Caliban's War - James S.A. Corey

The Blurb: The alien protomolecule is clear evidence of an intelligence beyond human reckoning. No one knows what exactly is being built on Venus, but whatever it is, it is vast, powerful, and terrifying.

When a creature of unknown origin and seemingly impossible physiology attacks soldiers on Ganymede, the fragile balance of power in the Solar System shatters. Now, the race is on to discover if the protomolecule has escaped Venus, or if someone is building an army of super-soldiers.

Jim Holden is the center of it all. In spite of everything, he’s still the best man for the job to find out what happened on Ganymede. Either way, the protomolecule is loose and Holden must find a way to stop it before war engulfs the entire system.

This is the second novel in Corey's Expanse series, the first being Leviathan Wakes. James S.A. Corey is the pen name for the collaboration of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and if they wrote this the same way they wrote Leviathan Wakes, each concentrated on the one of the main POV's, in this case Captain James Holden, Captain of the Rocinante  and Chrisjen Avasarala, a powerhouse of an UN politician. Both wants to save the universe.

The blending of two voices and styles was done much better than the first book, as it reads seamlessly between the different POV's. Chrisjen, who serves as the Undersecretary of Executive Administration, is a stand out character in this book. I feel this must have been heavily influenced by Abraham, seeing as it reminded me of his astounding Long Price Quartet with the political machinations done in an interesting way. She plays the Game brilliantly, but she has a single driving force. To keep people safe and the universe out of an all out war. 

Some new characters who also plays a huge role are also present. Gunnery Sergeant Bobbie Draper is a huge Martian Marine that lives through the slaughter of her whole platoon and has to struggle through the loss and keep her feelings of revenge in check. Praxidike Meng, a botanist from the breadbasket Ganymede, daughter gets kidnapped just before the unleashing of a new Protomolecule monster by some idiots, is the flame that lit the fuse in this novel. His single minded drive to find his daughter is done well, and I've felt his pain jumping off the page.

The depth of Corey's writing makes this book shine. There are no cardboard characters. Family ties are there and explained and the motivations are fleshed out, not just thrown in to move the story forward. I love the idea of humanity's drive to expand done in such a dirty, desperate way. It feels as if the space travel is real, and just beyond our current reach. No Warp Drives or Black Holes. Distance is a bitch in space and used as such. Oxygen and water is a problem that keeps everyone in check. Space Pirates that board ships and steal everything, including the air, makes all kinds of sense.

Now to the alien protomolecule that crashed on Venus in the previous novel. It's hinted at and talked about throughout the book, and the threat of something totally unknown a utterly alien hangs over everyone's heads. That is the crux of this novel. Humanity trying to prepare for an external threat, and loads of people with guns who are  twitchy is always bad. 

As soon as I finished this book I realised it's almost a prologue for the next one in the series.  The problems they faced here is going to be as nothing during what is to come. Important events happened and events unfolded that's going to be critical in the future. It's not a problem, but damn I can't wait for the next one.

9/10

Caliban's War - Sample

Here's a sample of the first chapter of Caliban's war, the second book in the frankly brilliant Expanse Saga.



“Snoopy’s out again,” Private Hillman said. “I think his CO must be pissed at him.”

Gunnery Sergeant Roberta Draper of the Martian Marine Corps upped the magnification on her armor’s heads‑up display and looked in the direction Hillman was pointing. Twenty-five hundred meters away, a squad of four United Nations Marines were tromping around their outpost, backlit by the giant greenhouse dome they were guarding. A greenhouse dome identical in nearly all respects to the dome her own squad was currently guarding.

One of the four UN Marines had black smudges on the sides of his helmet that looked like beagle ears.

“Yep, that’s Snoopy,” Bobbie said. “Been on every patrol detail so far today. Wonder what he did.”

Guard duty around the greenhouses on Ganymede meant doing what you could to keep your mind occupied. Including speculating on the lives of the Marines on the other side.

The other side. Eighteen months before, there hadn’t been sides. The inner planets had all been one big, happy, slightly dysfunctional family. Then Eros, and now the two superpowers were dividing up the solar system between them, and the one moon neither side was willing to give up was Ganymede, breadbasket of the Jovian system.

As the only moon with any magnetosphere, it was the only place where dome-grown crops stood a chance in Jupiter’s harsh radiation belt, and even then the domes and habitats still had to be shielded to protect civilians from the eight rems a day burning off Jupiter and onto the moon’s surface.

Bobbie’s armor had been designed to let a soldier walk through a nuclear bomb crater minutes after the blast. It also worked well at keeping Jupiter from frying Martian Marines.

Behind the Earth soldiers on patrol, their dome glowed in a shaft of weak sunlight captured by enormous orbital mirrors. Even with the mirrors, most terrestrial plants would have died, starved of sunlight. Only the heavily modified versions the Ganymede scientists cranked out could hope to survive in the trickle of light the mirrors fed them.

“Be sunset soon,” Bobbie said, still watching the Earth Marines outside their little guard hut, knowing they were watching her too. In addition to Snoopy, she spotted the one they called Stumpy because he or she couldn’t be much over a meter and a quarter tall. She wondered what their nickname for her was. Maybe Big Red. Her armor still had the Martian surface camouflage on it. She hadn’t been on Ganymede long enough to get it resurfaced with mottled gray and white.

One by one over the course of five minutes, the orbital mirrors winked out as Ganymede passed behind Jupiter for a few hours. The glow from the greenhouse behind her changed to actinic blue as the artificial lights came on. While the overall light level didn’t go down much, the shadows shifted in strange and subtle ways. Above, the sun—not even a disk from here as much as the brightest star—flashed as it passed behind Jupiter’s limb, and for a moment the planet’s faint ring system was visible.

“They’re going back in,” Corporal Travis said. “Snoop’s bringing up the rear. Poor guy. Can we bail too?”

Bobbie looked around at the featureless dirty ice of Ganymede. Even in her high-tech armor she could feel the moon’s chill.

“Nope.”

Her squad grumbled but fell in line as she led them on a slow low-gravity shuffle around the dome. In addition to Hillman and Travis, she had a green private named Gourab on this particular patrol. And even though he’d been in the Marines all of about a minute and a half, he grumbled just as loud as the other two in his Mariner Valley drawl.

She couldn’t blame them. It was make-work. Something for the Martian soldiers on Ganymede to do to keep them busy. If Earth decided it needed Ganymede all to itself, four grunts walking around the greenhouse dome wouldn’t stop them. With dozens of Earth and Mars warships in a tense standoff in orbit, if hostilities broke out the ground pounders would probably find out only when the surface bombardment began.

To her left, the dome rose to almost half a kilometer: triangular glass panels separated by gleaming copper-colored struts that turned the entire structure into a massive Faraday cage. Bobbie had never been inside one of the greenhouse domes. She’d been sent out from Mars as part of a surge in troops to the outer planets and had been walking patrols on the surface almost since day one. Ganymede to her was a spaceport, a small Marine base, and the even smaller guard outpost she currently called home.

As they shuffled around the dome, Bobbie watched the unremarkable landscape. Ganymede didn’t change much without a catastrophic event. The surface was mostly silicate rock and water ice a few degrees warmer than space. The atmosphere was oxygen so thin it could pass as an industrial vacuum. Ganymede didn’t erode or weather. It changed when rocks fell on it from space, or when warm water from the liquid core forced itself onto the surface and created short-lived lakes. Neither thing happened all that often. At home on Mars, wind and dust changed the landscape hourly. Here, she was walking through the footsteps of the day before and the day before and the day before. And if she never came back, those footprints would outlive her. Privately, she thought it was sort of creepy.

A rhythmic squeaking started to cut through the normally smooth hiss and thump sounds her powered armor made. She usually kept the suit’s HUD minimized. It got so crowded with information that a marine knew everything except what was actually in front of her. Now she pulled it up, using blinks and eye movements to page over to the suit diagnostic screen. A yellow telltale warned her that the suit’s left knee actuator was low on hydraulic fluid. Must be a leak somewhere, but a slow one, because the suit couldn’t find it.

“Hey, guys, hold up a minute,” Bobbie said. “Hilly, you have any extra hydraulic fluid in your pack?”

“Yep,” said Hillman, already pulling it out.

“Give my left knee a squirt, would you?”

While Hillman crouched in front of her, working on her suit, Gourab and Travis began an argument that seemed to be about sports. Bobbie tuned it out.

“This suit is ancient,” Hillman said. “You really oughta upgrade. This sort of thing is just going to happen more and more often, you know.”

“Yeah, I should,” Bobbie said. But the truth was that was easier said than done. Bobbie was not the right shape to fit into one of the standard suits, and the Marines made her jump through a series of flaming hoops every time she requisitioned a new custom one. At a bit over two meters tall, she was only slightly above average height for a Martian male, but thanks in part to her Polynesian ancestry, she weighed in at over a hundred kilos at one g. None of it was fat, but her muscles seemed to get bigger every time she even walked through a weight room. As a marine, she trained all the time.

The suit she had now was the first one in twelve years of active duty that actually fit well. And even though it was beginning to show its age, it was just easier to try to keep it running than beg and plead for a new one.

Hillman was starting to put his tools away when Bobbie’s radio crackled to life.

“Outpost four to stickman. Come in, stickman.”

“Roger four,” Bobbie replied. “This is stickman one. Go ahead.”

“Stickman one, where are you guys? You’re half an hour late and some shit is going down over here.”

“Sorry, four, equipment trouble,” Bobbie said, wondering what sort of shit might be going down, but not enough to ask about it over an open frequency.

“Return to the outpost immediately. We have shots fired at the UN outpost. We’re going into lockdown.”

It took Bobbie a moment to parse that. She could see her men staring at her, their faces a mix of puzzlement and fear.

“Uh, the Earth guys are shooting at you?” she finally asked.

“Not yet, but they’re shooting. Get your asses back here.”

Hillman pushed to his feet. Bobbie flexed her knee once and got greens on her diagnostic. She gave Hilly a nod of thanks, then said, “Double-time it back to the outpost. Go.”

The rest can be read over here. The book will be released 26 June 2012. Leviathan Wakes was my best book of 2011, so I can't wait for this!

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

The Blurb: Welcome to the future. Humanity has colonized the solar system – Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond – but the stars are still out of our reach.

Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, The Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for – and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to The Scopuli and rebel sympathizer, Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations – and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.

This is the first book of the Expanse by James S.A. Corey, who is the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. It is brilliant. I can stop the review right there. Go and read it.

OK. A few words. It seems that Abraham and Franck wrote the two main characters, Miller and Holden's chapters on their own(ish), then polished the complete work together so that it flows nicely. I thought that it would be difficult to get into the flow of the book, but I was really pleasantly surprised. The brilliant upshot of writing in a team is that the two main characters each have a very distinctive voice, character and thought pattern. Holden is the crusader of righteousness, Miller the semi-alcoholic burnt out detective.  They react differently to the same pressures, and it makes for some fun reading.

The setting of the book is mostly in the Kuiper Belt, with people who work and live there seen as the lower class, scummy part of our universe. It's the industrial district of space. Mars is terraformed (mostly) and being lived on and Earth still exist, which is nice. All three cultures hate each other, which is right up our human nature alley.

Holden starts to flounder the deeper into the plot we go. His black/white world view starts to struggle when morality is more a shade of grey. He sticks by his decisions, come hell or high water. He stands by his crew, and he deserves respect for it.

Miller is my favourite though. Drunk for the first part of the book, hallucinating and half insane for the rest. He sees the world as it is. Broken and cynical. He does what he knows is right, even at major cost to himself. All for the best of humanity.

I was put off from science fiction for quite a few years, but these guys has restored my faith in the genre. Epic scope, brilliant characters, believable physics for a sci fi book and loads of fun! 
Hell, it was good enough the keep me off Skyrim last night.

10/10 

Current Reading

I felt that I needed a change of scenery reading wise so to speak, and I thought I'll give good old Sci Fi another bash. I've been put off in the past by all the weird sex that the writers hope will happen in the future. Hmmmm.

I've only heard good things about Leviathan Wakes though. It's a collaboration written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pseudonym James S.A. Corey. I'm a Abraham fan, and this is the first thing I'm reading that Franck has done. I'm about halfwayish and enjoying it immensely. A review should be up next week sometime.

In other news, my huge bookase is done and up! For a first ever woodworking project, it went surprisingly well. I bled quite a bit, but no stitches was needed. Photographic proof will be added as soon as I can find my damn camera.