“Someone is working very hard to start a war” (98).
Perhaps best likened to Games of Thrones in space, the first book of The Expanse series Leviathan Wakes packs a heavy punch. This is a wild, rollicking page-turner for a nearly 600-page science fiction epic novel. It originally began as an RPG-game in the style of “World of Warcraft” by Ty Franck, former personal assistant of George R.R. Martin, but when that project eventually fell apart Franck joined forces with writing partner Daniel Abraham under the nom de plume “James S. A. Corey” –a now legendary science fiction writing duo– to craft the new series for Orbit Books. With Leviathan Wakes, the Corey duo successfully bridges the gap between epic space adventure and post-apocalyptic science fiction with a gritty futuristic aesthetic coupled with a deeply unsettling horror trope lurking in the silent emptiness of space. The James S. A. Corey writing duo once described Leviathan Wakes as a noir book, whereas Caliban’s War is a political thriller, Abaddon’s Gate is a haunted house story, and Cibola Burn is akin to a Western. This unique blending of genres under the science fiction umbrella makes this a compelling series with an understandably devoted fanbase.
In the not-too-distant future (I believe the 23rd century), humanity has colonized the solar system, but all is not well. Tensions are running high between the three chief political entities: Earth (controlled by the U.N.), Mars (an interplanetary power), and the inner planets which rely on the asteroid belt where the “Belters” reside. The asteroid belt serves as a chief source of mining for vital resources, such as ice which is hauled back to inner planets that need to purchase water (the Belt is populated by 50-100 million people who require a lot of water). Interestingly enough, in The Expanse, the future remains fairly capitalistic. Platinum, iron, and titanium is mined in the Belt, water from Saturn, vegetables and beef are grown in big mirror-fed greenhouses on Ganymede and Europa, organics are provided from Earth and Mars, power cells are produced on Io, Helium-3 is mined in the refineries on Rhea and Iapetus. But the solar system is currently a fragile political tinder box. Throughout the colonized planets, racism runs high against the working-class Belters, who are sometimes regarded as not fully human anymore since long periods of life in space have elongated their bones, making them tall and thin. Space travel has significantly altered human life. About 150 years ago during the “parochial” disagreements between Earth and Mars, the Belt was a horizon of tremendous mineral wealth, and a scientist named Solomon Epstein “built his little modified fusion drive” which allowed ships to travel at a marginal percentage of the speed of light (the discovery apparently killed him aboard his yacht). “The Epstein Drive hadn’t given humanity the stars, but it had delivered the planets” (7). Presently, just under twenty million people live on the moons of Saturn, forty-five million are on the moons of Jupiter, and the farthest outpost of human civilization includes five thousand people living a moon of Uranus –at least until the Mormons finish their generation ship and head for the stars (they are seeking freedom from procreation restrictions in the solar system).
“Nothing in space ever actually stopped; it only came into a matching orbit with some other object” (29).
Leviathan Wakes begins with prologue in which a transport ship called The Scopuli is attacked and boarded. The Scopuli is a light freighter of Martian registry, which shows Erosas as its home port. Note the “Sirenum Scopuli” are the islands in Homer’s Odyssey which lure sailors via the siren’s song. This is but the first of many subtle allusions to classical literature throughout Leviathan Wakes. At any rate, the crew is taken captive while one particular crew member, Julie Mao, managed to survive in an environment suit in a locker while many of her crewmen are rounded up and tossed out an airlock (recall the line in Ridley Scott’s Alien in which it is acknowledged that ‘no one can hear you scream in space’). Eventually, after eight days Julie escapes captivity and wanders through the ship until she makes a horrifying discovery: Captain Darren’s horridly mutilated head is begging for help in the control room along with the rest of her crew. “Why? What does anyone gain from killing an ice hauler? Who gets paid? Someone always gets paid” (74).
Not long thereafter, we are introduced to a giant ice-hauler ship entitled The Canterbury (“The Cant”), a retooled colony transport (three-quarters of a kilometer long, a quarter of a kilometer wide), one of dozens of sister ships under the Pur’n’Kleen Water Company which make the loop from Saturn’s rings to the Belt and back hauling glaciers. Suddenly, The Cant receives an emergency signal from a nearby ship, The Scopuli, which appears to be in trouble. The emergency signal is coming from a chartered non-Belt asteroid, “The law of the solar system was unequivocal. In an environment as hostile to life as space, the aid and goodwill of your fellow humans wasn’t optional” (14). Thus, five crewmen of The Cant board a shuttle called the Knight to investigate – the members include executive officer Jim Holden (who previously spent seven years in Earth’s navy and five years working in space with civilians); chief engineer Naomi Nagata; a Belter pilot named Alex Kamal; a veteran engineer of the Martian navy (MCRN) Amos Burton; and the medic Shed Garvey. What they find is shocking –an entirely empty ship with a Martian transmitter (with MCRN written on it, referring to the Martian Congressional Republic Navy). Was the ship attacked by pirates? Meanwhile, several unknown stealth ships suddenly appear and nuke The Cant, leaving these five crewmen stranded in their shuttle with Holden in charge. He quickly issues a hasty message to the solar system of what happened, leading many to believe Mars has attacked the Belt. Needless to say, an intense cold war ensues all throughout the colonized regions. From there, the five surviving crewmen are taken aboard the Martian flagship, the Donnager (which intends to shepherd these survivors to Jupiter), but that ship is also suddenly attacked and boarded by unknown forces (Shed gets his head blown off in the fight) and the remaining four crewmen barely escape aboard an MCRN corvette light frigate, the “Tachi,” which they later call “The Rocinante” –of course, this is a reference to Don Quixote’s famously slothful steed: “it means we need to go find some windmills.” The Donnager self-destructs and the crew are then taken in by Colonel Frederick Lucius Johnson (after using his requested code word “ubiquitous” in a broadcast). Colonel Johnson, once one of the most decorated officers in the UN military, ended up one of its most embarrassing failures, now known as the “Butcher of Anderson Station.” He started his career with several high-profile pirate captures, then came a minor revolt on Anderson Station, a tiny shipping depot on the opposite side of the Belt from the major port at Ceres, in which people protested against surcharges for air and water and they threw their leader Gustav Marconi out an airlock, before Colonel Johnson and his Coalition forces swept in and massacred everyone at the station for three days. The whole thing was broadcast live throughout the solar system, and it led to the forced resignation of Colonel Johnson. He issued an apology for the massacre, then he disappeared before orchestrating a settlement on the Pallas colony and peacefully resolving a revolt of metal refinery workers, avoiding a bloodbath which suddenly made him a hero again. “To Belters, he was the Earther Sheriff of Nottingham who’s turned into Robin Hood. To Earth, he was the hero who’s fallen from grace” (95). Now, Colonel Johnson, or simply “Fred,” resides on the Tycho Station, the largest mobile construction project in the solar system. Tycho Station was founded by engineering genius Malthus Tycho; his grandson Bredon now runs the company.
Leviathan Wakes offers us two different main characters with juxtaposing views of the world: Jim Holden of the Rocinante, as discussed above, and also the jaded, porkpie-wearing Detective Josephus “Joseph” Miller. Miller has lived his whole life on Ceres, a Belt port city and the largest asteroid in the Belt between Mars and Jupiter. He works for Star Helix Security Force with his partner Havelock under the leadership of Captain Shaddid, but he is often disrespected within the force (he is also divorced). Typically, he spends his time tracking down organized crime on Ceres, but privately, Miller is reassigned by Captain Shaddid to help track the lost daughter of Ariadne and Jules-Pierre Mao of Mao-Kwikowski, wealthy and prominent mercantilists based on Luna. Her last residence was on Tycho Station, she rejected her family’s privilege, and joined the OPA (Outer Planets Alliance), a political group fighting for Belter rights. Her name? Julie Mao, the young woman from the start of the novel. However, when Miller disobeys an order to stop digging into Julie’s life, he is fired and then manages to join up with the crew of the Rocinante when they all gather on Eros (Holden and the crew are searching for a codenamed OPA operative named “Lionel Polanski” and Miller is tracking the Rocinante when he figures out it was actually previously known as the Tachi). The adventure leads them to join forces while the solar system gradually falls into rioting and war. Along the way, the group makes a startling discovery inside the hotel room of “Lionel Polanski” –they find the horribly mutilated corpse of Julie Andromeda Mao lying on the bathroom floor with strange tendril growths protruding from all of her orifices… they smell the stench of “something deep, organic and intimate. Manure in a hothouse, or the aftermath of sex, or a slaughterhouse” (245).
After all the people on Eros are quickly herded into radiation chambers and given a lethal dose of radiation by the Protogen corporation, the crew narrowly manages to escape Eros in the Rocinante amidst a hail of gunfire, and they follow a series of clues from notes found on Julie’s phone (apparently among her notes is an allusion to Dune, “fear is the mind-killer”) which leads to an asteroid numbered BA834024112 where they find the deserted stealth ship, the Anubis, that attacked the Scopuli, but it is covered in flesh and severed body parts from the crews on both the stealth ship and the Scopuli. In the ship’s data banks, they watch a video from the Protogen Corporation and learn about a strange, disturbing infection which causes people to become ‘goo-vomiting-zombies’ with rapidly expanding black filament-covered tendrils erupting from their eyes and mouths. We learn that the crew of the Scopuli was kidnapped aboard this stealth ship, the Anubis (a Protogen ship named after the Egyptian god of underworld) where the entire Scopuli crew succumbed to the strange disease caused by something called the “protomolecule” which the company Protogen was using to test on the humans until Julie managed to escape from her captivity on the Anubis, tether the Anubis to the asteroid BA834024112, and then escape, herself, aboard a shuttle to Eros before unwittingly causing the Eros outbreak crisis. It was on Eros that Holden, Miller, and crew found Julie’s dead body. We also learn that the protomolecule has mysterious origins –it appears to have been sent from a distant galaxy with the intent of reaching Earth some two and one-third billion years ago, thereby destroying all life on Earth (or at least irreparably altering it), however, the protomolecule accidentally got trapped in Saturn’s orbit ice moon of Phoebe (the moon was believed to have originated in the Kuiper belt before it was caught by Saturn’s gravitational pull; it actually appears to be of alien origin). The Protogen company first discovered the protomolecule on Phoebe. The protomolecule is thus dubbed the first alien supervirus ever discovered. “There was life out there. They had proof of it now. And the proof came in the shape of a weapon, so what did that tell him?” (379). And tragically, rather than destroying all remnants of the protomolecule, Protogen has been attempting to harness its power (in The Expanse, we return to a familiar science fiction trope reflecting a deep cultural skepticism of the idea that corporate power can ever be harnessed to support noble ends). Hence, why Protogen apparently created this elaborate distraction of war between Earth, Mars, and the Belt, all while unleashing the protomolecule to study its effects. Naturally, the Roci crew nukes the stealth ship before they depart back to Tycho Station.
“Protogen is in a position to take sole possession of not only the first technology of genuinely extraterrestrial origin, but also a prefabricated mechanism for the manipulation of living systems and the first clues as to the nature of the larger –I will call it galactic—biosphere. Directed by human hands, the applications of this are limitless. I believe that the opportunity now facing not only us but life itself is as profound and transformative as anything that has ever happened. And, further, the control of this technology will represent the base of all political and economic power from now on” (345).
Miller contacts his former partner Havelock who is now working for Protogen regarding a hidden Protogen base receiving data from Eros called “Thoth Station” (Thoth was an Egyptian scribe in the underworld). Once they receive the coordinates, the Roci crew leads an assault with a group of OPA volunteers on Thoth Station, here they meet a head researcher at Protogen named Anthony Dresden who calmly explains the importance of research into the protomolecule, defending the outbreak on Eros. But before he can speak more, Miller suddenly shoots Dresden which infuriates Holden. Now kicked out of the Roci crew, Miller hatches a plan to destroy Eros and prevent any further outbreaks of the protomolecule along with Fred and OPA members who commandeer the gigantic Mormon generation ship Nauvoo before it can depart forever to Tau Ceti –the Nauvoo “drifted by like the meal bones of some dead and decaying leviathan” (374) and like all long-flight spacecraft, “it was built in the ‘office tower’ configuration: each deck one floor of the building, ladders or elevators running down the axis. Constant thrust took the place of gravity” (111) “The structure echoed the greatest cathedrals of Earth and Mars” (463). They attempt to collide with Eros and send it hurtling directly into the sun while Miller detonates a string of bombs on the surface of Eros, however something entirely unpredictable happens! Eros somehow dodges the impending collision and begins rapidly speeding toward Earth. What has happened here? “Miller looked at the stars as if there was some answer written in them. And to his surprise, there was. The sweep of the Milky Away, the infinite scattering of stars were still there. But the angles had changed. The rotation of Eros had shifted. Its relation to the plane of the elliptic” (489).
As it turns out, Miller discovers that a zombie-esque Julie (under the power of the protomolecule) has been awakened in suspension –“Julie was waiting for him in the darkness; the thin beam from his hand terminal cut through her. Her hair floated, spin gravity, after all, no effect on phantoms of the mind. Her expression was grave” (524)—and she is actually controlling Eros (all while Earth sends its entire nuclear arsenal toward Eros) until Miller sacrifices himself to Julie and the protomolecule. Holden uses his transponder to redirect Earth’s nuclear missiles (but why not just allow Earth to nuke Eros into oblivion?) as Miller is taken over by the protomolecule to change the trajectory of Eros such that it crash-lands on Venus instead, thus sparing Earth a cataclysmic outbreak. “The protomolecule didn’t know English or Hindi or Russian or any of the languages it had been spouting. All of that had been in the minds and softwares of Eros’s dead, coded in the neurons and grammar programs that the protomolecule had eaten. Eaten, but not destroyed. It had kept the information and languages and complex cognitive structures, building itself on them like asphalt over the roads the legions built” (525).
In the end, Miller crashes Eros into Venus, an event which becomes “the most widely broadcast and recorded event in history” as pieces of Eros disintegrate in orbit around Venus… and a string of odd two-kilometer-high crystal towers begin forming on the surface of Venus…
“I doubt the things that built the protomolecule just wanted to store it here. This was part of a bigger plan. We saved Earth, Mars, the Belt. Question is, what happens now?” (554).
There are two fascinating sub-plots in Leviathan Wakes. The first is a budding romance between Holden and Naomi, as well as an obsessive amorous affection Miller feels for Julie as his detective work leads him to become a “voyeur” prying into her life. However, a far more interesting theme emerges in the form of a dialectic between Holden and Miller. Holden plays the role of the traditional hero –a man committed to honesty, integrity, and self-sacrifice—whereas Miller is a more noir-esque jaded, world-wearied, diplomatic figure. Holden’s first reaction upon discovering the MCRN signal device aboard the Scopuli is to issue an honest broadcast throughout the solar system which, despite the best intentions, plays right into the shadowy enemy’s hands and leads to a massive war along with the deaths of many thousands. Consider the following back-and-forth as Miller confronts Holden over his foolhardy –dare I say quixotic– heroism:
“You found a Martian battery, right? So you told everyone in the solar system about it and started the single largest war in human history. Only turns out the Martians maybe weren’t the ones that left it there. Then, a bunch of mystery ships kill the Donnager, which Mars blames on the Belt, only, dammit, the Belt didn’t even know it was capable of killing a Martian battle cruiser… Let me finish! And now you find some data that implicates Earth. First thing you do is blab it to the universe, so that Mars and the Belt drag Earth into this thing, making the largest war of all time even bigger. Are you seeing a pattern here?… So what do you think’s going to happen?… This is how these people work! They made the Canterbury look like Mars. It wasn’t. Now it looks like the whole damn thing’s Earth? Follow the pattern. It probably isn’t. You never, never put that kind of accusation out there until you know the score. You look. You listen. You’re quiet, fercrissakes, and when you know, then you can make your case” (328).
“You can’t just throw information at people,” Miller says. And when Holden defends himself by claiming “there’s a right thing to do” if only the general public can be provided with accurate information, Miller retorts with: “You don’t have a right thing, friend… you’ve got a plateful of maybe a little less wrong.” For Miller, politics exists of necessity, and therefore he rejects Holden’s romantic idealism because he lacks tact, political maneuvering, and he broadcasts himself as a “self-appointed martyr.” However, ironically, in the end it is Miller who chases after love and sacrifices himself like a heroic “martyr.”
I thought this was a terrific start to an impressive science fiction epic series, massive in scope and wonderfully imaginative. A few of my lingering questions after reading Book I of The Expanse series include: Why did the Anubis attack the Scopuli in the first place? Who created the protomolecule and attempted to send it to Earth over 2 billion years ago? Will we ever see Miller again? And why wouldn’t Holden simply allow Earth’s nuclear missiles to annihilate Eros? And what happens to the redirected Earth nukes at the end of the book? Where did they go? Lastly, will the apparent outbreak of the protomolecule on Venus spread to other planets? Can it be contained? What will become of the solar system?
Corey, James S. A. Leviathan Wakes. Orbit Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. New York, NY, 2011.
Leviathan Wakes was dedicated to Jayne and Kat “who encourage me to daydream about spaceships.”
You are in for a wild ride, my friend.
Excited!