We’re back in the Expanse universe with book 5. This story was different from the others in the series in that James, Alex, Naomi and Amos split up and went their separate ways while the Rocinante is in dry dock for repairs. Amos heads back to Earth, specifically the city he grew up in, Baltimore. Alex heads to Mars to try to reconnect with his ex-wife. Naomi leaves James behind and tells him its best he doesn’t now; she has a secret past. Interestingly, we don’t really learn much about James in this novel. We follow the other 3 and learn a lot about where they came from and who they were in the before times. Even the protomolecule and the rings and the alien technology doesn’t make much of an appearance, really at all. So the book felt very different.
But, it was a thrilling read. The prologue starts right off with a rogue group of who we are led to believe are pirates stealing some materiel from the Martian navy. It suggests that the system is not as in control as we have been led to believe with the mass exodus of people for the rings. We also get to see a lot of interactions between Fred and James, and learn a bit more about their backstory.
I continue to absolutely love this series. I love the hardness of it. The realism. The fact that ships need to accelerate and then decelerate at the end. The transitions between weightlessness in the middle of the solar system to hard thrust. The acceleration couches. The need to shed heat when close to the sun. The fact that Earthers leap out of their chairs when they are on the moon because they aren’t used to the gravity. The fact that people are just out there living their lives in space, on asteroids, on ships. Mild spoilers for the rest of this paragraph. There is a scene where a character needs to escape and it is right at one of the climaxes of the book, and I was locked in to the story at this point, and they have to go outside without a suit. It is very well done, terrifying, and you really feel like you are there.
At this point I’m just going to read the last 4 books in the series as quickly as I can, and then I am going to convince my wife to watch the series with me. We made it most of the way through season one when it first came out and then never got back to it. I’m glad I’ve read the books now. Going back will let me revisit some of the earlier works again. I am definitely basing my spaceflight scenes on this series in my novel. I have decided which books are comps for mine, and it is this series, Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell, and the similarly realistic space travel books by Alastair Reynolds. The recent Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky. All four of those cross multiplied by Dune for the vastness of the worlds and the depth I hope to put into the backstory, as well as some of the more mystical/magical elements that I resisted putting in but as I’m writing, I am finding that I really need those pieces to tell my story. I want it grounded in the real world, with real physics, my own world building for FTL travel (the Expanse has Rings, Embers has the wormholes (I forget what they’re called), Shards has n-space. Only Reynolds has kept it completely realistic. And that’s ok. It’s fiction, and I am exploring (it turns out) diversity themes in the book more than I ever knew. I’m looking forward to finishing it over the next few months!