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

Sometimes a story takes a little bit to take hold. It could be mindset, it could be expectations. It could be maturity. But The Expanse television show was one that took me three times to really dive into and feel committed to. To be honest, the same thing happened to me with Battlestar Galactica, a show that has been suggested to me by my best friend for so long that I even still have a BURNED COPY OF A DVD of the pilot before streaming services were an option. But for all of the high praise that the show received, whenever I would sit down to take it in, I would be unmoved by it. Bored, almost. There was something different that third time, though. Something that helped me see past the corny noir detective hamminess of Thomas Jane’s Joe Miller. Something that helped me accept the low-budget SyFy Network b-movie hokiness. When the first season of the show stuck, and I made it through one, I immediately jumped on board for two more. I watched all 6 seasons in succession over the course of a few months (I’m pretty definitively not a binger) and ended up coming out of it as a major fan. Easily one of the best shows I’ve ever watched. I was such a fan, in fact, that I have been meaning to get into the books since last year when I finished it up just to get more. Just to stay immersed in that universe. Having just finished the first book of the series, I can safely say that despite knowing how all of these encounters are going to end, I am absolutely hooked.

In my experience with deep sci-fi, so much of what’s written is pulled from the wildest and farthest reaches of the imagination. New races that have psyonic powers the likes of which humanity hasn’t harnessed. Massive city planets where every level of financial freedom and imprisonment is represented in vertical layer of housing. Starships and space stations and weaponry that are ungrounded and massive in ways that we shudder to grasp the need for its development. This series doesn’t go near that stuff, instead grounding itself in speculative fact and in the development of its characters and the projection of a class-based system developed as a result of our reach out into the solar system.

The people feel real. The science feels real. The ships feel functional. All of the wonder and marvel about the stars and what lies beyond seems flattened. This book feels like you are reading about military and ex-military, like bored cops, like working stiffs. People who work jobs just like you and I do, and sometimes they have a great day where they’re happy to have shown up and others where they would rather be home in bed. It feels lived in, it feels like we are on a ride along and just happened to pick the best day ever to start taking notes.

We do get to delve into a little bit of moderate caste-like politics, along with a sense of how different parties feel about war (both post- and pre-). We have moderate romance which doesn’t steal away from the main narrative. We have failures. We see that our main characters aren’t superhuman or savants. We also get to scrape into just a little bit of space horror, some descriptions of gore and miasma that I would love to see visually represented in high detail. There’s enough for everyone in this book as long as you’re willing to suspend some disbelief, if only because you don’t believe this is where we will go once we get extraplanetary.

Knowing the television series helps a lot in terms of who different types of people are. It helped to have a visual of a typical Belter and how their gear and their ships are strapped together to support more function than form. It helped to know how stalwart and militaristic the Mars inhabitants were. It also helped to give me little bit of a reality injection to see some of the internal workings of some of the ships so I could do a little bit more mental navigating as they described where different crew members were both during battles and downtime.

The one massive difference I would say here is to grant some clemency for a character who I really didn’t like in the show as he came across a little too hammie and a little too Sin City for me. Joe Miller’s “deadbeat” noir detective got a little canned for me while watching the show to the point where I would almost laugh at how cut-and-paste he felt in a science fiction product. The book does a bit of a better job showing that he’s Just Some Guy and a few of his quirks are just from being a little old and a little out of touch. I had way more of a soft spot for Miller in this form of the story than I did the other.

I definitely recommend this book for anyone who is into science fiction or really any adventure stories. There is enough action to allow you to get into the thick of it without having to needle too deeply into the space stuff, and enough character work to help you fall in love with the crew little by little. This series is the closest to a Mass Effect spinoff I can get and if you love interactions between crew members and the disparate ways they’ve gotten here, but come together to gel as a cohesive team this book rules. As far as I’ve been told as well, there is a lot of highly accurate Science to the Fiction portion of it, so if you’re a stickler for things like that, I think you’ll find a joy to it, though if you are the opposite (like myself; spare me the facts) they will still show just enough restraint from making you feel like you’re in a physics lecture. Great book and I can’t wait for more. I have the next two entries on deck and it’s taking a lot of effort to not go right from the end of this book directly into the next!