Big announcement: Book Review Contest Loser

It's happened again: I have failed. If you're interested in a non-award-winning review of Leviathan Wakes, you're in luck.

Over on Freddie deBoer’s substack, I have once again lost the book review contest.

BUT!! For the second time, a friend has won!!! Congratulations Carina!!!! (Disclosure: I’ve already read her review, and it is a hilarious yet incisive look at former-pro-wrestler John Cena’s children’s book. You simply must read it when it’s published.) But back to me, and my inability to succeed.

Now seems like a good time to remind you to like and subscribe:

Just kidding of course. I’m actually proud of this review: it tracks my initial response to and gradual shift in perspective of The Expanse series book 1, Leviathan Wakes. I highly, highly recommend the sprawling space opera by James S.A. Corey. Enjoy!

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Pathetic. Unlikable. Clichéd. Detective Miller is a tedious trope. Bold move making a misanthropic, washed-up, kind of skeezy guy a point-of-view protagonist, never mind in a debut novel, but that’s what James S.A. Corey did in Leviathan Wakes. He’s a 30-year veteran working in a cubicle, bad at team sports and good at poker—not that we ever see either; he just says so about himself. He drinks too much, has an ex-wife, and throws around boxing terms. He wears a goddamn porkpie hat. He becomes obsessed with a woman decades his junior. Gets “too close to the case.” Speaks in clipped sentences.

I mean, it’s not good. Perhaps worse, Miller is written earnestly.

Miller is one of two protagonists in Leviathan Wakes, the first novel in a nine-book space opera series. Aside from the book’s prologue, written from the point of view of a mysterious captive named Julie, the chapters alternate between the perspectives of Detective Miller and yet another trope in the form of ladykiller James Holden, a didn’t-live-up-to-his-potential former Navy man who finds himself working on a low-status merchant ship.

Supporting characters include overqualified engineer—and get this, it’s a girl!—Naomi, meathead mechanic Amos, and pilot Alex, who greets people with a drawling “Howdy!” and refers to Holden as “boss.”

Sigh.

At the center of the plot is the mysterious disappearance of Julie Mao, the gal from the prologue, who, it turns out, is the daughter of a rich Earth-based shipping magnate, the co-owner of Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile. Miller is tasked with finding her, but not really; he soon realizes he was selected for the dead-end task because he was likely to fuck up a job that Important People wanted fucked up. Holden’s plotline, which will eventually intersect with Miller’s, is driven by the inexplicable destruction of civilian ship that leaves him and his crew stranded on a—wait for it—technologically superlative Martian warship they happened to stumble upon and know how to fly.

The setting is what kept me interested, despite bromidic lines from Miller like “Every one of you I have to arrest or cripple or kill” and Holden’s testosterone-fueled yet naïve decision making. Miller and Holden live in a realistic potential future, a couple hundred years of technology and space exploration seeing humanity expand from an overpopulated Earth first to Mars, then to space stations in the asteroid belt, and even moons of outer planets. The world-building is richly developed and unencumbered by lore, the way many fantasy or alternate-universe sci-fi stories can be. The tech is more than plausible: nuclear-powered engines; low-gravity human habitats; and feats of scientific ingenuity like terraforming, spin gravity, and sunlight-amplifying space mirrors. “Hand terminals” are the unbranded and upgraded smartphones of the future.

Readers will also find the political landscape familiar and believable, if fast-forwarded a few centuries. Earth is one political entity headed by a revamped and updated United Nations; Mars is another political and, more importantly, military powerhouse; the Outer Planets are a meaningful but less influential player, filled with “Belters,” the people of an oppressed culture, who rely on Earth and Mars for resources even as they provide the spacefaring labor and expertise. Refreshingly, the Belters are a mix of humanity’s phenotypes and languages, with a patois all their own. Apparently in the future racism still exists, it’s just based on the length of your bones and your muscle mass—the physiology of a low-gravity life—rather than your skin color. (Belters tend to be tall and lean and completely unsuited to Earth’s comparatively punishing gravity well.)

All very interesting. So I kept reading.

I’m not usually a fan of inserting an author’s identity into the discussion of a book—art is separate from the artist, and all that—but in this case, a few background details provide context that may help skeptical readers press on despite Miller’s cringey, Dick Wolf-style one-liners and Holden’s toxic masculinity or whatever.

Leviathan Wakes author James S.A. Corey is actually two people: Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Franck (a personal assistant to the contemporary king of fantasy George R.R. Martin) and Abraham developed The Expanse series from an original idea for a tabletop role-playing game.

For the uninitiated, which I was, tabletop RPGs require players to pick an archetype, then build a character from that archetype, often using literal rolls of the dice to determine a character’s strengths and weaknesses: their raw materials of ability. Usually steeped in fantasy—think Dungeons and Dragons, which hit markets in the 1970s—potential identities include “classes” like mage, fighter, cleric, and so on.

Each character’s choices, bound by her inherent class parameters, influence the unfolding adventure; the interplay of multiple characters’ strengths and weaknesses even more so (the group of players is known as a “party”). A character’s initial highly prescribed flatness is by design. Over time, plot experiences outside the players’ control—or events that arise because of a character’s behavior—will lead to significant character differentiation and complexity. Often, this fluidity births unplanned plot twists.

Though I’ve never played an ongoing RPG myself, it’s a fascinating conceit for a book series. Dungeons and Dragons innovated gaming by blending rules of play with a highly literary archetypal framework and improvisational performance. It’s more than just opera for nerds: Abraham and Franck have innovated written storytelling by allowing the story and the characters to coevolve, changing each other to make something at once familiar and yet unique. In a particularly clever turn, The Expanse’s plot itself could be considered a character (you’ll see; no spoilers). Fortunately, they have the writing chops to take such a formal device from eye-rolling convention to moving, resonant explorations of human nature. After all, stereotypes and tropes and archetypes exist for a reason.

As the cultivation of Holden and Miller advanced and the plot unfolded, I realized the uncharitable hot take on Leviathan Wakes was wrong.

In RPG parlance, Detective Miller is a rogue. Rogues, the official website D&D Beyond explains, rely on their skills and cunning. Rogues are resourceful. They solve problems with little regard for ethics. Most rogues “live up to the worst stereotypes of the class.” Corey (as I’ll refer to the authors from here on) applies a gumshoe trope to the rogue archetype, and the result is private-security-firm Detective Josephus Miller.

He’d been working Ceres security for thirty years, and he hadn’t started with many illusions in place. The joke was that Ceres didn’t have laws—it had police. His hands weren’t any cleaner than Captain Shaddid’s. Sometimes people fell out of airlocks. Sometimes evidence vanishes from the lockers. It wasn’t so much that it was right or wrong as that it was justified. …a certain moral flexibility was necessary.

Almost less interesting than an alcohol-soaked, jaded cop is a good-looking, somewhat vapid Dude who’s an idiot about women, but that’s James Holden. He’s also a dogged follower of rules, not because he’s a sheep, but because at heart he’s a Good Guy (he’s abashed by his own inability to cut corners—one of those weaknesses that’s just a strength in disguise, like volunteering too much).

Holden’s annoying inflexibility and self-righteous myopia make sense in the context of his class: he’s a paladin. Paladins maintain a single-minded dedication to justice, an often wearisome quality. “Whatever their origin and their mission,” explains D&D Beyond, “in a moment of desperation and grief with the dead as the only witness, a paladin’s oath is a powerful bond…to stand with the good things of the world against the encroaching darkness, and to hunt the forces of evil wherever they lurk.”

Does that hold true? Let’s see:

Heat bloomed in Holden’s chest. He wasn’t scared. Aneurism-inducing rage made his temples pound and his fists squeeze until his tendons hurt. He flipped on the comms and aimed a tightbeam at the retreating ship. … “You don’t get to just fly away, you murderous son of a bitch. I don’t care what your reasons are…You need to know who they were. I am sending to you the name and photograph of everyone who just died in that ship. Take a good look at what you did. Think about that while I work on finding out who you are.”

Holden’s paladin nature offers direction to his extended story arc, which will last remarkably (and, truth be told, effectually) for nine books: “Sometimes their oaths lead them into the service of the crown as leaders of elite groups of knights, but even then their loyalty is first to the cause of righteousness, not to crown and country.” Political intrigue ensues.

In RPGs, character and plot work together rather than one suiting the other’s aims, though the ongoing force of the larger story (or “campaign”) is punctuated by occasional deus ex machina flourishes of the dungeon master—the non-playing storyteller, a Greek god of the game who drives the plot while presenting obstacles, imposing his will and whim if the characters aggravate his sensibilities. And as always, there’s no accounting for mood and personality.

With every injection of plot arises another opportunity for character growth and change, or failure and regret. Each character emerges from a conflict changed—improved or weakened, more judicious or jaded. It is that matured version of the character who will encounter the next obstacle, which will always come. Ultimately, the most predictable aspect of this form is the relentlessness of the greater world’s unfolding.

Crucially, obviously, Leviathan Wakes is a book, not a game. Abraham and Franck hold all the reigns: they are the gods, creating both the characters and the plot. I am fascinated, though, by the creative conventions they have chosen for scaffolding, a combination of prescription and cooperation taken even to the extreme of sharing authorship (the idea was originally Franck’s). Even alternating chapter-by-chapter points of view is a device essential to the series—no two books will share the same narrative perspectives.

So they use clever devices, so what? What are they trying to say? And do they say it well?

Holden’s narrative takes a global perspective of human relationships, an interesting contrast to the micro-setting, which is alternatively within a close-quartered spaceship and cramped habitation tunnels. Space is vast, after all, but humans exist only sporadically, in small bubbles of air. In such a pared-down setting, he learns that even the best intentions won’t shield you from derision or, still more devastating, absolve you of culpability.

Even as Holden develops meaningful and lasting interpersonal connections, Miller becomes increasingly isolated. Miller’s dead-end missing persons case turns into an obsession, which he follows all the way from his home dwarf-planet, Ceres (named for the goddess of plebeian laws), to an asteroid settlement called Eros (named for the god of passion and sensual love), apt choices for Miller and his unsettling emotional fixation.

However, Corey didn’t invent these asteroids. Ceres really is a dwarf planet in our solar system’s asteroid belt, and Eros really is a Mars-orbit-crossing, near-earth asteroid—an important fact that adds science-adjacent credibility to a later deus ex machina moment. Noteworthy: the goddess Ceres also presides over agricultural fertility; Eros, human fertility. Apt, as the novel’s unfolding intrigue will threaten human flourishing and our ability to control—or not—the leviathan of natural forces that we seek to manipulate.

Perhaps most distressing, though, is Miller’s final confrontation with himself. He knows he’s a joke, that his life hasn’t amounted to much.

“You are, and you aren’t. You are, and you aren’t. You are, and you aren’t,” an inane voice speaks to Miller near the book’s end, when he finds himself more alone than any other human in the universe. Contemplating without distraction the insoluble but inescapable questions at the heart of all our personal comedies, dramas, tragedies. Am I the hero, or a villain? An individual, or a stereotype? Precious, or pointless? I am not special, true, but am I at least significant?

You are, and you aren’t. You are, and you aren’t. You are, and you aren’t.