The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
If anyone would care to explain why my post about The Expanse from three years ago is getting so much attention over the last couple of days, I’d love to know.
Meanwhile, I’m going to turn off the “comments close after two weeks” policy and see how fast I regret it.
Do you know what I did when I got home from work today?
Well, okay, I ate a pile of Arby’s. But after that?
Yeah, I fired up fucking Elden Ring again. I only played for a few minutes, but there was this one minibus I hadn’t killed yet, and … well, I wanted to, so I did. I am currently trying to decide whether I want to go ahead and dive into New Game + or hold off in hopes of being properly leveled for the inevitable DLC, which hasn’t been announced and probably won’t be released for months yet. I think the answer is probably “dive into New Game+,” except for … everything I said yesterday, which is all still true even if I’m apparently too dumb to act like it.
Today went well, I suppose; there are 31 days of school left as of right now, and I’m being observed tomorrow. I should probably figure out what I’m having the kids actually do during said observed lesson. I’ve never actually done an observed lesson by the seat of my pants, though, and if there was ever a time to do that just for the hell of it, the last month of my boss’ time in the building is probably it. He’s not going to give me a bad observation. He’s just not. I know this, which allows me a certain amount of freedom. That, and the fact that even if he did give me a poor evaluation I don’t think it would actually matter to anyone.
(I’m not going to do that. I’ll come up with something. We’ll see what it is, though.)
Let’s see, anything else? I wrote a post about the Expanse series a month or so ago, and while looking for books to compare the Expanse to, I commented that I’d never read any of Iain M. Banks’ Culture books. That wasn’t 100% true, as it turns out; I have owned the first book, Consider Phlebas, for long enough that my single, aborted attempt to read it doesn’t show up on Goodreads anywhere. I decided to take another shot at it and finished it the other day. The good news: I can’t figure out why I put it down all those years ago; the bad news: that doesn’t mean I thought it was especially good. I’ve heard that Phlebas is among the weaker Culture novels if not the weakest, so I might go ahead and try the second book anyway. Anybody out there have any observations to make? If I didn’t like the first Culture book, should I continue on anyway?
It seems like an awfully daunting task to actually review James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series, so I’m just going to write a brief post about it and hopefully that will be enough to convince literally every single one of you to pick it up. I finally finished the 9th book last night after sitting on it for a little while (beginning it at the same time I was starting Elden Ring wasn’t a great decision) and now that I’m done with the series, I’m just kind of stunned at what an amazing accomplishment the entire series is.
I was kind of irritated to discover that Leviathan Falls, the final book of the series, was compared to A Song of Ice and Fire on the back cover, as if ASoIaF is the superior product that Expanse ought to be compared to. I’ve said this about other series before, but The Expanse is markedly better than ASoIaF, not the least because it’s actually finished, and we all know George is never, ever finishing that series. It is also better than That Other fantasy maxi-series you might have in mind, if for no other reason than the series, unbelievably, is nine books and, oh, 4500 pages long or so, and features almost no bloat. That’s kind of astounding, considering what has happened with nearly all of the long-term fantasy series on the market right now.
(Why am I not comparing it to other SF series? Because in a lot of ways there’s nothing to compare it to. Scalzi has done a bunch of books in his Old Man’s War series, but they’ve all been pitched as standalone, more or less, as opposed to having been deliberately structured as a nine-book series from the start. Kevin J. Anderson has his two Saga of Seven Suns series, the first of which was seven books and the second a trilogy, but I’m the only person I know who has read those and I never see anyone talking about them, plus the Corey collective is simply a better writer than Anderson. The closest SF analog may actually be Iain M. Banks’ Culture books, but … uh, I haven’t read those.)
But yeah: one way or another, this series feels like it was planned out, at least in the broad strokes, from the beginning, and while the scope of the series ends up enormous, the author(s) have been smart enough to keep the characters a fairly tight group, with a core of four main characters who are in every single book. Is this a plot armor situation? Maybe, but it never really feels like it, and frankly my two favorite characters in the series both died, so they’re entirely willing to kill characters when they feel like they need to. The status quo keeps sliding around, too; there’s a thirty-year time jump at one point, and there are at least two points in the series where they basically kick the legs out from under everything you thought you knew and remap the board from scratch. Alex, Naomi, Amos and Jim are the constants; everything else is up for grabs.
I know it’s a hell of a thing to tell everybody to go read a nine-book series, but if you’re a sci-fi fan at all and you haven’t picked these up yet, you really owe it to yourself, and the series is done(*) so there’s no longer any excuse. Go get ’em.
(*) There have been several novellas as well, which are going to be collected into a 10th book sometime next year, I think, but this story is definitely finished as of the last few pages of Leviathan Falls. The universe is still out there if they want to come back to it, but it’ll be something very, very different if they do.
…and I’m making a pot of coffee. I managed to land another two-day weekend, my second of the past eight weeks, only I didn’t know that I was getting it until showing up to OtherJob yesterday to pick up my paycheck and noticing I wasn’t on the schedule.
I am emphatically not complaining. So far today my activities have included finishing a book I was reading and taking a long nap and not bothering to shower until 2:30, so I’m working hard.
*stares into space for literally twenty-three minutes*
*gets up and gets coffee, drinks half a cup*
So. Yeah.
Let’s talk about that book for a minute, actually, although this isn’t going to rise to the level of a review: Nemesis Games, the fifth book in James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series, and the book that is, I think, finally going to get me started on buying the series in hardcover once volume 6 comes out in December. In some ways, Nemesis is a sloppy mess of a book; I don’t know if it’s because I was trying to read it as an author or what, but it’s clear for the majority of the book that a) there’s a lot of deliberate moving around of chess pieces so that the right characters can be in the (improbably) right places for the action of the book to move forward, and b) this isn’t a book itself so much as a setup for the next book or, more likely, the next couple of books. I feel like you can see the architecture on this one in a way you can’t with most books and you haven’t been able to in the previous four Expanse novels.
That probably sounds like a complaint, so let me follow it up by saying that Nemesis Games surprised me in a way that I haven’t been surprised since reading A Game of Thrones for the first time, and that it’s virtually impossible to talk about the book in any detail without spoiling how Corey wipes the status quo almost completely clean and throws every corner of his(*) universe into turmoil by the end of the book, only to then turn around and introduce a whole new problem in the final chapter of the book. It’s a hell of an ambitious thing, Nemesis Games is, and even if the story wasn’t as compelling as it was I’d respect the hell out of it for what it managed to do. My wife read it before I did, and she’s been chewing her nails for weeks waiting for me to get around to it since she wanted to talk about it and refused to tell me anything before I’d finished the book. That’s compelling, guys. Like I said, the book’s kind of a mess as a standalone artifact, but maybe as book 5 of what is probably a series with no planned end it doesn’t need to be. I mean, it’s not like anyone’s starting with Book 5, right?
…you should probably read these books, is what I’m saying. There’s a season of TV floating around out there that you should get into, too, as it’s quality stuff, even if the TV version of Amos is fighting with the Amos in my head in a way I don’t like. My Amos is better and he needs to win.
(*) James S.A. Corey is actually two people, but saying “their” in this context feels weird. They’re both dudes, so “he” it is.
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