Book: Leviathan Wakes
Oct. 7th, 2012 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: James SA Corey
Details: (c) 2011 James SA Corey; Pub 2011 Hachette Digital; ISBN 9780748122967
Verdict: Leviathan Wakes is really strong, pacey, intelligent space opera.
Reasons for reading it:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rysmiel informed me that James SA Corey is a pseudonym for a collaboration including Daniel Abraham, whose Long Price quartet I thought very highly of.
How it came into my hands: I paid full price for it from Books On Board.
The buzz about Abraham's pseudonymous writing is that it's more conventional than The Long Price. And yes, to some extent, Leviathan wakes isn't genre-challenging, it's straight down the line space opera with lots of battles between futuristic spaceships and handwavy tech. It's also very good space opera, and includes considerable elements of originality even within the overarching conventional structure; in many ways it's more consistently good than The Long Price overall, even if it doesn't reach quite the high points of the very best elements of that series. The thing that Abraham-writing-as-Corey is really good at is telling a story at multiple different scales; there's interpersonal stuff, with really good characterization, there's factional rivalries within and between enterprises of varying degrees of legality, there's political intrigue, there's interplanetary tension and warfare, and there's humans versus utterly weird extra-solar aliens, and as a reader I cared about all of those levels and the interplay between them. LW is a long and complex books, but the pace never really drops, I was always excited to find out what would happen next. And the blending and intertwining of so many levels of plot means that Corey can keep up almost constant jeopardy, upping the stakes as appropriate, without losing the emotional impact of each successive dire threat.
In some ways Miller and Holden are clichés, the jaded noir detective and the idealistic, loyal starship captain. But they're so well drawn that I completely believed in them, and the alternating chapters worked really well. I wasn't frustrated by the structure with the first two thirds switching between almost unconnected stories, and then drawing the two together at the end so that you're seeing the same scene through different eyes; that's something that can easily be annoying, but in LW it works really well to develop both characters and make the worldbuilding seem vivid. Ever since being exposed to A tale of two cities at an impressionable age, I've been a complete sucker for that style of unlikely martyr narrative, and Miller makes for a magnificent Carson figure. I also like the way that Holden's idealism has real consequences; the reader may be encouraged to root for him, but when he does the right thing even though everybody else is out for personal profit, in the middle of an interplanetary war his impetuosity sometimes gets people killed. The secondary characters are not as vivid, they're more types than real people, and the attempts at gender and racial equality can tend towards being a bit clunky and tokenist. Still, kudos for to some extent subverting the apparent fridged-woman set-up of the prologue.
LW is considerably more violent than the sort of things I normally enjoy. There's a whole lot of basically boring weapons porn about the military capacities of the imagined spaceships, and even more old-fashioned, interpersonal violence including detailed descriptions of shooting people. And it's really vividly gory in lots of places, whether it's the rather horror-ish descriptions of the alien virus thing, or medically accurate details of the effects of major radiation exposure. You know how Amazon has characteristic two-word phrases for its books? One of them for LW is vomit zombies, and that tells you quite a lot. It doesn't make sense to ask whether the violence is gratuitous, because it's basically the whole book; for my part I kept going, even when the descriptions were making me feel quite sick, simply because the book is that good. And mercifully, the elements of sexual violence, while they do provide plot points, are very clearly and specifically never sexy.
Like the best space opera, LW did make me feel as if what I was seeing was plot-relevant glimpse of an entire solar system, not just some guy's favourite bit of western European military history In Spaaaaace. It's not pretending to be hard SF, and other than the weapon porn is free of long infodumps about exactly how the futuristic tech works. But there's a very nice emotional sense of the economics of humanity being spread out across the solar system, the social and personality consequences of living for several centuries on a terraformed Mars, or on various moons, or ekeing out an existence within the asteroid belt, or remaining behind on a dying but still revered Earth. And the way that this leads to conflicts and different attitudes feels very plausible, while people are still individuals, not just typical specimens of their imaginary cultures.
LW exhibits one of the best plot twists I've ever come across, what I believepapersky refers to as a "trapdoor moment," when something heart-stoppingly unexpected happened and it completely changed my interpretation of everything I'd read up to that point. Really brilliant! And I definitely liked the ending; it was satisfying, it resolved the novel as a complete arc, but it still also opened out the story to yet another level, and made me more eager for a sequel rather than feeling cheated at an unfinished story.
Details: (c) 2011 James SA Corey; Pub 2011 Hachette Digital; ISBN 9780748122967
Verdict: Leviathan Wakes is really strong, pacey, intelligent space opera.
Reasons for reading it:
rysmiel informed me that James SA Corey is a pseudonym for a collaboration including Daniel Abraham, whose Long Price quartet I thought very highly of.How it came into my hands: I paid full price for it from Books On Board.
The buzz about Abraham's pseudonymous writing is that it's more conventional than The Long Price. And yes, to some extent, Leviathan wakes isn't genre-challenging, it's straight down the line space opera with lots of battles between futuristic spaceships and handwavy tech. It's also very good space opera, and includes considerable elements of originality even within the overarching conventional structure; in many ways it's more consistently good than The Long Price overall, even if it doesn't reach quite the high points of the very best elements of that series. The thing that Abraham-writing-as-Corey is really good at is telling a story at multiple different scales; there's interpersonal stuff, with really good characterization, there's factional rivalries within and between enterprises of varying degrees of legality, there's political intrigue, there's interplanetary tension and warfare, and there's humans versus utterly weird extra-solar aliens, and as a reader I cared about all of those levels and the interplay between them. LW is a long and complex books, but the pace never really drops, I was always excited to find out what would happen next. And the blending and intertwining of so many levels of plot means that Corey can keep up almost constant jeopardy, upping the stakes as appropriate, without losing the emotional impact of each successive dire threat.
In some ways Miller and Holden are clichés, the jaded noir detective and the idealistic, loyal starship captain. But they're so well drawn that I completely believed in them, and the alternating chapters worked really well. I wasn't frustrated by the structure with the first two thirds switching between almost unconnected stories, and then drawing the two together at the end so that you're seeing the same scene through different eyes; that's something that can easily be annoying, but in LW it works really well to develop both characters and make the worldbuilding seem vivid. Ever since being exposed to A tale of two cities at an impressionable age, I've been a complete sucker for that style of unlikely martyr narrative, and Miller makes for a magnificent Carson figure. I also like the way that Holden's idealism has real consequences; the reader may be encouraged to root for him, but when he does the right thing even though everybody else is out for personal profit, in the middle of an interplanetary war his impetuosity sometimes gets people killed. The secondary characters are not as vivid, they're more types than real people, and the attempts at gender and racial equality can tend towards being a bit clunky and tokenist. Still, kudos for to some extent subverting the apparent fridged-woman set-up of the prologue.
LW is considerably more violent than the sort of things I normally enjoy. There's a whole lot of basically boring weapons porn about the military capacities of the imagined spaceships, and even more old-fashioned, interpersonal violence including detailed descriptions of shooting people. And it's really vividly gory in lots of places, whether it's the rather horror-ish descriptions of the alien virus thing, or medically accurate details of the effects of major radiation exposure. You know how Amazon has characteristic two-word phrases for its books? One of them for LW is vomit zombies, and that tells you quite a lot. It doesn't make sense to ask whether the violence is gratuitous, because it's basically the whole book; for my part I kept going, even when the descriptions were making me feel quite sick, simply because the book is that good. And mercifully, the elements of sexual violence, while they do provide plot points, are very clearly and specifically never sexy.
Like the best space opera, LW did make me feel as if what I was seeing was plot-relevant glimpse of an entire solar system, not just some guy's favourite bit of western European military history In Spaaaaace. It's not pretending to be hard SF, and other than the weapon porn is free of long infodumps about exactly how the futuristic tech works. But there's a very nice emotional sense of the economics of humanity being spread out across the solar system, the social and personality consequences of living for several centuries on a terraformed Mars, or on various moons, or ekeing out an existence within the asteroid belt, or remaining behind on a dying but still revered Earth. And the way that this leads to conflicts and different attitudes feels very plausible, while people are still individuals, not just typical specimens of their imaginary cultures.
LW exhibits one of the best plot twists I've ever come across, what I believe
papersky refers to as a "trapdoor moment," when something heart-stoppingly unexpected happened and it completely changed my interpretation of everything I'd read up to that point. Really brilliant! And I definitely liked the ending; it was satisfying, it resolved the novel as a complete arc, but it still also opened out the story to yet another level, and made me more eager for a sequel rather than feeling cheated at an unfinished story.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-17 03:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-18 09:45 pm (UTC)