Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey

 

Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey is the first book in The Expanse Series.

Started: 1/29/2021
Completed: 2/3/2021
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Recommended By: Rachel

Review:

This is a rip-roaring shoot-em-up with a couple of minor romances to keep interest in the characters alive.  The book takes place over a short period, so it is not reasonable to expect the characters to grow, but they are fairly flat.  Corey overcomes this by changing the point of view frequently so that the characters are richer with their inner stories.  From the start it felt to me like an alien invasion (either Alien or Invasion of the Body Snatchers), but this did not play out until around midway through the book.

Normally a sci-fi book takes some technological innovation and then examines what the innovation would do.  This book takes notes from, say, The Foundation Series, and examines what happens when things get complacent.  What happens when humans have created "enough" tech and "enough" distance from one another that balance seems possible.  The inevitable conclusion is, war.  I do not find war interesting in this sense and in this book war seems like a way to put drama into people's lives.  It is not really an exploration of the worst or best of people.  The characters seem to muddle through (as one might expect during a real war), but the war feels almost like a prop...something that Corey throws around, but never really investigates.  One hears that battles occurred without any real sense of them occurring.  The characters also seem to ignore war in general and treat it as incidental to their own drama.

The alien concept is ill-explained.  It is hard to imagine that a proto-molecule has any form of will.  It is odd to think that it becomes a virus which then starts directing its host.  There is hand-waving that this is incomprehensible as the proto-molecule was created by technological gods, but it is unclear how the proto-molecule could ever develop a will of its own.  Don't get me started on crystal towers on Venus.

It feels to me like the book is a set-up for a movie.  There are chase scenes, death scenes, love scenes, and plenty of background.  One thing that is odd is the discussion of scents, which comes up repeatedly in the novel.  At one point, a person talks about smelling the body of the former owner of a spacesuit, but shortly thereafter, "can only smell himself."  I kind of have the feeling that the discussions of scents were an editor's addition to a book destined for the screen.  This helped make it more of a novel and less of a screen play.  Actual astronauts do not describe a space suit as having a smell at all and the bottled oxygen has to be constantly circulated or the astronaut would just end up with CO2 in the helmet.  Heating and cooling is not done with air, so I dunno.