In reality, the last manned mission to the moon was America’s Apollo 17, but the jumping off point for this story is that there was actually an ApolloIn reality, the last manned mission to the moon was America’s Apollo 17, but the jumping off point for this story is that there was actually an Apollo 18 done as a secret military operation. How do you keep a space mission involving thousands of people a secret?
Look, if you’re gonna read this book, you need to stop asking questions like that.
Kaz Zemickis was a test pilot who was also training to be an astronaut when an unfortunate collision between his plane and a seagull leaves him with one eye. Now Kaz is working as a liaison between Washington and the Apollo 18 mission. This is challenging because he’s essentially changing their whole mission plan at the last minute.
Instead of just going to the moon and collecting some rocks, the astronauts need to photograph and hopefully sabotage a Soviet space station equipped with new cameras that will be able to take high resolution spy pictures of the US once it’s manned. Once that’s accomplished, they’re supposed to go to the moon and check out a previously unexplored site that the Soviets are investigating with a lunar rover, and if possible, the astronauts are supposed to sabotage the rover as well. If they can squeeze in a little science in between all this sabotage, scientists have discovered some weird holes in the moon that they’d like checked if possible.
Unfortunately, one of the astronauts dies in a training accident, and must be replaced with a back-up. Meanwhile, the Soviets have made an interesting discovery on the moon with their rover, that they’d very much like to keep to themselves. The Russians also have some leverage over one of the astronauts on Apollo 18.
This book was written by a former test pilot and astronaut who has a ton of experience in space and in working with the Russian space agency. I am NOT a former test pilot and astronaut, but I am a giant space nerd who has checked out a bunch of books and documentaries about manned space flight. I’ve also seen Apollo 13 like 12 times.
So while not an expert like the author, I’d like to think I know a little more than the average bear about the subject, but I wouldn’t presume to say that the author got any of the technical or historical details wrong about this. In fact, per his notes at the end some of the things I thought were insane were true.
What I will question is the basic premise and way this book is structured just from a thriller standpoint. For starters, we’re told from the jump that Apollo 18 is a military mission that is going to be a secret. Yet, we’re never told what that mission was. (Bear in mind that the stuff about the Soviet spy station and rover comes into the picture when they change their mission at the last minute.) The world knows that the US is going back to the moon, but the details of the mission aren't being revealed. Yet, the training seems to be about doing the standard moon stuff of grabbing some rocks, making some observations, taking some samples, setting up some experiments, and trying to get back to Earth without dying. The story tells us that Nixon paid for this operation by using military funding, but we're never told what they were originally going to do that was different from other moon missions.
I also question that NOBODY in this story ever brings up a legal, political, or ethical concern that the US is essentially going into space to sabotage Soviet property. Since this is the Nixon administration making this call, I’m not saying that they wouldn’t try it, but it seems odd that absolutely nobody ever brings up that we’re essentially using a ultra-expensive Apollo mission that the world still knows about to commit an act of war.
Also, nobody brings up that they're launching a rocket they told the world would be going to the moon to do secret military things. So when a Soviet space station fails immediately after the US capsule hits orbit, and the a Soviet rover fails right after Apollo astronauts land nearby, it's pretty obvious what happened. Maybe Russia couldn't prove it, but it would certainly cause accusations to be made and an international incident.
The next part is where it really gets messy, but I’ll keep it vague to avoid spoilers. Let’s just say that things don’t go well when Apollo 18 tries to sabotage the Soviet station, and there is absolute chaos for a few minutes as well a high probability that the space capsule has been damaged. A bunch of other shit has gone wrong as well, but despite it all, the astronauts go ahead and hit the Go-To-The-Moon button to do their burn for lunar orbit. Even when NASA gets involved again, they learn that the capsule has so many issues that it makes the Apollo 13 mission look like a cakewalk by comparison.
And yet they still decide to land on the fucking moon rather than just orbiting once and coming back immediately.
There’s a lot more that happens and other than the technical details, most of it seems so outlandish that it’s impossible to take any of it seriously. Plus, much like most action movies these days the ending seems way to long and drawn out with even more utterly unbelievable twists and turns with a bunch of events occurring that would most likely result in the US and Soviet Union immediately launching nukes at each other. There’s also some blatant sequel set-up that makes me pretty sure that the author plans for this to be some kind of Tom Clancy style thrillers using spaceflight as the hook with the Kaz character acting as Jack Ryan.
I should be the kind of reader who would go nuts for a historical-fiction/alt-history/conspiracy-thriller/set-in-space kind of book, and I was more than willing to go along with some of it at first. But there’s just too much of everything in this. Too many characters, too much detail, too many plot twists, too many outlandish events, etc. It’s all just too much for me to suspend disbelief and roll with it, and that’s what this kind of story needs for it to really work....more
How do you write a review of the last one of a nine book series without spoiling the entire thing in the process?
Very carefully.
So here we are at the How do you write a review of the last one of a nine book series without spoiling the entire thing in the process?
Very carefully.
So here we are at the end of all things, and I’m not just talking about the finale of this story. While various factions of people continue to battle among the stars, a far more dangerous enemy has been awakened and seemingly won’t rest until humanity has been wiped out. There might be a way to fight back, but it would essentially mean destroying the human race to save it. At the heart of it all are the surviving characters that fans of this series have come to know and love, but what’s left of the crew members of the Rocinante are not what they used to be. Age, violence, regrets, and grief have all taken a toll, and even the ship itself is long past it’s prime. Despite it all, nobody is ready to give up and die just yet.
This series hooked me from the start, and it’s been a franchise that never let me down. New books appeared regularly, and what started as a space opera mixed with a conspiracy story grew into a sprawling epic that got deeper and richer as it progressed. It always had the beep-boops and cool pew-pew space war stuff mixed with politics and espionage that any nerd could appreciate, and the plots were also clever, tense, and intriguing.
While that stuff always worked, what really made this shine was that it was about people. Not perfect people, that’s for sure. Our heroes had their fair share of flaws, and there’s a cynical streak to this story that feels more true every day. Almost nobody can set aside their own grudges and immediate self-interest to take the long view. At one point in this a character states, “Optimism is for assholes.” And considering the last couple of years, I don’t think I’ve ever nodded more at a line in a book.
Still, while The Expanse never felt like a shiny Star Trek style future, it also didn’t feel entirely hopeless. There were times when good people came through in big ways, and even a few points when total jerks had moments of clarity. It never lasts long, but it always gives a reader enough hope that humanity might just stumble through whatever catastrophes it creates for itself. Through it all, we had a core group of characters, and as happens in the best of fiction, I came to care deeply about all of them.
I also appreciate that the authors who make up the James SA Corey name have been very clear about this being it. There will not be any spin-offs, prequels, or anything else done by them with this franchise other than the books and handful of short stories they already wrote. It’s rare to read a story these days that feels completed, and that’s what this is.
They didn’t just finish the story, they finished it well....more
I received a free advanced copy of this from NetGalley for review.
Amnesia in SPAAAACCCEEEEE!!!
A man wakes up from an extended induced coma on-board a I received a free advanced copy of this from NetGalley for review.
Amnesia in SPAAAACCCEEEEE!!!
A man wakes up from an extended induced coma on-board a spaceship alongside two corpses, and he no idea of who he is or how he got there. As he explores the ship, he slowly begins to get his memory back and realizes that he’s Ryland Grace, the sole survivor of a desperate mission to reach another solar system and hopefully find the answers to save Earth from a cosmic catastrophe. With only a sketchy idea of how the ship works Ryland must rely on basic science and improvisation to try and accomplish his mission, but he’ll find more than a few surprises waiting for him when he reaches his destination.
Since The Martian was such a sensation I think Andy Weir is doomed to be one of those authors whose later work is always compared to his debut, and there’s no doubt of some similarities here. The most obvious one is that they both feature smart and funny main characters being alone and having to science the shit out of what they have on hand to get the job done. In fact, it’d be easy to see this as just flipping The Martian’s plot because in it you had pretty much the entire world banding together to save one isolated man, and Project Hail Mary is about one isolated man trying to save the entire world.
However, while it seems at first that both books are working off the same template, Weir only relies on that hook for a while before seriously changing things up and getting very creative. In fact, I suspect that some fans of The Martian are going to dislike this because of how it seems to start out in that near-future type of hard sci-fi that the mainstream is quicker to accept, but then it takes a hard turn into weirder concepts.
I don’t want to say too much because I feel like this is one that benefits from going in knowing as little as possible. Rest assured that even when things get strange that Weir still relies on a funny narrator working off a foundation of real science so that it stays grounded and relatable.
It also has a couple of really good twists, and actually ends up being a far more moving book than I thought it would be. It’s not as good as The Martian because part of the appeal was Weir’s ability to make science entertaining, but now that's part of his brand so it doesn't feel as new and inventive as it did before. It's still a supremely entertaining book that blends a realistic approach with sci-fi and comes up with something that again feels fresh....more
I received a free advance copy from NetGalley for review.
So this is sci-fi set in the far future where humans caused a bunch of trouble for all the otI received a free advance copy from NetGalley for review.
So this is sci-fi set in the far future where humans caused a bunch of trouble for all the other known alien worlds, and after being driven to the brink of extinction they are still the most hated and feared species in the galaxy.
I can’t fault that story logic.
Sarya is the last known human living under a false identity with the protection of her adoptive mother, Shenya the Widow. (It’s kind of like having the queen from Aliens as a parent.) They live on a space station that is part of the vast Network which connects every alien and AI as well as organizing the structure of every facet of everyday life as well as providing the faster than light travel that connects them all.
When a stranger approaches Sarya with the knowledge that she is actually Human she soon finds herself on the run as she discovers just how big and terrifying the Network really is.
This is one of more unique and well thought set-ups for a future space civilization I’ve read, and it’s filled with interesting concepts. Most intriguing to me was how there are various levels of intelligence for Network users so manipulating lesser rated beings is a key point. I also admired how the story embraces the scale of it all because space is so freaking big that the Network can be enormous beyond all human comprehension and yet still be a tiny part of the galaxy.
However, that also turned out to be a stumbling block because at one point the story shifts away from trying to get us to really empathize with Sarya and instead tries to blow the reader’s mind. Which it does pretty well, but I think some of the emotions of the story got lost will all the effort to impress with the vastness of it all....more
I was reading something about the 50th anniversary of the moon landing recently, and one thing that caught my eye was that apparently over 400,000 peoI was reading something about the 50th anniversary of the moon landing recently, and one thing that caught my eye was that apparently over 400,000 people worked on various projects related to making that happen. I’d say that out of all them, the contribution of John Houbolt may be the most controversial.
Houbolt was an engineer at NASA who became an advocate for Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. In the early days of trying to get to the moon most everyone thought that the way to do it was to either build an enormous rocket that would make the entire round trip or that a ship would have to be assembled in Earth orbit and then sent to the moon. The thing about LOR was that by taking a light landing craft it would save having to get an enormous amount of weight, mostly fuel, to the moon and back. The problem was that it would mean that two spacecraft would have to rendezvous in lunar orbit, and at a time when nobody had docked in Earth orbit yet that seemed extremely dangerous, maybe even impossible.
So when most of the NASA committees and big wigs were trying to make decisions the idea of LOR was usually quickly crossed off the list. However, Houbolt had done an extensive analysis of the numbers, and to him it was clear that LOR was the only way to get to the moon by the deadline John F. Kennedy had set for the country so he started to relentlessly push the idea even when he was dismissed out of hand. Sometimes he was met with outright hostility like when another engineer angrily declared that Houbolt’s numbers were a lie in a meeting with some of the top NASA people.
Although frequently hurt and frustrated, Houbolt refused to take no for an answer and continued to push LOR, and he even risked his job by skipping the chain of command and sending letters and his report to one of the top men in NASA. Eventually the tide turned and LOR was adopted as the strategy to get to the moon. Yet, Houbolt was almost immediately shut out, and many in NASA began downplaying his role. Houbolt would end up leaving the agency just months after the decision was made, and for the rest of his life he’d insist that he hadn’t received the credit he was due.
The counterpoint to that is that Houbolt didn’t create the idea of LOR, he was just a believer who pushed it. So the NASA attitude was often that while Houbolt was an early advocate for LOR that other people were also studying it too, and that the idea was so logical that it surely would have been used even without Houbolt’s efforts.
The other odd factor is that Houbolt did, in fact, receive a lot of recognition. NASA awarded him a commendation at the time, he was interviewed and profiled in the media including Time magazine, he was invited back to NASA to witness the moon landing from Mission Control where Werner von Braun thanked him personally, and his old hometown gave him a parade and named a street after him. Houbolt and his struggle were even briefly depicted in the HBO mini-series From the Earth to the Moon back in 1998 so it’s not like he’d been completely ignored and forgotten. However, Houbolt was eventually denied a large cash award thanks to a NASA executive downplaying his importance so maybe that’s why he seemed to feel like he wasn’t given his due.
Another interesting aspect explored in this is that while LOR was probably the only way that America could have gotten to the moon by 1970, it might have been a mistake for long term space exploration. Some engineers were envisioning a whole orbital infrastructure that would be used to not just go to the moon, but beyond. By doing it the quickest way possible to make an arbitrary deadline NASA may have inadvertently set manned space exploration back by decades.
I very much enjoyed this as an Audible original I got as one of their freebies. There’s not really enough here for an entire non-fiction book, but the 3 ½ hours audio presentation including interviews and historical clips is just about the perfect way to learn about Houbolt and this story. It seems more like listening to a long NPR feature or podcast episode instead of a book, but it’s an intriguing side story for anyone interested in the Apollo landings....more
If you’re a fan of this series the very first sentence will break your heart.
Do things get better after that? Let’s see what one of the characters hasIf you’re a fan of this series the very first sentence will break your heart.
Do things get better after that? Let’s see what one of the characters has to say about the possibility of good things happening after bad things:
”Sometimes it’s just one shit sandwich after another.”
Truth.
So yeah, there are a couple of moments in this that absolutely suck if you’re invested in these characters. That’s not to say that all hope is lost, and that there aren’t some good fist-pumping “Hell yeah!” moments. There are plenty, but there is a steep price to pay for them. It’s still worth it though.
That’s pretty much all I have to say about this one. It’s nigh on impossible to talk about the eighth book in a nine book series without spoiling the previous ones so I’m just going to once again urge that any sci-fi/space opera fans try this if they haven’t already. Oh, and the TV show based on it that is now on Amazon Prime is well worth watching, too....more
You ever have a novel that you know is considered a classic of its genre yet you know absolutely nothing about it other than the title? This is one ofYou ever have a novel that you know is considered a classic of its genre yet you know absolutely nothing about it other than the title? This is one of those for me. I knew nothing about it other than the vague notion that it was an important sci-fi novel, but when it popped up as a deal on Audible I took a chance on it and went in cold.
How’d it work out? Pretty well.
A couple of centuries from now humanity has developed the ability to teleport themselves using only their minds in a practice called jaunting. While it has revolutionized society in many ways it’s limited to just a few hundred miles at most so spacecraft are still needed to ferry people and goods around the solar system. Because people are always gonna be assholes there’s a war raging among the Inner Planets and Outer Satellites.
Gully Foyle is just a working class grunt with little education and even less ambition who had the bad luck to be on a ship that got blowed up real good as part of that war. For six months he survives by staying in a small storage lock and scavenging supplies in the wreckage using a damaged space suit. Deliverance seems at hand when he sees another ship named Vorga passing close by, but even though Gully sends out plenty of distress signals that couldn’t be missed the other ship simply passes him by. Enraged at being abandoned, Gully begins to show more gumption than he ever has as he first manages to save his own life and then embarks a campaign to find and kill the people who left him to die. When he finds himself caught in much larger schemes of powerful people his obsessive need for revenge puts him beyond any attempts to bribe or bully him.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff here that gets into some really big trippy sci-fi concepts that seem way ahead of their time in many ways plus there’s a kind of Count of Monte Cristo style story embedded in it too. It’s easy to see why this is so highly regarded and is considered a forerunner to cyberpunk.
Gully Foyle is also an interesting bastard of a character. He starts out as this crude and violent man fully capable of crimes like murder and rape, and his journey eventually turns him into something much more than that. Yet because it’s his unswerving desire for simple revenge driving him he’s always got that primitive core just below the surface.
Despite being published over 60 years ago it doesn’t come across as that dated either. Alfred Bester did a lot of well thought out world building as to what this space faring society that has also mental powers like telepathy and the ability to teleport would be like. Some of the stuff he did here like a conflict between factions fighting for the resources of our solar system are still used today in sci-fi like The Expanse series, and the idea of powerful corporations being as much a force as government has been used countless times as well. The ending also seems like a leap forward to a kind of sci-fi that something like 2001 would do a decade later.
It’s a bold and ambitious story that seems ahead of its time in many ways, and I’m glad that I took the opportunity to fill in a gap in my sci-fi reading....more
I guess that 5 star streak for all the Saga collections had to come to an end sometime.
This is still the best comic book space adventure/fairy tale/rI guess that 5 star streak for all the Saga collections had to come to an end sometime.
This is still the best comic book space adventure/fairy tale/romance you’re likely to read, It also still has enough weird alien characters to populate a cantina in Star Wars as well as more violence, profanity, sex, and nudity than most R rated movies. However, it seemed to lack of a bit of the pop that made the rest of the series so next level. Part of this is probably due to so many story threads being scattered at this point, but some of those are knitted together by the end of this one....more
T S Eliot wrote that the world would end with a whimper instead of a bang, but if you’re in space or at the frozen wasteland at the top of the planet T S Eliot wrote that the world would end with a whimper instead of a bang, but if you’re in space or at the frozen wasteland at the top of the planet you might not even hear that much when it finally happens.
Augustine is an elderly astronomer who refuses to leave his Arctic research station after an unspecified world emergency causes the evacuation of everyone else there. He soon loses contact with the outside world, but a mysterious young girl becomes his only companion. Meanwhile, Sully is a female astronaut on the spaceship Aether that is returning from a mission to explore the moons of Jupiter, but they’ve lost all contact with Earth even though their equipment is functioning perfectly. The unsettling silence from home and what it means begins to deeply affect the crew.
Augustine and Sully, with one surrounded by ice and the other floating through a merciless vacuum, may be in vastly different circumstances, but they have a lot in common, too. They’re both people who deliberately avoided family entanglements and steady domestic lives to pursue their scientific dreams. In his younger days Augustine was always ready to move on to the next observatory once his chronic womanizing had worn out his welcome somewhere. Sully left her daughter in the care of her ex-husband to pursue her quest of going into space. Their isolation and fear make both of them reflect on their lives as they wonder if their choices had any meaning at all one way or another considering the now silent Earth.
This one belongs to be shelved along with other literary apocalypses like The Road or Station Eleven although this is definitely it’s own thing. (However, the cover certainly appears to be designed to evoke Station Eleven.) It’s extremely well written, and at about 250 pages it doesn’t have a wasted word. It’s by far the quietest end of the world story I’ve read, and that’s fitting with its settings as well as the lack of noise from Earth being the thing that lets you know something has gone terribly wrong.
It’s also got some nicely straightforward and pragmatic descriptions about the logistics of life in a mostly abandoned scientific station and a state of the art spaceship rocketing towards home. There’s enough to make both these places feel vivid, but whereas some books of this type become all about how you survive end-of-the-world scenarios this one keeps it focus on the inner lives of its two main characters which ends up being more compelling than how Augustine gets a snowmobile started or Sully helps fix a problem on her ship.
It’s the silence and the questions about what may have happened that lurk in the background here and give the book a haunting quality, but those questions end up being relatively unimportant. It’s the story of these two people and their deeper connections that really matters. (view spoiler)[ I’ll admit to feeling like a bit of an idiot that I didn’t pick up that Augustine is Sully’s long lost father sooner than I did. That piece could have made this all very hokey, but I think it works in the context of this story. (hide spoiler)]
I received a free advanced copy of this for review from the publisher....more
“My life has become a single on-going revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.”
This is the kind of cheery thought one is apt to have when facing“My life has become a single on-going revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.”
This is the kind of cheery thought one is apt to have when facing a narcissistic megalomaniac who has gained power by convincing some people that all their problems can be blamed on other groups while setting humanity on a self-destructive path it may not be able to recover from.
Geez, I thought I read science-fiction to escape reality.
The Expanse series took an epic dark turn in the last one, and this book is mainly about dealing with the fall-out from that as well as trying to resolve the new threat that arose. The short term stakes involve a fight to control the outposts outside of Earth and Mars, but the longer view will determine nothing less than the fate of humanity itself.
Like the other books this has a self-contained story that features all kinds of political intrigue and strategy as well as a healthy dose of interesting characters riding around in spaceships being all Pew-Pew!. Which is what The Expanse does really well as a general rule. The new wrinkle here is that because this is the aftermath of catastrophic events that there’s a tone of shock and even a certain wistfulness in this one. Things will never be what they once where and everyone knows it. This makes the conflict here literally a fight for the future, and all the characters are under enormous amounts of pressure because of it.
There was one element I wasn’t entirely happy about. (view spoiler)[ I absolutely loved the set up at the end that the Rocinante crew is essentially facing an Alamo situation where their best option is to die well while taking as many of their enemies with them as they can. However, it seemed like more than a little bit of cheat that they simply manage to make the Free Navy ships vanish via the ring gates, and it seems way too easy of an end for Marcos Inaros. (hide spoiler)] On the other hand there’s still story to be told so I’m trying to set aside any feelings of mild disappointment I have about the ending here because it’s likely that there is more pay-off coming.
As always after finishing one of these I’m left wanting more and am already counting the days until the next book releases. It helps that we’ve got the second season of the TV show coming to fill the gap between books....more
Only human beings would look at a lifeless hunk of rock in a vacuum and think, “This place is too dull. I received a free copy of this from NetGalley.
Only human beings would look at a lifeless hunk of rock in a vacuum and think, “This place is too dull. We should spice it up by making it a haven for the worst of humanity, and then it could also be a cesspool for crime and corruption.”
Purgatory is a colony on the far side of the moon founded and controlled by a wealthy tycoon named Fletcher Brass who left Earth because he was about to be prosecuted for various crimes, and that makes it perfect for any anyone else trying to avoid a prison sentence. It’s also a tourist destination where money can buy drugs, surgery, sex, privacy, or pretty much any depraved thing a person might be looking for. What happens in Purgatory stays in Purgatory.
Damien Justus was an honest cop on Earth which earned him a face full of acid as a reward as well as a target on his family so he’s come to Purgatory to hopefully avoid further repercussions. The assassination of one of Brass’ top officials is his first case, and he quickly learns that he can’t count on the corrupt police force. He also realizes that he’s probably being used as a pawn in a battle for power between Brass and his upstart daughter.
In a parallel story we follow the adventures of an android as he journeys across the moon towards Purgatory. He’s been downloaded with the Brass Code, a set of pithy declarations created by Brass that are essentially boasts about how willing he is to be a selfish asshole to gain and keep power that would make Donald Trump seem low-key and rational by comparison. Unfortunately, the android’s literal interpretations of the code mean that he gruesomely murders almost everyone he meets.
This is an interesting hybrid of several genres. There’s obviously the sci-fi elements, and O’Neill delivers there with a great setting and a well thought out society. He does enough world building to make the idea of a seedy crime-ridden moon colony seem real, and the depictions of things happening outside on the moon’s surface are equally compelling. There’s enough hard science here to ground it and make it feel authentic, but it never does info-dumps to the point of boredom.
It’s also a noirsh mystery, and the story of one good cop facing a rich bastard who controls everything is a familiar concept that feels fresh in this setting. My favorite parts involve the killer android because once you realize how this thing is going about its business those sections read like a horror movie as it relentlessly pursues its goal, and its twisted personality becomes genuinely creepy so that every interaction he has with anyone will keep you on the edge of your seat as you wait for him to start his usual crazy murder spree.
The writing style and pacing keep the whole story cooking along, and even minor supporting characters are fleshed out very well with quick backstories. There’s also an underlying dark humor to the whole thing that I appreciated. Overall, it’s an entertaining and well written story that should appeal to fans of sci-fi, hard boiled mysteries, and killer robots....more
I've run out of ways to praise Saga at this point so I'll just say that it continues to be one of the most entertaining, creative, funny, heartbreakinI've run out of ways to praise Saga at this point so I'll just say that it continues to be one of the most entertaining, creative, funny, heartbreaking, profane, graphically violent, and well drawn comics I've read. ...more
(I received a free copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for this review.)
I’ve read a lot of John Sandford novels so I was a little confused at firs(I received a free copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for this review.)
I’ve read a lot of John Sandford novels so I was a little confused at first when there wasn’t a serial killer on the spaceship.
In the year 2066 telescopes spot what can only be an alien ship near Saturn as it docks with a previously unknown object in orbit. The governments of the United States and China both want to get there first which leads to a rushed program to quickly put together ships capable of making the long journey. Political tension and potential sabotage make the voyage into space even more dangerous as crews from both nations race to Saturn.
Sandford (Real name John Camp.) regularly puts two new crime thrillers on the best seller’s list every year so it seems a little odd that he’d forgo one of them to team up with photo-artist Ctein to do a pure sci-fi novel. However, Sandford’s bio and his books have also highlighted his interest and knowledge of subjects like art, photography, archaeology, surgery, and computer technology so it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise that his mind might turn to this kind of book outside his normal genre.
There’s an authors’ note at the end in which they explain that the core of the idea was based on needing to get to Saturn in a certain time frame. From the details in that you can tell it was the focus of their thinking on how come up with some realistic near-future spaceship propulsion methods. By working up a couple of different ways to accomplish this they set up a kind of tortoise and the hare race between the Americans and Chinese which also helps set up the drama to the story. (The authors’ note also provides a very satisfactory answer as to why they decided to name the US ship after Richard Nixon.)
It also helps that Sandford has had a lot of practice at creating characters in familiar genre situations while still making them seem like real people who all work, bitch, commiserate, screw, take drugs, drink, scheme, and joke while risking their lives as part of a potentially disastrous contest with a rival nation to try and meet some aliens.
There are a few things here that make clear that Sandford’s not working on his usual turf. One of his strengths is writing scenes in which people have to act fast when things start going wrong, and generally his pacing is nearly flawless when it comes to building tension. However, the nature of this story requires a timeline in which months of boring traveling is involved, and while they do their best to use this downtime to set up story, build characters, develop the setting, and add humor, it just doesn’t have the sense of frantic momentum that Sandford can usually deliver except for a few scenes.
Plus, this is the only book of Sandford’s I’ve read which doesn’t focus on one single lead. While Sandy Darlington seems like he’s going to be the main character at first this actually turns into much more of an ensemble book, and that added to a sense that the story is drifting at times. I also question how much time and effort was spent describing the various cameras and the best way of using them, but that’s what happens when one of your authors is a photographer.
There’s also a slight letdown related to what they discover when they get to the alien object. It’s not a complete fumble, but it does show that Sandford and Ctein put more thought into how they’d get to Saturn rather than what the characters would find when they got there. (view spoiler)[While I thought the idea of the alien trading post managed by an AI was fairly clever, it really just existed to give the Chinese and Americans something to fight about on the way back to Earth. It was a bit disappointing that in a novel about people risking everything to make first contact that they essentially just end up getting an answering machine message. It gave me the impression that most of the creative juice was spent on propulsion systems and orbital mechanics which left me wishing that some of the same kind of care and effort was put into coming up with something equally well-thought out for an alien race. (hide spoiler)]
It’s still an entertaining read with some exciting fast paced parts, but those not interested in problems like how you vent excess heat from a spaceship engine might find it a bit dull at times.
3.64 stars.
(Also posted at Kemper's Book Blog. I also wrote a similar, but different, review for the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog for which I was paid after I had written and posted this.)...more
“This is as good as it gets. Can’t expect everyone to be on the same page. We’re still humans after all. Some percentage of us are always going to be “This is as good as it gets. Can’t expect everyone to be on the same page. We’re still humans after all. Some percentage of us are always going to be assholes.” - Naomi Nagata - Nemesis Games
"Boy, that escalated quickly... I mean, that really got out of hand fast." - Ron Burgundy - Anchorman: The Legend of Run Burgundy
After their latest misadventure the Rocinante is in need of extensive repairs that will keep the ship sidelined as the crew finds itself with a variety of personal matters that need their attention so they split up and head to different spots all over the solar system. Unfortunately, one of them gets caught up in an elaborate trap that will have a devastating and long-range impact.
The Expanse novels have been about big events potentially changing the future of humanity, but these things have been done against a backdrop that fundamentally hasn’t changed. The political and military organizations have remained mostly stable, and a large part of the story is about the reaction by those powers to what's going on. What happens here is particularly sneaky on the part of the authors who make up the James S.A. Corey name because this is the point where they’ve kicked over the table and upset the entire game.
That makes sense because by their 9 book timeline this is where we cross the halfway point so we’re firmly in the second act which is where things traditionally get dark for the heroes of any kind of story. What’s shocking here is the extent of the damage done, and it’s made even more disturbing that even those who have generally been portrayed as being the most powerful and savviest characters get caught flat-footed.
Once again, that makes sense in the greater context of The Expanse because one of its on-going themes is how short-sighted selfish people can always draw attention away from larger threats and find a way to fight over things even as humanity should be on the brink of a new age of limitless exploration and expansion. This is especially been built up as part of an increasingly good job of developing villains.
At the start of the series the third party subjective nature of shifting the point-of-view around a handful of characters sometimes made the threats seem vague or to come out of nowhere. Since the third book the authors have done a much better job of finding ways to put a face on the bad guys, and they’ve got a knack for creating a particular brand of smug self-absorbed jerkfaces who are masters of developing rationalizations for their actions.
Another selling point here is that at this point in the series we’re fully invested in our main characters. (Or at least I assume that anyone who is reading the 5th book of 500+ page novels cares at least a little bit about these guys.) By scattering the crew of the Roci around and making them the narrators who carry the story, it not only brings a lot of the epic scale down to a more relatable level, it also sets up a near guarantee in emotional investment. Even as they’re going through different trails and tribulations they all have one goal, to get back to their ship and each other. That's the hook that carries off this whole thing because it's what all the readers want, too.
I could nitpick a bit about how some of the coincidences seem a bit much or that the novella The Churn probably should have been boiled down to backstory for this one rather than selling it as a extra by itself. But overall I’m just having too much fun with this series to gripe much other than bitching about how now I gotta wait until the summer of 2016 for the next book. I just hope I don’t get Dark Towered on this thing…....more
In The Expanse humanity has spread out among our solar system, and there have been decades of political tension and hostility among the people of EartIn The Expanse humanity has spread out among our solar system, and there have been decades of political tension and hostility among the people of Earth, Mars, and the Belters of the Outer Planetary Alliance. The events of the previous books have resulted in the unlocking of a system of wormhole gates that puts literally a thousand habitable new worlds and all their natural resources within reach.
All the people put their differences aside to begin a new golden age of peace and prosperity as they work together to explore and colonize……BWAH HA HA HA! I’m sorry. I couldn’t even finish that with a straight face. I was just messing with you. Actually, most of the people in the future are still short-sighted selfish idiots who suck, just like today, and they promptly begin fighting over the very first planet that has boots on the ground.
A group of squatters from the OPA got to the planet first and set up a half-assed colony as they began mining lithium with the idea of selling it to become independent. The Royal Energy Corporation was given a charter by Earth’s government to survey the planet and exploit its mineral rights. The squatters and the RCE competing claims are complicated by the long history of bigotry and mistrust between the people of Earth and the Belt. Things quickly escalate to violence, and when the governments need a guy with a reputation for honesty and fairness to act as moderator they call on Captain Jim Holden.
So it’s a planet filled with angry people using terrorism tactics against a fanatical security chief for the corporation who will stop at nothing to protect RCE interests. Oh, and there’s lots of alien ruins and artifacts left by a long dead civilization. What could possibly go wrong?
Everything.
As usual Holden and his intrepid crew are trying to do the right thing and save people in the midst of a political tangle and general assholery. However, the first half of this book has both sides so entrenched in their hatred and grudges that I was half hoping that Holden would just throw up his hands and have the Rocinante bomb them from orbit. Things change a bit in the second half when events put everyone in a dire situation, but even then there’s no shortage of talking sphincters making a bad situation worse.
As I’ve said in my earlier reviews, that’s one of the things that I love about this series. There’s an on-going mystery and potential looming threat with all the alien stuff and the way that Holden is connected to it is very clever. The action and sense of tension are well done, and the good guy characters are all likeable and well-drawn so that you actively root for them while feeling the frustration of every set back and problem. The books also have a healthy sense of humor with a variety of one liners or funny beats drawing a laugh out of a reader at the most unexpected moments. The authors also do a superior job of figuring out bad situations to stick the characters in and equally clever ways to get them out of them.
But it’s still the commitment to making the biggest obstacle usually be rotten people of one kind or another that continues to help ground the series and make it really relatable. These people may be squabbling on another planet, but when they argue about who did what to who and use it for justifications for continuing to escalate the violence it’s all too easy to see ourselves in this collection of asshats.
Bonus Material: Check out the trailers for the TV show based on the series here and here....more
There’s a utopian idea in some sci-fi like Star Trek that humanity exploring space will bring out the best in us as a species. I think that anyone whoThere’s a utopian idea in some sci-fi like Star Trek that humanity exploring space will bring out the best in us as a species. I think that anyone who believes that hasn’t paid enough attention to what we are actually like. That’s one of the big reasons that I’m loving this series. It shows that people suck whether they’re on Earth, Mars, a moon, an asteroid, a spaceship, or exploring an alien construct built by an ancient protomolecule.
This third book in the Expanse series picks up shortly after the events of the last one. James Holden and his small crew of misfits continue to earn a living by hiring out the Rocinante as a transport or escort ship around the solar system. The governments of Earth, Mars, and the Belt have all sent ships out towards the mysterious giant ring that the protomolecule cobbled together that is now outside the orbit of Uranus. (Feel free to make your own Uranus jokes.) As you’d expect the three rival powers are spending as much time watching and scheming against each other as they are trying to figure out exactly what the ring is.
Holden wants nothing more to do with the protomolecule, especially since he’s having some freaky episodes that are apparently connected to it, so he tries to get them a job that will take them as far away from the ring as the Rocinante can get. Unfortunately, he’s got an enemy named Clarissa who thinks Holden is responsible for her family’s misfortune, and she manipulates events to get him near the ring where she can destroy his reputation and kill him.
As usual with this series we’ve got Holden and his crew as the on-going hero characters while some new people are introduced. Clarissa is a key figure, and her desire for revenge, extensive resources, and some illegal implants that give her a limited amount of berserker fury make her a very dangerous figure. Carlos ‘Bull’ c de Baca is the security chief on the main Outer Planets Alliance ship sent to the ring, but his loyalty to the leader of the OPA means that he’s been secretly given the responsibility of making sure that the ship’s idiot captain doesn’t screw things up. Pastor Anna Volovodov leaves her wife and child behind to go to the ring as part of an Earth delegation made up of religious figures and artists to try and figure out the significance of the ring to humanity from a spiritual standpoint.
As I noted before, one of the things I love about this series is how it sets up the idea that even with the terrifying and astounding things that have happened because of the protomolecule that the different factions of people scattered around the solar system still spend most of their time focused on squabbling with each other and looking for an angle to use the alien tech for their own purposes. That remains one of the key drivers to the plot, and it’s all too easy to believe that when confronted with something huge and scary that people would rather fight with each other than think about what it actually means.
Another aspect that I enjoy about Expanse is that it at least nods towards real science in that if you’re going to create a story in which spaceships can go fast enough to make travel within our solar system feasible, then that means you’ve got to account for the force of that on the human bodies in those ships. That’s built into these books with special gel couches and drugs having to be used to offset thrusts that cause high g-forces, and those forces get used to catastrophic effect in ways that are horrifyingly clever. When you’ve got people casually referring to how someone got turned into pasta sauce, you know things have gotten ugly.
The only off note is in how the book gets pretty black and white with the good guys vs. the bad guys. I’d complained before that the first two books had the heroes facing off against a shadowy conspiracy with no indications from their side what the plan was so it made the threat kind of vague and cartoonish. Here, we know that one big threat comes from Clarissa, and we get plenty on her motivations and her schemes. The other thing endangering everyone is the scared and stupid behavior of small minded people, and that’s also a relatable idea.
However, when things go sideways it seems like all the good guys line up on the same side immediately, and there’s no doubt whatsoever that they’re way is the right way even though with the information available the other side isn’t entirely out of line. It would have been nice to get a few more grey areas or some doubts creeping in rather than having almost everyone lining up along exact battle lines and sticking to that for the most part.
That was a minor point and didn’t detract much from the overall enjoyment I continue to get out of this ambitious space opera with it’s all too human characters....more
Rocket Raccoon has shot more than a few people in his time guarding the galaxy, but he’s shocked to be accused of multiple murders. He’s even more stuRocket Raccoon has shot more than a few people in his time guarding the galaxy, but he’s shocked to be accused of multiple murders. He’s even more stunned when he learns the real killer is another armed raccoon because he thought he was one of a kind. Rocket stages a prison break with his buddy Groot and sets out to get some answers, but he’s also got a pack of angry ex-girlfriends on his tail that are hell bent on killing him.
I was a little put off by the artwork in this one at first because I thought it was too cartoony to do Rocket justice. Yeah, yeah….I know we’re talking about a heavily armed talking space raccoon in a comic book, but anyone who has seen the Guardians of the Galaxy movie or read Abenett & Lanning’s run on the comic knows that Rocket at his best is more than just a joke about the smart-ass rodent with a gun. He can also be the voice of experience and wisdom as well as the heart of the team when written well. So I was a little worried that the movie popularity was going to have Marvel pushing him in the easy direction of cheap laughs by just having him be the cute animal with a big gun and a bad attitude.
And there are plenty of laughs here, but we’re laughing with Rocket, not at him. Skottie Young creates a fun adventure that lets Rocket shine as the lovable scoundrel who is always ready with a quip, a plan, or a threat depending on the situation, and he sprinkles in enough emotional moments to make it more than just a madcap romp in the life of an interstellar raccoon. I especially enjoyed the comic that was Groot telling a story about Rocket in which, of course, all of the dialogue and captions consist only of “I Am Groot!”...more
One big thing that stands out to me going back to this after reading all the available books in the series is that my complai**Reread update 5/17/17**
One big thing that stands out to me going back to this after reading all the available books in the series is that my complaint about distinct bad guys not getting introduced until very late in the stories was addressed. From this point on we almost always have a face of the threat through most of the action, and that’s an improvement that made a great series even better.
I also wanted to check this out again after seeing the second season of the TV series. The show has gotten so good that I’m now visualizing all the characters as the actors who play them while reading. There’s also an interesting dynamic in that that the two-headed writer who makes up the James SA Corey name also works on the show, and since they have the advantage of knowing what’s going to happen for the next several books it’s able to shade in lot of character nuance and motivations that were just a little thin and simplistic in the early going.
So now I’m counting the days until the new book publishes and the next season premieres.
(Original review.) Essentially this is a mix of Game of Thrones and Firefly without all the rape and child burning and people talking like they’re in a western movie.
Humanity has expanded throughout our solar system, colonizing Mars and various moons and asteroids. Since people are always gonna be people, and will therefore suck, political tensions are high between Earth, Mars, and the Belters, and the events of the first book in the series have the threat of war seeming higher than ever. And just like in Westeros everyone is so consumed with their petty scheming and power plays that they’re ignoring the much larger threat that is growing under their noses. So it falls to a crew of misfits running their own ship for profit to step in when the shit hits the air recyclers.
This on-going space opera has sucked me in to its world...er… solar system completely with its spaceships, action, politics, and weird sci-fi elements mixed with just enough humor and emotional weight to give it some heft beyond its pew!-pew! appeal. The characters are well drawn even if they aren’t particularly deep, and their motivations are plainly spelled out in their dialogue. So this is all text, no subtext, but it is entertaining. I particularly liked the new character of Chrisjen Avasarala, a grandmother and UN official from Earth whose little old lady appearance is subverted by her foul mouth and political cunning.
However, the series so far has suffered a bit from not giving us any perspective from the vast conspiracy that is causing so much of the trouble. Granted, some of this has been played as a mystery to solve, but for two books now we’ve gotten no sense of who the bad guys are or what they're planning other than what’s been figured out by the heroes. Both books have finally revealed a kind of mid-level mastermind character near the end, and in both cases these have been full on mustache twirling villains so the threat they pose seems kind of vague and cartoonish.
Still, this one ends on a helluva twist that has me itching to roll right into the next one, and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough when I was in the midst of this. I’ll be happily returning to the Expanse series as soon as possible.
Plus, this trailer for the show coming to SyFy based on the series has got me even more excited....more
“Got another assignment for you on Guardians of the Galaxy. We need to spice things up. So put Venom on the team. And maybe Captai“Bendis!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Got another assignment for you on Guardians of the Galaxy. We need to spice things up. So put Venom on the team. And maybe Captain Marvel. They’re thinking about putting her in a movie so we might as well start linking them together. I’m thinking some kind of story where the team gets captured and separated by their enemies and go through hell. Those fan boys love it when we torture the good guys.”
“Uh…but sir….I was really hoping that I might finally get to just tell a Guardians story that was about ….uh…the Guardians.”
“What are you talking about? You’ve done over a dozen issues on this new series. You’re writing Guardians stories all the time.”
“Well, you’d think so, sir, but actually I haven’t had a lot of time to do much with just the Guardians. First, we had the story with Iron Man running around with them for a while.”
“Excellent crossover there. Those Marvel studio movies are a gravy train with biscuit wheels, and we need to sop up every last drop!”
“Yes, sir. And that actually turned out to be a pretty fun storyline, but then you had me bring Angela on the team because…. Uh, why did we bring Angela on the team? It really doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“I’ve told you before, Bendis. To piss off Todd McFarlane. And that reminds me, we haven’t had enough Angela lately. Be sure to put her in the next story, too.”
“Uh…but sir, after Angela I had to do tie-ins to the Infinity event and then a crossover with the X-Men…”
“You’re acting like this is something different than the usual way we do any comic, Bendis.”
“Oh, I know it’s how most of our stuff gets done these days, sir, but it’s just that with the popularity of the Guardians movie, wouldn’t it be good if we did some stories that just focused on the characters that all the fans know? Didn’t we launch this new book that featured those five heroes to capitalize on that? So I’m a little confused as to why we can’t just do at least a few comics that feature the team working together without a bunch of other characters? And separating the team for a story line? Sir, I’m sure you’re aware that one of the things I do best is writing banter among superheroes, and that’s a little hard to do if they’re all scattered around the galaxy getting their brains beaten in. Plus, we’re already planning that Original Sin event so that will be another time I have to write for a big storyline rather than just the Guardians title, sir.”
“Crossovers, Bendis! Crossovers! That’s what the public wants. Whether its characters crossing over or those giant storylines, that’s what these nerds pay for, and that’s what we’re gonna give ‘em. Why do you think the Avengers movies make more than the solo ones? It’s because they’re all together at the same time. The movies producers know that. Have you seen the line-up for Captain America: Civil War? I think they got more characters in that one movie than we had in the story we did in the comics. So we will keep churning out crossovers and sticking random characters in other books whether it makes sense or not.”
“Sir, I just worry that at some point the fans would like a coherent story line that features the actual team that is the title of the book.”
“Ah, don’t worry about it. From what I hear we’re gonna blow all this shit up in Secret Wars so you’ll be retconning it all anyhow.” ...more
Probably all self-proclaimed nerds have dipped their toes into the pool of tie-in books for a franchise they like at one point or another, and I'm no Probably all self-proclaimed nerds have dipped their toes into the pool of tie-in books for a franchise they like at one point or another, and I'm no exception. However, I mostly gave up on the concept years ago because reading a Star Wars book when what you really want is a new Star Wars* movie is about as satisfying as eating Hamburger Helper when what you're really craving is filet mignon.
* Feel free to insert your own prequel joke here.
Yet, the idea of Chuck Wendig doing a book as part of the new post-Lucas official canon that was going to bridge the gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens..... Well, that’s the same kind of siren call that lured Darth Vader to the dark side.
The results are mixed. Wendig does a decent job of creating a new cast of characters and giving them a worthy adventure set immediately after the end of Jedi. This runs into the problem of trying to introduce new characters to a franchise like Star Wars in a tie-in book though. We haven’t seen these people on screen before so there’s just no way that a reader is going to be as invested in them as the ones we know.
Plus, you can tell that Wendig was hobbled by the requirements of writing a book that is set between the last phase of the franchise and the new one. It’s obvious that he couldn’t do anything that would give anything away about the new movie, and that’s frustrating because one of the most interesting parts to me was the tidbits we get about what the remains of the Empire’s forces are planning to do.
This also severely limited him at using any of the major characters. Wendig tries to skirt around that by incorporating Wedge Antilles, but he was a bit player at best in the movies and even here he has little more than a supporting role. This makes the one brief chapter that actually features a couple of the big cheeses seem like a tease in the same way that Samuel L. Jackson popping his head in the door for an episode of Agents of SHIELD isn’t all that much fun.
It’s not a bad Star Wars book, I’ve certainly read worse, but it may have been more satisfying if it was done after the release of the new movie so that Wendig could have told us more rather than dancing around so much of it....more
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