Leviathan Wakes

I read a really good book last autumn, it was called Leviathan Wakes.  Space opera at its best.  Science fiction has gone through the same revolution that Fantasy has gone through.  That revolution was made up of really imaginative people writing books that very few people initially read, but eventually was read be millions of people.  Most of the writers were not bad, some of them were bad, but their stories were good, the ideas.  But let me be clear, very few of them were great writers.  Even the best writers, were not as good as the best writers of the standard works.  On the other hand in the present, the writers still follow the standard deviation of good and bad writers, but there are a lot more of them.  And the bad ones are reading better fiction and so they are not as bad as what they could have been, so the bad writers are not that bad.  James SA Corey, is not a good writer, mostly because he does not exist, he is two people and together, they are excellent.

Leviathan Wakes takes place in the not so distant future, how far, certainly centuries.  The population of the Earth is over thirty billion, Mars is at four billion and they are terraforming that planet.  The outer planets have millions, but only millions.  There are ships moving from planets in the outer solar system to mars and the outer planets with water in the form of ice.  Mars and Earth are presently in a stand off, Earth has a much larger fleet but Mars has a much more advanced fleet and relationships are strained.  Artificial Gravity exists, it is created with spinning hunks of rock and by accelerating ships at the level of gravity that they want to experience.  Think about it, if a ship is accelerating at 10m/s or about one Earth Gravity, the people in the ship feel as heavy as they would on Earth and they would be constantly speeding up.  After an hour they would be cruising at 36 kilometers a second after a day, they would be going as fast as 1008 km/s then the ship reverses its direction and slows down at the same rate creating artificial gravity for another day as it slows down.  Trips between the planets would still take days, and the more outer ones would take months.  In the book the most comfortable gravity is 1/3 Earth gravity.  But faster accelleration is possible, if you can protect the human inside the ship, too fast and the human dies.

In this book the bad guy is human.  The evil cooperation.  Actually the pursuit of the mighty dollar causes a horrible disease to infect one of the outer colonies.  The story starts off with a prologue that is truely horrifying.  The plot of the SciFi book is a mystery, crime fiction, an unlikely Cop on the distant Dwarf Planet Ceres starts looking for a girl, the daughter of a wealthy conglomerate owner, based on the moon.  Millions of people live on the interior of Ceres, and the entire planet was spun up to create a higher artificial gravity.  At the same time, a pseudo terrorist trade union, the OPA, outer planetary alliance, declares independence from Mars and Earth.  Part of the OPA is a company that is building ships for people with a lot of money.  In this case, the Mormons, who are commissioning a generation ship that will take them to Tao Ceti at a fraction of the speed of light.  Into this mix, a group of space faring crew is thrown into the mix when their scout ship investigates a abandoned ship and a stealthed military ship nukes their water hauler and they are forced to make their way to the nearest port of call and their desperate search for the truth.  The truth combines everything so far mentioned and it becomes a shooting war, or not war exactly.  The not war ends when the infection is determined to have an extra terrestrial origin….

There is a second book, which I read last week, and there is a third book which I read yesterday.  There is a fourth book that is to come out later this year.  Overall I would have to say this series rocks.  Read it.  If you like crime fiction but hate SciFi, you can read this too.  But overall it is a five star read.