Friday, July 17, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey



Leviathan Wakes is the first book in James S.A. Corey's (the pen name of SF/F creators Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) space opera series, "The Expanse."  The Expanse, in case you've been living under a rock, has of course been turned into a major TV series by SciFi and now Amazon, and has gotten a lot of positive reviews in this form.  I'd actually watched the first season and a half of The Expanse and enjoyed it a lot, and after my enjoyment of Game of Thrones had been impacted by my foreknowledge and constant comparisons to A Song of Ice and Fire (the book version), I'd planned on skipping the books and watching the show blind.  Alas, I fell behind - I'm not very good on keeping up with long running shows - and have never caught up, and in the meantime, The Expanse just picked up its second nomination for the Hugo Award for Best Series (also being nominated in the award's first year).  So finally I opted to bite the bullet and give the books a try, starting with this novel.

And I was impressed by Leviathan Wakes - it's a really interesting first space opera novel, creating an interesting setting and characters and melding it all together into an interesting story with not only a satisfying ending, but also clear areas for the plot to move forward in the future.  The themes it deals with aren't anything unusual, but it works with them quite well.  I was also surprised by how straight the adaptation seems to have been, which made it easier to read through this novel in 2 days: pretty much everything from the TV show was straight from the book, so there was never a moment of surprise.  That obviously complicates my attempt to review this as a stand alone novel, but I'll try nonetheless.


---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
The solar system is in a state of detente, with major powers Earth - home to the largest population and vast resources - and Mars - home to the most advanced technology but whose populace is forced to live inside domes - at peace.  Meanwhile Belters, those who live in the outer belt of the system live on their stations and ships in a state of unease, annoyed at the planets' influence in their lives, as they struggle to survive while harvesting the resources the inner planets need.  But that detente is about to fall apart.....

In the middle of space, the ice hauler Canterbury picks up a distress call, and its XO Jim Holden and four others go out to investigate...only to see the Canterbury get blown up by a mysterious ship while they were away.  As the five of them try to figure out what to do next, they find signs that the culprit belonged to one of the major powers, and their acts threaten to destabilize the entire system....

On Ceres Station, station security inspector Joe Miller is given a special assignment from his chief: investigate the disappearance of a wealthy family's daughter, Julie Mao, and bring her back to the family by any means necessary.   But when Holden's actions cause Ceres Station to erupt in fighting,, Miller discovers that Julie Mao's disappearance was not as typical as it may seem, and the investigation will lead him to truths that many would want buried....

Holden and Miller, an Earther and a Belter respectively, could both have been called losers in some way before events forced their hands.  But the fate of all the people in the Solar System will fall into their hands, and nothing will ever be the same......
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Reviewing this novel is tricky because well, so much of it was directly adapted for the TV show, and I watched that first, basically up until the TV show finished with this novel (episode 5 of season 2).  And while rereading the episode summaries on wikipedia suggest there were a number of changes in driving causes of things coming about in the show (to say nothing of adding a character from what I believe to be the second book as a major POV to the show), the show basically doesn't diverge in any serious way from this book at all.  So if you started with the show, you could skip straight to the second book in this series and miss absolutely nothing (and perhaps further, I haven't read book 2 or seen further in the series) and well other than saying that show watchers won't get much extra out of this book, it's kind of hard to judge it on its own merits when i knew every character development and action that was going to happen.

Still, I'll try and reading Leviathan Wakes, I can see why SciFi grabbed this series for an adaptation to try and make their own "Game of Thrones" style hit (GOT was in its peak years when The Expanse debuted).  The book features a pair of point of view characters in Holden and Miller who it keeps alternating between, as well as a number of powerful political factions, and morality that often leans more towards shades of grey than black and white.  And the political conflicts and dynamics that create the plot all feel very real and easy to believe in, in ways that remind me quite a bit of Daniel Abraham's (one half of the writers of this novel) Long Price Quartet.

Through this all are two very different main characters: Holden and Miller.  Holden is the closest thing this series can have to a good guy - again it's pretty easy to imagine someone at SciFi reading him and thinking: "Hey it's SciFi Ned Stark!"  Holden is the XO on an ice-hauling ship, not exactly a hero, but when push comes to shove, his first instinct repeatedly is to try and help people and to make sure that everyone is aware of injustice where he sees it.  Like Ned Stark, the results of his actions, which are often incredibly impulsive, often backfire in tremendous ways (you could argue that each shift in the plot is marked immediately beforehand with "Holden does something without thinking of the consequences").  But whereas Game of Thrones treats Ned Stark as someone too dumb/idealistic to live, this book does the opposite for Holden, with characters repeatedly looking up to him because they wish they could have the same ideals as him, and Holden being able to trade on his integrity in support of his arguments.  It makes Holden enjoyable to read and root for, even if you may sometimes want to hit him in the face.

By contrast, Miller is a sociopath and reflects more than a few times about that fact.  If there's one difference between the book and the show that I noticed, it's that the book makes it clear that Miller is a loser as well as an asshole, whereas in the show he's only the latter: here Miller is the cop who unwanted partners get dumped on, as well as unwanted assignments - and Miller doesn't even realize that fact till a third way through the novel.  Driven to moroseness by his divorce and with nothing to live for, Miller doesn't really care about anything - and is more than willing to kill anyone directly in his way who might be trying to oppose his current objective, if he can get away with it.  Miller has no higher ideals, he's a cynic at heart, but gets obsessed with and falls in love with the target of his investigation Julie Mao, and that of course leads him into the path of Holden.  Combine his capability with his lack of ethics, and you get a fascinating character to read and to contrast with our other protagonist, especially when the two intersect.

This duo, along with the other major characters who join Holden (Miller's more of a solo operative so his side characters are less important, if still not bad) form the emotional core of this novel as the plot moves forward at a nice pace, and we see the conflict deal with issues of discrimination, power and more.  Again, none of these themes are new or done in particularly unique ways (again, to compare this to Abraham's Long Price Quartet will make this look like child's play) but they're executed well enough.  And the book ends in truly satisfying fashion which is honestly the biggest surprise for the first novel in a nine book series:  Yeah there's plenty of open threads for future books to be built upon, but the main arc of this novel is resolved straight out.

I will be trying to track down book 2 as soon as it becomes available from the library (but unsurprisingly there's a long wait).
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