Leviathan Wakes
James S. A. Corey (pen name)
Science fiction
Ah, the good old-fashioned solar-system space opera. You know what you're going to get when you open the book. The only question is how well is it's done.
Pretty well, is the answer. The pacing is great. The science is plausible--not rigorous, but easy to swallow. The characterization is basic, just enough to propel the plot. The plot itself is, let us say, heavily recycled; also, to be honest, some of the fundamentals don't make a lot of sense if you think about them too much, except that you probably won't. There are exploding spaceships (always a plus; Henry James, for example, didn't have nearly enough exploding spaceships in his work). The language is snappy.
Notably, the world-building is solid--not original, but solid. You got your scheming megacorporations. You got your prickly independent asteroid miners. You got your characters who are enough like us to identify with, but a little different. You even got your outer space monsters, sort of, although these would be definitely tricky to depict with a guy in a rubber suit.
I've used food analogies before for this sort of thing. It would be easy to label Leviathan Wakes as literary junk food. That would be wrong. It's more like comfort food. This is your-mom's-mac-and-cheese science fiction. It's turkey-dinner-with-all-the-trimmings adventure. It's the all-night diner of the mind. I may or may not review the other books in the series, but I'm virtually certain to read them.
I enjoyed up to the third book in the series. I started book four and it didn't grab me like the others had. I was also very busy at the time, work-wise, so that's probably another reason. I should pick it up again.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I'm curious if you remember whether there was something more specific that was different about #4 (no spoilers, though). If I make it that far, I'll post a reaction.
DeleteHard to say, exactly. And I have to admit I am pretty fickle. But the place and plot started to veer away from what I expected and/or wanted. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it just didn't grab me.
DeleteBooks 5 (Nemesis Games) and 6 (Babylon's Ashes) are a tonal change from the first 4 and I liked them less than the earlier volumes, but I very much like the series and recommend it and the Expanse on SyFy.
ReplyDeleteI watched the first season of the show and thought it was pretty good, mostly faithful to the book.
DeleteMaybe the tone change is just the writers getting tired, or maybe the readers are.
I found the series seemed to take a few episodes to get going, and it really needs longer seasons to avoid some weird breaks in the plot (Book 1 is Season 1, and about a third of Season 2; Book 2 is the rest of Season 2 and will likely be at least a third of Season 3, etc.)
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