I Read James S.A. Corey’s ‘Memory’s Legion’.

So now, for real this time, I’ve finished every piece of fiction that The Expanse has to offer for me. I had been waiting for so long to finish the final short story in this entry, and it feels so good to finally have a bow tied around the entirety of that universe.

Just like any short story collection, there are ups and downs. Some of them fell a little flat to me, as they felt a little bit like fan-fiction at times, but the cool thing about this book is that each story has a specific bridge between two books or a proper place in the timeline that somewhat tells about an implication of an event in the book prior or establishes a more complete aspect of the lore that’s described in the proper entries.

There are a few stories specifically that I’d recommend as they give a lot more flesh to things that were ultimately just alluded to in brief passages in the larger fiction. The Churn gives a more emotional and committed exposition on Amos and why he is the way he is, complete with giving more refined explanation about his motives and emotional stiltedness. It’s hard to ever feel anything for that character mostly because he feels nothing at all. It’s refreshing to see him reacting in the most pragmatic of ways in the face of sheer panic in the bodies of everyone else, but there are times where massive emotional swings will occur, and I felt, like, “damn, dude. Just a thumbs up?” This entry clarifies and explains that a bit better.

I also think the story Strange Dogs should be ‘required reading’ if you’re taking a dive into the third trilogy. There are elements of that story that not only introduce us to Xan and Cara in important ways, but also do a great deal of explaining the way that certain cycles are able to be put into play. I feel like if I hadn’t read this story, I would have been a little bit more in the dark about how things worked in terms of the way that organic things got put back together once they were no longer able to be put back together (I’m trying to be vague so as not to illustrate too much of the fiction if one still wants to read or if one hasn’t gotten to this point yet).

The rest are ‘cool’. A couple of them dive pretty deeply into the bureaucracy and inhumanity that the new empire rules with, but also introduces some characters that we’ll be dealing with as well, so it was nice to get an early look for some of those. I felt really disappointed that The Sins of Our Fathers was the “last song on the album” so to speak, in that it gives a little too much exposition about a character I was no longer interested in and also I don’t think it serves enough of a purpose in the finality of the way the books ended up to really illustrate the ways in which I imagined the future could have actually played out.

I would say that for a completionist, I think this works really well as DLC. If you are planning to get into the entire series, buy this along with the first book (or trilogy) and look up a reading list, and use this to plug in little gaps between books. If you’re casually enjoying getting into an entry here and there, I would say skip it and maybe try to find a way to read just Strange Dogs before you dive into the third trilogy.