Since I read this book after watching the first three seasons of the television show, The Expanse, my opinions of the book are colored by my experience with the adaptation. For example, my favorite thing about this book was finally meeting two of my favorite characters in print. Avasarala and Bobbie are amazing and I adore them.
Though we see more of the bigger picture of what’s going on in the solar system due to Avasarala’s position in the United Nations government, there’s still a focus on the smaller perspective in this book. The descriptions of the fall of Ganymede are not as glossed over, and while I felt for Prax in the show, I wanted to cry for him in the book. The events on Venus at the end are stunning and visceral (which the show did JUST RIGHT), but the slower decline of Ganymede spelled out on the page was even more tragic.
Though I mentioned in my review of the first book that the television show has made the protomolecule shiny and “sci-fi”-y, I retract any way in which that might be interpreted as a complaint. The show makes it truly alien, while the book presents the infected people as more typical zombies, something we’ve seen before.
This world has sucked me in, and I’m more than happy to be along for the ride.
Rating: 5 (out of 5) stars. Cross-posted to Amazon and Goodreads.
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