I LOVED THIS BOOOOOOOOOK
Space opera meets neo-noir detective story, with a generous helping of dope space-marine shit.
Leviathan Wakes is a fun little space opera that follows the crew of the Rocinante, a “salvaged” interplanetary frigate of Martian design, as they navigate the politics of a fully settled solar system and work to uncover a mystery that spans the stars.
Set at an indeterminate date a few hundred years into the future, the novel projects a hologram of a human race that has made a few large leaps in technology–allowing them to spread toward Mars, the asteroid belt, and the moons of the outer planets–yet has made little progress since, stewing in a mire of technological and existential stagnation. The solar system is divided into three distinct sections: Earth, Mars, and Everything Else (they don’t actually call it that). Earth and Mars share greater-power status with each other and war coldly, while The Belt and the moons of the outer planets are mined and inhabited by Belters, a severely oppressed class of tall, thin, big-headed (because of the low gravity they grew up in, so literally, not figuratively) people working under the thumb of the inner planets.
The novel is written from a limited third-person point of view, with each chapter following one of a few characters, revolving through each in turn. Our Entirely Too Honest main protagonist and captain of the Rocinante, James Holden, does his best to keep his raggedy group of brilliantly underachieving engineers, stone-cold killers, and drawling pilots together after their initial ship, The Canterbury–an ice-hauler that supplies the asteroid belt with fresh water–gets super-duper blowed-the-fuck-up for seemingly no reason (not spoilers because it happens RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK, SO GET OFF MY ASS, GAWD). Holden then does some REALLY DUMB SHIT that may or may not plunge the solar system into all-out war.
Meanwhile, on Ceres Station (in the real world, the largest object in the asteroid belt; in the book, also the largest object in The Belt, but inhabited), our Drunk and Not Very Honest alternate protagonist, Detective Josephus Miller, is ordered by his grumpy boss to track down a woman named Julie Mao–a petulant little rich girl who falls in with pseudo-terrorists instead of letting daddy continue telling her what to do–and bring her back to her very rich and very controlling parents. Little does Miller know that Julie has joined up with the Outer Planets Alliance, an activist group attempting to wrench the outer planets out from under the oppressive boots of Mars and Earth with little regard for diplomatic tactics, and she may or may not have tangled herself up with some crazy alien shit.
While Holden and his crew work to solve the mystery of Who Killed the Canterbury, Miller works to solve the mystery of Where is Julie Mao, each of them inching closer and closer to each other.
The things I don’t like about this book are what I don’t like about a lot of genre fiction: the characters are a bit tropey, and the dialogue can be a bit too quippy and Whedon-esque. There’s the honest-to-a-fault and entirely-too-moral main character, always with a zinger lined up; the ice-cold killer with a heart of gold and a soft-spot for children; the drunk and bitter detective; the engineer who is entirely too smart. We also don’t get a lot of character development in this book, but it’s book one of a nine-book series, so that will come in due time.
What I like most about this book is its detailed world and vision of a future in which the technology and habitats of humanity have changed drastically from our present time, yet humans themselves scarcely have. We still have the same hopes and fears, the same prejudices, the same desire to control things that can never be controlled. Instead of white vs. black, left vs. right, or America vs. everyone else, we have Belters vs. Inners: same shit, different sheen.
Hopefully the aliens will just blow us the fuck up.
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