Review: The Expanse: Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

The Eighth Doctor is back... always! My review of his most recent adventure, Ravenous 2, is up now at Unreality SF, as is my review of Bernice Summerfield: Epoch.

Trade paperback, 582 pages
Published 2011
Acquired October 2016

Read February 2018

Leviathan Wakes: Book One of The Expanse
by James S.A. Corey

I read this book after seeing the first two seasons of the tv show, so that was a bit of an oddity that influenced my whole way of experiencing the text; I kept imagining the tv actors performing the dialogue. Honestly, that kind of worked to my advantage, because I think at the beginning, especially, it's hard to get a sense of the main characters as people. The book just kind of makes them nice folks who get along. On the other hand, it's especially obvious which one of them is not going to actually become a main character, whereas on tv, I found the same moment really startling.

It's interesting how the show and the books are paced so differently. The events of Leviathan Wakes actually correspond to the first season of the show, plus the first few episodes of season two. In the show, the finale of the first season seems like a climax; in the book it's another point of escalation in the middle, even though it's basically the same events. The tv show adds a main character who's not in the novel (apparently she'll appear in book two), and since she's in politics, this gives a wider context to the adventures of our heroes; however, I was surprised that the book is still able to communicate this context, but maybe I shouldn't have been, since of course a novel can fill in those kind of details in a lot of ways. The politics viewpoint character in the show is on Earth, though, while the book gives us much more of a feeling for how the Belters feel about things, and why they do what they do.

The most striking difference, though, is speed. The show, for all the fact that it's harder sf than 90% of the sf on tv, gives the impression these spaceships get around the solar system at a pretty brisk clip, in a couple of hours when something's on the line. But in the novel, it's all we've got to get there as fast as we can... that'll take a few days. It's different, and I see why tv can't do that, but I like it a lot, it makes the universe feel lived in and real and distant and lonely.