Book Review: Leviathan Falls, by James. S. A. Corey
The final book in the Expanse series.
Orbit, 2021, 528 pages
The Laconian Empire has fallen, setting the 1,300 solar systems free from the rule of Winston Duarte. But the ancient enemy that killed the gate builders is awake, and the war against our universe has begun again.
In the dead system of Adro, Elvi Okoye leads a desperate scientific mission to understand what the gate builders were and what destroyed them, even if it means compromising herself and the half-alien children who bear the weight of her investigation. Through the wide-flung systems of humanity, Colonel Aliana Tanaka hunts for Duarte’s missing daughter...and the shattered emperor himself. And on the Rocinante, James Holden and his crew struggle to build a future for humanity out of the shards and ruins of all that has come before.
As nearly unimaginable forces prepare to annihilate all human life, Holden and a group of unlikely allies discover a last, desperate chance to unite all of humanity, with the promise of a vast galactic civilization free from wars, factions, lies, and secrets if they win.
But the price of victory may be worse than the cost of defeat.
Eleven years ago, Leviathan Wakes was published. Nine books, many novellas, and a cancelled Amazon TV series later, James S.A. Corey has completed the series with a decisive finale. Which is not to say there isn't room for more side novellas and sequels - dude has clearly learned from his old mentor, George R. R. Martin.
(By "dude" I mean two dudes, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who write together under the James S.A. Corey pen name and were actually both collaborators and writing assistants to GRRM.)
One of the most impressive feats of the Expanse series is steadily expanding the scope without making it feel forced. Some series arbitrarily up the stakes in each book to make the story bigger. The Expanse did it what was clearly a planned fashion. In Leviathan Wakes, humanity had colonized the solar system, but interstellar travel was still just a dream. We got our first hints of a bigger universe with an existential threat to humanity introduced by an alien "protomolecule."
We also met James Holden, as the captain of a scrappy ice miner whose crew was just trying to make a living hauling freight between planets.
Over the next eight books, the universe got bigger. A lot bigger. We watched wars transform solar system politics. The Belters revolted, Mars became an imperial power, Earth went from oppressor to underdog, and eventually humanity discovered the ring gates, which opened up the entire galaxy, and in Leviathan Falls, it's decades later, mankind has colonized 1300 worlds, the Laconian Empire is doing its best to conquer it all, and James Holden is still tooling around trying to Do The Right Thing on a cosmic scale.
The final book in the series reminds us throughout that it's the final book, with callbacks to old friends who've died along the way (some of whom come back as "ghosts"), and the existential threat introduced in book one proves to have been only a harbinger of the real existential threat, the threat that exterminated the ancient builders of the ring gates.
It's not a perfect book. Abraham and Franck's writing tics are very noticeable; they have a certain way of writing dialog that's clever and punchy sometimes, but sometimes just feels overdone. The plot doesn't have any real surprises; will James Holden save the galaxy? Of course he will. Will some beloved characters die? Of course they will.
And I didn't love Colonel Tanaka, who's just kind of a bitchy bad-guy replacement for Bobby Draper, the bad-ass Martian space marine who entertained us for half the series, RIP.
But we've known most of these characters for nine books, and even the recent additions have become important. They started out as a motley crew of space adventurers, and now they're decades older and have survived interplanetary wars and literally seen the rise and fall of a galactic empire. Bringing it all home was a sweet finale.
It's a very well written space opera with heart, epic scope, and actually admirable characters, and it finishes. That is a hell of a thing.
Also by James. S. A. Corey: My reviews of Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, Abaddon's Gate, Cibola Burn, Nemesis Games, Babylon's Ashes, Persepolis Rising, and Tiamat's Wrath.
Orbit, 2021, 528 pages
The Laconian Empire has fallen, setting the 1,300 solar systems free from the rule of Winston Duarte. But the ancient enemy that killed the gate builders is awake, and the war against our universe has begun again.
In the dead system of Adro, Elvi Okoye leads a desperate scientific mission to understand what the gate builders were and what destroyed them, even if it means compromising herself and the half-alien children who bear the weight of her investigation. Through the wide-flung systems of humanity, Colonel Aliana Tanaka hunts for Duarte’s missing daughter...and the shattered emperor himself. And on the Rocinante, James Holden and his crew struggle to build a future for humanity out of the shards and ruins of all that has come before.
As nearly unimaginable forces prepare to annihilate all human life, Holden and a group of unlikely allies discover a last, desperate chance to unite all of humanity, with the promise of a vast galactic civilization free from wars, factions, lies, and secrets if they win.
But the price of victory may be worse than the cost of defeat.
Eleven years ago, Leviathan Wakes was published. Nine books, many novellas, and a cancelled Amazon TV series later, James S.A. Corey has completed the series with a decisive finale. Which is not to say there isn't room for more side novellas and sequels - dude has clearly learned from his old mentor, George R. R. Martin.
(By "dude" I mean two dudes, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who write together under the James S.A. Corey pen name and were actually both collaborators and writing assistants to GRRM.)
One of the most impressive feats of the Expanse series is steadily expanding the scope without making it feel forced. Some series arbitrarily up the stakes in each book to make the story bigger. The Expanse did it what was clearly a planned fashion. In Leviathan Wakes, humanity had colonized the solar system, but interstellar travel was still just a dream. We got our first hints of a bigger universe with an existential threat to humanity introduced by an alien "protomolecule."
We also met James Holden, as the captain of a scrappy ice miner whose crew was just trying to make a living hauling freight between planets.
Over the next eight books, the universe got bigger. A lot bigger. We watched wars transform solar system politics. The Belters revolted, Mars became an imperial power, Earth went from oppressor to underdog, and eventually humanity discovered the ring gates, which opened up the entire galaxy, and in Leviathan Falls, it's decades later, mankind has colonized 1300 worlds, the Laconian Empire is doing its best to conquer it all, and James Holden is still tooling around trying to Do The Right Thing on a cosmic scale.
The final book in the series reminds us throughout that it's the final book, with callbacks to old friends who've died along the way (some of whom come back as "ghosts"), and the existential threat introduced in book one proves to have been only a harbinger of the real existential threat, the threat that exterminated the ancient builders of the ring gates.
It's not a perfect book. Abraham and Franck's writing tics are very noticeable; they have a certain way of writing dialog that's clever and punchy sometimes, but sometimes just feels overdone. The plot doesn't have any real surprises; will James Holden save the galaxy? Of course he will. Will some beloved characters die? Of course they will.
And I didn't love Colonel Tanaka, who's just kind of a bitchy bad-guy replacement for Bobby Draper, the bad-ass Martian space marine who entertained us for half the series, RIP.
But we've known most of these characters for nine books, and even the recent additions have become important. They started out as a motley crew of space adventurers, and now they're decades older and have survived interplanetary wars and literally seen the rise and fall of a galactic empire. Bringing it all home was a sweet finale.
It's a very well written space opera with heart, epic scope, and actually admirable characters, and it finishes. That is a hell of a thing.
Also by James. S. A. Corey: My reviews of Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, Abaddon's Gate, Cibola Burn, Nemesis Games, Babylon's Ashes, Persepolis Rising, and Tiamat's Wrath.