Follow up on Cibola Burn

[vaznetti]

...since I mentioned that I was reading it, and have now finished it. One thing that struck me when I was done with it, though, was about Murtry. I mean, I hate Murtry about as much as the text wants me to and maybe even more. But by the end of the book I also found his self-delusions really interesting, because on the one hand he believes that he is on The Frontier, and on The Frontier, Might Makes Right, and he is a Hard Man who makes Hard Decisions. And for that to be true, he has to cast the Belter colonists as the natives that he's going to drive out to make room for civilization, which you can kind of see. But he also has to cast Holden as the representative of the civilization that Murtry is preparing for, but present too soon, because he is Too Soft to make those Hard Decisions, etc. And one can see why he thinks so, because Holden puts on a face which about morality and equity and things like that.

But when the chips are down, that is not who Holden is. And you can just about see that Murtry might have figured this out -- every now and then he remarks on Holden keeping Amos around as something that doesn't fit his view of Holden. But he's so attached to his version of who he himself is that he has to reject that information. And it's true that Holden sees his purpose there as (at least in part) a conciliator, someone who is going to set up rules and relationships and not settle everything through violence. But when he wants to, Holden can jettison all that: he won't fire the first shot, but if anything happened to Naomi, or looked likely to happen to her, he would absolutely destroy the Edward Israel and probably every living person in the system. Whereas Murtry keeps escalating, because he really thinks that eventually Holden will just cave to him. And at the very end, when it's all settled, it's Murtry who tried to rely on the rules of civilization, claiming that everything he did was covered under the charter he was given, and was done to uphold the rule of law, and Holden who plan to use extra-legal means (his connection with Avasarala) to make sure that none of that matters. By the end he was so wrong I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

(Currently I'm a bit over halfway through Nemesis Games; I had to put it aside for a little while but I'm eager to get back to it.)

Comments

[likeadeuce]

Ohh, this is a really good encapsulation of what makes Expanse villains interesting.

[vaznetti]

I have been reading Persepolis Rising (the first of the post-timeskip books) and the villain in that book is also really interesting to me, although I think he falls into a more well-known category -- he's clearly psyching himself up to commit genocide. He's absolutely the guy who takes home movies of his wife and kid with the smoke from the death camps just over that line of trees. But he's also been left to sink or swim in his difficult job that as far as I can tell he has no real preparation for.

Edited to add: so his failure is terrible and terrifying, but he himself has also been failed by the structures he's trying to serve -- and he can't see that, or can't let himself see that.

[likeadeuce]

Yes! I don't remember his name but that's the other character I was thinking of. It's also the general vibe from 'Andor' that makes that show feel more like The Expanse than Star Wars.

[vaznetti]

I hadn't thought of that about Andor but yes -- even the people who do terrible things (not all of whom are technically villains) do them in part because they are stuck in a terrible system. But it's the only game in town so they feel like they have to play.