Cibola Burn

Bloggers note: I am deferring my other graphic novel post for a little while but I promise I will come back to it.  I liked Lucifer too much to not write about it.

Warning: While this post contains only minor spoilers for Cibola Burn, it does have more major spoilers for Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, and Abaddon's Gate,  the previous books in the series, simply by virtue of discussing the plot at all.

Right before I started reading The Expanse series they announced that instead of being a three book series, they are making it six books.  In between book three (Abbadon's Gate which I reviewed earlier) and this one, they announced that they are making a tv show on Syfy.  The show has no release date yet beyond "2015" but news is gradually coming out.  Regardless of how well the show does, shortly before this book came out the writers announced that their contract had been extended to 9 books.  I think it is safe to say that the series is taking off.

Cibola Burn starts off a little while after the third book leaves off and has some general sci-fi settling an alien planet cliches along with some space western cliches but it blends them well and still has some originality and pushes the overarching plot of the series in an exciting direction.  As with the other books in the series, the authors manage to weave another genre in with sci-fi.  This time it is clear from early on that the genre is Western and there a lot of plot points that could come directly from a spaghetti western but infused with scifi trappings.

I was privileged enough to get the chance to hear them talk when they were on their book tour (Side note: in case you were confused by my use of plural pronoun, James S. A. Corey is a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) and they said that the book was inspired by a game a role playing game that they were playing that was a fusion of Traveller and d20 modern (I was hoped it was inspired by Diaspora, my space RPG of choice) and overall they were very charming and interesting (but then again, I have yet to meet an author whose books I like that I don't like as a person as well).

I think this might be better than the series the other books in the series.  It manages to have political intrigue, space combat, and classic western frontier style plottings all blended together.  It also repeatedly shows the authors careful tracking of how the events in their story affect their setting as a whole and the political balances within it.

Overall, I would give this book a 96%.

Abaddon's Gate

Warning: While this post contains only minor spoilers for Abaddon's Gate, it does have more major spoilers for Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War, the previous books in the series.

As I mentioned in the Caliban's War review the authors said that they wanted to do a different thing with each book.  This book is certainly different than the previous two.  The first two hopped about the solar system.  The majority of this book takes place on one ship that barely moves for most of the story.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, once again, it is just different.

Based on the timing of the blog post in which they discuss it, it looks like the authors recieved an offer for three more books while they were writing this one.  It is exciting because I enjoy this series and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes but there are a couple places in the book where there are visible stretch marks of the book being changed from the thrilling conclusion to now the middle book of the six book saga.

This book, like the previous one, has four characters that are followed from the third person limited perspective.  However, with the exception of Holden, these characters all new (as in the readers didn't even know they existed in the universe before now).  None of them were as well done as Avasarala but I think the average quality of these four is better than those of the previous four.

The combat in this was very cool.  In the first two books, a lot of the combat takes place between ships but in this one it takes place mostly person to person.  While the layout of the battlefield was a little confusing at a couple points, the intricacies of zero gravity combat were well explained.  In addition, this book makes good references to the previous two with the technology and name dropping characters from other books.

There was one plot element that seemed to be basically a red herring, which is fine but it seemed a little like a wasted storytelling opportunity.  In addition, there was a second plot point which appears to have just been dropped.  Perhaps it will be picked up in future books but I have difficulty seeing how that would happen.

I know I spent a lot of page space on complaints here but this book is really pretty good.  It is a lot like the first two but with just enough tweaked to make it exciting and different (and more tweaked than the second one which felt a little like a slightly more complex repeat of the first).

Overall, I would give this book a 91%.

Caliban's War

Warning: While this post contains only minor spoilers for Caliban's War, it does have more major spoilers for Leviathan Wakes, the previous book in the series.

On one of the interviews with the authors, they talked about how they wanted to make each book in the series a slightly different genre.  Caliban's War is certainly sci-fi but this one is definitely lacking the noir aspects of the previous one.  It has a much more action movie feel than Leviathan Wakes, which I guess is what happens when you replace the detective character with a marine, a politician, and a scientist.

Unlike the last book, which flipped back and forth evenly between Miller and Holden, this book has no set order to the characters and so sometimes the readers can go a while with out seeing one.  Holden is still certainly the star of the show but I enjoyed the politician's chapters a great deal.  She is a well done female character.  A lot of times (especially in stories written by men) the female characters can be simply "men with boobs" but this character is convincingly female while also being nowhere close to being the other stereotype: the damsel in distress.

While the overall tone was enjoyable, I felt that the plot of this one was a little too derivative of that of the first book.  However, unlike the first book, this one gave us a view of the political underpinnings of the event, which made it still a good read.  Holden's conflict with his "inner Miller" was tedious and, combined with his self-righteous attitude make it a lot harder to like him this time around.  It seems that the authors are going to make him the main character of the whole series and I am glad that most of his personal issues are out of the way by the end of this book.

The series is obviously building towards something, however this book just feels a lot like the scaffolding.  Hopefully the next installment pushes the overarching plot along a little more.  However, for the people who gobbled up the first book, unless Miller was your favorite character, they will probably gobble up this one too.

Overall, I would give this book a 90%.

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%.