Book Review: Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate

I decided to do this review and include both of these novels as they finish up the Expanse Trilogy that I began with the earlier review of Leviathan Wakes a bit over a month back.

While S.A. Corey's initial novel in this series was very entertaining and a complete work in its own right, the follow ups are less baked.  Leviathan Wakes saw the death of its strongest character, detective Miller, and the rest of the series suffers for it.

Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate centers on Jim Holden and the other crewmembers of his ship.  Holden is too "good" to be a main character...he is given no flaws other than his "goodness" and "honesty"...not real great flaws to generate action within a novel.

Additional problems arise in the story itself.  While Leviathan Wakes largely focused on a traditional "missing person" hunt and alternated between two characters, the next two novels either repeat that same premise (the missing person) or wander off into an underdeveloped premise without anything remotely close to a satisfactory resolution while adding a bunch of weaker characters to the mix.

Both novels lose the impressive world building nature of Leviathan Wakes and no longer feel fresh while the invasion of the solar system by an alien weapon system dispatched billions of years ago, falls almost to the wayside in both works and the story focuses on almost solely the human to human intrigue--which is a large part of the unresolved nature of the entire series.  Everything that Leviathan Wakes builds towards is left hanging in the next two novels with little learned and nothing gained.

I wish I could recommend these two novels and the series as a whole.  The series isn't a total loss as there are certainly ideas and themes here that are valuable--particularly the "world" building contained within the initial novel.  The descriptions of how humanity moved out into the solar system and the conflicts and machinations that occur with that move are extremely well done.  If possible, the series might have been better hewing even closer to a more traditional military/whodunit style of works.  The authors don't do a great job with their big driver of the series--the alien "protomolecule" and thus...it ultimately isn't worth it.

Book Review: Leviathan Wakes

Written by the combination of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pen name of James S.S. Corey (why?), Leviathan Wakes is one of the first large form Sci-Fi books I've written in quite some time and one of the most entertaining I've ever read.

Make no mistake, this isn't "hard" sci-fi.  You won't be getting into multipage descriptions of the technological minutiae of a propulsion drive or the math required to calculate the force necessary to move a heavenly body out of its orbit.

What you do get is a fully formed and eminently believable "world" in which the story functions.  Extrapolating from today's space technology, political machinations and corporate expansion, Corey weaves an extremely detailed pathway for his characters to ride.

Corey also does a fantastic job of literally weaving the story together--taking two characters and alternating chapters between them until they come together later in the story and then towards the end returning to the alternating perspective as the characters again are separated.  The convention works well and lends itself well to holding the reader's attention.

The story itself involves the hunt for a missing woman and the eventual conspiracy that is uncovered as being responsible for her death (? here as I'm not sure she really "dies").  You have all the typical features of a great sci-fi story with space battles, weird creatures, items floating around, the danger of space's vacuum, etc.  In fact, much of the story carries familiar aspects that we've all encountered elsewhere--whether its in Alien, Blade Runner, 28 Days Later, Outbreak, etc.  Corey is not exactly breaking new ground in terms of storytelling but he has wrapped together a number of genres into a very entertaining package.

With Leviathan Wakes being the first novel in a trilogy, it does what it sets out to do--which is to get you looking for the next chance you get to buy the followup.