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The Expanse: still reading
Mar. 26th, 2025 09:26 amMy final comments on Tiamat's Wrath are basically: Teresa! Amos! Incoherent noises!
And yes, OK, also Jim and Elvi. But mostly, Teresa! Amos!
Now I am about halfway through Leviathan Falls. So there are three humans (or maybe, former humans) who can interfere with whatever is going on with whatever destroyed the ring-builders. One is Cara, one is Amos, and I think that the third is Duarte, not Xan. Because "where exactly is Duarte and what is he up to?" is the great big hole in the story right now.
I really, really like how alien both of the alien species are -- the weird collective intelligence of the grandmothers and the darkness which lives in the other universe they broke into. And everything about the situation is terrifying, because the darkness doesn't understand human existence any more than the humans understand it. But I feel like creating really, really alien aliens is something a lot of science fiction doesn't bother to do; I have kind of resigned myself to never really understanding what happened to the ring-builders. (Although one thing that reading these books has made clear to me is how much more easily and deeply I understand information in a written form than in audio-visual -- I've seen the TV show probably three times and yet I understand what happened in the televised books so much better now that I've read them.)
One thing I'm lukewarm on: Aliana Tanaka. But these books do a good job making me interested in the antagonists eventually so I am hoping she will become more interesting to me. Was the sex stuff supposed to do that? It just reminded me a little of Signy Mallory in Cherryh's Alliance-Union books.
One thing kind of surprised me: there was a point I think in this book where it becomes clear that Naomi still believes that Filip died with Marco. So he never reached out to her to try to create a relationship with her! I am kind of impressed by that: both of Filip's parents were insufficient in different ways, and Naomi only comes out looking OK because Marco Inaros was a mass-murdering sociopath. I hope Filip went on to have a happy and fulfilling life.
Everything seems to be happening very quickly now, after the slow build-up over the first two books in this part of the series. I really feel the tension rising as I read.
And yes, OK, also Jim and Elvi. But mostly, Teresa! Amos!
Now I am about halfway through Leviathan Falls. So there are three humans (or maybe, former humans) who can interfere with whatever is going on with whatever destroyed the ring-builders. One is Cara, one is Amos, and I think that the third is Duarte, not Xan. Because "where exactly is Duarte and what is he up to?" is the great big hole in the story right now.
I really, really like how alien both of the alien species are -- the weird collective intelligence of the grandmothers and the darkness which lives in the other universe they broke into. And everything about the situation is terrifying, because the darkness doesn't understand human existence any more than the humans understand it. But I feel like creating really, really alien aliens is something a lot of science fiction doesn't bother to do; I have kind of resigned myself to never really understanding what happened to the ring-builders. (Although one thing that reading these books has made clear to me is how much more easily and deeply I understand information in a written form than in audio-visual -- I've seen the TV show probably three times and yet I understand what happened in the televised books so much better now that I've read them.)
One thing I'm lukewarm on: Aliana Tanaka. But these books do a good job making me interested in the antagonists eventually so I am hoping she will become more interesting to me. Was the sex stuff supposed to do that? It just reminded me a little of Signy Mallory in Cherryh's Alliance-Union books.
One thing kind of surprised me: there was a point I think in this book where it becomes clear that Naomi still believes that Filip died with Marco. So he never reached out to her to try to create a relationship with her! I am kind of impressed by that: both of Filip's parents were insufficient in different ways, and Naomi only comes out looking OK because Marco Inaros was a mass-murdering sociopath. I hope Filip went on to have a happy and fulfilling life.
Everything seems to be happening very quickly now, after the slow build-up over the first two books in this part of the series. I really feel the tension rising as I read.
