Jeff Bezos Made this Book Good and That’s Saying Something 

 I watched The Expanse on Amazon Prime maybe about 3 years ago now. The first season is actually really good. Having not been much of a science fiction fan, I was surprised by how much I loved the story. When I found out it was based on a book, a space opera that was being dubbed as Game of Thrones beyond the stars no less, well I had to read it. And…I was a little disappointed to say the least. So, here’s my full review of Leviathan Wakes, and why it really wasn’t that good until Jeff Bezos got his grubby little hands on it. 

Disclaimer: This is a supremely negative review from an angry woman. If you’re opposed to misandrists sharing their opinions on popular Sci-fi, turn back now for your own sake. If you too are a fellow angry women, ehhhhhhh let’s get it girly, hope you enjoy the review and have a fabulous life ❤ 

The Author(s)

Leviathan Wakes is the first of nine books in The Expanse series. It was published in 2011 and written by James S.A Corey. If you think this sounds like a pseudonym, that’s because it is, and a pretty plain one at that. Corey is actually two men, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. When I found out that this was a pen name, I thought it might be a kind of J.K Rowling-esque ‘I’m not a woman, I’m a writer’ kind of pen name. But nope, it’s just two white sci-fi fans who for some reason picked a third bland name to represent them. Probably because it’s a little damning that two authors managed to write a book that one good writer could’ve written on their lonesome.

Of course, as readers we have to note that they’re white men, because that’ll give us some good background as to how and why they write their characters and story in the way that they do. Yes, we should separate art from the artist, especially when it comes to science fiction. But I’d hazard that no other art form requires the artist to pull from their own opinions and beliefs like writing does. It’s less fun to read when you read critically, but for this story that’s clearly written for “white male”traditional” sci-fi fans, if you don’t fit into these categories then critical reading is a must. 

Setting 

Before we get to the actual plot, let’s tackle genre and setting. If there’s one thing this space opera isn’t, it’s a space opera. This is partly due to the world-building of the setting. Personally, I love the idea of setting a story in a part of human history that doesn’t often get talked about. We have sci-fi stories about contemporary humans, and we have sci-fi stories about humans who have gone to the stars, but we never really get stories about the long process of actually achieving a reach great enough to get that far out into the galaxy. 

This time period is exactly when Leviathan Wakes is set. We have the fusion drives necessary to make inter-planetary travel quite simple and efficient (the tiny amount of exposition we get about this is actually super cool). We have had them for long enough, in fact, that we’ve now colonised Mars and the asteroid belt. Humans can easily reach the outer planets in our solar system. It’s been so long since we stepped out into the stars that the humans who relocated to a colonised Mars now feel they are far more Martian than they could ever be Earther. However, they are still human. 

This sets up some really cool ‘racial’ boundaries, and I think these are actually included in the plot of the story really well – when the authors aren’t constantly mentioning where someone’s from and how that’s affected their physiology and opinions, that is. There is a tendency to lump people of the same planetary races together in groups as all holding one belief, but I think the authors just manage to skirt round the damaging implications of this sci-fi trope by having the main characters, who are part of these races, hold different views to their ‘countrymen’ based on the increasing amount of new information they are provided with. Conveniently, every one of our 4 main crew members belongs to one of the different races involved in the story. Holden and Amos are Earthers, Naomi is a Belter, and Alex is a Martian. 

Leviathan Wakes does world-build quite a lot, and we visit a lot of the locations we hear about being explained, which is, well…a pretty basic facet of good writing. However, to have a space opera, you likely need more than just a few ships and a few space stations. All the corridors look the same, all the NPCs are merely prostitutes, tourists, or workers. We don’t visit any new or unusual planets, we don’t even visit any planets at all. We’re in the hull of a ship, or we’re in the corridors of a space station. That’s it.

Plot

Ok so, the plot. In short, Julie Mao is a rebellious nepo baby who quite aptly joins a group of Belter rebels. On board a mission ship she is infected with a space parasite, known as the Protogen protomolecule, that takes over human bodies and turns them into goo zombies. Detective Miller is charged by her parents, high-ups in the Protogen company, with finding Julie and bringing her home. Not likely, since she’s the mother of the goo zombie parasite virus now. Across the galaxy, Holden, an XO of an ice collecting ship known as the Canterbury, receives a distress signal from the ship that Julie and her crew were on when they were exposed to the molecule. While he and his ‘team’ are on a rescue vessel travelling out to this ship in distress, an unknown force blows up the Canterbury and all Holden’s friends, including his buxom, blonde lover. He’s sad for about 2 seconds, but then he’s out for justice. Holden wants to know why the ship was broadcasting a distress signal, why the Cant was blown up, and why he’s now being held prisoner by the Martian military who he’s just outed as a terrorist force. Eventually, Miller and Holden come together to find the answers to these questions. 

To be fair to it, the story does have a lot of twists and turns, and a lot of depth even if it does wane under its own weight in the final act. We hear about a variety of different groups of people, most with competing interests in the battle for space in space. We even get to delve into the existence of some of those groups, the most interesting being the Mormons, who are building the largest spaceship ever created in order to fling them out beyond the stars into the great unknown. (This spaceship is eventually destroyed so the main characters can enact their grand master plan.) My problem is not with the plot, that is very well rounded and evidently had a lot of thought put into making the disparate points connect up and work together. My problem is with just about everything else. 

Characters:

Julie – In many ways, Julie Mao is the main character of Leviathan Wakes. We get the introduction to the whole book from her viewpoint, and hundreds of pages later, a few documents of her thoughts as she lays dying from an inter-galactic parasite. And that’s it. The woman who sets off the entire chain of events leading to the story is reduced to being the story’s mystery. She’s essentially dead as soon as the plot begins. The perfect mirror upon which the writers can impart whatever impressions of this poor woman that they want the characters to hold. I like Julie, I wish we’d had a little more of the story from her perspective. 

Holden – Holden finds himself in the centre of a tough situation, an intergalactic war. Doesn’t get much tougher than that. Because of this, even if we wouldn’t particularly make the choices he makes, we have to respect him for simply making tough decisions in this tumultuous time. So, we’re meant to sympathise with him, but my gripe with Holden comes in the fact that we’re also meant to dislike him, because Miller dislikes him, and for a large portion of the story, so do his ‘crew’. He’s arrogant, stubborn, and for entire chapters at a time, all Holden has on his mind is kissy kissy time. There’s a real error here on the writers’ behalves. Why set your story from the point of view of two characters who dislike the fundamental aspects of their counterpart’s personality? All we ever hear about the characters, when it’s not being given from their own perspective, is them being slagged off by whoever’s POV the current chapter is in. It means we end up disliking both Holden and Miller, because they very, very rarely see the good in each other. 

Detective Miller – Miller is your typical grizzled noir detective. He’s not very interesting, but I can get into his character sometimes. My least favourite thing about Miller is that he falls in love with Julie. Of course, I can see the similarities between their characters. They’re both highly intelligent, disillusioned, and very good at figuring out mysteries. Julie is a young go-getter, she’s a fighter, and survived for as long as she could in her terrible situation. All of this leads me to believe it would be very easy to fall in love with Julie Mao. But, Detective Miller falling in love with Julie Mao? I don’t buy it. Has he never had to work on cases involving young women before? Has he never found any of his crime-scene victims to be relatable before? Has he never connected to any of his work before he was tasked with finding Julie? He falls in love with this woman whom he’s never met, to the extent that he gives his life for the cause that she joined (and he actively disparages for a majority of the book – I suppose you could call that an arc). His imaginary depiction of her leads him along the line of the mystery, she comforts him when he’s down and they share his successes together, they share full conversations in fact. Someone better call Freud on this one. I don’t know, it’s a sweet story, but I find it very hard to believe. It doesn’t make me think of Miller as soft and lonely, it makes me think of him as desperate and lonely, which I suppose he is too. And it makes me feel even more icky for poor Julie, who has random men she never thought she’d be connected to lusting after her for no apparent reason, altering their entire life trajectories for her. It’s very ‘put me face down in the coffin so I can stare at Marilyn for eternity or I’ll write you out of my will’ kind of vibes, and I do not like it. 

Naomi – I’m not going to be too harsh on Naomi, because apart from a dead gal and a few sentences from Miller’s bitchy boss, she’s the only female character. This is why it really, REALLY pissed me off when she went for Holden. This is a woman who prides herself on her work, and has watched Holden shmooze a woman on their last god knows how many trips together. She’s watched him make terrible and rash decisions that have put her life and the lives of her crew in danger. She’s had to save him on multiple occasions. Before the story even begins she’s likely overheard him have disgusting conversations with the other men on the ship, just like he does on the second page of the first chapter, as he discusses a mechanical implement that when attached to the human penis ‘feels just like a handjob’. And she fucks him. After all that, she fucks him. We don’t need anymore romance, we don’t need Holden to be in love for us to like him, and we certainly don’t need the only female lead reducing herself to worrying about how many times Holden has looked up from his console to gawp at her. I hate it, and I hate Corey for making me angry with Naomi. 

Fred – Think of Fred as Leviathan Wakes’ answer to Saw Gerrera. He’s leader of something called the OPA, or the Outer Planetary Alliance. Basically, he’s leading the Belter rebellion that Julie was a part of. Fred, despite being a disgusting human who’s killed a good bunch of people, is actually my favourite character. This might just be because the rest of the characters dislike him, but unlike Miller and Holden’s reluctance to work with each other because of their distaste for the other, the characters hating Fred actually gives him a great story. He doesn’t give a fuck about the fact that they hate him, he just wants them to do his bidding, and for that to happen he is forced to help them on their journey. I wanted to highlight this to show that you can make hateable characters likeable. Just not your main characters. Fred being widely disliked is part of his character, and therefore adds to it on this unique occasion. The fact that I like Fred might also be due to his presence only being included for a few paragraphs in every few chapters. 

So to summarise, the main character is not the nicest person, and the detective really isn’t that much better. I can like characters I don’t actually like, I can appreciate what they add to a story. However, making all their readers experience a space opera from the points of view of two dislikable men who are attracted to the only women in their close proximity is a pretty choice choice for the authors to make. 

Dialogue 

Well, it leaves a lot to be desired, let’s just say that. Like most sci-fi media, both literary and visual, emphasis is placed on the characters being witty more than it is on them developing individual and recognisable speech patterns. This is probably why I find it so hard to ride with the emotional connections in this story, because the dialogue between the people who are meant to be emotionally connected reminds me of how my step dad would use awful, sarcastic, and at times insulting humour to endear himself to me. 

Naomi’s speech is almost always used for exposition, or to explain some technicality about their surroundings. Miller’s speech is about as pathetic and dejected as him, so that’s good writing I guess??? The worst is Holden though, by far. He’s so arrogant and, at times, downright mean. I get it that people in this world probably have set ways of speaking to each other wherein, I would hope, sarcasm is genuinely believed to be the highest form of wit. But, let’s see an example and perhaps it’ll become a little clearer why I dislike him so much, and why the way he talks only makes me hate him more. 

‘“I spent a month in a rad shelter once,” Alex said as they pushed through the thickening crowd. “Ship I was on had a magnetic containment drop. Automatic cutoffs failed, and the reactor kept runnin’ for almost a second. Melted the engine room. Killed five of the crew on the next deck up before they knew we had a problem, and it took them three days to carve the bodies free of the melted decking for burial. The rest of us wound up eighteen to a shelter for thirty-six days while a tug flew to get us.”

“Sounds great,” Holden said.’

C’moooonnnn man, for real? Yes, traumatic events happen like this everyday in space, Holden has suffered through a fair share of his own, and it’s only right that he be desensitised to these situations. But, being used to things like this happening does not mean you have to be so apathetic when confronted with their reality. Alex is clearly reaching out for something a little more, for some connection to his friends who have also been in traumatic events like the one he’s describing. They’re in one right now for Christ’s sake. But, instead of choosing to comfort him, Holden gives him nothing but some sarcasm. Wow, what a witty response James Holden, I really hope you got all the cool points you were searching for. I can almost guarantee that not one reader laughed at that unoriginal and base remark, and it added sweet fuck all to Holden’s character apart from reinforcing that he shouldn’t be the focus of this story. So, what was the point? Please, enlighten me. 

Let’s do another one, this time it’s romance. 

‘“You’re making fun of me.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I am. Want to come home with me?”

“I—” Holden started, then stopped and stared at her, looking for the joke. Naomi was still smiling at him, nothing in her eyes but warmth and a touch of mischief. While he watched, one curly lock of hair fell over her eye and she pushed it up without looking away from him. “Wait, what? I thought you’d—” 

“I said don’t tell me you love me to get me into bed,” she said. “But I also said I’d have gone to your cabin anytime you asked over the last four years. I didn’t think I was being subtle, and I’m sort of tired of waiting.”

Holden leaned back in the booth and tried to remember to breathe. Naomi’s grin changed to pure mischief now, and one eyebrow went up. 

“You okay, sailor?” she asked. 

“I thought you were avoiding me,” he said once he was capable of speech. “Is this your way of giving me a win?”

“Don’t be insulting,” she said, though there was no hint of anger in her voice. “But I’ve waited weeks for you to get your nerve up, and the ship’s almost done. That means you’ll probably volunteer us for something really stupid and this time our luck will run out.” 

“Well—” he said. 

“If that happens without us at least giving this a try once, I will be very unhappy about it.”

So, the basis for this whole romance is something Naomi said at the start of the book when Holden was still shagging some other woman, coupled with the fact that they spend time around each other. If these are the only boxes on the checklist for romance, why not have Holden fall in love with Amos instead? Because Naomi is a woman, and Holden is a man, they simply cannot co-exist without bumping privates. I think the authors think that because they put these words in Naomi’s mouth, it’s ok. But imagine Holden saying that to Naomi, barely letting her butt in: if we don’t go at it at least once before we die then I’ll be a grumpy little boy. I don’t care about Holden, and I don’t have any emotional relationship to this pairing – dialogue like this is only going to compound this problem. 

But even this is arse backwards, because then in the next chapter Naomi tells him she’s a serial monogamist, and they’re in it for the long haul. But none of these contradictions matter because for some reason Holden is already in love with her?! When? Where? Piss off. I understand that romance is a very small and oftentimes necessary part of sci-fi stories, but if you’re not going to write it well then don’t write it at all. The story stands up incredibly well without it, in fact, the whole thing is only hampered by this feeble attempt at romance. 

Themes

The class and racial commentary is about as in-depth as can be expected from a book that details a society other than our own, but is based on our own and the experiences of two men within it. Much more focus is placed on the details of the setting and the intricacies of the plot, than is placed on making actual poignant commentary on the implications of colonisation, racial differences, and the incorrigible and instinctively human search for meaning. Perhaps it’s better this way, and perhaps Corey knew this. 

The different races are each given a handful of defining traits that are regularly fallen back on for story beats, and they’re perceived through the lens of the two main characters. This isn’t so bad, as neither Miller nor Holden is outwardly opposed to working with people from other planets. Belters, Earthers, and Martians tend to stick to their own, but when they have to, they work together toward a common cause admirably. Though, the races have their ingrained opinions of each other, and for the most part they act according to them. In my experience, this is pretty accurate to how different societies interact on our planet, in our time. As a white woman, I’m reluctant to provide anymore commentary on the way different societies are depicted in this story. Mostly because I’ll never be able to do the problems that arise from the descriptions of these races and their inter-mingling, alongside the allegories they touch upon representing, any justice. 

My problem comes in the depictions of class, and I can certainly talk about that. Miller, in particular, subscribes to the over-arching ideology of Ceres that he simultaneously condemns. He knows the struggling lower classes (mainly made up of Belter manual labourers) are turned into criminals by the dire situations they find themselves in at the hands of Ceres executives. Does he try and mitigate this situation? No, he outwardly states on many occasions that these people are not to be trusted, and he is proven right as they violently revolt and smuggle illegal substances onto the station. When he eventually leaves Ceres, he claims it’s partly because of his involvement in these injustices. But, it’s only when he does have to work with people of his own race who haven’t had his privilege of being elevated out of their struggle, that he realises perhaps the lower classes aren’t all that bad after all. He may be a policeman, but he’s not an aristocrat. He holds a position of power over the lower classes and he exploits it gladly, chastising them for their poverty as he goes. His lack of openness to class consciousness baffles me. 

In general, the rebellious Belters are universally hated by all of the main characters except Fred. They’re a violent nuisance, and not even the Belter protagonists seem to be able to sympathise with their suffering or cause. They’re low class and they behave accordingly, with loud music blasting at all hours, and exaggerated speech patterns. When they do eventually have to partner with the OPA and the rebellion, it’s only because the protagonists need to use the unhappy Belters for their own ends. I don’t know, I just feel like this is a dangerous idea to be putting out there. If you are being exploited you must make your voice heard by any means necessary. The Belters, as the stand-ins for the most exploited minorities, get a scarily bad rap in this regard even if they do get representation. 

Prose and Description 

Moving on from themes, the writing is pretty empty and devoid of the description you’d want from a story that’s set on multiple space stations. Y’know space stations, something only a fraction of the population has ever seen the interior of, and in the case of The Expanse’s space stations, no living human has ever seen. You might think it would be important to actually do something new or unique with these settings, and employ the description necessary to do them justice. Corey apparently did not feel the same. 

Abraham is quoted as having told Franck with regards to the original setting for the expanse, ‘people who write books don’t do this much research.’ I really wonder what research the authors did, because let me make something very clear, world-building is not research. Watching Alien is not research. Just because you’ve imagined up a world in your head, does not mean that you have the ability to create that world in the mind’s eye of a stranger on the other side of the planet merely through the medium of the written word. I’m not asking for Tolkien levels of description for every laminate floor tile, but please, can we have something a little more than base descriptions of locations and pointless descriptions of minuscule occurrences. An example? “The infrared monitor on the sensor console next to holden’s chair flared like the sun.” Perhaps similes like this are the reason the book is 500 pages long with no actual good descriptions. To drive home this point, let’s take a closer look at a larger description of an important setting. 

“His hole was on the eighth level, off a residential tunnel a hundred metres wide with fifty meters of carefully cultivated green park running down the centre. The main corridor’s vaulted ceiling was lit by recessed lights and painted a blue that Havelock assured him matched the Earth’s summer sky. Living on the surface of a planet, mass sucking at every bone and muscle, and nothing but gravity to keep your air close, seemed like a fast path to crazy. The blue was nice, though.” 

First off, this doesn’t actually explain Miller’s hole, which is the important setting for this small part of the story. It explains the route to miller’s hole, which we don’t really need, but I wouldn’t have minded so much if the description was actually nice. It feels like I’m reading the blueprint from the original team who built Ceres, not a best-selling, intergalactic space-opera. This is kind of a question of ‘well you could’ve created the art, but you didn’t, so you don’t get to have an opinion on its value’. Except I do, because I dedicated hours of my life to descriptions like these. I say this with all the hurt intended to the sci-fi boys that this statement is going to scathe, give me 5 minutes and I could write something far more enjoyable and descriptive than whatever the hell that was. 

And I did: 

“Miller’s hole was on the eighth level. It could only be reached through a sickeningly long residential tunnel, along which hundreds of sliding doors just like his, led into hundreds of holes just like his. Being stuck in a carbon copy of the minuscule room next to him wasn’t so bad, because outside lay one of the luscious parks that Ceres station had crammed into every empty corner. Earth palms reached up into vaulted ceilings, vines dangled from stainless steel arches, even the scent was one of a freshness so rarely embraced on this great hulk of metal floating through nothingness. It was all to make the Eathers feel more at home out here beyond the stars, and the false, blue ceiling was no different. ‘Exactly like the one on Earth’, Havelock had said, eyes sparkling as he stared upward. Miller was not an Earther, he never would be. But he liked the blue all the same.”

I understand that the limited third person view does pose restrictions on the way things can be described, but these are boundaries you can push in favour of tantalising the reader. I also understand that removing entire paragraphs from their context is an easy way for critics to bolster their own points. But I feel that in this case, if you tore out the original paragraph and slapped mine in there instead, it would make no difference to any of the surrounding prose or unfolding story. 

Some good points about the writing? Despite being 500 pages long it’s an easy read, and anyone above the age of 8 should be able to understand the basic syntax. The countless run on sentences might get a bit taxing though. Because of the simplicity of the writing in comparison to the complexity of the story, Leviathan Wakes is actually really easy to get into, and that’s why I didn’t so much mind that I hated the characters. I never felt excited or scared for them, but I enjoyed reading about the politics they were entangled in. The story is easy to follow, but I fear this is only true because I’ve watched the show. As you’ve seen above, the more technical stuff that actually poses the potential for readers to engage their imaginations is clinically explained with approximate measurements and references to gravitational pulls. Like, I still have no idea how Ceres actually looks or how Eros spins, and I wouldn’t without the show to help me. 

Final Thoughts 

In many ways, watching associated media before reading the text it was based on can ruin the original story. Characters that you’ve created in your own head are suddenly reduced to puppets mastered by the most conventionally attractive actors a production studio could find. Settings that had once been untameably sprawling in your imagination are reduced to a closed map only seen from a few select angles. This, however, is not the case for Leviathan Wakes. 

If I hadn’t seen the show before I’d read the book, I probably would’ve been thoroughly unimpressed by The Expanse.

The show takes what little description Corey could offer and builds upon it masterfully. Miller’s eagerness to die comes not from an unrequited love and fanboy fantasy, but from a genuine need for purpose and remorse for the state of the solar system. Colourblind characters are now given real bodies to inhabit, rather than just being bundles of fictional racial stereotypes and carefully collated wit. A variety of new players in the story are introduced, and we see everything from multiple perspectives. The story is incredibly in-depth and every added scene pushes the plot along. Locations are removed from their 2 paragraph long technical descriptions and readers can finally see them as physical spaces. Confusion surrounding the shapes of ships and planetoids is cleared up in a second long transitional frame. 

Of course, many of these are inherent benefits of taking something from a page and making it into visual art. However, nowhere was intervention from the visual arts more needed and necessary than on the pages of Leviathan Wakes. Unless you’re a die hard trad sci-fi nut who indulges in one dimensional characters, an absence of the female sex, and a belief that racial, cultural, and class boundaries can only be crossed with a common cause, just watch the show. Don’t worry about the book. 

I haven’t read the other books in the series, so there’s every chance that all of these issues are rectified in further novels. Plus, many of the problems housed in this book are problems with the wider sci-fi genre in general. That it’s dominated by men, and therefore by masculine worldviews and absolutely shite description with no flair or flavour. However, Corey manages to avoid so many of these damaging tropes that when they do fall into them it’s even more frustrating. With some tiny tweaks and a few more creative writing classes, Leviathan Wakes could’ve been unbeatable among its peers. As it stands, however, the Amazon Prime show is definitely the best interpretation of this story.