More of The Expanse
Mar. 13th, 2025 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaznettiI have finished Persepolis Rising and am now reading Tiamat's Wrath.
I commented in an earlier post that I was finding Singh an interesting villain as he persuaded himself that genocide was the right option for him; what I wrote tolikeadeuce was that 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. Little did I know at the time that he was actually being set up by his own side to be that guy. Not that he was necessarily going to fall, but the temptation was being put in his path and a plan was in place for Laconia to benefit from it.
That this is also hypocritical for the Laconians, because their power absolutely relies on the threat of utter destruction, is of course the point. This is a book about the delusions of empire: when Trejo asks Drummer how many lives she is willing to sacrifice, what is left unsaid is that there is anonther answer that also leads to zero. The Laconians could just pack up and go home. They won't, because they are afraid of what the universe outside their control might become, but they could. (Someone described these last three books as "the rise and fall of Rome, but in space," but the model for Laconia is right there in the name. These are the Spartans, and violence and subjugation are the only things they know. Of course they're afraid.)
Tiamat's Wrath is going more slowly for me: I read a bit, then I read ahead, then I go back and read again. So I've read through the whole thing and am now going back to read it in sequence. I'm enjoying it, but I am also taking it more slowly. The focus is still on the old familiar characters (now including Elvi!) but we also have new people moving in, especially Teresa. I really like Teresa and hope she makes it out of Laconia OK.
So if Persepolis Rising was about empire, this is a book about humanity, and what makes us human. And on one level Corey's answer is the same of Tolkien's, and of all the classical authors before: to be human is to know that you are going to die. So this is a book that starts with a funeral, and is punctuated by death, and has lurking just beyond the shadows, Duarte and Cortazar's attempt to escape death, which has removed Duarte at least from the sphere of "what is human." At its heart is Bobbie, and the death she chooses, and next to her is Amos, who has almost certainly escaped death in some way, but at what cost? Will he live forever, like the children in Cortazar's lab? And what does that make them? Two things struck me: the moment Elvi notices Cara comforting Xan with a gesture she recognizes as "a moment that primates had been sharing back to the Pleistocene, deeper and more recognizable than mere humanity"; and the point where Amos decides, having met Teresa, that maybe blowing up the whole palace is not the way forward. Like Trejo in the previous novel and Cortazar in this, he has the ability to kill or not kill: unlike them, Amos can look at a child and choose not to kill that child. And of course hanging over everything, the ring-builders and whatever destroyed them, which are so far from humanity as to be unknowable: whatever Cara and Xan (and Amos) are, they are surely more human than that.
(Aside from all that book-specific thematic stuff, another thing I love about these books is Naomi's growth. Of course she has become the leader of the resistance: it's been a long journey for her, to learn that rejecting Inaros does not mean rejecting leadership, but she has been on this road for a while.)
I commented in an earlier post that I was finding Singh an interesting villain as he persuaded himself that genocide was the right option for him; what I wrote to
likeadeuce was that 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. Little did I know at the time that he was actually being set up by his own side to be that guy. Not that he was necessarily going to fall, but the temptation was being put in his path and a plan was in place for Laconia to benefit from it.That this is also hypocritical for the Laconians, because their power absolutely relies on the threat of utter destruction, is of course the point. This is a book about the delusions of empire: when Trejo asks Drummer how many lives she is willing to sacrifice, what is left unsaid is that there is anonther answer that also leads to zero. The Laconians could just pack up and go home. They won't, because they are afraid of what the universe outside their control might become, but they could. (Someone described these last three books as "the rise and fall of Rome, but in space," but the model for Laconia is right there in the name. These are the Spartans, and violence and subjugation are the only things they know. Of course they're afraid.)
Tiamat's Wrath is going more slowly for me: I read a bit, then I read ahead, then I go back and read again. So I've read through the whole thing and am now going back to read it in sequence. I'm enjoying it, but I am also taking it more slowly. The focus is still on the old familiar characters (now including Elvi!) but we also have new people moving in, especially Teresa. I really like Teresa and hope she makes it out of Laconia OK.
So if Persepolis Rising was about empire, this is a book about humanity, and what makes us human. And on one level Corey's answer is the same of Tolkien's, and of all the classical authors before: to be human is to know that you are going to die. So this is a book that starts with a funeral, and is punctuated by death, and has lurking just beyond the shadows, Duarte and Cortazar's attempt to escape death, which has removed Duarte at least from the sphere of "what is human." At its heart is Bobbie, and the death she chooses, and next to her is Amos, who has almost certainly escaped death in some way, but at what cost? Will he live forever, like the children in Cortazar's lab? And what does that make them? Two things struck me: the moment Elvi notices Cara comforting Xan with a gesture she recognizes as "a moment that primates had been sharing back to the Pleistocene, deeper and more recognizable than mere humanity"; and the point where Amos decides, having met Teresa, that maybe blowing up the whole palace is not the way forward. Like Trejo in the previous novel and Cortazar in this, he has the ability to kill or not kill: unlike them, Amos can look at a child and choose not to kill that child. And of course hanging over everything, the ring-builders and whatever destroyed them, which are so far from humanity as to be unknowable: whatever Cara and Xan (and Amos) are, they are surely more human than that.
(Aside from all that book-specific thematic stuff, another thing I love about these books is Naomi's growth. Of course she has become the leader of the resistance: it's been a long journey for her, to learn that rejecting Inaros does not mean rejecting leadership, but she has been on this road for a while.)
