Last year, when I was working at NIST, one of my roommates was reading the Expanse series by James S. A. Corey. He recommended it to me as some of the best science fiction he’s ever read, so I got myself onto the waiting list at the library for the first book. Yes I know that there’s an Amazon show, and one day when I’m not in law school I will watch it, but I’ve always been a book first kind of girl. In late 2018, I finally got the first book of the series, Leviathan Wakes, out were the library and read it. I read the second book in January, and I’m waiting on the third. Since I’m continuing this series, I wanted to write full reviews for the first two books. This week, I’ll talk about Leviathan Wakes, and I’ll talk about the second book, Caliban’s War, next week.
Leviathan Wakes is set in the far future, where interplanetary space travel is common, and it follows two main characters. Jim Holden is the XO on a big ship that hauls ice from Saturn’s rings back to the asteroid belt and the inner planets. When the ship receives a distress call, Holden takes a small crew and a small ship and goes to help. They find a derelict ship full of dead bodies. And while Holden and his crew are investigating, someone nukes the whole ice hauler. So Holden and his team, the only survivors of the original ice hauler crew, set out to figure out who destroyed their ship and what it has to do with the derelict they were investigating. Meanwhile, Detective Miller is hired by a rich family to find their missing daughter, who ran away to join the revolutionaries in the asteroid belt. Miller’s investigation leads him to the derelict ship Holden and his crew discovered. And so now they’re investigating together. But as they draw closer to the truth, things become more and more dangerous. They’re moving in on a secret that could destroy the solar system and that someone is willing to kill for. At the same time, we have a war brewing between Earth and Mars, and the asteroid belt is preparing to fight for its independence, and all of this is connected.
I liked this book. In general, I really like anything to do with space, so right off the bat I’m in a good place. I did have some problems with it though. Let’s start with what I liked.
For me, the world building in this book was by far its strongest point. It was very detailed and intricate, and all the pieces that we learned about this futuristic solar system became relevant later. I don’t know if the science is accurate, but it’s portrayed with such authority that I believe it, whether it’s accurate science or not.
The plot was pretty strong too. Once I got into the book, there was no putting it down, and the plot and the setting work so well together.
I was less enthusiastic about the characters in this book. I felt like their motivations either weren’t fully explored or weren’t fully articulated to the reader. At least from my perspective, we pretty quickly pass the point where Holden’s quest for revenge against the people who blew up his ship and Miller’s quest to find the missing girl are the only motivating factors. Too much else is going on. Over and over again, Holden and Miller would make these decisions that just didn’t make any sense to me. Like if there’s some sort of nuclear event on the asteroid and everyone’s being ordered into shelters, but you’re pretty sure that something else is going on, YOU DO NOT GO OPEN A SHELTER TO SEE WHAT’S GOING ON! You get out of there!
Along the same lines, I felt like the characters didn’t develop over the course of the story. They keep making these same types of bad choices for bad reasons, and they just don’t learn from them.
Finally, and this is entirely a personal preference, this book managed to hit all my sci fi squik buttons, from people being thrown out of airlocks to nuclear meltdowns. Things are generally pretty grim. So if you’re looking for a light fluffy space adventure, this is not it.
Overall, as I said,I really liked the plot and the world building of this book, and while the characters got under my skin a little bit, it wasn’t enough to ruin my enjoyment in the book. It struck me as a very foundational book, and it’s the sort of book that I don’t feel like I can form a good opinion about without reading the rest of the series. If the rest of the series is excellent, I will forgive Leviathan Wakes its flaws. If the rest of the series continues to have these same flaws, we’l, then I won’t forgive Leviathan Wakes. I did go on to read the second book in the series, and as I said, I’ll talk about that more next week. But spoiler alert, I liked it a lot more than this one.
In the meantime, have you read Leviathan Wakes? What did you think?