'm not sure of the reason beyond that, after eight books, the reader can feel like they're on a first-name basis with him. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 1 posted:It pinged us,” Alex said. His voice was a light almost singsong that meant he thought they were screwed. The Rocinante is in the Kronos system. Oddly, and I don't know if this is correct grammar or if the editor was just lapse, but this is how it's put... Leviathan Falls, Chapter 1 posted:Jim, sitting on the ops deck with a tactical map of Kronos system on the screen and his heart going double time, tried to disagree. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 1 posted:The Rocinante was acting like a small-haul freighter, a class of ship thick on the ground in Kronos system. edit: On inspection, no, it appears the novels consistently drop the 'the.' "Back in Sol system", "in Laconia system." Don't know why I only noticed how awkward it is now. I feel like you'd just use "Back in Sol" but you need a "the" occasionally, for example, when talking about a map of the local system. Anyway, that second bit sets the scene: the Rocinante is pretending to be a freighter. Like it was done in previous novels, they're messed up the Epstein and welded on some extra plating. This is something you'll see a bit of in Falls -- we're basically getting a greatest hits of a lot of the ideas and set pieces from the earlier novels. What pinged them was a Laconian frigate, the Black Kite. No weather-themed naming? Unlucky. Smaller than a Pulsar-class (still referred to as the Storm-class), it's "well armed" and has the "self-healing outer hull." Interesting that we're introduced to a new class of Laconian vessel after the last novel made a big episode about the limited numbers of Laconian ships, seemingly all Pulsar-classes, and knocked out their capacity to build more. I believe this is because Falls needs the Laconian Empire to still be an implacable foe that holds the known galaxy in an iron grip for the Holden story to work. Alex wonders if they should power up the railgun. Holden is about to say 'yes' when Naomi says that Laconian ships can recognize railgun capacitors charging. Notably, we are now getting 'rail-gun' as the spelling and not 'rail gun.' Jim quips that “What a crew does with its rail-gun capacitor in the privacy of its own ship shouldn’t be anyone else’s business.” It turns out the Kronos system used to be habitable, and now it's basically dead, with the only human inhabitants being a bunch of miners scattered around the system. We get the usual exposition: the protomolecule made the gates, the gates led to hundreds of systems, etc. The Black Kite has apparently spent three days hunting through the system and knocked out the underground's radio repeater. The Black Kite sends a transmission. But not to the Rocinante, to a freighter called the Perishable Harvest. Holden begins to have a panic attack. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 1 posted:It was getting better. Easier. The autodoc had been able to supervise the regrowth of his missing teeth. Apart from the indignity of needing to numb his gums like a toddler, that had gone well enough. The nightmares were old acquaintances by now. He’d started having them on Laconia while still a prisoner of High Consul Duarte. He’d expected them to fade once he was free, but they were getting worse. Being buried alive was the most recent version. More often it was someone he loved being murdered in the next room and not being able to key in the lock code fast enough to save them. Or having a parasite living under his skin and trying to find a way to cut it out. Or the guards on Laconia coming to beat him until his teeth broke again. The way that they had. But in Tiamat's Wrath, Holden was treated pretty well. That was the whole point. Duarte had him under prisoner, had him being watched, had him allowed to basically free roam as a symbol of power and because Holden had nothing to threaten him with. Naomi had a bunch of angst about it -- had she gone to Laconia, Duarte would've kept his word. Holden never mentioned being tortured in his interlude and he never acted like it. He did lose one tooth -- a single tooth, not multiple teeth -- but that appeared to be because some Laconian guards beat him after the incident with Amos and Teresa, not as a years-long campaign of torture. It's really strange. After getting pretty soundly thrashed by the Underground, the Laconian Empire has retained their supremacy. How? At the end of Tiamat's Wrath, they had lost their supposedly critical infrastructure, couldn't communicate with the rest of the empire, every system outside Laconia was apparently in uprising, and Naomi had gathered up a fleet of four-hundred ships that outnumbered the entire Laconian navy three-to-one and had thrown rocks at the capital of the empire that'd still be hitting there months onward. But it doesn't put your final novel off on a good footing when the two immediate things a reader takes away from it, if they're been paying attention, is that everything is in flux: Laconia is strong again. Holden was viciously tortured. But fine, okay, if that's the truth going forward then it's the truth going forward. What's worse about this, and I'll admit this is pretty unusual for me, but Leviathan Falls actually has a pretty remarkable feeling of tone. It feels like the Rocinante crew are beleaguered, that everything is falling apart, that they can't fight Laconia, that the Goths are inevitable, that the world is ending and all they can do is just keep going and that's so goddamn rough because why keep going when it all feels like it's a day or two from falling apart. But how remarkable is it, really, when it's basically just retconning the previous novel? Leviathan Falls, Chapter 1 posted:There were still days when he couldn’t shake the sense of threat. Sometimes a part of his mind would get trapped in the unfounded and irrational certainty that his Laconian torture team was about to find him again. Others, it was the less irrational dread of the things beyond the gates. The apocalypse that had destroyed the protomolecule’s makers and was on the path to destroying humanity. Anyway, Holden goes down to the galley. Amos and Muskrat at there. Naomi doesn't seem to think of him as Amos, but Holden is so tired that he can't spare the energy to think of him as anything but Amos. Amos basically says that the Rocinante is out of supplies and breaking down. What happened to Naomi Nagata and her cult of personality? The Underground's ability to resupply from a thousand systems? Leviathan Falls, Chapter 1 posted:“You spoiled her,” Teresa said. “She’s never letting you forget that.” Alex tells Holden that the Harvest has dumped its cargo and is burning for the trade station in the "outer Belt." Would you capitalize belt if it isn't the Sol Belt? The Black Kite pursues, leaving the ring gate, and giving the Rocinante an opening to escape. Because that's all anyone can do at this point: run away and hide. Had the Black Kite come for them, they'd have had to abandon the Rocinante. Teresa says she'd stop them from hurting them, as she's the daughter of the high consul, but Holden says he's not comfortable with it because relying on the Laconians not shooting at them is not a good idea. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 1 posted:“If we need to run,” Naomi said, “we’ll run.” Chapter Two: Tanaka Oh, boy. Tanaka. I don't know what there is to say about Tanaka. I stand by that she's the worst perspective character in these novels. Just this overall concept that I can't get with. I'd love to know which member of the Corey team thought was a good idea, and how they just went forward with it. Meet Colonel Aliana Tanaka! She vapes! Leviathan Wakes, Chapter 2 posted:Aliana pressed the button on her vaporizer and inhaled deeply. The mist tasted like vanilla and hit her lungs like a soft warm cloud. Nicotine and tetrahydrocannabinol mixed with just a touch of something more exotic. Something that tempered the THC sleepiness with a vivid hyperawareness. Leviathan Wakes, Chapter 2 posted:Tristan was asleep next to her, his small muscular butt pressed up against her thigh. He snored gently as he slept, punctuated by the occasional twitch and sigh. Aliana knew that she found the noise charming and sweet because she was high and postcoital. Leviathan Wakes, Chapter 2 posted:Enjoy the power of seeming to be one thing while being another. And then be good at it. Even when it didn’t involve loving her junior officers, it was a kind of sexual perversion. The thrill of knowing that a wrong word or an unexpected slip could put a bullet in the back of her head was more important to her than the actual sex. Leviathan Wakes, Chapter 2 posted:She’d loved being part of the Laconian experiment from the beginning because Duarte’s vision—first as a capital offense against Mars and then as a permanent engine of danger—fed her kinks. She felt no shame about that. She knew what she was. (Seriously, I'm not sure how old Tanaka is. It's like the Singh thing all over again. This chapter tells us she was a soldier on Mars, and that she'd seemingly been loving her junior officers back then, which means she was probably at least in her twenties when Duarte's coup went off, so we've got thirty years there, then a few years between Persepolis Rising and Tiamat's Wrath, and another between then and now... Even if we allow that she's been on those life-extending drugs or something...) I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert in writing women. I don't think there's any reason why you couldn't have a sixty year old Colonel woman who does these things and did those things. I like characters who bend ideas about gender and defy norms. But this just feels off. Especially when I think of the wider context of how the Expanse handles women, from Naomi 'Does Nothing' Nagata, Bobbie getting written out, and Elvi really wanting to bang Holden that one time. Is she a commentary on Strong Female Characters? I know from reading this novel before something of what they're trying to do, but I feel like they're just missing their mark in a really odious way. Especially when we've never seen any other character be promiscuous, or a drug-user, or especially both combined. I feel like if you want to do a character like Tanaka, it'd be more interesting if you showed us the professional, disciplined officer... and then peel back the layers to show us that it's a façade over a monster. Instead, it's like: here's the monster, she's not fun and has no interesting qualities, I don't know, enjoy following her for a quarter of the novel? It's funny. Reading Holden's first chapter, I was like... Hey, this is pretty good, I don't know why I was so down on this novel. And then the moment I got a few paragraphs into this chapter, it all came back to me. I've said before that there are viewpoint characters that're just sort of bland, boring and unnecessary... but I don't think there's one quite like Tanaka, where she's just this malignant thing cloying up the novel. Tanaka is currently sleeping with Corporal Tristan Reeves. She assaults him into waking up and says, "I'm high. I want to gently caress." Tristan cracks a joke and Tanaka comes close to breaking his wrists. She enjoys the feeling of power it gives her and how scared he is of her. She threatens to kill him if he says anything that might get her discharged. Like, I'll admit I have a fondness for unheroic characters, for psychologically-addled screw-ups, for characters that are dramatically flawed, for characters who never quite get over the things that dog them. I don't need them to be good people. I don't need them to be moral. I don't need them to learn lessons. I don't need a 'save the cat' moment to root for someone and think they're worth following. But Tanaka is awful. She doesn't feel remotely realistic. She feels like she should be Alan Tanaka, some kind of corrupt military police officer who Jack Reacher puts a bullet into in the final act after exposing the people-smuggling ring he runs or something. Anyway, Tanaka gets a surprise call from the State Building. She's got a surprise debriefing in two hours from an Admiral Milan. Colonel Tanaka knows her way around the State Building because of her "professional connections in the highest ranks of power" but it's like... She's a Colonel. Maybe I'm overestimating my ranks, but I feel like that's high enough that knowing where to go in the big Laconian palace doesn't require dedicated explanation, especially when the novel is like 'oh, she's been here before, she knows these people, these hallways.' It comes back to that thought of, huh, this novel is just a bit sloppier than usual. Admiral Milan is acting commander in chief while Duarte is "in seclusion" and Trejo is taking back Sol. Tanaka arrives just in time to catch the ending of a briefing about a Goth incursion: twenty-three minutes of lost time, "some accidental fatalities." Also, the speed of light, uh, sped up by four thousand nanoseconds. Milan asks Tanaka if there's something she wants to tell him... because he has no idea why Trejo has given her Omega status in the Laconian Intelligence Directorate at the personal request of the High Consul's office. Leviathan Wakes, Chapter 2 posted:“Not a joke. Admiral Trejo has instructed that you be given the keys to the kingdom. Override authority on any mission. Access to any information, regardless of security classification. Immunity from censure or prosecution for the duration of your deployment. Pretty sweet. You really telling me you don’t know what it’s about?” Trejo fills her in. He bets she's been wondering how Duarte was leading the empire from seclusion -- well, he wasn't. "The high consul was a drooling, brain-damaged moron" when Trejo says he left for Sol. And Duarte killed Dr Cortazar. The only people who know this are Dr Okoye, Trejo, and Teresa Duarte (who, again, we're told she ran away.) So, eighty-five hours ago, Duarte appeared before Trejo. And I'm not crazy, Trejo says, because there's evidence: Duarte put on clothes, had some tea and a chat with his valet, and left the State Building. Trejo wants Tanaka to find him. She can do whatever the gently caress she wants, providing she gets Duarte back in custody. Also, this might be weird thing to note, but where's the Voice of the Whirlwind? Did Trejo take it to Sol? Is it still guarding Laconia? It hasn't been mentioned. Chapter Three: Naomi The Rocinante heads for the gate. The Black Kite asks them where they're going, but can't intercept them. Naomi has this ploy with them being a freighter from Sol, the Vincent Soo. Naomi and Alex quip a bit, and I'm pretty sure the Coreys are really going to hammer 'people using humor to mask their panic' a lot. Alex and Naomi wonder about ship numbers, how many ships the Laconians have, how many are looking for the Rocinante. Naomi goes off to get some rest. Jim is already asleep. Jim's so rattled by his time in prison that Naomi can tell it when he's sleeping. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 3 posted:“Hey, sexy lady,” Jim said. “What did I miss?” Later, they're about to go through the gate. Alex is nervous about it. Jim notes that Laconia blew up the underground repeater but didn't drop their own (why?) which means the Kite can't signal anyone on the other side of the gate. The underground and Laconia are apparently at war, and no one is tracking ships going through the gates, and there're tons of ships vanishing (which is presumably pissing off the Goths further.) The underground is still using the bottle strategy to send messages. Holden and Naomi wonder what they'll do next, but Teresa calls them: something is wrong with Amos. In the machine shop, Amos is having a seizure or something like it given his new state, and the chapter ends so abruptly that I'm left wondering if my Kindle copy is missing pages. Which is another issue I felt with Falls back when I first read it: chapters just feel like they end almost randomly, like the Coreys were hitting word limits and going, okay, chapter done, move on. It's really weird because, usually, their chapters end well. They know the importance of having a little dramatic beat to end on, or a cool line, or something. Chapter Four: Elvi Aboard the Falcon, Elvi is running experiments with Cara. Something's going wrong and Elvi wants to pull the plug but Cara refuses. She's linked to the big space diamond and something is happening. Elvi ends the experiment. We get a big reminder about the Falcon being the only survivor of the attack on the ring space and how Elvi lost a leg and it was so traumatic and such. I get that there's a certain degree of exposition we need to know, but I feel lit lacks the usual Corey invisibleness. Even back in the first novel, it felt like the infodumps were relatively organic: sleek and invisible. Here, it's very much that classic SF/F sense of 'Stop the plot, here's some information.' Elvi and her team discuss what happened. Whatever was happening to Cara didn't happen to Xan. Cara and the diamond are now "singing in harmony" without any light delay, without transferring any particles, and they have no idea how. Elvi reflects about Duarte's plan to go to war with the dark gods and how it crippled him and how that led to her becoming where she is now. She goes to see Cara. Cara tells her it was like being in a dream. Whatever is in the diamond isn't the library, the source of the knowledge that Cara, Xan and Amos have, but "where the information all comes from." Cara thinks she can interface with it and wants to try again. She dismisses Cara and Xan and talks about the relationship between the protomolecule, the subject, and the space diamond (a presumed alien data core.) Elvi is worried that the diamond was made to interact with someone or something else and continuing the experiment might destroy Cara or the diamond or both. She sends the info to Naomi. Then Duarte's personal valet calls up, and says there's been a change in High Consul Duarte's status... Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Mar 4, 2024 |
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Mar 4, 2024 02:11
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What's amazing about this book feeling really sloppy (which I agree with) is that it was delayed a full year from the usual release pattern so they could work on it more. And yeah... Tanaka. I just don't know what happened with her, or how anyone that read those chapters thought she was a good idea. She's unpleasant to read, and not in a satisfying way where you expect there's some big comeuppance coming up. She's exactly as deadly and competent as she thinks she is, and none of her negative qualities ever impact her being deadly and competent. And yeah, she vapes, because I guess vaping was a big thing when this novel was being written. Even though with current medical technology you'd think vaping wouldn't really be a thing anymore? I'm not exaggerating when I say that she's not just the worst character in all of the Expanse books but she's the worst POV character in anything I've ever read. I also can't remember, and admittedly I've not read this book since it's release, but I can't remember her contributing a single thing to the actual plot? I think you could cut her out entirely and you wouldn't have to change much of anything?
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Mar 4, 2024 17:38
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I really don't like Tanaka's POV and I love hosed up women characters who everybody dislikes  She's written like she's supposed to be kind of a dark Bobby, an exploitative sensual authoritarian domme to Bobby's laid-back protective momma bear, but she doesn't have any charisma about it. She's got that Coreyan self-reflectivity where she can't enjoy anything, she just knows she's enjoying it because it's a thing people enjoy. So she doesn't work even as a fetish thing (which she explicitly is?) Then we get the later exploration about how she's actually like this because she's so damaged inside by childhood trauma and she needs control and isolation to feel safe blah blah blah and like, at least it's consistent, she's a soggy no fun unpleasant mess to read because she's not really having any fun with it either, I guess. But: isn't Revealing The Inner Vulnerability of A Big Tough Sex Having Violent Woman a tedious cliche? From the moment she shows up on page you're dreading the moment, the loving moment, you know exactly the one, where she's paralyzed by some insight and we get an overlay of a little girl's face saying something profoundly sad and we're like "ohhh on the inside she's just a little scared girl." gently caress you! This was annoying when it was Mass Effect 2, it's annoying every time it happens. "Women become bad because they're secretly scared/childlike" is, in my opinion, misogynistic — in aggregate if not in each little example. She's also used, in (imo) a very unfortunate way, to equate Duarte's big plan with rape. Mixing up a wild science fictional premise with a very real, very raw human crime is...I don't know. I think it's very hard to do well. I don't think this book does it well.
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Mar 4, 2024 18:12
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There's a better, more dramatically satisfying version of this story where Tanaka is Bobby.
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Mar 4, 2024 18:14
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General Battuta posted:There's a better, more dramatically satisfying version of this story where Tanaka is Bobby. Where she bought into the Laconian dream and never joined the Rocci? I can see that working. Disillusioned Bobby after the events of Book Three would be easy pickings for Duarte to recruit by promising her he's the version of Mars she always thought she was working for pre-Caliban's War.
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Mar 4, 2024 18:22
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PriorMarcus posted:What's amazing about this book feeling really sloppy (which I agree with) is that it was delayed a full year from the usual release pattern so they could work on it more. From memory, Tanaka basically never gets close to finding Duarte (even when it should be pretty obvious), gets outfoxed by the Rocinante crew like three or four times, repeats a bunch of information from previous chapters, and finally kills Duarte with her bare hands after having that dreaded moment Battuta describes within Duarte's rather bizarre take on the Human Instrumentality Project. On one hand, I like that Tanaka is this force who actively pursues the Rocinante crew. In the eight previous books, there was never an antagonist who was an active threat. Even Marco's dogged pursuit of Holden and Naomi felt like a one-off event. Most Expanse antagonists, if they're a perspective character, feels like someone who is doing bad things in parallel and not really doing bad things that target the good guys, so, a pursuit plot is welcome. But Tanaka is so bad at it, that it makes you think that the reason they didn't do it before is that they couldn't. I remember being astounded that the Rocinante crew consistently beats her via luck and circumstance which should make her feel more threatening but just left me thinking she was incompetent. I think you could very easily cut her. That said, there's one element of Tanaka I like, but I think this stems from my brain picking up on this grim tone from the first Rocinante chapters and inventing something. See, I thought for a time that the Coreys had gone for one hell of a twist and all my predictions were wrong: the Goths can't be stopped, human civilization is doomed, the stars are going out, the Rocinante crew is spending their last days being hounded by the most insane woman in the Laconian Marine Corps, and they need to try and do one good thing (finding a school for Teresa, as meaningless as it feels) before the end. I hadn't read The Last Policeman at the time, but I think it's a similar idea to the third novel in that series: the end is coming, what will you do with the time you have left? And I think that's interesting and meaningful. Tanaka is a victim of trauma who, even at the end, is trapped by it, and would rather follow the last order she ever got than face up to the end of everything. That, however, is not what we get. General Battuta posted:There's a better, more dramatically satisfying version of this story where Tanaka is Bobby. PriorMarcus posted:Where she bought into the Laconian dream and never joined the Rocci? I can see that working. Disillusioned Bobby after the events of Book Three would be easy pickings for Duarte to recruit by promising her he's the version of Mars she always thought she was working for pre-Caliban's War. Absolutely. Like you point out, Battuta, Tanaka feels like a Star Trek Mirror Universe Bobbie -- her dark opposite. If Tanaka was Bobbie, I think it'd add a lot of resonance to the coming plot, even just on the very basic level of 'she knows all their tricks.' I know I've generally been lukewarm on the Expanse cast, and I've joked that the most remarkable character is Amos who is just a thriller protagonist who wandered into a space opera, but I do enjoy them generally. I can see what the writers were going for. Avasarala is great, Bobbie is fun, Naomi is a lacking execution of an interesting idea. But I genuinely struggle to see how the writers who seemed to understand the pitfalls of women characters, ended up writing a character like Tanaka. People were mocking Mass Effect 2's Jack in 2010! "I'm pissed off. I'm a dangerous bitch, but then, I'm a little girl again." I can only assume they were making what they thought was a deep and meaningful comparison between her backstory and Duarte's big plot... Well, we'll leave that for later. You could probably even have Bobbie join up in Persepolis Rising. She's on the Roci, she's disillusioned and bored, Holden and Naomi are leaving, her power armor has finally broken down -- and in ride the Laconians with their super battleship, their discipline and order, their vision, their shiny suits of power armor. Even Holden was like, hey, these guys seem pretty good. Then Bobbie could've been our eyes into the unknown Laconian way of life, and you could maybe do this thing where as Bobbie gets increasingly immersed in it, and finds the purpose she had lost, and gets made a Colonel or whatever, the reader is seeing that the Laconian civilization isn't as great as it appears to be. Then she and Holden can do things in Tiamat's Wrath, with Bobbie maybe castigating him about how unhappy she's been without a purpose and that Duarte might not be right but humanity needs a purpose, too, and that leads into this novel where, in some ways, everything has changed but nothing has: the final confrontation is that of an Earther trying to do the right thing and a Martian who values order over anything else. I feel like that'd be a more cutting 'things never change' statement for the series. But that's the thing, too. A big failing of the final book, in my opinion, is that the authors just did not have the guts to deliver anything but the most basic, boring ending possible. A few other random thoughts I didn't put into the write-up:
Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Mar 5, 2024 |
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Mar 5, 2024 00:32
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A thought that came to me just now. When Singh comes up with the big plan to hold the rings in Persepolis Rising, when Laconia discovers that the magnetic beam striking the ring gate resulted in a fifteen second long exponentially larger gamma ray burst projecting from every gate that roasted a bunch of ships, and they make this the lynchpin of their whole strategy by keeping a Magnetar-class on station at Medina, why did nothing similar seem to happen when the Tacoma star blasted all of that energy into the ring station? Fayez even worries that it's a problem, Sagale acknowledges it, but nothing happens. At least, it's not mentioned. 
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Mar 5, 2024 13:54
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Honestly Laconia is kind of the lynchpin of the RPG logic on display. A big part of their nominal appeal is that Duarte is the guy who "solved" the usual problems of authoritarianism by...uh... look, the writers aren't going to answer that, ok? The latest book looks like the Coreys are split on Duarte actualizing the philosopher king vs the Laconians just being another corrupt dictatorship high on their own hype. Tanaka is a perfect example of a creature from the latter, but otherwise this is the smoothest dictatorship ever. There are no factions Duarte has to appease, nobody is stealing from the till, and the only division in Duarte's inner circle comes when Holden rolls a 20 on his "start poo poo" check. Even when the capital planet is bombed - the kind of reality check that inspires generals to start loading bombs into briefcases - the Laconian navy remains 100% loyal and nobody criticizes the leadership for letting this happen. The weird thing is that Daniel Abraham at least knows about this stuff because the Dagger and the Coin features a Hitler-esque dictator who destroys himself and his empire through his own lies, so I'm wondering if he didn't take over this book to add things like "torture teams" and Tanaka to show the readers that yea, he's just another dictator high on his own supply.
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Mar 5, 2024 15:01
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Honestly Laconia is kind of the lynchpin of the RPG logic on display. A big part of their nominal appeal is that Duarte is the guy who "solved" the usual problems of authoritarianism by...uh... look, the writers aren't going to answer that, ok? Laconia is a great concept, but I think it's a good example of why you don't suddenly introduce a table-overturning polity in the last third of your series. I feel like we still don't know much about Laconia, and I have some questions about the things we do know. So, the survey data comes in. Duarte sees the world that is Laconia and it has a big alien structure in orbit. He knows that to activate it he'd need the protomolecule. So, he concocts things with Inaros, snaps up a third of the Martian fleet, and takes over Laconia (which, apparently, already had a UN science colony going on, but I feel like that's an inconsistent retcon because it's one thing to take over a planet no one has any idea about and another to invade a UN colony that is actively documenting unprecedented protomolecule structures.) What was the Laconian vanguard like? They were all the most hardline of the Martians and seemingly happy with letting Inaros run rampant over Sol while they set up a new society and isolated themselves from everyone else. It seems like anyone of note within the current Laconian Empire was a low-ranking officer within the Martian navy. Tanaka and Trejo were both Lieutenants and Duarte appears to have been a Commander who promoted himself to Admiral. Many of the other older elements of Laconia's structure, such as Song and Ilich, were probably former MCRN officers, too. What did Duarte tell these people? We've had a few comments about believing in Duarte's vision, but what was it? Okay, a sort of New Mars 2.0, sure -- but where does the protomolecule treatements fit into that? When Duarte started dosing himself up with the thing that ate Eros, created the Rings, and turned people into zombies or child-brained super soldiers, is that something they were okay with? When news got in that Inaros was about to kill all of Sol, did that do anything to morale? Like you say, it feels like there should be factions. Maybe Trejo's a true believe in Duarte's protomolecule-driven future, but there's a line between using it as technology and trusting someone like Cortazar to be shooting that poo poo in Duarte's veins. It feels like there should be a significant faction within Laconia who are like, hey, are we sure about this weird stuff Duarte is still doing? The guy's skin is getting really odd looking... I signed on for New Mars, not living under an alien God-Emperor... I guess the assumption is that Duarte has sent anyone who would pose a threat to his rule to the Pens, but then how come that didn't provoke anything (if that is truly what happened?) I don't think it is what happened, because all we see is that, like, Singh got his old superior in trouble for dereliction of duty. Turning someone into a living science experiment for that is horrible, but it's not as if he was grabbing random people off the street or whatever. But in general, The Pens feel like an idea that got mentioned once but not thought of any more than that. Speaking of Holden's plan, it's a bit of a poor form on their part when Holden is like "Oh no, Cortazar's plan is going to accelerate, Teresa is in danger" without acknowledging then and there his role in putting the idea in his head. I get it's to preserve the twist, but I feel like twists that require you to lie to the reader are ones you should re-think. If you're going to bring up Star Wars, the great thing about the father reveal is that it makes Obi-Wan into a liar, too. We just never saw Obi-Wan's thoughts. The other thing I don't really get is the idea of a divide between the vanguard and the new generation that Persepolis Rising seems to introduce. Trejo is the 'old school' guys who came from Mars, and Singh is the generation that'd been fully indoctrinated from birth. And yet this never means anything. Trejo is deeply loyal as it is. I guess the tension is just to see if Singh and his ilk are just... good at their jobs? I wonder how much of Laconia's treatment comes from whoever was writing the Singh chapters versus having an overall idea of what Laconia was. Was Laconia Franck's idea or Abraham's? Did it remain consistent? Was the person who wrote Singh the same who wrote Elvi? Did one writer envision Duarte as being a benevolent-ish philospher king and another see him as a "high on his own supply" guy? The latter interpretation certainly fits every other antagonist we've seen in this series. More broadly, I think the structural issue that bothers me most about this series is that a lot of the details simply don't matter and a lot of the plot points are almost a one-book-only affair. It's an issue that has rapidly became more obvious since the end of the third novel, but it was even present in the first novel -- remember how lasers to cut through boarding tunnels were a thing, and the laser defences on the science station? The photon cannons? The stealth-coating on the asteroids? Some of it, like the lasers, are just really minor things. But it feels like every novel from Cibola Burn onward introduces some kind of concept, perhaps even makes it an important plot element, and then either forgets about it, or just awkwardly writes a way around it. The asteroids are stealth coated? Well, it turns out there's a ship guiding them. The Laconians can shoot gamma rays through all rings at the same time? Not really. The Siege of Laconia knocks the evil empire around? Not remotely. Like, those are just the things I immidiately recall. The Ring Space in general is weird, too. The Magnetar blasts the ring station which, for whatever reason, does not draw the attention of the dark gods. I can only assume they maybe hadn't decided what they had about the ring space and the dark gods that we'll learn in this novel. Same with the dark gods striking Medina after the ring station gets hit by the gamma ray blast. It doesn't feel like it adds up to anything. Leviathan Falls, Chapters 5 - 8 Chapter Five: Tanaka Leviathan Falls, Chapter 5 posted:The Laconian Mechanized Infantry Suit: Special Reconnaissance, or more affectionately the Stalker, was a marvel of design. Built for extended recon, it was lighter and faster than the standard suit, and instead of bristling with weaponry, it was covered with sensors and tracking systems. It wasn’t meant for front-line fighting. Its job was to slip in, spot the enemy and mark the targets, then slip away before the heavily armed shock troops arrived to take care of business. The small-caliber rapid-fire Gatling gun on the suit’s right arm meant a Stalker could still handle a little business of its own, should the need arise. It's like how the Gathering Storm is about as effective as the Rocinante despite being twice the size, thirty years advanced from, and enhanced with protomolecule-derived technology. I don't understand why the Coreys do this. It's like they forget what they write, or simply don't have an interest in imagining something. They've wrote a few scenes where Bobbie wears power armor and does action things, and it's like that set the trend for Tanaka, and there was no desire to dream up anything else. It doesn't help that we get some Tanaka backstory here, too. She was a member of the Martian Marine Corps in the Force Recon group (same as Bobbie) at Hecate Base (just like Bobbie) and joined the Laconian military. The Stalker suit is her favorite, which Tanaka knows because she's worn "just about every" model of armor. Compare to Bobbie, whose favorite was the Goliath because it was the only on that fit her well. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 5 posted:The Stalker suit was her favorite. Long and lean, fast as a greyhound and tough as nails, she’d always fancied that the suit looked like a robotic version of herself. She doesn't have much info on Duarte. Despite having Omega access, she's got basically nothing. His medical records are "sketchy and vague" which feels odd given what Elvi was doing last novel, and much of his life on Laconia was simply never recorded. Apparently, she's tracking Duarte through the forest by using her suit's sensors as she's calibrated them to track anything that matches data gained from his dirty laundry, and it's just... what. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 5 posted:Best-case scenario he was still walking, and she’d be able to find him in a long afternoon. But the colony worlds had a habit of sprouting ancient transportation networks—methods the aliens who’d engineered the place had used to move poo poo around. If he’d tapped into one of them, he could be anywhere on Laconia or miles under it. Tanaka spooks some not-deer. She thinks about blowing them away with her arm-gun. She follows vague signs and chases down false leads. She ends up in Amos' cave. A pair of rodent-like creatures hiss at her, and Tanaka kicks them to death. Nice bit of casual animal cruelty to round her out. I'm not one of those 'never hurt animals in fiction' people, not someone who checks Does The Dog Die Dot Com, but it's just so... dumb. Tanaka's evil! How evil?! She kicks helpless animals like they're soccer balls! But she's not mindless -- see, she chose not to kill the deer because they didn't threaten her, but the not-rodents hissed at her and so they died. It's like when the Dark Urge kicks a squirrel to death in Baldur's Gate 3. Yeah, I see what you're doing, writers, and it's loving lazy. The chapter reminds us that Laconians killed Amos Burton after finding him with Teresa, that he'd had a mini-nuke, that he'd been hoping to free Holden. There are apparently tunnels all through this cave (is this the first we're hearing of them? I think so) and Teresa thinks she should call in a swarm of micro drones to check them out but despite being cleared for anything and everything, Trejo also told Tanaka that she has to keep things on the down low, so, she can't. Let's pause here for a second. Just what is Tanaka doing? We've had space warfare pedantry, so now I'm going to do a bit of, I don't know, ground tactics pedantry. Tanaka's goal is to bring Duarte back. Duarte can shoot kamehamehas. Tanaka has unlimited power and operational agency. Tanaka's plan is to... run off into the wilderness chasing Duarte's scent like a dog with a bone. No surveillance? No satellite data? No pickets? No backup? No grabbing some dude and telling him you're running an exercise in the wake of the infiltration of the State Building surrounds? Now, she doesn't know where Duarte went and he could be anywhere, but as Tanaka explores these tunnels, it turns out that it's actually a 'protomolecule builder' installation! Did no one know this was there right under their noses? There was this cave of protomolecule stuff just within walking distance of the State Building, and Laconia just... left it there? It's even marked 'needs further study' and the reasoning is that "since the attack on Laconia" everyone has forgotten about it -- but, I mean, before that. The idea that Amos set up shop in protomolecule ruins and no one knew about it is difficult to square away. Tanaka picks up Duarte's scent. She ends up in a room filled with weird glass lattice towers. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 5 posted:She wondered if they were made by alien intelligences or the blind, idiot forces of nature. That she couldn’t tell was either beautiful or damning, but either way, beside the point. See, were Tanaka the only protagonist, you could maybe condense it down to a scene or a paragraph or even a single line. "Duarte wasn't on Laconia. After twenty-four hours, that much was clear to Aliana." Instead, because of the rotating perspective, you can't just... cut a whole chapter out. So, it's all this walking through tunnels and percentage matches and Duarte had stood here at some point maybe. A pair of the strange dog repair drones are hanging around the base of the towers, and we get our first real information on them, and I wish we'd gotten it earlier. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 5 posted:Laconian intelligence called these things repair drones and indicated that they were nonthreatening. Occasionally they’d wander into the fringes of the city and steal broken things, only to later return them repaired, but altered. She picks up Duarte's scent again, stronger, and follows it into a large room with a big opening to the outside world. Tanaka calls out for Duarte but he isn't there. But there's some weird fifteen-meter-long eggs that look like a Gravitar-class battle-- Gravitar-class? It's Magnetar-class. But it's funnier that the Expanse wiki is like, yep, definitive proof of a battleship type we've never heard about, and has never been a factor, and will never be mentioned again. --ship. Duarte's scent leads to an empty launch slot. Oh no! He's gone! Later, Doctor Ochida says that, surprise, the egg was a ship. One thing this book is doing, and it appears to the the Coreyian tic since Book 8 had a scene about wall art, is describing wall art and prints and paintings. And it's kinda like, 1. I don't care and 2. I don't buy Tanaka as an art connoisseur. I get that there's a link between a painting called 'Artemis the Hunter' and Tanaka having just gone on a hunt, because the chapter has mentioned her being on the hunt more than a few times, just to ensure we got it, as if it weren't obvious, but what's the point of the comparison? A simple irony that Tanaka the kinky animal-killer has hung up a painting of the goddess of wild animals and chastity? Ochida is like, oh these eggs, we've seen them before, and we know what they do. Tanaka wants to track it, but Ochida says it can't be done because they're basically ships from Mass Effect and move via gravity shenanigans, and Tanaka thinks about beating him up, then dismisses him. She wonders that her search area has expanded from Laconia to the 1300 systems across human space. But how can she track a ship that is invisible to radar and has no drive plume? If she could figure out what he was looking for, perhaps... But wait, Tanaka thinks, what if she brings Duarte to her? Duarte cared about killing Cortazar to save his daughter. Perhaps she can bait a trap for Duarte with Teresa. Apparently, the underground has been in communication with a cousin of Duarte's dead wife and she runs a boarding school on New Egypt, and maybe they're going to hide her there with the new school term. "Hiding a teenage girl in a place with a lot of other teenage girls made sense," Tanaka thinks. Delightfully devilish, Aliana. So, Tanaka prepares to take command of the Sparrowhawk and will head to New Egypt. And it's like... I'm sorry, what is this? The logic feels really tortured, and the evidence is really convenient. Here's the thing, Tanaka. If I was chasing down the protomolecule-infused God-Emperor Mankind, there's one place I'd absolutely check first. The ring station. But that'd short circuit the whole plot. But when I read this chapter, I had the thought that Duarte, given his whole spiel to Trejo in the prologue, and how he was not worried about Teresa in that same prologue, would be heading right there. Even if he isn't, given it's importance, given that the protomolecule can activate it, you'd at least send someone to take a look. If you need to keep it on the down low, then just lie. You've got Omega clearance and there's a war on. "Captain of the Stormeagle Rainhawk, go check out the ring station, Command is concerned the Underground is messing with it. Run all the scans you can and remain on station until you are relieved." In the past, comments have been made about the Expanse feeling a bit like a standard-issue narrative product. Chapters like this exemplify it. It's pure mechanical structure, not organic at all. Tanaka needs to spend a whole chapter not capturing Duarte, and we need to have Duarte vanish so the later 'twist' works, and we need to get Tanaka in position for Chapter 12. There's a part of me that wonders if they wrote the 'Holden finding a school' plot, realized it wasn't a whole novel/was a sad ending, came up with the forthcoming Duarte stuff, and then backfilled Tanaka into it. Chapter Six: Naomi Amos is in the autodoc, but Naomi doesn't think he's Amos. He say he's feeling fine, but has no idea what caused the seizure. Amos thinks it's some kind of background process in his brain and it was a bit of a hiccup. Then he says, "You don't think I'm him, do you?" Naomi dodges the question, even though she notes the odd usage of him instead of me. Naomi asks him if he's still human, and Amos dodges that question by saying he's not sure he ever was. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 6 posted:“That’ll do then,” she said, and made herself lean over and kiss his wide smooth scalp the way she might have if she hadn’t had doubts. If it was true, and he was Amos, then it was the right thing. If it wasn’t, and he wasn’t, better that whoever he was believe she accepted him. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 6 posted:Until it did. And then it had been annihilating. After my wonderings about the state of the galaxy, we get some information. Laconia was defeated in its home system, on its home planet. Trejo has been consolidating the power the empire still has, primarily shipyards and supply lines, with "the forces that remained to him." A bold claim given he lost, what, three or four ships during the siege? So, he still has hundreds of the Pulsar-classes alone. Plus the Whirlwind to hold Laconia, and that attack strategy surely won't work again, and all these hunter-killer frigate groups prowling around for Teresa... So, how worse off is the Empire, really? Apparently, Naomi is attempting to turn the underground into something bigger. Jillian Houston, still captain of the Gathering Storm, says that a particular system doesn't like being told "when they can and can't trade" and space libertarian Houston is like, hey, they have a point, which is a fun call back to her background. It makes Naomi mad. It's interesting that for Naomi's massive Siege of Laconia plan, her whole hope to bring Laconia to the table, that simply hasn't happened. The baffling thing was how Naomi's plan was to knock out the shipyard and then withdraw from the system, giving up her leverage. I supposed during Tiamat's Wrath that it wouldn't be enough to knock out Laconia and, hey, it seems like I was right. But Naomi doesn't seem to really notice this. She punched Laconia in the mouth and Laconia basically went, hey, thanks -- bet you can't do it again. And she can't. The Siege of Laconia. The mastermind campaign of Admiral Naomi Nagata. The strategy of using fake rock strikes. Months of military operations. The vaunted lessons she supposedly taught to Laconia: you can't rely on reinforcements, we have thirteen hundred systems and you have one, chase us down and you win... What was any of it for? At the end of the day, after Bobbie's argument that if you're going to fight then you have to play for keeps and win, Naomi just... chose not to win. Naomi still failed. She thought Laconia would come to the negotiating table of their own free will, not that she'd have to drag them there. The people who lost their lives during the battle died for nothing except that, I don't know, they got Jim back? None of this comes up. Instead, Naomi's upset at the colony worlds. If they were all Belters, she thinks, they'd all band together and solve things because "failure meant the death of everyone on the crew" and it's like, okay, but what about the Free Navy? The Belters split in two. The Belters have always been held up as a bunch of disparate factions. See, inners jockey for being better than the person next to you, which is something Belters never do. Give me a break. Naomi acknowledges that she's just being a bit of a dummy. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 6 posted:She knew it wasn’t fair or even really accurate. Her frustration was leaking out as tribalism and spite. Then, there's a message from Kit. That's Alex's son from his second marriage. He wants to let Alex know he's got a job with a geological survey on Nieuwestad and that Alex will be a grandfather soon. Alex comes down and watches it. Naomi reflects that her own son is dead. Then, a message comes in from New Egypt: ADMISSION APPROVED FOR FALL SEMESTER. Doesn't that feel backward? The progression isn't 'the good guys want to get Teresa to a school' -> 'oh no, Tanaka is onto them!' it's, like, 'Tanaka knows about this Teresa plan we haven't heard about' -> 'oh no, Naomi is... falling into a trap... that they were already set on doing?' Chapter Seven: Jim Well, it turns out that no one told Teresa about this 'get your rear end to school' plan. Jim says he didn't want to get her hopes up about it, but now she'll be able to hang out with her mother's cousin, Elizabeth Finley, and she hates Duarte which means she won't turn Teresa in. And New Egypt isn't associated with the underground or Laconia. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 7 posted:At fifteen, Jim had been a sophomore at North Frenchtown High. The issues he’d struggled with were how to sleep an extra twenty minutes in the mornings, how to cover over his profound disinterest in Mr. Laurent’s chemistry lectures, and whether Deliverance Benavidez would go out with him. Back then, all of Montana had seemed too small. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 7 posted:“Shields take the hit,” Jim said. “Shields get shot. That’s what they’re there for. And someday, someone is going to think that they can disable the Roci by putting a round through our drive cone. Or that it’s worth the risk to drop a few rail-gun rounds through us. There’s a calculus here, and yes, you make them less likely to shoot us down. But I don’t want to be the guy you died for. I’m not okay with it.” Holden goes to tell Naomi, and hears Alex listening to the message from Kit. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 7 posted:The truth was, Jim was astounded by Kit’s optimism. And by astounded, he really meant horrified. When Alex talked about his grandson, working out whether he’d been born yet, how big he was likely to be, speculating on the names that Kit and his wife might choose, all Jim could see was one more body on the pile when the end came. Another baby who’d stop breathing when the deep enemy solved its puzzle. Another death. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 7 posted:It was just that this time, it was different. This time, they weren’t going to make it. The only other one who knew, who understood, was Amos. And so Amos was the only one he could talk to. Alex wants to get a picture of his grandson. To do it, they'll need to head through the Sol gate. After a brief chat, they say they'll head to Sol, get the picture from Kit, and then head for New Egypt. A fast transit ship, which I believe is supposed to be Tanaka's transport heading for the Sparrowhawk, comes through the Laconia gate. The Rocinante heads through the Sol gate. Interlude: The Dreamer (1) Oh, here we go. Leviathan Falls, Interlude: The Dreamer (1) posted:The dreamer dreams, and her dream carries her and hers flowing backward into a time before minds. Like grandmothers telling the stories their grandmothers told about their grandmothers before them, she falls gently and forever into black oceans the size of everything. The other two are and aren’t and are again, with her and within her like humming to the memory of songs she never quite forgot. She broadens like a sunbird spreading its wings to catch the warming light, but there is no sun and no light—not yet—and the cold darkness is wide and comforting as a bed. I've mentioned before that I don't like dream sequences as a general rule, and these chapters are a good case study into why. They're just kind of pointless. They obscure relatively meaningless data behind metaphor and symbolism to give an illusion of depth. And what's worse about these ones -- well, you'll see in the next chapter. It isn't that I think interludes are bad overall. I quite like The Investigator interludes in Cibola Burn. These feel like a cheap imitation. "Hey, remember when we did interludes in Cibola Burn? Let's try it again, but bigger and weirder." But compare the language. Cibola Burn, Interlude: The Investigator (1) posted:One hundred and thirteen times a second, nothing answers and it reaches out. It is not conscious, though parts of it are. There are structures within it that were once separate organisms; aboriginal, evolved, and complex. It is designed to improvise, to use what is there and then move on. Good enough is good enough, and so the artifacts are ignored or adapted. The conscious parts try to make sense of the reaching out. Try to interpret it. Leviathan Falls, Interlude: The Dreamer (1) posted:Once and gone so far away no one was there to think it, the it was like this: Down was the hardness of heat, and up was the hardness of cold, and between those two implacabilities was the universe. The dreamer dreams the currents of flow and force, and her blood is the ocean’s blood. Her salt is the ocean’s salt. With a hand as wide as continents and softer than her skin, she caresses the burning heat below her and the soothing cool above. Leviathan Falls, Interlude: The Dreamer (1) posted:It is a thousand new toys wrapped in gauze and ribbon. It is coffee and candy and the first awkward kiss, the almost-almost-almost shuddering against the skin. And she knows she will go again, that she who is a child of bubbles will send herself away again to be burned and then cherish her blisters. She longs to be made strange by the hotness and the hurt. We'll leave that there. Chapter Eight: Elvi Elvi is going over the data with Fayez. Fayez doesn't know what it is. After a bunch of exposition about a movie she saw when she was fifteen and the place where she had her lectures, Elvi asks Fayez about the slow life model. Fayez does not know what that is. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 8 posted:“Right. Basics. Okay. So, there’s a range of metabolic rates. You can see that in animals. You have something fast with a high reproduction rate like rats or chickens on one hand, and tortoises with a really long lifespan and a much slower metabolism on the other. The whole tree of life is on that spectrum. It predicts that you’d see things evolving in very low-energy environments that, y’know, needed very little energy. Low metabolisms, low reproduction. Long lifespan. Slow life.” So why have it? Leviathan Falls, Chapter 8 posted:“That’s what Cara’s describing. That biome. Look. She talks about the cold above and the heat below. Like the ice shell of a water moon with a hot core. And free water in between. The part where she says she felt it starting to make more of itself. That’s . . . I don’t know. Some kind of reproduction. Mitosis or budding.” Leviathan Falls, Chapter 8 posted:“No, it makes sense. Sort of. I see why that would be the best information-sharing strategy and all that. It’s just. Okay, say the protomolecule engineers have gotten us up to the part of their story where they were like hamsters avoiding the dinosaurs. I don’t mean to be an rear end in a top hat, but . . . so what?” Elvi says it's important to establish the origin of the species that built the vast galactic empire and broke physics. Fayez is like okay, that's nice, but it'd be better if we could learn how to not die to the space monsters from beyond time and space first. Which they might not even know. After all, their trap in the Tecoma system didn't seem to do much but piss them off. And Holden's vision back in Abaddon's Gate made it seem like they had no idea what was going on how to fight it. Elvi breaks down in tears that she can't fix it. They hug. Fayez goes to sleep. Elvi gets some messages. People are trying to find the Tempest's void bullet after it got blown up in Sol but there's no luck which is a fun little creepy note. Huge machine intelligences across the Laconian Empire are trying to catch something the humans had overlooked in the data (but Milkfred, this is a story about humans, there are no advanced computers in this series.) Elvi wonders if this was Duarte's true plan: put humanity into a position where everyone was looking for the answer to the ring entity problem. Is it ironic that this follows Naomi's griping that no one can stand together for a bit of regulation? Elvi goes down to the mess hall and finds two members of her crew discussing an entertainment feed about "a hidden space station built by angels that were also human desires in physical form." Which is just... kind of. I don't even know how to sum that up. 'On the nose' feels lacking. You'll see. Elvi considers Cara "the girl who wasn't a girl" and thinks she's "eerie" which feels like she's reassessed her idea of them since the end of Tiamat's Wrath. Elvi asks to talk to her about the dive into the diamond. Cara says she feels fine and that it engaging with the diamond feels good and right. Elvi wants to do more dives and Cara is fine with it. "It's going to be all right," Elvi says. As an aside, if you're wondering, this novel completely drops the Roman and Goth codenames. So, like I said at the top, what's the point? EDIT: Oh, and I highlighted Holden's past for a reason. Remember how everyone, including the writers, like to retcon Holden as a person of color? Well, as of 2021, the largest ethnic group in Frenchtown is White. I know, in the fictional future, maybe this would change, but Holden was basically blindly described and coded within these novels as an unremarkable White dude. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 9, 2024 06:32
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Leviathan Falls, Chapters 9 - 12 Kit exists. Fayez listens to exposition. Amos and Tanaka re-enact the age old conflict between Flight Plan and Master Plan. Chapter Nine: Kit Next to criticism of Tanaka, the general inclusion of Kit is probably the common criticism of Leviathan Falls. Kit is Alex Kamal's son from his second marriage, and he's been mentioned a few times in the past two novels, but his overall inclusion as a recurring perspective character in the final novel is honestly perplexing. His chapters do not help the feeling that this novel was coming in well under the expected word count. And the idea that the Rocinante would go pop into Sol for Alex to catch up with Kit -- which, as far as we know, still has Trejo's flotilla heading out-system -- is a bit silly besides. Alex is going on about how proud he is of Kit and his wife Rohi. Kit's reading the message, but he can't get a reply going because his door chime goes off. There's a bunch of information about Kit and his family. Kit goes for a walk with his wife. They get noodles. They discuss their plan to head out through the gates. Rohi thinks they should stick with Mars because the consistent gravity is important for their newborn son's development and being in low-gravity could end up with him getting "any of the low-gravity syndromes." Kit says there'll never be an optimal time, citing everything from the baby's development, his mother's health, or the aliens killing everyone. Huh, kinda weird to see that out in the open, isn't it? Is that really known like this? Holden knew, Amos knew, and the upper echelons of Laconia probably know... but to filter down to someone like Kit? Anyway, Kit says that all he can do is keep moving forward and acting as if they'll have a future. His hope is to go out to Nieuwestad (first mention) where there'll be good work and ways to help the baby with the gravity issues. Kit and his wife have dinner and go home. Kit records his response to Alex, and he doesn't really say much. So what? Chapter Ten: Fayez Fayez is discussing things with Lee, Elvi's second-in-command. A science guy from Laconia, Galwan ud-Din, is sharing some results. "Light, as I'm sure you know, is a membrane phenomenon on the surface of time." I don't know if this is true. I'm basically an idiot. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 10 posted:For half an hour, ud-Din made what in the end was a surprisingly comprehensible case that Elvi’s slow-life jellyfish had ended their evolutionary arc as a complex, vastly distributed brain-like structure that relied on the counterintuitive truth that time dilation put photons in a state of instantaneous emission from a distant star and absorption by an observing eye even if they seemed to outside observers like Fayez to travel for years in between. The rate-limiting step on a system like that would always be mass, and so technologies for moving mass—inertia manipulation, “shortcut” ring gates—would be prioritized, which evidence suggested they had been. Compare it to something like Exordia (not to toot Battuta's horn) where the dense scientific jargon is directly relevant to the characters, their journey/s, the worldbuilding, the wider themes... I can kind of follow it even when I'm lost within it. There are signposts, basically, meaning I can link the jargon back to the story beats that actually matter without spelling it out. I've previously complemented the Coreys' abilities to make infodumping and exposition invisible -- this is not that. Ud-Din is worried, however, because apparently the Science Directorate has ordered them to do anything Colonel Tanaka says... which feels like it goes against Trejo's directive to keep it all on the down low. Ud-Din would like Elvi and/or Fayez to tell the high consul to tell Tanaka not to yank their leash. Tanaka has, apparently, already retasked "several" of the workgroup and research leads. Lee apparently has a brief on what Tanaka is doing, but doesn't tell Fayez. Fayez goes off to find Elvi. She's currently discussing things with Cara. We get more information about the Builders. They were sea slugs (not jellyfish?) and they could parasite a goo cap that'd transfer energy from the volcanic vents to them. They could also "harvest evolutionary innovations" and they could gain eyeballs and so then they weren't slugs stuck doing infrared semaphore and bioluminescence. Wait. Wait just a dang second. Bioluminescent slugs that come from the ocean? Cibola Burn, Chapter 31 posted:The ground was covered with small holes where brightly colored worm-slugs had pushed their way to the surface, and shiny trails of slime radiated in all directions showing their recent passage.  This apparently turned the whatever-lifeform-the-builders were into "free-floating neurons" and they then used this ability to implant themselves into other forms of life to basically do what the protomolecule did. Elvi asks Cara to step outside, and she does. Fayez is like, Elvi, you didn't tell me you were doing another dive into the diamond. Elvi shrugs it off and asks about Tanaka. Tanaka's apparently got those scientists searching for that Builder 'ship' and for "traces of manipulation" in Trejo's brain scans because, apparently, there was evidence in Holden's brain scans that he had a direct neural link to Proto-Miller and I think the only time this has come up was when Duarte mentioned seeing dry riverbeds in Holden's psyche or whatever. Fayez isn't sure if Tanaka is really looking for Duarte, if it's not some ploy to see what info leaks to the underground. Fayez suggests she stop feeding anything to "Jim and Nagata." Elvi says that the alien incursions are happening more frequently, Laconia is only reporting the ones where people get caught in them. But, over a twenty-four-hour period... Leviathan Falls, Chapter 10 posted:“Changes in virtual particle annihilations in Pátria, Felicité, and Kunlun systems. Lightspeed variations in Sumner and Far-home. Electron mass changed in Haza system for almost two minutes. Electron mass. Sanctuary system had gravity increase by a tenth of a percent throughout the system for six seconds.” Fayez goes off to send Cara back to Elvi. He does so, but then Xan says that something's happening. Cara keeps coming back "different." Chapter Eleven: Teresa Leviathan Falls, Chapter 11 posted:At fifteen years since the first permanent settlements, New Egypt was a younger colony system. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 5 posted:A distant cousin of Duarte’s dead wife ran a boarding school on New Egypt... Leviathan Falls, Chapter 5 posted:“Put me on New Egypt now.” But there's more to it than just that oddity. Back in Babylon's Ashes, of all novels, New Egypt is mentioned as having already been settled by colonists and specifically "landed on." But this novel says that -- well, as it says above -- it was only settled after the time skip. Babylon's Ashes, Chapter 22 posted:The same company that had landed on Ilus and Longdune and New Egypt. The Rocinante is heading for Abbassia and the Sohag Presbyterian Academy. Would we still have religious schools some three hundred years in the future? I have no idea, honestly. The Rocinante has a shadow, an unknown ship has come through the gate and is burning hard for Abbassia. Naomi and Alex can't match it to anything. Alex thinks it's a coincidence. Jim thinks it's Laconian-- Wait, why is Teresa thinking of him as Jim? She always thought of him as Holden in Tiamat's Wrath. I know, it's just what they're doing for Holden in this novel, but it feels lazier (and harms the point they're trying to make) when it's not Jim and Holden but just Jim. She might call him James, maybe. --and Naomi thinks it doesn't matter because it wouldn't be following them. Amos thinks it's a freighter or a pirate. Teresa can't bear listening to it and so goes to find somewhere quiet -- the Rocinante machine shop. Amos drops by and tells her a story about someone he knew back on Earth who had a hard time letting go and it ruined him. "I'm good wherever I am," he says, "You don't want to be like me." As an aside, I think the ship was supposed to be the Sparrowhawk because it never gets mentioned again, but the next chapter will complicate this idea to the point of being unworkable and so the whole sequence of them discussing the ship feels like (you guessed it) padding. Teresa thinks Holden is throwing her away because she's inconvenient, and what she wants doesn't matter, but she's also more angry at her dad than Holden. Does she know he's up and mobile again? Did Elvi and such tell the Rocinante crew that? Teresa asks Amos if he likes her being here and he tells her she should go, because "if you stay here on this ship, you will. That's the kind of ship this is." Which is... Well, I don't know how profound that is when the two significant deaths over nine books have been Clarissa and Bobbie and neither of them died on the Rocinante. Heck, the only person who died on the Rocinante is Fred. (I didn't forget Shed. Not only did he die over thirty years ago, they didn't have the Rocinante then.) The Rocinante lands on Abbassia. Alex and Naomi stay aboard while Holden and Amos escort Teresa (and Muskrat) to the school. There's no one around. Holden thinks they're the first to arrive and it's between semesters, but Teresa is like, uh, isn't it a boarding school? And then Tanaka makes a big dramatic entrance by stepping out of the main doors to the school. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 11 posted:“I’m unarmed,” the woman said. Teresa recognized her tone. An officer’s voice. Brusque, and carrying an expectation of obedience. Her father’s palace had been filled with voices like it. “I’m no threat to you. You don’t need to escalate.” Amos pulls Teresa back a little. Holden instantly has a panic attack (yes, really.) Tanaka says she's not there to hurt anyone, she just needs Teresa's help. Amos notes that Tanaka has a fire team up on the roof. Tanaka says she doesn't want to start shooting -- in fact, Holden and his crew and his ship can leave. Tanaka gives her word she won't open fire as soon as she has the girl. Teresa attempts to negotiate, and Tanaka says she can comply immediately or she'll kill her friends. Jim says to Teresa that she doesn't have to go with her. Teresa says she'll go -- but Amos steps in front of her and draws his gun. Chapter Twelve: Tanaka One thing that Leviathan Falls does and, again, it doesn't help that feeling of padding, is hopping back to show us things we've already seen. We hop back about half a dozen paragraphs to Teresa attempting to take control of the conversation. Tanaka ponders charging forward and just grabbing Teresa. Her fire team, Venom 1 through 4, check in and only seem to acquire their targets then and there. I think you have to be careful with scenes like this. It's very easy for tension to evaporate when your antagonist and protagonist stand around talking poo poo to each other. In this case, with four (presumably) good shooters at her back, and her noted history of insane bloodlust, why hasn't she just shot Amos and Holden dead? The shooters are above the pair and presumably have a direct shot on them. It's probably the best shot they'll ever get. But they don't take it. And honestly, why isn't Tanaka in her power armor? Tanaka says she expected Teresa to be there at the school already, but she brought a four-person fire team and a "large caliber pistol loaded with high explosive rounds" anyway? The Sparrowhawk mentions the the Rocinante is heading for the school. The ship's captain, Mugabo, says he can reach the school in twenty minutes. Tanaka tells him to "stay on the Rocinante" and to "not let it leave this planet with the girl on board." The Sparrowhawk had been "hidden around the far side of the planet to avoid detection" but, weirdly, that's the exact thing Alex says they'll be doing with the Rocinante in the chapter immediately previous. So, uh... Tanaka thinks she needs to grab Teresa before the Rocinante shows up because when the Sparrowhawk shows up, it's all going to get very violent. But it's staying on the Rocinante? She just told Mugabo to not come to their location. What does she mean by staying on the Rocinante? Just shoot the aging Martian frigate down. What the heck is Tanaka doing? Anyway, this is a whole conversation that Tanaka has somehow had without Teresa or Amos or Holden noticing, because it's now when Amos steps in front of Teresa. And the Rocinante arrives. Tanaka orders "Venom, take the girl" which seems like an order that might result in Teresa getting shot, and it becomes almost Keystone Cops-ish. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 12 posted:“Shots fired,” one of her team said. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 12 posted:The old-style Martian Navy sidearms Holden and Burton carried would never penetrate a modern suit of Laconian power armor. They could fire their guns dry, and her team would just walk up and snap their necks. (And, seriously, Tanaka didn't armor up but showed up with a full team of power armored goons?) Well, the boys get out of it because the Rocinante opens fire with its point-defense cannons and blows all four members of Venom team apart with a single shot. Holden, Amos and Teresa are fine. Tanaka takes cover in the school. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 12 posted:The roar of the ship’s thrusters rose in pitch, then began to cycle down. The ship had landed. They’d blown her team apart, sent her running, and decided the coast was clear. But it turns out Amos is ready to ambush the ambusher and the hunter has become the hunted, and he charges Tanaka from behind in a moment that's so cliché that I'm not sure what to call it. Amos decides to punch her in the side of the head and Tanaka drops her gun. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 12 posted:“What are you doing?” Holden asked. Amos says they should take Tanaka with them for questioning. Tanaka puts up a fight and she punches Amos in the throat, which makes the thing that might not be Amos choke and clutch at his neck (three paragraphs before, he tanks a palm uppercut like he's a Terminator...) and Tanaka tries to re-enact the Transformers movie with Holden as Optimus and herself as Megatron when she sees her fallen gun not too far away. Amos comes back for another round and they keep fighting. Tanaka is like, weird, I read your file and it says we killed you. She only notes then that Amos has all-black eyes. Which is utterly bizarre because the guy has grey skin. Like, Tiamat's Wrath was explicit about this. This is apparently because when they're writing 'grey' what they really mean is 'pale' but Tiamat's Wrath only ever says grey which doesn't make me think, well, corpse-pale. Regardless, Holden then puts three bullets into Tanaka's chest, but she's wearing fancy underarmor so she just goes down. Tanaka hopes they don't come check her body, and they don't. I would've sworn Amos was the guy who checked if people were dead. Tanaka thinks Holden is upset that he had to shoot someone, and this would almost be a big moment... if he hadn't shot people in Eros, hadn't shot Nguyen in Caliban's War, presumably shot people in Abaddon's Gate, and hadn't had his big 'I just killed a man' dissociative beat in Nemesis Games. Because apparently he's "never really grown comfortable with violence." Tanaka crawls toward her gun and grabs it, and shoots Amos in the back, blowing out his chest "like someone had swapped his heart with a hand grenade." Holden returns fire and almost takes the top of Tanaka's head off, and then something hits her in the cheek and knocks her unconscious. This was a very bad chapter. I'll talk about why in the next post.
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Mar 17, 2024 23:43
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Tanaka is already unpleasant to read but this chapter makes her seem completely incompetent too. Do the Coreys hate her??? These choices baffle me.
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Mar 18, 2024 00:09
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I actually remember having some sense of hope in this chapter that they were going to kill Tanaka off immediately as a twist...General Battuta posted:Tanaka is already unpleasant to read but this chapter makes her seem completely incompetent too. Do the Coreys hate her??? These choices baffle me. And it really seems like they were setting her up to be all bark and no bite, but no, she just keeps on trucking.
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Mar 18, 2024 00:50
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I think the Coreys just suck at writing villains in general. Even the ones with real promise like the company many on Ilus devolves into generic Corey Villain by the end of it. Also Holden 'never getting use to violence' is kind of weird. Didn't he blow off Nyugen's head pretty gleefully while the dude was basically begging for mercy?
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Mar 18, 2024 01:20
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General Battuta posted:Tanaka is already unpleasant to read but this chapter makes her seem completely incompetent too. Do the Coreys hate her??? These choices baffle me. PriorMarcus posted:I actually remember having some sense of hope in this chapter that they were going to kill Tanaka off immediately as a twist... Baffling is the right word from it. I came away from this chapter thinking of Tanaka as a Saturday morning cartoon bad guy. "I'll get you next time, Holden!" This chapter, about 25% of the way through the novel, is also where I made a note that I was really unsure about this novel on my first reading -- we're a quarter of the way through of the last book in this epic series, and nothing has happened. But worse than that, it's not clear where the plot is even going. As I'm a few chapters ahead, I'm pretty sure this chapter got rewritten at some point. Tanaka's next chapter has mention that her armor is "out in the courtyard, packed neatly for recovery" and that people are stripping her team of their weapons and gear without much mention that they'd been literally blown apart. So, maybe she showed up in her power armor at some point, and it all went down differently. Or they wrote the next chapter first, realized there's no way for Holden and Amos to beat five goons in power armor, and slapped together Chapter 12 because they had to go from "Tanaka springs an ambush" to "Tanaka gets patched up." It's all very strange. In Chapter 11, I assume that ship coming out from the gate is the Sparrowhawk. Why else would it be burning hard for Abbassia? Why have the characters sit around and talk about it otherwise? Sure, Tanaka was heading toward New Egypt before the Rocinante crew were, but we have no idea how far away the Sparrowhawk is even with the Rocinante's stop-over in Sol. It's conceivable that she could arrive just after them. But the Sol bit feels like a deliberate inclusion to ensure the Rocinante gets there after Tanaka does. So, how long has Tanaka been waiting? Where are the students and teachers? Why are her people stupid and her orders seemingly counter-productive? Action scenes can be really difficult to write, especially when one side has vastly superior capabilities than the other. It's obvious that Tanaka isn't wearing her Stalker suit because she'd win and the plot would break -- or would it? Surely the protomolecule-modified Amos could be enough of a plot device to go toe-to-toe with her for a bit. It's not like he has to win. But I think the Coreys really wanted Holden to shoot her in the chest but have her be saved by her undersuit -- so, why not just have him do it immediately, and sidestep the whole action scene? Tanaka shows up, Holden immediately shoots her in the chest, Tanaka goes down and stays down like "What the gently caress?" and her team remain paralyzed because the last order she gave them was to hold their fire. But they need Amos to get shot because, for some odd reason, they want to do another Amos fake-out. Spoilers: he's not dead. It isn't just that she's not doing Tactical Realism, but it's not true to Tanaka's character. There's one thing we can say for sure about Tanaka: she's a psychopath who enjoys having power and inflicting pain. But she's also, apparently, a very competent officer. She's been hand-picked to handle the Duarte situation, she knows what is at stake. There is absolutely no reason for her to botch every tactical decision she makes. The Sparrowhawk is too far away to prevent the Rocinante from flying over and doing close air support, and yet Tanaka seems to think it'll come in and help in direct defiance of her orders not to do so. Venom Team doesn't take what should be easy shots, and clump up enough to get blown apart by a single PDC round. She herself is wearing a standard uniform, but she obviously expects danger because of the undersuit, and doesn't wear power armor despite her being Force Recon who are the power armor guys. I don't know how you'd fix it, short of changing a bunch of elements. Venom Team don't have their power armor. The Rocinante doesn't show up until the end of the scene. Tanaka doesn't get into a stupid prolonged fistfight with Amos. Tanaka certainly doesn't stand around talking about how much she needs Teresa to come with her. Honestly, I feel like Tanaka would just shoot Muskrat. Horrible, yes, but it was threatened by Ilich in Tiamat's Wrath and, as see, Tanaka has killed a bunch of harmless animals. I feel it's exactly the kind of thing she'd do, especially given in her later context as a victim of abuse. But, as mentioned, people are very squeamish about violence towards dogs. Tanaka shooting Muskrat feels like the exact stupid display of 'power' that she'd do and might break everything into a firefight. It'd be a very painful moment, and that makes it worth doing, I think. But at the end of the day, I don't think the Coreys have the fortitude to do something like that. I think the worst thing an action scene can do is have everyone come out the other side of it the same way they went in. A few minor injuries don't count. To me, an action scene should be like... turning a corner, either in plot or character. If you can cut it, either entirely from the narrative or just shunting it 'off the page', then it probably shouldn't exist. Holden's fine. Teresa and her dog are fine. Tanaka suffered some minor wounds. Amos got shot, but he gets better next chapter. Tanaka's Venom squad got wiped out but she didn't even know their names and they had about zero characterization, so, they don't really exist. The only change is that Tanaka knows Teresa is on the Rocinante, but that's... exactly where she was at the end of Tiamat's Wrath, and this was presumably known, so there could've been a bunch of other ways for her to discover that. Another bothersome point is the geography and blocking of this scene. I feel like all the different times they invoke actual distances in meters make things more confusing, not less. For example, Tanaka is ten meters away at first, but won't take a shot because she'll risk hitting Teresa, but then takes one when she's forty meters away. When her power armor team is only "a few meters" from Holden, they get wiped out by a PDC round which obliterates them into pieces ("an undifferentiated pile of meat and technology") and even sends a concussive hit to Tanaka... but Holden, Amos and Teresa aren't even knocked over. She won't take a shot at Holden when he's "a dozen" meters away and unaware of her. How she gets ahead of Holden and Teresa is because she can move through long grass, even though they had a head start, and then somehow Amos gets in position to ambush her and she doesn't notice it until he decides to give her warning before hitting her. I don't buy it. Amos isn't that stupid. Amos is the kind of guy who'd punch her in the back of the head. I honestly found myself thinking about the infamous Dark Knight Rises plane scene when Amos showed up out of nowhere. "You're a big guy, Burton." "For you." Would not be out of place. It's got that similar energy of seeming exciting and sensible, until you stop to think about almost any part of it and you get increasingly bewildered by just about every part of it. "The flight plan I just filed with Trejo lists me, Venom Team, the dog Muskrat here, but only one of you!" But that's at least cinematic and interesting to watch, even if it's filled with bizarre line readings, acting, and almost dream-like logic. But Chapter 12 is just... pointless. I feel like the Coreys were shooting for a Western gunfight in an oddly abandoned town vibe, but didn't quite get there. Or, perhaps, they were writing backwards and had to try and make a chapter work where the following things happened:
Kchama posted:I think the Coreys just suck at writing villains in general. Even the ones with real promise like the company many on Ilus devolves into generic Corey Villain by the end of it. Arguably worse than that. He shoots Nguyen in the throat, meaning he probably choked to death on his own blood, while Nguyen was offering the codes for a ride off the ship. As Nguyen was probably protomolecule exposed, this is a no-go. But Holden's argument in response is basically, "Give me the codes because you're a good person, or give them to me because you're dead." Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 02:30
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That said, virtually all those gripes would evaporate or make sense if Tanaka was replaced by Bobbie. She wouldn't want to kill Holden and Amos, and they wouldn't really want to kill her, and the whole confrontation would just become sad and pathetic on the eve of apocalypse, y'know?
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Mar 18, 2024 06:17
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:That said, virtually all those gripes would evaporate or make sense if Tanaka was replaced by Bobbie. She wouldn't want to kill Holden and Amos, and they wouldn't really want to kill her, and the whole confrontation would just become sad and pathetic on the eve of apocalypse, y'know? Bet they were really kicking themselves that they killed Bobbie off just to have less people to write in the main cast.
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Mar 18, 2024 09:51
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Making Bobby a Laconian sympathizer or whatever makes zero sense.
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Mar 18, 2024 10:57
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banned from Starbucks posted:Making Bobby a Laconian sympathizer or whatever makes zero sense. Honestly I think it's the exact opposite. It makes more sense than her hanging around on the Rocci for 30 years accomplishing nothing. Her dream of Mars might have died when she encountered corruption in the Martian government but it was a dream she had for the majority of her life, Duarte, if he'd been savvy enough, could of recruited her off that alone before he ever left Sol. Hell, she'd be valuable to him as a political tool in the same way Holden was, and she's been inside working protomolecule tech. Just have her leave the series after Abaddon's Gate, like many of the protagonist do when their story is over, and then bring her back in Tiamat's Wrath as Holden's friendly, but opposing face on Laconia. Then, instead of tracking down Duarte, she can be tasked with tracking down Teressa/Holden directly in this book because she knows him and Teressa might lead to Duarte.
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Mar 18, 2024 11:35
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General Battuta posted:Tanaka is already unpleasant to read but this chapter makes her seem completely incompetent too. Do the Coreys hate her??? These choices baffle me. Is Tanaka supposed to be competent? She strikes me as the kind of crappy officer with no self control who gets promoted for being loyal over being competent a la the Husseins Junior, not some scary hypercompetent true believer. It goes back to Laconia being kinda not really fleshed out IMO. Is the Rocinante launching an airstrike on a school ever coming up again?
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Mar 18, 2024 16:20
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banned from Starbucks posted:Making Bobby a Laconian sympathizer or whatever makes zero sense. It makes dramatic sense because it's painful and gives us a Laconian we care about, other than Duarte who we care about because he's interesting but he's promptly shuffled offscreen. Another thing they could've done in this book is have Duarte show up to Jim the way Miller used to show up to Jim (and the way he shows up to Trejo) and they could have Duney conversations about the future of humanity but that would've been too cool I guess. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Is Tanaka supposed to be competent? She strikes me as the kind of crappy officer with no self control who gets promoted for being loyal over being competent a la the Husseins Junior, not some scary hypercompetent true believer. It goes back to Laconia being kinda not really fleshed out IMO. God, I don't know. But if she's not fun to read about and not competent what kind of villain is she? A kinky animal-murdering doofus?
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Mar 18, 2024 16:59
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PriorMarcus posted:Honestly I think it's the exact opposite. It makes more sense than her hanging around on the Rocci for 30 years accomplishing nothing. General Battuta posted:It makes dramatic sense because it's painful and gives us a Laconian we care about, other than Duarte who we care about because he's interesting but he's promptly shuffled offscreen. The solution to Tanaka being poo poo isn't to just ram another character in her slot even if we happen to care about them. The Dream of Mars is one thing but it's a far cry from "yes I guess I'll join the guy that enabled the biggest terrorist humanity has seen, tosses people into pens and injects himself with alien goo because clearly these are the good guys" I mean I guess you could go that route if you're cool with a total assassination of her character. The "Laconian we care about" is essentially Elvi. What you're actually asking for is "Laconian we care about who is also a true believer and military so we can write tense standoff scenes around" No pre PR characters fit this criteria so unfortunately, there is no workable solution to this other than just rewriting Tanaka to not be poo poo. banned from Starbucks fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Mar 18, 2024 |
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Mar 18, 2024 18:29
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Fundamentally IMO there's nothing interesting about Laconia. The Coreys' fascination with great man history and psychopathy as a superpower has metastasised into What If Protomolecule Makes the Trains Run on Time.
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Mar 18, 2024 19:23
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Is Tanaka supposed to be competent? She strikes me as the kind of crappy officer with no self control who gets promoted for being loyal over being competent a la the Husseins Junior, not some scary hypercompetent true believer. It goes back to Laconia being kinda not really fleshed out IMO. I'm pretty sure she's supposed to be competent. Going back through Persepolis Rising, both Singh and Trejo appear to admire her, and the advice she gives to Singh is generally correct (and Singh considers his removal of her to be one of the reasons he lost control of Medina.) As Trejo says, her role is to "rub some of the stupid" off Singh. The Corey team tries to bridge this gap in Leviathan Falls by saying that she's professional and such on the outside, and the weird psychopath we see on the inside. And like what Battuta says, if she's not competent and not fun then... what's the point? There's a line I've always liked about implementing ideas in a work and it's from T Bone Burnett who scored Inside Llewyn Davis: "Even if a song is supposed to be bad in a film, it still has to be great. Because if you put bad music in a film, it's just bad -- then the film's bad. You can put good music in a film and say it's bad and the audience will believe it's bad, but it will still be good and they will still be entertained by it, even though they're told it's bad." And I think it applies to Tanaka, too. Even if she's supposed to be an incompetent doofus who got promoted for loyalty over skills and can't handle the job to get a teenage girl back, then she should still be a fun character to read. There should be something interesting about her, something that makes you want to read a Tanaka chapter instead of slogging through it (much like Kit.) banned from Starbucks posted:The solution to Tanaka being poo poo isn't to just ram another character in her slot even if we happen to care about them. The Dream of Mars is one thing but it's a far cry from "yes I guess I'll join the guy that enabled the biggest terrorist humanity has seen, tosses people into pens and injects himself with alien goo because clearly these are the good guys" It's not as if people knew about those things when Laconia came through the gates, and I'm not even sure if the breakaway faction knew what Inaros was planning. Bobbie falling for the hype -- even Holden was like, dang, these guys might just walk the walk -- and seeing the reality would be really interesting. And while Elvi is a member of the Laconian military, I've never really bought her as a part of the Laconian machine. She's basically a special consultant. Also, there's a little oddity that sticks out to me. Consistently, changing with the perspective character, it appears one author refers to the Pen as, well, "the Pen" but another refers to it as "the pens."
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Mar 18, 2024 23:37
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General Battuta posted:God, I don't know. But if she's not fun to read about and not competent what kind of villain is she? A kinky animal-murdering doofus? She reminds me of that evil rapist prison guard officer in David Weber's Echoes of Honor whose character trait was that she really enjoyed raping and got blown up in the first five minutes.
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Mar 19, 2024 01:54
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Leviathan Falls, Chapters 13 - 16 Dreams are dreamt and your burning questions are answered, Amos cheats death (again!), Teresa has the world's saddest Sweet Sixteenth, and Duarte reminds us that he is somewhere in this story. Interlude: The Dreamer (2) The dreamer (Cara) is communing with the grandmothers (protomolecule Builder ancestor-mind) again. But unlike the previous one, this one isn't as easily understood. It turns out eventually the Builder species became a great mind before breaking through the ice shell of their planet and saw the stars for the first time, which was one hell of a thing for them. Then, things go wrong for Cara. Leviathan Falls, The Dreamer (2) posted:Death floods toward her emptier than darkness and the dreamer forgets, grabs for the brother who is always at her side except not here except not here and the other one is, pock-voiced and funereal, it’s all right it isn’t you I’ve got you. Chapter Thirteen: Jim Amos has just been shot. The "black meat of his flesh" makes his bones look pale, and so, like I said, I don't see how you can have 'black meat' but just be kind of pale. I really was under the impression that Amos, Cara and Xan have, like, granite-colored flesh. Like golems more than humans. Teresa pulls at Holden. He grabs Amos' corpse and can lift him because of how gravity is only .75 of Earth normal. Holden's still in the grips of a traumatic episode and can't even speak. Holden, Teresa and Muskrat board the Rocinante and begin to escape. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 13 posted:“He isn’t secured,” she said. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 13 posted:Alex squatted beside him. “You okay?” Holden heads up to the command deck. There's an incoming craft and, weirdly, the Rocinante can't recognize it as a Laconian frigate. But surely we can assume it's of the same class as the Black Kite from Chapter 1? Whatever type of ship it is, Holden thinks that running from it will make it easier for them to hit the Rocinante's drive cone and then board the ship and take Teresa at their leisure. Captain Mugabo calls them up and asks them to return to the planet's surface. Holden says they just shot Amos, so, no. Mugabo says they just killed four Laconian marines. He adds that they just need Teresa's assistance and they will not hurt her nor detain the crew of the Rocinante. Holden doesn't believe him, refuses to listen, and tells Mugabo that won't be happening. It's an interesting thing. While I don't like Holden's PTSD because I don't think it reflects what happened in Tiamat's Wrath, I think it's an interesting aspect to complicate this novel. Is Mugabo on the level and Holden's paranoia is screwing things up? Well, no, but it's fun to wonder. Holden makes a counter-offer: the Sparrowhawk lands to prove they're not a threat, and Holden leaves with the girl. Mugabo checks with Tanaka -- and agrees. Or does he? Holden points out the Sparrowhawk isn't beginning a deorbit burn. Holden thinks he's lying and playing for time -- and the Sparrowhawk launches torpedoes. Wait, torpedoes? Well, they're shooting them in a wide arc to strike the Rocinante from behind and blow off the drive cone but, man, that strikes me as something that could go very wrong if they really want to keep Teresa alive. Not that it matters. The Rocinante shoots down the torpedoes and they put a railgun slug through the Sparrowhawk. Hooray? The Rocinante heads out-system. Naomi says they should head to Freehold so they can resupply and figure out what's happening. Naomi asks what happened to Amos and, surprise, Amos shows up, all healed and better. He just doesn't remember all of what happened. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 13 posted:“You died,” he said. “You took a round to the back, and it blew most of your chest out. I saw your spine. It was in pieces.” Holden reflects that he has no idea what Amos is, and that whatever the drones had done to him, it hadn't stopped when they left the planet -- whatever it was, it's still happening, and that Amos is in an "ongoing process of becoming." But becoming what? Chapter Fourteen: Elvi Elvi is sitting by Cara's bedside. It turns out when Amos was shot, something happened and this is what ruined the dive, and Cara had passed out. She wakes up and explains things: Leviathan Falls, Chapter 14 posted:“Yes, but more. There are more of them. Only I think something happened. Something bad. I don’t know if they died. And then another one of me was trying to calm me down.” Cara’s eyes went wide, and her grip on Elvi’s hand squeezed hard enough to hurt. “Xan? Is he all right?” Elvi goes to see Lee and mentions Cara's words about feeling another presence. Lee is like, whatever, she was probably hallucinating. Crew morale is low; Lee asks Elvi to address the crew. Later, Elvi is talking with David Trujillo about something I've been wondering about : why firing the magnetic cannon provoked a response in the Sol system but not in the ring space. tl;dr: Trujillo thinks the ring space is not part of our universe. Apparently, the field generator isn't actually an antimatter cannon, but it creates a a tiny ring gate effect that violates entropy and, I don't know, I feel like my question isn't answered at all? If firing that thing provokes an immediate response, and the ring gate aliens can affect things inside the ring space, then why did they not immediately respond when it was fired there? Also, apparently the Proteus (remember it?) was armed with the exact same weapon, and it is (finally) explicitly noted as being a half-built alien ship. So, thirty years ago, Laconia flew that thing to Medina and no one noticed or thought about it ever. The Goths are doing more weird things: breaking lightspeed, gravity, whatever. Fayez asks about Cara, Elvi says she's fine. Elvi suspects she's connected to Amos Burton in some way. Elvi wonders about the bullets. Fayez thinks they're hosed-up bits of our universe. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 14 posted:“Sure. Maybe. But how? What does it do? How do they work? Can we use them to get back to wherever these things are? And how come sometimes they black out one system at a time, and then other times, it’s everywhere? Why do they blow off locality and then leave a scar or bullet or whatever it is that’s in a place and tied to a local frame of reference?” See, on Ilus, the bullet felt like, well, a bullet. The shot the celestial killers had fired to bring Ilus to a halt. Did it affect the wider system? We don't know, but I'd be inclined to say 'no.' Something about Ilus specifically led the killers to headshot it. Was it the first bullet fired or the last? Did they only fire the one? How does it fit with what we saw in Abaddon's Gate? It was a cosmic-scale murder mystery. Fitting for Miller's last ride. But everything after that? Well, the bullets can't be the usual result of the killers striking the Builders because the Ilus bullet is seemingly the only one ever discovered. There'd be more of them in the other systems otherwise, right? The next time we find a bullet, it's when the Tempest destroys Pallas with its mini-gate weapon, and the bullet is placed inside the Tempest and knocks out the minds of everyone in Sol for a little bit (yet doesn't affect the protomolecule tech warship at all.) Strangely, while no bullet is fired when the Tempest fires its weapon in the ring space, potentially indicating that ring space is safe from them, as we see in Tiamat's Wrath, they're more than capable of pushing in there anyway. Also, seemingly the consciousness-distorting events happen without bullets showing up, because they haven't been mentioned since. So, like, what the heck are they? My thought on the gamma ray burst event is as follows: by causing the star to fire a burst, it allowed the killers to locate the ring station as the ring station absorbed the energy and the whole of the space began glowing. It fits better with what we learn in this novel than the fairly complicated shotgun-at-the-door plan of the Builders. There's no need to give answers, and I feel like Leviathan Falls is weaker for trying to answer them. Bringing up the magnetic cannon, talking about the Proteus again... It feels like, hey, here's your answers, guys! But there's no greater understanding, no depth, no revelations. It's just, yeah, haha, it's so crazy that it's inconsistent, right? But that's what we were aiming for from the beginning, we're hanging a lampshade on it or whatever. Anyway, Elvi goes to bed and drifts off to sleep. She wonders what it'd be like to have Fayez in her mind like Xan and Cara and maybe Amos are in each other's. Be careful what you wish for, Elvi, dang. Chapter Fifteen: Teresa Teresa is about to turn sixteen. She reflects how silly it is that everything is determined by Earth years and how simultaneity is an illusion. About four paragraphs in it turns out we're actually in a dream sequence. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 15 posted:She was still in her real quarters, could see the real walls and light, but they were augmented by black spirals whose fine detail she was more aware of than the dim light could justify. They seemed to weave and reweave themselves as she watched them. Filaments of black thread that reached out, found each other, built together into a new shape that was also part of the old one. Tiny blue lights wove in and out of the constantly remade spirals too, glimmering like fireflies. As hypnagogic hallucinations went, it was probably the most beautiful her brain had ever come up with. She felt like she could watch the black spirals forever and never get bored. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 15 posted:“Happy birthday,” he said. “Everything is going to be all right.” It's a sad little moment, but I like it. It comes back to that 'everything's hosed' feeling in the Jim chapters. She remembers how her last birthday was within the State Building. She'd wished for a way out and gotten one. Holden, Naomi and Alex talks about whether 15 or 16 is the big birthday party age. Amos gets a pair of Wise Guy Amos moments. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 15 posted:Amos smiled an empty, friendly smile that meant he didn’t know or care what the others were talking about but he was willing to let them go on about it for a while. Sometimes he reminded her of a huge, patient dog in a crowd of puppies. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 15 posted:She watched Amos. He didn’t talk about birthdays or parents. Of the four, he was the one most like her—on the edge of the conversation. But he was comfortable there. He was comfortable anywhere. But the Laconian destroyer orbiting Freehold is not the Gathering Storm. Dun dun! Chapter Sixteen: Tanaka Meanwhile, Tanaka is getting patched up by the school medic. Tanaka does not like him. They've stripped her strike team of their equipment and buried them. Tanaka wonders why no one shot her while she was down. It turns out Holden shot her in the cheek, and she's lost teeth and so on. The medic advises her to wait a week or so. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 16 posted:Tanaka didn’t dignify that with a reply. Her armor was out in the courtyard, packed neatly for recovery along with what was salvageable from the dead fire team, and she walked out of the infirmary to join it, with the medic trailing behind her like a wisp of tissue stuck to her boot. Mugabo shows up with the recovery cart. They've had to salvage Tanaka's transport ship to repair the Sparrowhawk. Tanaka thinks that she lost because she'd been "too slow to reach for violence." She ponders annihilating the school from orbit, but she thinks that people would know she did it out of embarrassment and shame and, so, lets them live. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 16 posted:She remembered something she’d heard once: I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. Tanaka gets back onboard the Sparrowhawk. She gets better medical care. She sends a report to Trejo explaining her failure. They can't catch the Rocinante, it has too much of a lead. She sends out information on the Rocinante so everyone knows to look for it. She goes over reports about the egg-ship. Leviathan Falls, Chapter 16 posted:She’d taken the Survey and Exploration Directorate off all its other work and tasked it with a report of all known alien structures in all systems. If Duarte had gone someplace, it was almost certain to be one of these. Activity in any of them would give her somewhere to start. But so far, no joy. Tanaka decides to think about her past. She remembers that her mother and killed herself and her husband by sabotaging the air system in their quarters. Tanaka survived because she had been sent to stay with her aunt Akari. After getting slapped in the face at school, Tanaka seeks advice from Aunt Akari who slaps her for it and asks her if she's sad or angry. Tanaka says angry. Akari replies: Leviathan Falls, Chapter 16 posted:“Anger I can do something with. Sadness, fear, self-pity, self-doubt? They are inwardly focused. They keep you locked inside yourself. They’re useless. Anger is outwardly focused. Anger wants to take action. Anger is useful. Are you ready to use it?” Later, Mugabo asks where they should be heading. Tanaka considers returning to Laconia, but decides against it. A message comes in from Trejo. Trejo says that the operation could've gone better, who would've guessed that Teresa was on the exact same ship she left Laconia, etc. But the Derecho in Freehold, which is hunting the Storm, has picked up the Rocinante. Tanaka cuts the message and tells Mugabo to burn hard for Freehold. Tanaka resumes the message. Trejo says he has a strategy they can try. They need to change their tactics. We don't know what it is but Trejo says it's something that he would regret not having "the balls to try." That can't be good!  to anyone who can guess what ballsy plan Trejo wants to try.
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Mar 23, 2024 02:25
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I don't remember the ballsy plan
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Mar 23, 2024 03:43
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General Battuta posted:I don't remember the ballsy plan Guess!
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Mar 23, 2024 05:24
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Guess! Oh my God. I don't remember any of this at all either. Hmm... he's going to try shooting at their drive core? I know it's going to be something completely loving standard and underwhelming and most likely already tried.
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Mar 23, 2024 11:20
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I don't understand why the special agent/designated Commander Shepherd of the entire Laconian Empire doesn't bring enough dudes/ships to deal with one insanely old corvette class frigate (or frigate class corvette). They are jobbing so hard. I know this kind of tactical realism complaint can be really tedious but the problem is it undercuts her role in the story. If the point is that Laconia sucks because fascism is terrible at achieving things, well...I feel you could make that point without using so much of your final novel! General Battuta fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Mar 23, 2024 |
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Mar 23, 2024 15:51
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General Battuta posted:I don't understand why the special agent/designated Commander Shepherd of the entire Laconian Empire doesn't bring enough dudes/ships to deal with one insanely old corvette class frigate (or frigate class corvette). They are jobbing so hard. Is Laconia fascist? Of course they are, but the books seem to change their minds on this constantly.
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Mar 23, 2024 16:01
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Isn't Laconia just, like, monkeys, defending their tribe 
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Mar 23, 2024 16:56
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