Leviathan Wakes
If there’s one sub-genre I heartily dislike, it’s military sci-fi. As soon as the marines in powered armour come out and start firing plasteel-coated tungsten shells at percentages of the speed of light or whatever, I’m out. Not interested, at all.
Anyway here’s a review of a military sci-fi book that I kind of liked.
It’s some time in the future (I don’t think it’s ever specified when exactly, but I’m too tired to go and check) and humanity has colonized the star. That’s star, singular–we’ve spread only as far as one of the moons of Neptune, and other solar systems are as unobtainable to the characters in the book as they are to us right now.
This is actually one of the reasons I gave the book a chance to begin with: I much prefer space-based sci-fi that stays within our own friendly stellar neighbourhood, as that just feels vastly more plausible and therefore more exciting than a future where we’re zipping across the galaxy at faster-than-light speeds. Large ships in this setting can make use of an advanced fusion drive to get up to impressive speeds, but even with this, traveling from Earth or Mars out to the gas giants takes weeks. Or possibly longer, depending on where those planets are in their orbits; Leviathan Wakes takes a somewhat hard sci-fi approach to space travel, which means that ships have to turn around and start decelerating hours or even days before they reach their destination, and the limiting factor of spaceflight speed isn’t technology but the fact that there’s an upper limit to the amount of acceleration a human body can withstand.
The political situation in this inhabited solar system is fraught. Earth and Mars are the political cores of humanity and are technically in an alliance, although it’s one that everyone knows is shakier in actuality than it appears on paper. The moon colonies of the outer planets, sparsely populated by humans whose physiology has altered as a result of generations of growing up in low-gravity environments, are becoming restless with their status as the inner planet’s cheap labour source. The hotbed of this dissension is the Belt, the scattering of populated asteroids and minor planets separating the inner and outer solar system.
This powder keg is ignited when a fleet of apparently Martian stealth ships destroy a Jovian ice freighter in an unprovoked attack, causing one of the ship’s survivors, captain James Holden, to rashly send out a system-wide broadcast that more or less instantly causes Mars and the Belt to go to war. At the same time we have Miller, a Sad Detective on Ceres whose missing person case quickly turns out to be linked in some way to the escalating conflict.
Let’s be clear here: Leviathan Wakes is absolutely a military sci-fi book. You’ve got spaceships getting turned into “radioactive slag” by other spaceships, you’ve got space marines in powered armor, all the ingredients are there. Just because the spaceships are firing at each other from thousands of kilometres away instead of lining up like old warships to pew-pew each other with lasers doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the action.
And yet, this veneer of hard-SF realism makes a huge difference. There are no magical “deflector shields” here; if a ship takes a sufficiently large hit from a single missile it’s toast, and the only ways to avoid that happening are to either dodge the projectile or use physical counter-measures. Coupled with a willingness to kill off characters without warning, this makes for some wonderfully tense battle scenes. The book generally does a good job presenting the reader with an appropriate amount of information so that the status of the various ships involved and what everyone is doing is always clear, without describing every thrust increase and kinetic delta inversion or whatever so that the battles become overloaded. I particularly like how this information is often conveyed via dialogue rather than narration, as it makes the twists and turns of the battle scenes a bit more flavourful when they’re being filtered through the protagonists’ reactions.
About that dialogue, though. Author James SA Corey seems to have been bitten by the Whedon Bug at some point in writing the novel; symptoms include annoyingly quippy one-liners and characters trading hi-larious banter during life or death situations. This mostly manifests during Holden’s chapters, with Miller going in more for the hard-boiled detective schtick.
This wasn’t enough to make me prefer Miller’s storylines to Holden; in fact, he’s the worst part of the whole story.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: there’s a sad divorced detective who drinks too much, partially because he’s the only person left on the force who still cares god damn it, and now he’s on One Last Case involving a missing young woman, after which he’s planning on offing himself for reasons that aren’t communicated very clearly.
Except now, imagine that the detective is in space.
It changes remarkably little. Actually, that’s not accurate. It changes absolutely nothing. This is Sad Detective: Iteration Number 465338, to the extent that I found myself at times forgetting that he was doing his detecting in the asteroid belt and not New York in the 1930s. It doesn’t help that Miller is not even a terribly interesting sad detective by the standards of sad detectives; his only really unique feature is getting weirdly obsessed with the missing woman he’s looking for and creating this imaginary fantasy quasi-romance with her (to be fair, Miller himself acknowledges that this is unhealthy and kind of creepy).
Despite this fairly significant flaw, I enjoyed going along for Leviathan Wake’s wild space ride. I don’t think it’s turned me into a fan of the IP’s expanse-ive cross media empire–I started reading the second book and have already stalled halfway through–but I’m glad I gave it a chance. If you’re looking for a brain-off popcorn blockbuster, you could do worse.