Review: The Expanse: Babylon's Ashes by James S.A. Corey

Originally published: 2016
Acquired: May 2020
Read: August 2020

Babylon's Ashes: Book Six of The Expanse
by James S.A. Corey

One thing I like about The Expanse is the way it structures each individual novel, and the way it plays with those structures. Book one had two alternating narrators; books two through five had four, though it didn't move through them in a strict rotation, instead bouncing back and forth as needed. (Plus each book has additional narrators for the prologue and epilogue.) Book six initially seems like it's going to have six: we're introduced to four narrators in turn, then we cycle back to the first, then to the second. But then a fifth is added, then a sixth. All in all, Babylon's Ashes features sixteen narrators, though some just for a chapter or two.

I wasn't sure what I thought about this. It definitely gives a wider perspective on events; some of the earlier novels, I think, struggled to place the events in the broader political and cultural context of the solar system. It's also nice to check in with characters such as Prax, who I suspect we will have no reason to hear from again. But it also prevents the book from obtaining a thematic unity because the character arcs that I think are supposed to be important don't have enough room. I feel like there was something about Holden's increasing awareness that doing the right thing is complicated that was too subdued to be clear; similarly, I think Michio Pa's arc was meant to resonate with that, but she often seemed to vanish from the narrative, and we would only hear about things she did, instead of see them. I think I would sacrifice hearing from Prax again to make that work better. I wanted to hear more from Filip, too, though I liked how his story arc ended.

I'm curious about where this series is going. The first trilogy was very directly about the protomolecule; the middle one was more about the consequences the protomolecule has had on the wider politics of humanity. I like that idea in theory, but I also found that the all three books of the middle trilogy were weaker than all three weeks of the first trilogy. I wonder if the protomolecule will come into increased prominence again in the final trilogy, and if the series will recover the energy and depth it had in the original trilogy. Babylon's Ashes was fine, at times very good, but I feel like there's a better version of it that could have existed.

I read an Expanse story every eighty-ish days. Next up in sequence: Strange Dogs