I Read James S.A. Corey’s ‘Leviathan Falls’.

There is no feeling that quite resonates as empty as the silence that follows upon finishing a favorite series. Whether it’s a television series, a collection of novels or the last entry in a saga of video games, I have never fully felt at peace when one of them ends.

This series kept me completely engulfed from the moment I picked it up. I received the first three books as gifts and over birthdays and christmases and fathers days, I got volumes 4–8. I would read an Expanse entry and then go into another one-off, only to loop back onto this science fiction masterpiece after every detour from it. This book, the final in the series, is the only one that I ended up having to buy for myself after months of waiting and wondering how they were going to clean up the loose ends of the entire universe. For me, oftentimes patience wins out, but with this series, I needed to close in on the ending sooner than later.

I’m really happy I completed it.

Tying this one up felt like a nearly impossible feat, as the physics of the universe itself were beginning to fray at the edges. The manifestation of the forces crashing in on the main characters was barely even a singular person, but instead a primordial state of matter. Important facets of allied forces were working together on separate ends of the galaxy and communicating through virtual messages in a bottle. The best I had hoped for was survival. Escape. Refuge. But that’s not how the crew of the Rocinante was willing to let things fall. This book once again took us to the front lines of a battle with the smallest odds of victory. Throughout this book, nothing felt safe, nothing felt certain. It was that very same feeling that ran throughout this series of the very small and tenacious making due against a force more enormous than one can even witness. I think constructing a threat of that magnitude is one that takes a lot of work to conceptualize, let alone skilfully construct. Authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck pull it off beautifully.

Endings are hard to compose. The results are stark and complete and conclusive. Make it too vague and you’ve barely completed the task. Make it too concrete and you’ve made decisions that can polarize your audience. I think the reality of what happened within the world that they’ve built across 9 books, over 5000 pages, wraps up in a very grounded and realistic fashion. On a grand scale, it feels like a “happy” ending, but when you drill down into the specifics of each of the characters that I fell in love with, I don’t think anyone is happy at all. This is a cast of mortals. This is a cast of damaged and troubled and brash and confident and proud people. Their goals and desires are clear. I wanted the best for all of the main characters and I can say that I felt sorry for many of the way that much of this book shook out.

But the way things came together in a war and assault of this scale felt right.

I’m trying to prevent myself from “feeling” something about the entire series while trying to discuss this specific book. But endings have a certain way of becoming an umbrella which catches all which came before it. I don’t believe that this particular book was the best of them all. I don’t even necessarily think that it all ended with a big bang, bringing together huge cameos from moments that were building to this moment. In fact, this final book feels like a series of conflicts which show the protagonists at their most threadbare, their most exhausted. I think that the way that the final antagonist of this trilogy reveals themselves, acts throughout the book and eventually interacts with the characters resolves in a fairly flat way, one that feels a little anticlimactic… but believable. And I think the authenticity of how messy all of it ends up makes me enjoy it even more.

I mentioned this in my reaction to the first book in the series, and I may have brought it up over the course of my time with the other books. The closest comparison to this book I have is the Mass Effect video game series. I love each of those characters and the way that they operate together. I love this book series’ Rocinante the same way that I love that game’s Normandy. If you have any love for Shepard and his crew, I urge you to check in with at least the opening trilogy of James Holden and his homeys.

Incredible book. This series has set the standard for the type of science fiction that I want to read going forward. I’m not sure anything else can touch it. Highest of recommendations for this series.