Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsI was looking forward to this...
Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2020
I was told that I would love the Expanse. To be honest I have been thinking about getting the DVDs to the show but I love to read the books - if the series is based on books - and the Expanse was based on a book series. So of course I found the first one, Leviathan Wakes, cracked it open, and dived in.
And after reading the Prologue I was worried. But let me break it down into what matters to me. Characters, setting, and plot.
I love characters and setting more than anything else. Give me great characters and a great setting and the story can have a mundane or even sub-par plot. And the characters are GREAT. Filled out, distinct, interesting. Even the interaction between the characters, the relationships, the reactions to the events. I loved some of the characters, I disliked some, but all because they were WELL made. I didn’t hate a character from bad writing. If I hated or disliked a character I did so because they reminded me of a jerk I knew or because I knew they are making a horrible decision. But hey, great, so far, so good.
Setting. From what I understand the Expanse was first developed as a Role Playing Game, a space opera setting, so there is a ton of details to work with. BUT the authors, knowing data dumps are a no-no - nobody likes to read chapter after chapter of history, science, and politics - went pretty light on the details. Too light. I knew that the people of Earth, Mars, and the Belt hated each other. And sometimes a station might got some details about it. But that was it. I understand there are more details were released in the other books and in the first season of the TV series. But judging it on its own the setting didn’t have the details I liked. Did I need a ton of details to know what was going on? No, but I would have liked it to make it different from all other near-future solar system settings. This story could have been set in the same solar system we find in “Bio Of A Space Tyrant” by Piers Anthony. Nobody would have noticed! So....bad.
And the plot. I think most reviews have already given it away so let me just say this - not really into zombies. To me horror has to creep up on me. It has to be a puzzle which I slowly put together and making the unknown real and terrible. Yes, there is a certain horror in realizing that something out there in the dark tried to terraform the Earth, and only the Earth, over two billion years ago. Lovecraft would be proud. In fact, funny enough, I feel the characters failed to see the BIG PICTURE. And I am interested to see if they see the BIG PICTURE in the other books. Because the “Protomolecule“ isn‘t a weapon. It’s a packet of seeds. And sooner or later the gardeners will show up. Of course, I could be mistaken. But the idea an alien race sent a “weapon” against the Earth two billion years ago only makes sense if the aliens PLAN To show up. If the characters don’t figure this out within the next few books I will drop the series completely.
But the biggest problem was I was able to predict everything, at least the major turns in the plot, a few chapters before it happened and I figured out much of the plot halfway through the novel. Sometimes that can be good - means the authors have left clues for the characters which you just happen to be picking up first - but when one of the answers to the events in the book is vomiting zombies that kind of ruins it for me. Oh, goodie, its the T-virus. IN SPAAACCCCCCEEEEE!
Great characters, little to no setting, with a plot that I was able to predict and didn‘t enjoy at all. Three out of five.
