Leviathan Wakes

I picked this book up as part of my flurry of buying books on December 31st, 2012 (I had a four hour layover).  This book came personally recommended by George R. R. Martin and being a Science Fiction fan as well as a GRRM fan, I knew that I would have to pick it up at some point.  After receiving it, the book languished on my shelf for a few months because I wanted to read the entire series together in one go.  After the third book came out, I started reading this one (though it appears that there are a few more in the works).

James S. A. Corey is the penname of the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.  Daniel Abraham is a relatively well known sci-fi and fantasy author while Ty Franck is GRRM's assistant.  It seemed an odd paring and I wondered if the recommendation by GRRM was not quite as honest as it could have been.  However, my distrust was misplaced.

In short, this is a really good book.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The action is well done and the setting is interesting.  In an interview in the back of the book they say that most sci-fi falls into two categories: the near future with only a few changes or the far future where there are basically an incomprehensible number of changes.  This book aims to fall in between the two.  There are human settlements on Mars, the asteroid belt, and a few places beyond but the only real technobabble technology is the drive that the ships use to make travel times a little more reasonable.  It is by no means faster than light, it just means that a trip from Earth to Mars can take weeks rather than months.

Similar to A Song of Ice and Fire (or The Gap Cycle, since this is sci-fi), each chapter follows a viewpoint character from the third person limited perspective.  Unlike the previous two, this book (with the exception of the prologue) alternates back and forth between two characters.  In the beginning this was frustrating because I was far more interested in the character that involved spaceships than the one living on an asteroid.  Since the most recent series I read in this format was ASOIAF, it was slightly disconcerting because in ASOIAF all of the characters generally trend towards separating whereas in this book from 100 pages in it becomes clear that the characters are going to meet up pretty early on.




One of the other interesting parts about this novel was that it was certainly science fiction (hard to have a book with spaceships shooting at each other that isn't) but it also has elements of horror stories and detective stories which make it different than some other sci-fi novels.  It is not hard sci-fi like Vernor Vinge or Alistair Reynolds, but it is pretty close.

This book was very fun read and I sped through it.  I have high hopes for the sequels.

Overall, I would give this book a 96%.