Cibola Burn

Four books deep into the Expanse series and the ideas are all coming together and the depth of this universe is really starting to sink in. The duo known as James SA Corey have truly created something special in this series, although there were things about Cibola Burn that didn't quite click as well as the past books in the series.

The first thing is the characters that were introduced in this book were not exactly great. They weren't bad, but we've kind of reached a point where the readers are all so invested in Holden, Naomi, Amos and Alex that it's natural to want to see more of them.

Mix in the fact that there were characters introduced in the second and third books that deserve another spin (Chrisjen, Bobbie, Anna, etc.). From what we can tell, we'll probably get back into their heads in the fifth installment, which is cool, but in Cibola Burn in particular the characters really felt like they were there just to bring the reader to the crew of the Rocinante to keep them front and center.

Each character had their strengths, for sure. It was nice to get some time with Havelock considering that Miller is still floating around as a servant of the protomolecule, but Elvi and Basia had a glimmer of hope of being interesting but tended to fall a bit flat and served just to end up being links to the crew. This brings up a point that I've seen floating around that if they are going to simply create characters whose sole purpose is to help us keep tabs on the crew, why not just get inside of the crew?

It feels late to get POVs from Amos, Naomi and Alex, but Elvi and Basia were good characters that could have been a lot better if we didn't have to inhabit their thoughts. Murtry – our villain – border-lined on ridiculous at times in how dastardly and uncaring he was. While I understand that he's supposed to be a counterpoint to Holden, his motivations were so over-the-top and thin at times that he fell flat. A lot of that probably had to do with how fleshed out Melba was before or even the evil corporations we've had in the past.

RCE didn't feel like an evil monolith, which is good, but Murtry was almost trying to make them into one, which was weird.

The general premise was solid, because we saw what the protomolecule did to the worlds that it inhabited through the gates, hinting that Earth was destined to be one of these thousand worlds reachable by gate to be strip-mined for resources, but it never got that far due to the mysterious alien power that caused the creators of the protomolecule to shut down the gates. We also saw how ridiculous humanity can be in drawing lines in the sand as well as the challenges of humanity expanding to other worlds.

Of course, a lot of what happened in this book felt almost like it was jammed in there to make for a full length novel, with the weird side plots. I'm talking about killer slugs, blinding rain, natural disasters and ships falling out of orbit. They all demonstrated what could and probably will go wrong on these planets that are accessible via the gates, but we were approaching biblical plague levels of fatigue here.

Still absolutely a fun book and I'm looking forward to the rest, but probably the weakest of the bunch. They can't all be winners and I'm okay with that.