The Expanse series has an odd oscillation between huge, sweeping cosmic visions which affect all of humanity, and tight, focused, small events that affect a small group of people. This fourth book in the series swings back to that tight focus, when James Holden and his crew are sent to deal with a conflict on the first planet outside the solar system that is settled by humanity. There are two groups - some free settlers who have asserted squatters rights and set up a mining colony on the planet, and a large Earth corporation that wants to survey the planet and study it scientifically. Things immediately get nasty between these two groups, and they stay nasty, nearly leading to the deaths of everyone involved. Again, the mystery of the civilization that made all this is touched on and more information is gradually revealed, but at the end, we are still left with just tantalizing clues and more questions. This episode of the series isn't one of the strongest, since it seems to focus on characters, and that has never been the strong point of the series.
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Abaddon's Gate
This is the third book of the Expanse series, and things are getting serious. At the end of book 2 the weird things brewing within Venus launched out into space, and the consequences are felt in book 3. I can't say anything more without spoilering the first two and a half books, so here goes: Spoiler Alert for the first half of the Expanse series ahead!
The series makes the transition from interplanetary sci-fi to interstellar sci-fi here as the weird alien artifacts create a gate that connects to a strange bridging space that contains hundreds of gates to other star systems. Naturally humanity gets all fighty over control of this, and a mystery is revealed: who are the aliens that created all this, and where are they? The book touches on these mysteries while dealing with the unfolding conflict between various factions trying to control how humanity deals with the huge change that follows from having access to a thousand new planets. The same core characters are again central to the unfolding adventure, and it's starting to get a bit silly that they always happen to be in the right place at the right time, and never get killed when everyone around them is getting killed.