Review: Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey (AKA Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham)

Published : Orbit, 2011

Series : Book 1 of the Expanse

Awards Nominated : Locus SF and Hugo Awards

The Book :

“Humanity has colonized the solar system - Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond - but the stars are still out of our reach.

Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, The Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for - and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to The Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations - and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.” ~WWend.com

Leviathan Wake is my last review of this year’s Hugo novel nominees, so I’ll have a summary post up about this year’s Hugos soon.  I’ve never read anything by Ty Franck before (I believe this is his first novel), but I’ve enjoyed Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet, in addition to some of his shorter work published in Asimov’s. I’d been looking forward to reading their collaboration, and I think they work well together.  Apparently, Abraham wrote from Miller’s point of view, Franck wrote from Holden’s point of view, and then they edited each other’s work.  The result is a very smooth and coherent novel that felt as though it were written by a single author.  From what I hear, this is planned as a six novel series.  The second novel, Caliban’s War, is already out.   

My Thoughts :

When it comes to excitement and adventure, Leviathan Wakes definitely did not disappoint. Leviathan Wakes was mostly a solar-system-bound space opera, but it also contained elements of noir and horror. Frequent humor helped to lighten the mood in darker places, but the characters still remained appreciative of the seriousness of their predicaments.  The story was full of explosions, disasters, large-scale space operations, and horrifying surprises.  It didn’t take long for the story to get into high gear, and the stakes were fatally high for both the heroes and the human race as a whole. In general, the story seemed like the novel equivalent of a well-crafted sci-fi adventure film.  It featured a team of heroes caught up in world-shatteringly significant events, and it pitted them against some unmistakably evil villains.  There was also a romantic subplot and a few regrettable action film cliché moments.  All of that added up to a highly exciting and entertaining story, which kept me eagerly turning the pages.

The two heroes of the story were Holden and Miller, whose viewpoint chapters alternated. Holden was an idealist who believed that all information should be freely broadcasted, and people tended to treat him as something of a holy fool.  While I can respect Holden’s standing by his convictions, I felt that he needed to take more responsibility for the destruction his ‘free information’ could cause.  Miller was contrasted with Holden by his belief that information should be guarded, and released with care in order to bring about a desired result.  I liked the idea of the heroes, but their characterization seemed a little too deliberately extreme to be realistic, especially near the beginning.  All the same, it was interesting to see how these very different characters interacted with one another, and how they developed throughout the story.

Holden and Miller were strengthened as characters by their supporting casts.  With the inclusion of Holden’s surviving crew, Miller’s colleagues, Martian soldiers, people who worked at research stations, and a rebellious ‘belter’ organization, the universe of Leviathan Wakes felt real and highly populated.  Of course, few of these supporting characters were especially developed, but most of them still felt distinct in personality and voice.  To me, the most interesting supporting characters were the members of Holden’s crew.  They each had memorable personalities and meaningful roles in the unfolding story.  Even the love interest character was interesting in her own right, and I hope she plays a large role in the story to come.

In addition to an exciting story and memorable characters, the “Expanse” universe seemed very well designed.  Though the setting of Leviathan Wakes was limited to our solar system, the novel showed that this was more than enough space to create a compelling and complex universe.  The descriptions of the physical spaces and of the different levels of social, political, and economic structure were sufficient to make the solar system feel like a real place where people lived and worked. I enjoyed the examination of the physical and cultural differences between the ‘belter’ and ‘inner planet’ citizens, and of the difficult relationship between them.  I loved this fictional future setting, and I feel like it has a lot of potential for future novels.

My Rating : 4.5/5

Leviathan Wakes is a highly engaging, exciting space opera set solely within our current solar system.  While most of the story is a space adventure, there are also some noir and horror elements.  To me, Leviathan Wakes seemed to novels what especially well-crafted action movies are to films.   It was very exciting, it had humorous moments to break up the darker segments, it had characters that were  painted in extremes, and it had occasional moments of cliché.  Behind the action of Leviathan Wakes were characters that were easy to care about, and our colonized solar system made for a very interesting setting. In short, Leviathan Wakes was thoroughly entertaining, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series! 

Review: The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

Published : Orbit, 2008

Awards Won : British Science Fiction Association Award

The Book :

“After the devastation of the Faith Wars (or Oil Wars, as they are also called), the world went through what is known as the Great Rejection.  Now, religious faith is swept under the rug, and all officials are required to feign non-cognizance of any religious affiliation in the citizens they serve.  When a man dies in a bombing in Edinburgh, Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson suspects that the cause might be related to something he officially doesn’t know—the murdered man was a parish priest.

Ferguson pursues the case with his robotic partner, another legacy of the Faith Wars.  When the robotic war machine partners of human soldiers gained sentience, people suddenly saw them as highly dangerous.  Many of the self-aware robots, such as Ferguson’s partner, Skulk, were downloaded into the less threatening bodies of mini-War-of-the-Worlds tripod helper robots.  Others maintained their human form, and simply removed themselves from society.  Many moved up the space elevators into orbit, but hundreds continue to live in seclusion at a New Zealand creationist park, under the care of a robotics engineer and fundamentalist Christian, John Richard Campbell.  As robotic intelligence, faith, and violent crime collide, Ferguson searches for truth in a case that continues to grow ever more strange.” ~Allie

The Night Sessions was the novel I chose as a prize from WWEnd’s Grand Master Reading Challenge, which has been a lot of fun so far this year!  I’d never read any Ken MacLeod before, but I was intrigued by the premise—terrorism in a future with self-aware robots, and with religion almost completely removed from the public sphere.

My Thoughts :

The Night Sessions was a fairly quick read, and I wished that it could have been longer.  With its relatively short length, The Night Sessions tended to focus more on plot than on characterization or the details of the world building. There’s much to enjoy in MacLeod’s future world, but I felt as though I only got to see the parts that were absolutely necessary for the main plot.  For instance, the idea of sentient robots is obviously not a new one, but I enjoyed seeing how they were (or were not) integrated into society. Robots are very common in the world of The Night Sessions, but they were mostly only shown in their professional capacities.  For instance, Ferguon’s partner Skulk, was the most developed robotic character, but even he was rarely shown outside of the context of working on their case.  There’s not very much speculation on robotic psychology, or on how they might view their human creators, who only accept them if they are inferior and subservient.  There is an obvious parallel that could be drawn with Christianity here, but the novel doesn’t seem to travel far down that road.   

The basic plot is a detective story, but (thankfully) Ferguson is not the hotshot, failure, or alcoholic that I’m becoming used to seeing in these kinds of stories.  Instead, he’s just a pretty decent detective. He drinks moderately, is happily married, and sees his job as a job, not a validation of himself as a person.  However, he does have something of a dark past that is occasionally mentioned.  Apparently, in the past, the police actively persecuted churches and religious people. Ferguson regrets the brutality he took part in during those years, but the details of his past are left a little vague. Since I don’t know what acts he is guilty of having committed, it’s hard to judge whether he’s a decent cop who’s done a few bad things or a brutal cop who feels mildly ashamed of his worst excesses.  As a result, I was left with the impression that I did not understand the character of Ferguson very deeply.

Like Ferguson, most of the other characters were also lightly characterized.  Though they were developed only as far as was necessary for the plot, I still appreciated the different mindsets each character portrayed.  Religion (mostly Christianity) is a major factor in the story, and I liked that MacLeod showed some of the diversity of people of faith.  For instance, John Campbell is an extreme fundamentalist.  However, while he is occasionally infuriating, he’s not shown as a bad person. Another Christian character, Grace Mazvabo, was a fairly intelligent, religious professor. Of course, there are also strongly negative portrayals of religious faith, mostly of people who turn to violence on the basis of their beliefs.  An interesting added twist was the idea of robots finding religion, though I wish the mindset of religious robots could have been more thoroughly explored.   Altogether, there was quite a lot that I enjoyed about The Night Sessions, but I felt that a lot of interesting implications in the setting and characters were left unexplored.

My Rating : 3.5/5

I enjoyed reading The Night Sessions, but I was left wanting more.  I wanted to know more about the world MacLeod had begun to reveal and about the characters that I felt I only barely knew.  I liked how MacLeod showed the many different kinds of people—and robots!—who are drawn to religious faith, but I wish there could have been more of an exploration of what ideas lead robots or people toward faith in the first place.  The central mystery was interesting enough, but I would have loved to see more attention devoted to the many intriguing ideas that were barely referred to throughout the story. The world, its technology, and its issues were all very interesting, but I felt like the book was too short to explore any specific idea in great detail.   

Review: Man Plus by Frederik Pohl

Man Plus by Frederik Pohl

Published : Random House, 1976

Awards Won : Nebula Award

Awards Nominated: Hugo, John W. Campbell, and Locus SF Awards

The Book:

“In the not-too-distant future, a desperate war for natural resources threatens to bring civilization to a crashing halt. Nuclear warships from around the globe begin positioning themselves as the American government works feverishly to complete a massive project to colonize Mars.

Former astronaut Roger Torraway has agreed to be transformed by the latest advances in biological and cybernetic science into something new, a being that can survive the rigors of Mars before it is terraformed. Becoming Man Plus will allow him to be the linchpin in opening the new Martian frontier…but not without challenging his humanity as no man has ever been challenged before.” ~barnesandnoble.com

Man Plus  is my July book for WWend’s Grand MasterReading Challenge.  Frederik Pohl is not a completely new author to me, as I have read and loved his novel Gateway. Man Plus has some interesting ideas, but it did not replace Gateway as my favorite Pohl novel to date.

My Thoughts:

On starting Man Plus, one of my first reflections was that the writing style seemed like a cross between a novel and an observational journal.  It seemed as though the story was being told by group of detached overseers, who were describing the progress of the ‘Man Plus’ project. This impression is deliberate, though the reason for it is not addressed until near the end.  However, the style—which tended towards blunt, choppy sentences—sometimes made the story feel very dry.  There was also a tendency to introduce each secondary character with a brief description of their physical appearance, skills, and main personality traits, and then not to develop them much further throughout the novel.  As an example of this technique, and of the writing style in general, here is the introduction of Roger Torroway’s wife, Dorrie:

“Torraway… married a green-eyed, black-haired teacher of ceramic sculpture. Dorrie on Earth was what made him yearn, and Rog in orbit was what made Dorrie a celebrity herself, which she loved.

It took something special to make an astronaut’s wife newsworthy. There were so many of them. They looked so much alike. The newspersons used to think that NASA picked the astronauts’ wives out of the entries in Miss Georgia contests. They all had that look, as though as soon as they changed out of their bathing suits they would show you some baton-twirling or would recite “The Female of the Species.” Dorrie Torraway was a little too intelligent-looking for that, although she was also definitely pretty enough for that. She was the only one of the astronaut wives to get major space in both Ladies’ Home Journal (“Twelve Christmas Gifts You Can Bake in Your Kiln”) and Ms.(“Children Would Spoil My Marriage”).” 

By far, the main focus of the book was the change and development endured by the main character, Roger Torroway. Throughout Roger’s painful transformation into a ‘Martian’, I enjoyed watching the slow shift in the way he perceived himself and others. I also found it interesting to see how others’ perception of him changed, as he became less and less physically human.  However, aside from my interest in seeing their reactions to the changes in Roger Torroway, I didn’t find the other characters of the novel to be particularly engaging. The main drama subplot, which I found somewhat tedious, involved Roger being jealous that his wife was sleeping with someone else.  Compared with how interesting I found the transformation of Roger and its psychological effects, the infidelity-related-angst subplot just seemed kind of prosaic.

For me, the physical transformation of Roger was even more interesting than his psychological transformation. There were extensive descriptions of the procedures that were used to turn him into a creature that could live unaided on Mars.  While they were usually a bit dry, these descriptions were actually one of my favorite parts of the book.  For instance, there was a fairly long section about filtering visual input, and how giving Roger the physical ability to take in more information would be dangerous if the data were not mediated before reaching his human brain.  The novel also did not gloss over the difficulty of Roger learning to operate his new body, which I thought was an interesting touch.  While the details of the project were very entertaining, the intended human goal of this project was more than a little hazy.  Roger could not reproduce others like himself, so he could not found a colony of  ‘Men Plus’ on Mars. 

The political reasoning behind the project involved the most dated aspect of the novel—the social and political climate. The world seemed to be caught in the grip of a increasingly violent continuation of the Cold War, in which the last bastions of the ‘Free World’ were on the verge of being wiped out, and the threat of nuclear war hung over all.  I’m guessing that extrapolation seemed a lot more likely in the mid-1970s than it does now, though the energy crisis he describes might still happen in our future.  Socially, the odd mixture of sexism and socially acceptable promiscuity seemed like something that might have been imagined from the vantage point of the 1970s.  The dated feeling of the global society made kind of a strange contrast with the inclusion of advanced technology that is still nowhere near becoming a reality today. In short, this novel definitely doesn’t knock Gateway down as my favorite Frederik Pohl novel, but there’s still enough of interest for it to be worth a read.

My Rating: 3/5

Man Plus has a number of interesting ideas, but I didn’t feel like it was entirely satisfying as a novel.  The writing is bland and short, a lot of the politics and social attitudes seemed very dated, and most of the characters failed to make much of a significant impression.  While the soap-opera drama of Roger Torroway’s troubled marriage was not very engaging, his transformation into a being that could live on Mars did capture my imagination (though the reasoning behind the program didn’t make all that much sense).  I think the novel was strongest when it was detailing the many alterations that would be made to Roger’s body, and when it was addressing the psychological changes that such a severe physical alteration would cause.  I don’t think this is Pohl’s strongest novel, but I think that it is still worth reading for those interested in his work.