Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
So, I’m late to this series. There’s 7 books out of a planned 9 (plus novellas). There’s a TV show that I hear the authors love, despite its deviations from the books. (I haven’t seen it yet) I heard an interview on Sword and Laser with the two men who make up James S.A. Corey and the series intrigued me; especially the part where the first book was a noir detective story. I LOVE those. Plus I’ve really been getting into working-man-in-space stories since many of our SF stories are about the best of the best (or people destined to become best of the best). JSAC makes a reference to Alien in an interview added to the end of this book and I agree with that.
Just like George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones (who is also mentioned in the post-story interview) this book switched POV chapters and has opening and closing chapters with POVs who aren’t main POV chapter characters for the rest of the book.
I really enjoyed this book and I thought JSAC did a great job of balancing heroics with realism. Yeah, it’s a heroic tale in which the protagonists are mostly great and the enemy is mostly evil. But there are important shades of grey as well as a world that operates realistically in the way it deals with news. In 2017’s Fake News and so on era, this book even hits harder than it did when first published.
I want to leave you with this quote I loved from the epilogue because I love the honesty of how death so dramatically changes our memories:
“He was a good man,” Holden said.
“He wasn’t,” Fred said. “But he did his job. And now I’ve got to go do
mine.”