Book: Caliban's war
Feb. 11th, 2014 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: James SA Corey
Details: (c) 2010 Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck; Pub Orbit 2013; ISBN 978-1-84149-991-8
Verdict: Caliban's war is an exciting sequel which really improves on the first volume of the trilogy.
Reasons for reading it: I enjoyed the first in this series, Leviathan Wakes a great deal. And![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rysmiel assured me that the sequel benefits from
How it came into my hands: I attempted to buy it from Barnes and Noble for my new shiny Nook. But something went wrong with the DRM somehow and I couldn't read the file. Which did not exactly give me great faith in using my Nook as intended, a terminal for B&N's online shop. So I kept meaning to break the DRM or download a pirate version or even argue with B&N about taking my money and selling me a file I couldn't use, but in the end I happened on a copy in the library sooner than I got round to doing any of those things.
Basically everything I liked in Leviathan wakes I still like in Caliban's war. It's exciting throughout; even with a long and complex plot and that technique I often dislike of switching between multiple viewpoints and jumping to a different subplot just when the action gets to a cliffhanger, I could hardly bear to stop reading. I more or less devoured the (long) book at a gulp. Abraham and Franck are particularly good at keeping the stakes high; I never felt like I didn't believe in yet another threat to all of humanity across the galaxy, because CW really does sustain the impression of a very fragile and complex situation where there are in fact multiple interconnected annihilation threats. I suppose it helped that I already knew from LW that these writers are more than prepared to kill major characters or have their desperate tiny chance moves fail.
I do love some of the characters in this, including the much better gender balance. I loved Avasarala the politician superhero very much; she's old, and ethnically (south) Asian, and extremely sarcastic and sweary, and she's awesome in ways that lots of books don't really notice is awesome, especially when it's women running subtle geopolitical games and consolidating power. Bobbie is perhaps a bit too much filling the niche of the kick-ass heroine; I really enjoyed all the sections from her viewpoint and her traditionally male story role of the ultra fighter who has lost everything and takes on a suicide mission to avenge fallen comrades. But I would have liked her a lot better if the narrative, no matter whose head we're supposed to be in, even her own, avoided going on and on about how sexy she is. I like that Naomi gets more development beyond just being a love interest for Holden. In fact my favourite character is male after all: Prax the botanist, who is useless in a fight but displays a courage that isn't physical and sometimes manages to save the day through the scientific method. I really can't help loving scientists who do actual science, and his frustration at trying to explain his reasoning to people with no scientific training is just beautiful. I still sometimes felt like Abraham and Franck were ticking "representation" boxes a bit, especially with everybody's race being carefully described and most of them being mixed cos it's The Future and we've moved on beyond twentieth century ethnic divisions. But in lots of ways what I really like about CW is that's such an ensemble piece, there's no special chosen one who saves the day through awesome, it's just a bunch of (undoubtedly exceptional) people who are more or less effective in different situations and sometimes screw up and ultimately win by working together.
CW is noticeably the middle of a trilogy, and it is in many ways traditional space opera. So I wouldn't recommend it to people who don't already know they like this kind of thing, but if you do, it's a really great read. It would work if you hadn't read LW, but it's definitely better as a sequel than a stand-alone. The plot depends rather less than LW on the amazing capabilities of completely imaginary space weapons, and the light-speed limited solar system is even more fleshed out here and seems almost big enough to actually be a whole solar system. The blurb compares it to Star Wars; honestly I'd say it's a lot more like Firefly in book form, though the worldbuilding does make rather more sense than Whedon's.
Details: (c) 2010 Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck; Pub Orbit 2013; ISBN 978-1-84149-991-8
Verdict: Caliban's war is an exciting sequel which really improves on the first volume of the trilogy.
Reasons for reading it: I enjoyed the first in this series, Leviathan Wakes a great deal. And
rysmiel assured me that the sequel benefits from more female characters, fewer vomit zombieswhich made me all the more inclined to read it.
How it came into my hands: I attempted to buy it from Barnes and Noble for my new shiny Nook. But something went wrong with the DRM somehow and I couldn't read the file. Which did not exactly give me great faith in using my Nook as intended, a terminal for B&N's online shop. So I kept meaning to break the DRM or download a pirate version or even argue with B&N about taking my money and selling me a file I couldn't use, but in the end I happened on a copy in the library sooner than I got round to doing any of those things.
Basically everything I liked in Leviathan wakes I still like in Caliban's war. It's exciting throughout; even with a long and complex plot and that technique I often dislike of switching between multiple viewpoints and jumping to a different subplot just when the action gets to a cliffhanger, I could hardly bear to stop reading. I more or less devoured the (long) book at a gulp. Abraham and Franck are particularly good at keeping the stakes high; I never felt like I didn't believe in yet another threat to all of humanity across the galaxy, because CW really does sustain the impression of a very fragile and complex situation where there are in fact multiple interconnected annihilation threats. I suppose it helped that I already knew from LW that these writers are more than prepared to kill major characters or have their desperate tiny chance moves fail.
I do love some of the characters in this, including the much better gender balance. I loved Avasarala the politician superhero very much; she's old, and ethnically (south) Asian, and extremely sarcastic and sweary, and she's awesome in ways that lots of books don't really notice is awesome, especially when it's women running subtle geopolitical games and consolidating power. Bobbie is perhaps a bit too much filling the niche of the kick-ass heroine; I really enjoyed all the sections from her viewpoint and her traditionally male story role of the ultra fighter who has lost everything and takes on a suicide mission to avenge fallen comrades. But I would have liked her a lot better if the narrative, no matter whose head we're supposed to be in, even her own, avoided going on and on about how sexy she is. I like that Naomi gets more development beyond just being a love interest for Holden. In fact my favourite character is male after all: Prax the botanist, who is useless in a fight but displays a courage that isn't physical and sometimes manages to save the day through the scientific method. I really can't help loving scientists who do actual science, and his frustration at trying to explain his reasoning to people with no scientific training is just beautiful. I still sometimes felt like Abraham and Franck were ticking "representation" boxes a bit, especially with everybody's race being carefully described and most of them being mixed cos it's The Future and we've moved on beyond twentieth century ethnic divisions. But in lots of ways what I really like about CW is that's such an ensemble piece, there's no special chosen one who saves the day through awesome, it's just a bunch of (undoubtedly exceptional) people who are more or less effective in different situations and sometimes screw up and ultimately win by working together.
CW is noticeably the middle of a trilogy, and it is in many ways traditional space opera. So I wouldn't recommend it to people who don't already know they like this kind of thing, but if you do, it's a really great read. It would work if you hadn't read LW, but it's definitely better as a sequel than a stand-alone. The plot depends rather less than LW on the amazing capabilities of completely imaginary space weapons, and the light-speed limited solar system is even more fleshed out here and seems almost big enough to actually be a whole solar system. The blurb compares it to Star Wars; honestly I'd say it's a lot more like Firefly in book form, though the worldbuilding does make rather more sense than Whedon's.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-12 09:59 am (UTC)