Cibola: The Spanish transliteration for pueblo ruins. Of course the civilization remains of the protomolecule’s creators is going to have a big influence on this book. Book 4 in the Expanse series is the colonization/western novel. I have always loved these kinds of novels, both historical colonization novels to futuristic ones. I realize that they’re often fraught with political issues (and historical novels with a colonization bent often ignore those issues) but that doesn’t change the fact that I could read stories about people going […]
Monkeys with a Microwave
Continuing my obsession with this sci-fi series, we have book three Abaddon’s Gate. Because the summary is going to be a bit spoilery for previous books, I want to start with why you should pick this series up. First, it’s just a really good operatic sci-fi series with enough elements of ‘hard’ sci-fi to give it a believable feel. I think I initially avoided the series because I’m not particularly fond of ‘hard’ sci-fi books where the author gets so lost in his science research […]
This series is filling the Battlestar Galactica shaped hole in my fanish heart
I have fallen deep down the well of fanish obsession with this series. Caliban’s War picks up a few month’s after the end of Leviathan Wakes and it’s just Space Opera, Military Sci-Fi awesomeness. However, if the next book also starts with a daughter in peril, I am going to have words with Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, WORDS I say. I saw some complaints on Goodreads that this was too similar to Leviathan Wakes, and while I can see that, I’m perfectly happy with […]
Highly Entertaining Space Opera
I was not expecting to like Leviathan Wakes as much as I did. I picked it up because I liked The Expanse on Scy-Fy and needed to know what happened next, but I picked it up thinking it’d be a slog through overly detailed hard sci-fi and I wasn’t really looking forward to the slog. But it is an extremely enjoyable read and I found myself fully immersed and engaged in the world that James S.A. Corey has created. If you watched The Expanse, then […]
The Expanse novellas aren’t just a money grab.
The Churn “To go from an unregistered birth such as his to having any power and status at all was an achievement as profound as it was invisible.” Before he was the engineer on the Rocinante, Amos Burton lived in Baltimore. A product of prostitution himself, he spent his childhood in sexual slavery, before being rescued by the woman who would essentially become his step-mother. This novella takes place about twenty years before the main events of the series, during a time when the organized […]
A great sci-fi series at peak greatness
The Expanse series has captured lightning in a bottle, and Nemesis Games is my favorite installation yet. The entire series is assertively skilled at balancing comedy, drama, suspense, and pure sci-fi adventure, all while grounding the story in character development and the interactions between them, as part of a larger picture that addresses societal concerns that are relevant to us today. Just by existing, the series critiques its contemporaries that are at a loss as to how to include and respect women and minorities. In […]