I whipped through Babylon’s Ashes, the sixth book in Jame SA Corey’s Expanse series. As with most of my reading, I “read” the audiobook version.
Honestly, it’s tough for me to actually write out my feelings on these books. For whatever reason, the old-school 70’s “hard” sci-fi vibe just resonates with me. I love that there’s no artificial gravity and that people’s bones decay if they don’t execute rigorous exercise routines. I love that the battles take place over the course of tens of hours, but that the “action” is resolved in a few seconds of too-fast-for-humans destruction. And this book is chock-full of nerdy stuff like that.
At its core, this is a war story novel, with lots of space combat or the actions leading up to space combat. Like most of the other novels in the series, it’s written in a collection of POV chapters from lots of people… but probably more viewpoints than in most of the other books. This means that not a lot of the “main” characters get to grow too much since they jump around so often, but we do get some returning characters that get some decent fleshing-out.
There are some weak spots: there are at least two distinct threads in the book that didn’t seem to have any immediate payoff or… really any reason for existing. The book could have excised both POVs entirely and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference one way or the other… or better yet, used those page-counts towards expanding on another story. One of the two seemed like an excuse to re-introduce a previous minor character just so as to have an “everyman” wartime viewpoint. Which is fine, but when that thread ended without actually having any material impact on the story, it kind of felt out of place.
But that’s mostly trivial. I had a great time with the book and was disappointed when it ended. The resolution of the book, while leaving a number of threads dangling, could have been a good close to the series… though I am happy enough that it doesn’t seem to be the case.
All in all, another good entry into the series. If you’ve read the other five Expanse novels, chances are you’re going to read this one no matter what I say, but you won’t be sorry when you do.
Audiobook notes - this is narrated by Jefferson Mays, who did most of the others in the series so far, and he does his usual great job.