After the rise of the Laconian Empire in the previous book, the crew of the Rocinante is spread across the universe once again. Naomi and Bobbie are both fighting an underground war in the ways they do best. These women continue to be my heroes and I adore them. This book especially shows the power inherent in both violence and communication, and how both are necessary to win a war.
One aspect about the writing in this series that I’m quite impressed with is the way Corey can have pages and pages of what is basically straight narrative, and I never get bored. Something else I noticed over halfway through the book is that with one exception, all of the point-of-view narratives are characters much older than the “traditional” age for normal science-fiction heroes. I’m sure time will not be as stretched out in the television adaptation, but it’s a fun point to think of in this version.
We have one left book in this series, and this installment does a great job of leading us to the brink of what is possible in this speculative universe. So often in this series, humans are idiots playing with toys they don’t understand, and I have the feeling that this is going to get even more extreme as we reach the farthest edges of the expanse.
Rating: 5 (out of 5) stars. Cross-posted to Amazon and Goodreads.