Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9)

2022 reads, #2. DID NOT FINISH. And so do my four years with "The Expanse" series of science-fiction novels end; as the saying goes, not with a bang but with a whimper. And that's because I was legitimately thrilled and excited when reading the first three volumes of this nine-book series and discovering one of the more complex and fascinating genre universes and alt-history storylines I've ever seen; set 300 years in the future when humanity has finally colonized the entire solar system, it creates a whole new series of mashup cultures for each planet and moon that interact and play with each other in these interesting, delightful ways, all of it made even more complicated by the first-ever discovery of proof of alien life, which sets all of these established cultures on even greater paths of conflict and change. Not for nothing did the initial work on this mythos by authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (writing together here under the pseudonym "James SA Corey") actually start out as background exposition for a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game they had originally been planning on making; that's exactly the kind of expansive mindset (see what I did there?) that this exposition hints at, that each fictional group needs to be interesting and complex enough to sustain a group of real people who want to play as them for $7.99 a month, no matter which group that is which appeals to them most.

My enthusiasm for the Expanse novels, though, started slipping downwards slowly but regularly during the so-called "second trilogy" comprising books 4, 5 and 6, in which the main mystery of the first trilogy is now solved and we switch gears into a much more traditional space-opera tale, with much more traditional goodies and baddies; then it plummeted straight to zero with the "third trilogy" of books 7, 8 and 9, in which the authors hamfistedly just shove in these giant, nonsensical changes to the story's structure because it's clear they had an end goal in mind, and by God, they were going to get to that end goal, no matter how much ridiculous nonsense they had to add to make it there. So that's why, just to name one of dozens of examples, we suddenly jump forward in time 30 years for these books, despite none of the characters emotionally changing or growing even a single bit, and not a single one of our existing story threads fundamentally changing besides having someone hold up a silent-film placard that says, "And then they all treaded water for three decades;" it's because Abraham and Franck decided that they needed a big bad unstoppable enemy to bring about a final showdown for these warring groups, and the only way to justify the big bad enemy having had the time and resources to build their cartoonishly massive unstoppable military ships is to say, "Oh, and did we mention that thirty years have passed? Yeah, I know, it doesn't look in any way whatsoever like any time has passed at all; but trust us, it's thirty years later, and that's how the new baddies seem to miraculously have all these amazing new warships that the rest of the human race can't even begin to stop."

The whole third trilogy is like this -- entire fascinating storylines from the first six books just thrown out the window wholesale, so the authors can instead spend the entirety of their time obsessing over a puerile, Sunday-school lesson of a story about how COLONIALISM! IS! BAD! and EMPIRES! ARE! BAD! and HUMAN! RIGHTS! ARE! GOOD! Jeez, Greta Thunberg, take it down a notch already, will you? Meanwhile, the entire alien "protomolecule" artifact that's been driving the overall storyline since page 1 of book 1 just sputters out here to an ignoble end, when Abraham and Franck eventually just throw their hands in the air and say, "Yeah, the aliens are, like, evil supernatural dudes who want to kill everyone they meet, or something like that, whatever, can't you see how busy we are trying to inform you that COLONIALISM! IS! BAD!!!!??!!!1!!" That's not what I signed up for when I first began the initial book four years ago, which like a lot of people was prompted for me by the accompanying TV show switching that year from cable's SyFy Channel to Amazon Prime Video; and by the time I finished book 7, I realized that my heart just wasn't into finishing books 8 and 9 if they were going to be as godawful as that one, which they indeed turned out to be. So I read like 50 pages of each, then went on Wikipedia to read the story recaps and at least learn how everything ends, and then came over here to do this writeup and read all the inexplicable 5-star reviews from friends of mine who I had assumed would know better. What's with you people? This book was freaking terrible, and I can't for the life of me understand what all of you saw in it that I clearly couldn't. Whatever the case, at least the saga is now officially at an end, and I can move on to some other sci-fi series I've had on the back burner for a while now (I'm looking at you, Isaac Asimov; and you, Philip K. Dick; and you too, William Gibson!); it's just too bad it all has to end with such a disappointed shrug for me, after initially thinking it to be one of the better sci-fi series of all time. If you're anything like me, you should stick to just the first three books only, then watch the TV series that wraps up the entire thing more succinctly at the end of season 6.