Leviathan Falls

When I really think about it, it's pretty impressive to finish a series well and in a timely manner. I think The Expanse might be the first big series to manage both since Harry Potter. Lots of series finish on time but poorly (Hunger Games, Game of Thrones TV), or take forever but finish well (???), or are stuck in limbo and could easily never finish (Game of Thrones, Name of the Wind, Locke Lamorra). I think JK Rowling deserves a lot of credit for publishing regularly and ending the series well, and so does Corey.

I thought it ended in just about the only way it could have, and each character's arcs made sense. The end is the right amount of sad, the right amount of sympathetic to villains, and the right amount of messy. I appreciated that the series wasn't too “tied up with a bow” tidy. Lots of small but fairly important things never got followed up on (Alex's first wife, Naomi's son), because that's how life goes. At the same time, we often saw minor characters become major characters in later books, and this is a great addition. It's fun to see them again, and it makes you reevaluate their past decisions in light of what you now know about their motives, which works really well. Captain Singh was one of my favorite characters, so seeing Tanaka's viewpoint adds a lot of depth to his interactions with her. This approach still gives character development, just via an ensemble. It keeps things fresh in such a long series.

The whole series is about two questions:

1. what do we do when we come across an alien thing?
2. if the aliens are dead, what could have happened to them?

This overall makes it a great extended meditation on the Fermi Paradox, and I'm very glad I took the deep dive.