I figured I'd go back and check on Leviathan Wakes to see if my dissonance with Havelock's new characterization is real or imagined.
I can see why the TV series reimagined Havelock more as a bit of a rookie cop who is learning Belter from a prostitute. Havelock doesn't actually feature in the TV adaptation of Season 4 due to scheduling conflicts as a result of the first cancellation, and I think a lot of people were upset about that -- but maybe if they were going to suddenly turn him into, well, this then maybe it wasn't such a bad loss. On the other hand, maybe they'll have done him better (and it's not like Season 4 hurts any for his absence.)
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May 1, 2022 12:54
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 5 - 7 Basia grapples with what's happening. Elvi grapples with public speaking (and Basia.) Holden grapples with the Corey perspective. Chapter Five: Basia Meeting in some of the alien ruins, Basia, Coop and the others are discussing everything that's gone down. Basia's pretty drat concerned that they're killed the governor but Coop and the rest all seem pretty okay with it. Coop says they won't figure out who they did it and, even if they do, they'll all play dumb. I get that I'm supposed to think that Coop hasn't thought this through, but... One of their number -- Loris -- suggests just killing them all and hiding the bodies. Another (Ibrahim) suggests bringing down the transmitter which will choke their bandwidth and disrupt their hand terminals. Coop considers that second one. Basia wonders what the point of it is. So you knock out their bandwidth, so what? Ibrahim argues they need to establish claim. Loris argues that claim is determined after the fact and it's more important to bleed RCE dry so they can't make a profit. No one seems to be raising the point that RCE and the UN have way more resources than the Belters, not even Basia. The plan seems to be that they'll show Holden they're ready to sell all the lithium and RCE isn't and this will, for some reason, solve everything. Cibola Burn, Chapter Five posted:Today, Coop nodded Zadie on ahead. She made the one-handed nod, the physical idiom of Belters who had to communicate in vacuum suits... On the way back, Basia meets with Carol Chiwewe who is the colonial coordinator and he agrees to go with her to the mining pits on the next morning. When Basia gets back to his house, he and Lucia share a nice moment. They're still subsisting on rations -- Ilus might be liveable for humans but they can't seem to grow anything. The two of them, according to Basia, were much happier on Ganymede and also lived better. They discuss Felcia, their daughter, and she wants to go off to university. Basia doesn't want her to go but Lucia thinks they can't keep here there. Lucia thinks Felcia never agreed to come to Ilus. Basia thinks sending them back to Sol is sending them backward. Cibola Burn, Chapter Five posted:“We aren’t from here,” Lucia said as if Jacek hadn’t come in, as if the adult conversation could go on with the boy there. “We’re making it that way, but it isn’t true yet.” Chapter Six: Elvi One thing that bothers me about Cibola Burn is how the Coreys love using the word 'analog.' There's no grass on Ilus, there's a grass analog. There's no plants but there's plant analogs. I get why they're doing it and draw attention to it -- it's not Earth, the flora and fauna doesn't resemble Earth's beyond the surface level -- but something about it grates. And then because they use it so often, it grates a little when they don't use it and just call the lifeforms lizards, for example. Anyway, Elvi's looking at the plant analogs and the mimic lizard. Her foot is still broken. She catches the lizard in a device and kills it "instantly" in order to sequence and study it. She'll transmit the data back to Luna for study. Cibola Burn, Chapter Six posted:It would take the signal a few hours to travel the distance that had taken her eighteen months, but for those hours, she and her workgroup would be the only people in all the billions of humans scattered throughout the planets who would know this little being’s secrets. If God had come and offered her the Library of Alexandria in exchange, she wouldn’t have taken the trade. At the meeting, Reeve tells colony that "the independent observer" is on his way. He wants "the security issue" fixed before they arrive. Fayez mentions that this means he wants to hang all the bad guys before the observer gets here and tells them they can't. It's presented a little oddly. Cibola Burn, Chapter Six posted:“We have definitively identified the explosive used in the attack, and we are looking into which individuals had access to it.” After that, Elvi gets up to speak. She's pretty nervous as she gets up there to tell everyone they need to limit cross-contamination as no one actually knows how bad Ilus can be for humans yet. It's why there's scientists with the RCE team. Every breath they take could risk something figuring out a way to take advantage of human physiology. Every time they defecate, they risk human bacteria getting out into the environment. Basia begins shouting at her and accusing her of trying to decide for them. Elvi, funnily enough, immediately starts thinking that whoever killed the Governor is in the room. Basia, come on -- calm down! Carol Chiwewe decides the meeting should come ot a quick close and Elvi heads outside. Felcia apologise to her for the behavior of her father and helps walk her home. Then, eventually, asks her what it's like going to a real university. Chapter Seven: Holden The chapter open with one of those Expansian paragraphs which is somehow both interesting for how it defies genre conventions in the course of telling a sci-fi genre adenvture yet draws attention to how banal it all is once you strip away everything exciting. Cibola Burn, Chapter Seven posted:Passing through a ring into another star system, halfway across the galaxy from Earth, should be a dramatic moment. Trumpets, or loud alarms, tense faces locked on viewscreens. Instead, there was nothing. No physical sign that the Rocinante had been yanked fifty thousand light-years across space. Just the eerie black of the hub replaced by the unfamiliar starfield of the new solar system. Somehow, the fact that it was so mundane made it stranger. A wormhole gate should be a massive swirling vortex of light and energy, not just a big ring of something sort of like metal with different stars on the other side. Cibola Burn, Chapter Seven posted:Humans kept finding ways to turn the astonishing events of the last few years mundane.  It'll take the Roci crew seventy three days or so to get to Ilus. Holden gets messages as they arrive. The first is from Captain Andrada of the Barbapiccola who fills him in on the details -- colony has been mining for four months, having brought up "several hundred tons" of ore that translates to "a dozen tons" of lithium. The Edward Israel, however, will not let them leave with the lithium under the arbitration is complete. Andrada thinks their priority is to get the Israel to allow his ship to leave. Naomi thinks Andrada believes they're there on the side of the OPA. The other messages are as follows: Captain Marwick of the Edward Israel demanding that Holden disable of the engines of the Barbapiccola, Fred Johnson sending along encouragement, three news organizations asking for interviews (one of them is Monica, the reporter from Abaddon's Gate.) Naomi and Holden have a nice moment where they wonder (not seriously) about going back to Pur'N'Kleen now that they're all famous. But Holden wonders how long Pur'N'Kleen can even function now that there's water and air everywhere? But Naomi can't come down to the planet due to her Belter physiology. Apparently, the Belter colonists had dealt with that by spending months on bone and muscle growth supplements. Feels a bit odd but whatever. However, I feel like the series will generally forget this idea that Belters can put in a few months of work and overcome a life of zero-gee. Cibola Burn, Chapter Seven posted:“Amos will look after you.” I know Holden's a little bit surly not having Naomi by his side but I feel like he's really selling Amos short here! I mean, it's not an either or thing, surely. Surely he'd be taking Amos down there anyway. Anyway, Naomi reminds Holden to take his cancer meds, which is really one of my favorite bits of continuity in this whole series, and that "they" are using him. Naomi thinks that Holden's inevitably going to upset someone and then that'll lead to the inevitable failure of the talks and that this is what the powers-that-be want. Holden, of course, thinks that if it was inevitable then he'd never taken the hob. Holden and Alex talk about the short-sightedness of humanity as they approach Ilus. Maybe there's more lithium out there past all the rings but there's lithium on Ilus now so everyone's going to fight over that first. It's some of the more interesting stuff in these novels, the Coreys just never really do anything with it. After that, Holden goes off to talk to Miller. He's taking Miller to a planet past the rings, so, he wants answers. First question: how is Miller following him around? First answer: you're not infected, Holden, but the proto-monster back in Caliban's War put a "local node" in the ship and so that's how Miller can follow him around. The second: what is he going to find on Ilus, what is Miller looking for? Miller says: whoever or whatever killed the civilization that built the gates... It's a really neat setup, I think. It's this small-scale drama about a murder and mining rights, and it's all taking place in the shadowy ruins of this galactic-scale apocalypse. It's not perfect but I feel like it has a nice texture to it. Especially with the creepy, charismatic chemistry between Holden and the simulated ghost of Joe Miller.
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May 17, 2022 12:04
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Apologies for the delay! Life's been very hectic. Cibola Burn, Chapters 8 - 11 Elvi inadvertently sets off a chain of events that sends everything from bad to worse. And Jim Holden wanders right into the middle of it. Chapter Eight: Elvi Elvi's hanging out with Fayez and Felcia. Felcia's been coming to chat to them regularly. Everyone on Ilus is getting on edge with the news that the Rocinante is getting closer. At present, Elvi is talking about why the Solar system only has one form of life but no one really knows why. Why didn't two different forms of life emerge? Elvi doesn't know why. Fayez supposes that whatever life eventuated outcompeted every other possible form. There's a slight idea that I feel like sci-fi texts never really get into, maybe because it's just kind of depressing: maybe life is just really, really, really rare. Maybe sentient life can only show up in the approximate conditions of Earth. While perhaps we weren't created by a deity, but perhaps the conditions are so cosmically rare that there's little difference. Maybe Earth is the only planet that rolled the hard six. Or maybe it's not just the planetary conditions but the planetary history -- after all, maybe we'd never become sentient tool-users if the dinosaurs were still the dominant form of life. Who knows! Anyway, Elvi and Fayez figure out that maybe they can't know anything. But what Fayez does know is that Ilus is not a natural planet. The whole planet has been machined, according to him. No lithium comes out of the ground so pure, the tectonic plate they're on is as smooth as glass, the tunnels seem like a transport system... Felcia interrupts that she needs a letter of recommendation so she can go to university on Luna. Elvi says she's never seen any of Felcia's academic work but Fayez offers to do it if she won't. Afterward, Elvi reflects that everyone in the science team is basically paired up except her and maybe Fayez and she'd like some intimacy. As she's out walking, she spies that someone is moving out in the ruins. This bothers Elvi, since they'd be contaminating the ruins, and so she goes to investigate. Whoever is there doesn't appear to hear her or see her which might be a good thing as Elvi promptly discovers a box of high explosives. Elvi promptly reports it to Reeve, Murtry's guy on the ground. Reeve keeps Elvi in his office as he correctly assumes they'd kill her if they knew what she found, with they being whoever had decided to hide high explosives in the ruins. Reeve heads off with his security team. Later, when it's time to sleep, Elvi steps outside and thinks everything appears much more threatening... It's another surprisingly short chapter, but an okay one. Chapter Nine: Basia Meanwhile, Basia's out in the ruin-mine. It's backbreaking work but he enjoys it. It helps him ignore the fact that he's a murderer and there's a security team looking for the guilty party -- looking for him. Coop, his murderous ringleader, drops by and says they have a problem. "That RCE girl" has gone up to the ruins and Coop sent Basia's son up there to tail her. They know she found the explosives and they know she's gone to tell the security team. While Basia thinks there's nothing to worry about, Coop thinks there's enough DNA evidence there that RCE will eventually be able to figure out who was using the hideout. Coop wants to blow the explosives -- immediately. It's kind of interesting that Basia reckons that Coop has this charisma about him because, to me, he really just comes off like a bit of a trigger-happy psycho who wants to bathe in the blood of inners. Either way, Basia knows he has to go up there to blow the explosives. They take a cart up to the hideout -- the same cart they used to blow up the landing pad which is laying it on a bit thick, Coreys. They pick up some of Coop's inner circle on the way and one of them is carrying a duffle full of just about every weapon they have. Basia realizes that the plan isn't just to detonate the explosive cache. Uh-oh! He looks up at the stars and wonders if one of them is Holden. He thinks Holden is going to be too late, just like he was too late to save his son, Katoa, on Ganymede. He's a bit bitter that Mei survived when his son didn't. In order to not be too late on Ilus, Basia thinks, Holden would have had to change things back before Venus created the Ring. Basia's unfamiliarity with the handgun he carries feels like it echoes Prax, which is somewhat interesting given they knew each other. Basia even has a bit where he fails to rack the slide on his pistol whereas Prax made things worse by racking the slide on his. Either way, Coop, Basia and his goons ambush Reeve and his RCE team and kill them without a single casualty. The action scene is done through flash-flash style italicised paragraphs as Basia kind of disassociates through it. It's not bad but I feel comes a bit short of the chaotic flash-flash-flash effect the Coreys were hoping for. They bury the corpses while Zadie sanitises the scene with digestive enzymes. Coop thinks that the next dust storm will prevent anyone from finding the bodies. Basia confronts Coop about lying and threatens him but it's, honestly, a surprisingly weak narrative beat. As is the bit at the end where Basia goes home and tries to wash the blood from his hands. Chapter Ten: Havelock Havelock's watching an interview with a video game developer when Murtry calls him and says they have a problem. Someone named Cassie is calling (not mentioned before now) and Havelock needs to keep her busy while Murtry talks things over with the captain of the Edward Israel. Turns out Cassie is a member of the security team. Cassie tells Havelock that the security team is gone and the only reason she isn't is because she was looking after Elvi. They found a hideout and now Reeve and the whole team are missing. Cassie's locked herself in the security office but she doesn't have any food. Murtry comes on the line to tell Cassie they're sending a team down in a couple of hours and she needs to keep Elvi safe and that Havelock has a briefing. Mutry's arming up his people -- seems like he only has ten or so left. He gives them the authority for "pre-emptive lethal response." Havelock thinks they don't have a choice -- in his logic, it was no longer a crime now but closer to a war. Cibola Burn, Chapter 10 posted:Well. At least they’d tried the peaceful way first. Not that the Belters would give them any credit for it. Later, in his office, Havelock is going through his message. The RCE head office is workshopping possible strategies to deescalate the situation on New Terra. Havelock briefly reflects that while they're a year and a half away in time when it comes to direct travel, it's only five hours to send a message back -- but that's still too slow. Chapter Eleven: Holden The Rocinante is arriving at Ilus and Alex is target locking the Edward Israel for no real reason beyond that he can. Alex considers them the new sheriffs in town and plays it off with a bit of a laugh. It's an odd beat, and it makes Alex seem like an rear end in a top hat, given that the Israel is not a military warship and could do nothing to stop a top of the line Martian warship and Murtry was just supposing that they might be a threat. Like, is there supposed to be some irony here? Anyway, Holden goes to see Amos. Amos is bringing out the heavy poo poo they have on the Roci -- body armor and rifles and explosives. Holden tells him sidearms only. Amos rattles off a line that feels like something Jayne from Firefly would say, bringing to mind that whole moment in the movie with their lack of grenades. Cibola Burn, Chapter 11 posted:“Later,” Amos said, “when you’re wishing we had this stuff, I am going to be merciless in my mockery. And then we’ll die.” The Rocinante lands but no one comes out to meet them. Holden and Amos have to walk to the settlement and the Rocinante returns to orbit. They talk briefly and it feels a little like the following exchange should be flipped: Cibola Burn, Chapter 11 posted:“According to the security wonks on the Israel, that’s where they think their people were massacred,” Holden said after they’d walked together for several minutes. "Yeah," Holden replied. "That's how we claim stuff, you know. This planet is officially ours now." I know the series likes to keep putting little pearls of wisdom in Amos' mouth because he's, like, the most sensible straight shooting guy with no biases, but I really think that's more of a Holden thing to say. Especially at this point in the story where he's a bit more cynical (or supposed to be a bit more cynical) than he was at the start of the series. Of course, I could poke a bit more at this. You typically don't claim something by killing the people who show up to take it from you. I think the history of colonialism makes it clear that the claimers were killing the people who were there first. The colonizers stake their claim and flag in the bodies of the colonized, y'know? Anyway, there's a neat little moment that mentions that the insects that bite Holden and Amos drop dead from contact with their blood, calling to mind what Elvi said earlier. When Holden and Amos arrive at the town, there's a mob at the main intersection. About fifty colonists and a dozen RCE goons. All attention immediately goes to Holden and everyone wants something -- kick RCE out, give them food, let them sell the lithium, prove they're innocent, etc. Murtry pushes through the crowd. Holden says it was his people who disappeared but Murtry corrects them -- they were murdered (and he's right!) Murtry rightly assumes that the murderers cleaned up the scene but Holden says he's the one in charge. Carol Chiwewe accuses of Murtry of wanting to implement martial law and has issued a shoot first directive. Murtry's like, hey, you've killed a bunch of us first. Coop shows up and promptly threatens Murtry implicitly. Murtry, for his part, promptly shoots him in the head. Holden and Amos draw on Murtry and the RCE team draws on them. In the end, Holden holsters his gun as Murtry says he'll come see them later. As Amos and Holden are drinking, which strikes me as not the best idea in such a situation, Murtry drops by to see them. Holden thinks Murtry should be in prison for what he did but Murtry argues he's just ensuring his people survive -- he's already lost twenty. Holden says: Cibola Burn, Chapter 11 posted:“You’re a corporate security detail. You don’t get to declare martial law and shoot people who don’t cooperate. I wouldn’t put up with that from legitimate governments, much less a rent-a-cop like you.” Let's have a quick aside here. I really like this chapter and I think Murtry is pretty neat. I think this chapter is one of the ones that really illustrates why Cibola Burn is stronger than lots of fans give it credit for. Murtry is a prominent antagonist (unlike any other novel in the series so far) and, as much as the story wants you to think he's a disgusting monster, I think his points are sound and logical. He's no Nguyen or Ashford. I won't say I like Murtry but I've mentioned before that I think there's something very neat about the reduced scale of this story, that the chief antagonist is just some dude with a dozen guys with guns. Anyway, Amos deduces that Murtry enjoys killing people and he and Amos have a bit of a exchange where they know one of them will probably end up killing each other. Holden thinks they're about to start doing that, but Murtry just wishes them a nice day and leaves. Amos thinks shooting him might help. Holden hopes not -- but thinks Amos might be right... It's interesting again that, as Khizan pointed out, that Holden is just reacting badly to his own personality traits reflected in Murtry. Holden killed Nguyen and he did it by shooting him in the throat which I think is far more painful than a headshot. Holden would probably kill and threaten people to protect his crew. Because that's a pretty important thing here. As much as Murtry is a psycho who is chomping at the bit to start killing refugees, he has been the victim of essentially a terrorist plot concocted by the guy he just-so-happened to execute. Like, it's hard to be too upset that he killed Coop, y'know? I have a feeling that Coop being the guy behind it all won't come up. And while the Belters are refugees and maybe in the slightly more moral position, I think one could make the argument that they're really not any different to the RCE -- they just happened to get there first. Sometimes, I think Cibola Burn wants you to put more mental energy into thinking of them as poor refugees who need a break and not a vanguard who is happily stripping a planet of resources to line their own pockets. Is this an unfair take? Maybe. But it's one that's running circles in the back of my mind. Does the fact that you were the first ones on the ground really entitle you to kill twenty people?
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May 26, 2022 14:29
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Does that 20 include all the people killed on the original ship? The setup actually makes the refugees come off as the real villains to be honest. Which I guess why Murty just happens to shoot the ringleader immediately so they can shift to him being the bad guy.
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May 26, 2022 14:39
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Kchama posted:Does that 20 include all the people killed on the original ship? It does. Reeve's team numbered five in total. I don't think we were told how many people were killed on the shuttle but that'd make fifteen, including Governor Trying. And, yeah, having Murtry ice Coop is an... interesting decision. It reframes the death of the closest thing to an actual villain so far into something to make Murtry into a bad guy. It's a little bit disappointing, really, because the looming conflict between him and Basia could be neat. Feels like another victim of how the narrative/s of the novel is constructed. I do wonder how much of a point we're supposed to think Murtry has? I feel the core of the story, the conflict between the Belter refugee squatters and the RCE corporation is a bit muddy. The title Cibola Burn refers to Cibola, a set of ruins that were conquered by conquistadors who came into conflict with the Native Americans. It's like the Coreys are drawing some parallel between the ruins, the Belters, and Murtry's people but it's an uneven one because, well, the ruins of Ilus were entirely abandoned. There are no natives. Were the American continents entirely abandoned, we'd probably have a drastically different view of the initial colonisers and so on. Alternatively, they may be using the title to refer to the mythical Seven Cities of Gold of which Cibola is one, but that means it really is just a conflict between a bunch of people who think getting somewhere first means you have the right to exploit it and the people entrusted with legal authority to survey and secure it. Somehow, I don't think Cibola Burn will get too much into the moral, legal and philosophical underpinnings of any of this.
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May 27, 2022 00:53
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That makes sense, regarding the number of dead. I kind of feel like maybe the Coreys didn't know how to make the corporation the bad guys since unlike most Evil Corporation stories they actually haven't done anything warranting murder. They hadn't even had a chance to do bad things before the colonists started killing them to take over the joint. So they just had the guy who had been the face of the deaths be suddenly killed and "Oh that's a murder! The corp has revealed their true evil ways!" by popping the guy in charge of the Murder Everyone faction while in the middle of threatening more murder.
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May 27, 2022 01:10
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 12 - 14 Basia remains the galaxy's worst insurgent, Elvi runs afoul of Jim "Stupid, Sexy" Holden, and Holden gets wrapped up in the boring part of making people play nice. Interlude: The Investigator (2) It's another Investigator interlude chapter. One hundred and thirteen times a second, it's reaching out to try and find something -- but nothing is answering. Like the previous, there's not much to say about it. It's almost a stream of consciousness depiction of something doing something. But, by the end of it, it's mentioning "doors and corners" and thinks to itself "This could get ugly, kid." It's the mind of the thing that's wearing Miller's skin and whatever it's looking for, it's still not finding it. Chapter Twelve: Basia Basia thinks Holden came too late. He's already blown up the governor and Coop and co. have already killed a whole RCE security team -- as far as he's concerned, it's too late for him. We hop back in time, however. Basia isn't watching the Rocinante descend but, in fact, the RCE shuttle -- Murtry and co. step out. Murtry says since his team was attacked and killed, he's establishing martial law. Coop, wearing a "smug smile" says that no one proved it was an attack. Carol says he can't do it, it's their world. Murtry disagrees. The Rocinante begins to drop in then, but Basia is taking his son -- Jacek -- back home. Murtry isn't just a bad guy, by the way, he's such a bad guy that Basia supposes his son can "smell the death coming off Murtry and his people." By the time Basia returns to the town, Holden's there and Coop is dead. Too late, Basia thinks. As mentioned, it's hard to care too much that Murtry blew Coop away. Not only was Coop threatening him, but just a little while before he was smugly smiling and gloating about his murders. Later, RCE people are marching around First Landing with weapons out. Basia thinks they''ll kill him next or put him in jail. Lucia points out to her husband that he took himself away when he made decisions like joining Coop's gang and driving Coop's gang out to where they killed people. Basia thinks it'll get worse because there'll be a desire for revenge for Coop and wants to try and convince them to stop. So, he heads off to meet with Coop's group. A mention is made of one of their wives staying home to take care of their son and his infected eye -- and wonder if this relates to something that occurs later in the novel. Anyway, Coop's people are working themselves up to pick a fight -- after all, Coop was shot in cold blood. Basia thinks they should want for Holden to figure out what's going on. Cate and Zadie don't agree, arguing that they can't depend on the OPA or UN to do anything. And how many of their people need to die before they can defend themselves? Basia points out their side started killing people first and everything breaks into a shouting match. Basia argues that with Coop's death things will feel balanced and that, while Holden is present, there's a way to solve it without more violence. Cate points out that, similar to what was said about the death of Coop, Holden's only seen -- as far as knows -- the murder of Coop. "We have the advantage of seeming like the victims right now," she says. In the end, they agree to let Basia talk to Holden. On the way back to his home, Basia wishes he'd never helped Coop do what he did. He encounters Felcia just outside his home where she says that she's going to board the Barbapiccola and go to college on Luna. "No," Basia says, "You're not." Chapter Thirteen: Elvi Elvi's grappling with the fact that the destruction of the shuttle could be that one bad thing could be an outlier but two -- the disappearance of Reeve and his team -- means there's a pattern. Or, as Elvi thinks, once is never, twice is always. Around the net, this gets bandied around as an old German proverb but I'm reasonably certain it's a Corey invention. Either way, it's a catchy little saying and it's stuck in my head since reading Cibola Burn for the first time. Murtry's questioning Elvi about the things she saw in the mine but she can't tell him anything she hasn't already told him. Holden wants to see her too, but Murtry tries to get Elvi to tell him to go away, but she doesn't. So, Elvi goes off to see Holden (he's presenting chatting with Fayez.) And, well, here we get one of the more annoying parts of the novel, and one of the bits that people rake over the coals and are generally happy that it was excised from the TV series... Cibola Burn, Chapter 13 posted:Sitting there, leaning on his elbows and talking to Fayez, he commanded the space. He owned it. What had belonged to everyone was now the unquestioned domain of James Holden. Elvi’s belly went a little tighter and anxiety sped her breath. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, and I imagine I'll talk more about it later. Holden's probably the most influential man in history at this point. Honestly, it's a little surprising that more people aren't smitten with him. The issue is that Elvi is old enough at least to be a Doctor but she comes across like a high school student crushing on her teacher. Which isn't fun for anyone involved. Anyway, Holden and Elvi talk about the problems facing the colony. Elvi still thinks that there's a significant risk from the foreign biosphere which could lead to something "mining" the bodies of the colonists -- a worrying thought! At one point, Elvi growing a little distressed about everything that's happened, she does the "talking loudly without realizing it" thing which is a bit of a tic a few characters have displayed through this series. Fayez backs Elvi up -- while they're busy killing each other, they're ignoring the fact that the planet might be very dangerous. Holden says that the people killing each other need to be his first focus. Fayez says the Belters are good people and that RCE is actually a pretty decent corporation, too. The conversation is broken up when Holden needs to go attend to more messages from the UN. Fayez asks Elvi if she's okay and Elvi says she is and thinks her hand is still tingling from where Holden had touched it. Fayez warns her not to fall in love with Holden, realizing that she perhaps already has. Chapter Fourteen: Holden Over to Holden. He's heading the "first colonial arbitration meeting." Carol Chiwewe is representing New Terra/Ilus and Murtry is representing the RCE. Carol is upset about that part but Murtry points out that basically, wel, who else is available to do it? Holden cuts into their bickering and says he's there to broker an agreement between the RCE and the people of New Terra (as he puts it, probably a nod to what Murtry said, or maybe that it's all recorded and it's the official name.) Holden tells Carol that there can be no further attacks on RCE personnel and then tells Murtry that he's a murderer who he'll prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. The first thing to try and establish is who has the claim to New Terra. Murtry has everything from the UN charter giving RCE the mission to the planet. Holden says they can't ignore that there were people living on the planet before the charter was drafted. He wants a compromise where RCE can do their work while allowing for the possibility of a self-governing Ilus in the future. Amos, who is there, actually falls asleep at this point. It's a little on the nose. Yeah, this is boring and legalistic -- but it's a necessity given the story you wanted to tell, Coreys. Hashing this stuff out is a bit of a necessity. Holden says he just wants everyone to get along -- RCE to do their thing and the colonists to do theirs. "How do we make that happen?" Murtry, again, gets to make a pretty good point: you probably shouldn't open by swearing to pin him to the wall when the colonists have killed "about two dozen people." It's interesting that he uses that language when just a few chapters before he had pegged it to twenty. Murtry doesn't strike me as a person who would exaggerate -- and, Hell, it was Holden who he named the twenty figure to! It feels a little sloppy from the Coreys. Either way, Holden doesn't catch the discrepancy. Holden says they'll get taken to trial, too. He, Amos, and the RCE team can get to the bottom of that. Murtry's fine with that. Carol counters that any kind of delay is part of Murtry's plan to kill them all because eventually they'll run out of supplies (but this doesn't appear to be an immediate concern.) Carol thinks they should be able to sell their lithium in the meantime. Murtry says they don't have the mineral rights until the UN says so. But Murtry agrees to let the colonists load lithium onto the shuttle and take it up to the Barbapiccola in orbit so they can ship it out as soon as the situation is resolved. He would like it, however, if the colonists didn't have a free access to mining explosives given that they used them to blow up a shuttle and kill a bunch of people. Carol agrees, albeit after some initial grumbling, and they go off to present the news to the colony. Apparently, it just pisses everyone off. Afterward, Amos goes off to get a beer and Holden is alone when Miller shows up. Cibola Burn, Chapter 14 posted:“Miller,” Holden said without looking. Cibola Burn, Chapter 14 posted:“Okay. Sure. Murtry’s a psycho who’s finally in a spot where he can do the creepy poo poo he’s been dreaming about doing all his life. I’d just have Amos shoot him. Carol and her gang of dirt farmers are only alive because they’re too desperate to realize how stupid they are. They’ll probably die of starvation and bacterial infections in a year. Eighteen months tops. Your pals Avasarala and Johnson have handed you the bloody knife and you think it’s because they trust you.” Cibola Burn, Chapter 14 posted:“An empty apartment, a missing family, that’s creepy. But this is like finding a military base with no one on it. Fighters and tanks idling on the runway with no drivers. This is bad juju. Something wrong happened here. What you should do is tell everyone to leave.” Basia is waiting for Holden when he returns to town. There's a part of me that was intrigued and loved that Holden doesn't recognize Basia -- but then I remembered: they never met in Cibola Burn. Basia says that Katoa wasn't dead when he and his family let on Ganymede and now, given everything they've gone through, no one can make them leave Ilus. Holden deduces immediately that if Basia isn't part of the colonial resistance then he knows someone who is. And then, he gets a call from Naomi. Something's happening down on the surface. A massive energy spike... and movement. Dun dun!
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Jun 2, 2022 15:03
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 15 - 18 Things go from bad to worse, and then worse to worser -- and that's just for Elvi's prospects with Holden! Chapter Fifteen: Havelock With the news of weird poo poo happening on the surface of But, like, who cares? The ending of Chapter 14 held some pretty ominous promises, and here we're getting Havelock Names Things He Sees. To quote a famous Youtube personality, "'Brevity is the soul of wit.' This just means don't waste my time." And this is the feeling I get from these books occasionally when it comes to the plotting and perspective switches. I am willing to bet that this chapter will not pick up on what happened at the end of Chapter 14 at all. I won't harp on, but I've been watching the newest season of The Boys and it blows my mind how tightly plotted that show is, and how much it just trusts its audience to follow along and understand. Should a book be paced and plotted like a TV series? Probably not. But, on the other hand, and I've said this before, what exactly did these books lose in the adaptation? (And in a month or two you may be able to see if I practice what I preach.  )Cibola Burn, Chapter 15 posted:There were more places and ecosystems down there, more discoveries to make and resources to use, than there had ever been on Earth. It seemed bizarre that they were fighting and dying over that one tiny piece of high desert. And it also seemed inevitable. Basically, the crew is getting a bit antsy. They want to be down on the planet. The scientists want to be down there doing the stuff they've come so far to do. Havelock floats the idea, to himself, of starting a second science colony far from First Landing but doesn't voice it. Murtry asks about the shuttle. Havelock's got it rigged to blow. Captain's not happy about it but, hey, whatever. Murtry wants Havelock to train up something of a militia out of the scientists, given the loss of the security team. Just in case they need the extra people. Havelock says it's not company policy, Murtry tells them to make it unofficial and train them with paint guns. Just in case. So, later, Havelock meets with Matthu Koenen, the Chief Engineer. Koenen can find eleven others who'll agree to run zero-gee exercises with riot gear. Havelock says, through clenched teeth, "No Belters." Which is kind of interesting because Murtry didn't specify anything either way about Belters in this little militia. Is Havelock clenching his teeth because he finds the words hard to say or because of how much he hates Belters? After a bunch of Expansian expository paragraphs, Havelock is eating in the mess hall. Captain Marwick arrives and joins him, asks about the surface. Marwick raises the point of Murtry's treatment of Holden -- while they may hold the relative position of power here, at some point the Edward Israel will need to head back to civilization, which means passing by Fred Johnson's Medina Station. Havelock, angry, points out that they've followed the rules and people got killed for it. Marwick is like, yeah well, morale high ground won't stop a missile or a gauss round. With that said, he departs and Havelock is pretty pissed. Koenen sends him a message that they've got a full team and that the club is getting a logo. Cibola Burn, Chapter 15 posted:Havelock considered the image. It was a stylized male form, squat and featureless, holding up a fist larger than its head. It was a cartoon of the Earther body type, and of violence. Anyway, Havelock sends back a reply: looks great. make sure you get one from me. And it doesn't really feel like anything in his arc because, as I mentioned earlier, he's been a weird angry racist from the very start of the novel. I guess no one on the Edward Israel noticed what Naomi did. I wonder if that'll come up or factor into anything. Probably not. Chapter Sixteen: Elvi Elvi's discussing the movement and power spike with Holden. The Rocinante has provided some images from orbit but it's not really enough to tell beyond that something is moving. The Edward Israel sees similar, apparently. Guess no one told Havelock. They'll have to go out with vehicles to see what's out there and it'll take them most of the day to get there. Elvi thinks it might be an organism of some sort but Holden tells her that organisms don't make power spikes. Which feels like something Elvi should know. They head out with Fayez and Wei. They arrive at around sunset and spot the thing responsible: Cibola Burn, Chapter 16 posted:The thing hunkered down in the depression between two hills. Its vast carapace was the nacreous white that she’d seen in the walls of the ruins, but there was nothing architectural about this. It had an insectile form, long articulated limbs like legs pressing weakly out into the hardpack. Two larger appendages emerged from its back, one gray and splintered, the exoskeleton empty of anything but dust, the other swinging awkwardly. Five black circles on its abdomen recalled eyes, but didn’t shift to focus on them. At least not as far as Elvi could tell. It doesn't seem too functional, though. Most of its limbs don't work and it appears unable to move. Yet Elvi notices that it's cleaned out a long line through the bottom of the valley, devouring the native life down to the rocks. Holden and Elvi think it might be repairing itself. Despite Holden's warning, Wei sights in on the thing and opens fire. She kills it with two rifle magazines' worth of ammo, so, it can't be too big, I guess? Holden asks Wei if she's out of her mind and she says it was a threat so she killed it. Holden isn't so sure, so, they decide to burn the corpse. There's a part of me that feels an odd disconnect here. Holden specifically brings up that these robots people and therefore played a part in the catastrophe in the Slow Zone. I feel like shooting one to death and burning the corpse might be an exceptionally risky idea, one that Holden would -- even with his fear of the protomolecule and such -- be a bit more aware of. The concept of a grenade told the ring station to make everything slow down all at once. What about the concept of murder? They go to sleep. Well, all of them except Holden (who is humming to himself) and Elvi (who is watching him.) She goes to talk to him and they have a nice little moment. Cibola Burn, Chapter 16 posted:“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. Holden tells her that something attacked the builders and they died in vain trying to stop it which passes by Elvi without much thought, and then Holden moves on to wondering about why the construct woke up. Elvi has no idea. Not enough data. Elvi mentions she grew up in Nigeria. Holden mentions one of his dads came from Nigeria. Elvi laughs and says she hops they're not related to each other, and it gets awkward, and both of them go to bed. It's a nice little moment of humanity and something this series has so very little of. Chapter Seventeen: Basia Basia's thinking about Coop. Coop was old enough to be part of the OPA back when wearing their tattoos was an arrestable offense. How long ago was that? One thing that bothers me about these books is the Corey's general reluctance to name years, even generally. Cate, Coop's old school OPA associate, thinks they're outgunned and that Holden's working with the RCE. There are a few new people among the, for lack of a better term, Belter insurgent group. But it turns out that Murtry's public execution of Coop made the guy a martyr and radicalized some people. Cate thinks the way forward is to knock Murtry and his team, Holden and "his thug", and everyone all at once. The way to do that, she thinks, is money. If it's not economically viable to occupy us, she says, then they won't. What makes something economically unviable? Killing people. Her logic is that it takes them eighteen months just to bring troops to Ilus, and that gives the Belters time to fortify their position on the ground. They can't do anything more than that, Cate says, because Medina Station will never support anything else. Basia points out that if they kill Holden, the Rocinante can just bomb them from orbit. Cate basically goes, great, hope they do it, let's be martyrs. Basia doesn't point out that this is also what'll probably happen if Ilus kicks up too much of a fuss. Sorry Cate, but in eighteen months you won't fortify enough to withstand plasma warheads and railgun slugs. So, the plan is simple -- we kill Basia tells them that they're doing something stupid and that he'd hoped that, without Coop, people might start seeing reason. But now they're seeing dead people as media tools, including his children. Basia leaves and runs home which feels a little... I don't know, if I was Cate, I wouldn't let Basia go. Luckily, enough, Basia doesn't tell anyone but Lucia. She tells him to go tell Holden, and that she's letting Felcia take the shuttle up to the Barbapiccola. Basia goes off to tell her goodbye because, well, this place is about to go to hell. He does. It's okay. Then, he goes to find Holden. He tells Holden about the group who killed the security team, that they're about to kick off another plan -- maybe tomorrow night. Holden tries to blow it off, presumably on account of the weird insect construct, and because he says they're all getting off the planet. Basia has a moment of: but I helped kill people to stay here. Holden says that stuff on the planet is waking up and that it could be another Eros. So, it's time to get everyone off the planet. He's sent an emergency request to both the UN and the OPA to give him more authority but he wants emergency command of all the ships in orbit. Basia doesn't think everyone will leave. In fact, he thinks they'd rather stay and fight whatever else wants them gone. Unfortunately, the chapter ends before we get to see Holden's response to that. Chapter Eighteen: Holden And we don't get to see it when we switch to Holden, either. He's trying to tell Murtry that people are out to murder him but Murtry's not taking it seriously, instead trying to use it as an opportunity to goad and taunt Carol Chiwewe. Holden tells them that he doesn't give a poo poo about their little tiff anymore and all this does is unite them against him. Holden says two things have changed recently and one thing hasn't. The things that've changed is that the violence is about to get worse and the alien stuff on the planet is waking up. The thing that hasn't changed is that he's the only one with a warship in orbit. He's leaving with the Israel in thirty hours. He wants everyone in orbit and ready to go by then. Murtry points out that Holden doesn't have power, just fame. And his fame is for being a hero who tries to save everyone, and that his ship has just the right name for it. "Yeah, I've read a book," Murtry tells Holden. The only real power Holden has is the one he derives from the Rocinante's firepower -- and Murtry knows Holden will never have the Rocinante fire on the Israel, the Barbapiccola, or the colony. Holden thinks Murtry is insane. Murtry is like, hey, I'm the only one not freaking out that there's alien things on the alien planet. Murtry says that even if Holden sends a report and even if the UN and OPA both agree he's right, it'll still take them three years to send a replacement. But I thought it was eighteen months from Sol to Ilus? I bring this up because in Chapter Ten, Havelock noted that it only takes five hours to get a transmission to Sol. Maybe the UN and OPA would want Holden to deliver the report in person? Or is Murtry accounting for the slow wheels of bureaucracy? Either way, this feels like a bit of an error. Holden threatens to "relieve" Murtry right now. Murtry calls that bluff too -- he'd be concerned if Amos was with him, but he isn't. Holden says he'd kill Murtry to save everyone on the planet. Murtry gets a call from Wei who asks if they're a go but Murtry tells her to hold. Then, Murtry reveals he's had the whole town bugged for a while and he knew about the incoming attack before Holden did. Which is a little... well, okay. Then Murtry tells his team to 'go' and the gunfire starts. Holden rushes out to get Amos. He runs into where the RCE is besieging, presumably, a residence of one of the insurgents. The house is burning and the RCE guys are just blasting away as people rush out. Holden tries to save a wounded woman while shouting for everyone to stop and then the shooting is over and it turns out she isn't wounded but dead. Wei shows up and orders her people to "secure" Holden. He replies "gently caress you" and gets beat with a rifle butt and he thinks he's about to get shot when Murtry shows up to tell them that no one's to shoot Captain Holden. Amos shows up with Basia and Carol and others. Turns out the dead woman is Zadie, who has been mentioned on and off again as one of Coop's people. Murtry claims that things went down how it did because the return fire from the "terrorists" ignited something in the house. His people, he says, did everything by the book when it came to protecting RCE personnel and a mediator from harm. Murtry wants to arrest Basia. Holden disagrees. Murtry points out that Basia is part of the conspiracy and Amos lays out one of the RCE people with a punch to the face. Murtry says he'll let that slide, but they're taking Basia in. Holden is like, who cares, we're all about to leave the planet. Murtry tells him that he has no authority to dictate that. Holden says he's taking Basia into UN custody as part of the investigation into the attack. Murtry is like, hey, whatever, just get him off my planet. Murtry and his people stand by while the Belters try to put out the fire. Back in town, Holden calls Naomi and tells her to bring the Roci in so they can off-load their heavy armor and firepower and take Basia up. Naomi tells him that there's been more power spikes and movement. Holden warns her that the Israel might go bad and Naomi, rightfully, laughs at the idea--let them try, she says. And that's that. I didn't say much of it at the time, but I think this Chapter is one of my series' favorites so far. I like Murtry and the tension where Holden might shoot him is well-executed. The bit with the gunfire and the house fire and such is pretty gripping, more than the usual Expanse fare. The stuff after it is less good but, hey, can't win 'em all.
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Jun 14, 2022 13:00
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 19 - Interlude 3 Havelock continues being Havelock. Elvi exists for a chapter. Naomi comes up with a plan that immediately backfires, potentially risking the entire mission. Chapter Nineteen: Havelock We return to Havelock running drills with his impromptu engineering militia team. Basically, it's not going well. Havelock just finishes blasting up the new recruits with a paintball gun. The way Havelock sees it, the engineers aren't soldiers. The ones without experience are rusty and the rest have no experience whatsoever. After the exercise, some of Havelock's people wonder why they're training with a mind towards the Barbapiccola instead of the Rocinante. After all, the Roci is a smaller ship with half of its skeleton crew down on the surface. And if they can take the Roci, they'll be in control of the colony. Havelock points out that they'll be in control until they return to Sol, and then they'll be in trouble. Afterward, Havelock meets up with Ivers Thorrsen who is a sensor analyst who makes more in a month than Havelock does in a year. He's also a Belter. What's interesting is that Cibola Burn introduces this idea of Belters who almost pass as Earthers. Thorrsen is one of that group. For whatever reason, growing up in microgravity didn't affect him as much as it did others. It's an odd little thing to bring up now. Previously, every single book has reiterated that Belters are weird lanky people with massive heads who cannot function in normal-gee. It's never really mattered and you can honestly forget it's even relevant, which is why the adaptation dropped it, but it's part of the recurring idea that it feels almost like Cibola Burn is retconning elements of the Belters. Oh, they can take drugs and live on planets just fine. Oh, some of them are barely different. But I think the later books will pretend these never came up. Anyway, Thorrsen... Let's pause for a second. It sticks out to me that this guy's name is Thorrsen when Bobbie had a Captain Thorsson back in Caliban's War. I guess the Coreys think it's a cool name. Anyway! Thorrsen is trying to study the weird heat spots showing up on New Terra but he's having trouble doing it because people are spraying urine into his equipment locker. Havelock gives him the 'boys will be boys' argument and is rather dismissive of Thorrsen's concern about the heat spots. He doesn't come off well in this conversation at all, telling Thorrsen not to turn it into a Belters versus inners thing. Thorrsen tells him he'd be seeing this differently if he was the only Earther in a place full of Belters. Havelock sits down to compose a message to the crew and thinks to himself if he was the only Earther. He remembers being subtly excluded on his first job on a cargo hauler, and he remembers Ceres where he'd always been given the worst cases and "the worst partner." I wonder if that's how he always felt about Miller or if that's in retrospect? Because Havelock and Miller seemed to get along really well in Leviathan Wakes. Well, Havelock assumes nobody pissed in his locker back then because it hadn't occurred to them. Havelock runs through some drafts. One where he calls the colonists "half-feral terorrists" and another where he basically says that every Belter has treated him badly so now it's his turn to treat them badly. But then, he thinks about one time where he got hazed on Ceres, and composes a message that tells the crew not to single out people from the outer planets for harassment as opposed to what he wanted to send initially, a warning to not let pranks get out of hand. It's and odd moment. It doesn't feel right. Havelock started this story has a surprisingly disgusting bigot and has maintained that tack up to and through this chapter. Small steps, I guess. But I maintain that Havelock should maybe have felt more like an idiot out of his depth and wanting to fit in than someone who feels like he's about to shout INNER LIVES MATTER. Chapter Twenty: Elvi On the surface, Elvi is waiting with her hand terminal to get the latest news from Luna. I don't think I've talked about the ubiquitous hand terminals before. See, it bothers me that they're always called 'hand terminals.' They'd almost certainly have a shorter name because saying hand terminal all the time is a mouthful. Handies? PT for personal terminal? It's little things like this that can sell worldbuilding, too. Do we always call our personal computers by their full name, or do we call them PCs, desktops? Not much really happens in her opening scene. She gets the report, listens to it, and examines her to-do list with some angst over writing a letter of recommendation for Felcia. Elvi returns to town and stands by the burned-out building for a bit. She goes to find Holden but there's only Amos. She tells Amos let Holden knows she wants to talk about the artifact in the desert. Then Fayez calls her over to have a drink with himself and Lucia. Elvi finds it difficult to talk to the latter because she's Basia's husband, the man who tried to kill her. Lucia heads off. Elvi asks Fayez why he's hanging out with the wife of Basia Merton. Fayez says that, yes, true -- but if he's nice and pleasant to the locals, it might make it less likely that htey kill him in the next uprising. Cibola Burn, Chapter 20 posted:And... and what is civilization if it isn’t people talking to each other over a goddamned beer?” Fayez said, then lolled his head back over his shoulder. “Am I right?” Elvi realizes that Fayez is afraid and that the two of them are in the same boat -- just waiting for the shoe to drop. Chapter Twenty-One: Basia Basia's about to be taken up to the Rocinante. He's locked in restraints. Murtry demanded them in exchange for Holden being able to take him into custody. Lucia and Jacek are with him but the rest of the townspeople are avoiding it. Holden is there with Murtry and Carol. The Rocinante lands. Lucia tells Basia to find some way back to her on the world. When he's brought aboard the Rocinante, he notes that Naomi is a "tall, pretty" woman but she's also wearing a "simple jumpsuit of gray and black" -- well, I guess they finally ditched those ill-fighting Tachi suits! How long did it take, four years or so? Naomi unlocks his restraints and orders Alex to lift off. He does. Basia wonders if he's a prisoner. Naomi asks him if he plans to do anything bad and Basia says no, even if he remembers hitting the button that kicked off this whole mess. So, she lets him have free run of the ship. They head up to ops. Alex says that all the heat spikes seem to correspond with those bugs-of-nebulous-size waking up. Alex and Naomi have also been monitoring what the Edward Israel is doing with their bomb-shuttle. They know something is up with it because the Israel has stopped using it for anything beyond keeping it a few hundred meters away. Naomi suspects it may be a bomb, presuming it'll be used against the colony. Basia thinks they need to warn the people on the surface but Naomi is certain they can shoot it down the moment it moves. Naomi calls Holden and tells them about the possible bomb-shuttle. Alex wants to blast it with a railgun but Naomi sees it as an escalation. Naomi has another idea -- she EVAs over to it and fits it with a cutout system that'll allow her to shut it down remotely if the RCE guys decide to get it moving. Holden thinks it is risky but far less risky than leaving it out there armed. I'm not sure I agree with that. Basia asks Naomi why she's doing this. Aren't they supposed to be neutral mediators? Naomi says, with 237 Kindle highlights: Cibola Burn, Chapter 21 posted:“Choosing to stand by while people kill each other is also an action,” she said. “We don’t do that here.” Chapter Twenty-Two: Havelock Havelock's going through the news from Sol. When it comes to the violence on New Terra, it looks like Mars is aligning with the OPA. In response to the attack on the RCE personnel, the UN is planning on sending a relief mission. The OPA implies they're willing to use Medina Station to blockade anything going through. Mars, it appears, will support this. Not because Mars cares about the Belters, but because Mars wants to stymie any UN footholds past the gates. Havelock goes down to meet with his militia. Today they're running a practice breaching operation. One team will attack while two others led by Koenen try to stop them. They won't actually cut into the hull of the Israel but they'll do everything up to that. He tells his people to brace for panic attacks once they're outside the ship -- or an attack of euphoria. The operation begins. Havelock takes his teams out but one of his men botches the initial ambush on the attack team and Koenen's people open up. Havelock's team loses (I think? I had to re-read it a few times) and Koenen's people win. But Koenen's grumpy about something -- who is out there working on the shuttle? Havelock gets Koenen to use his magnification to see who it is. Someone in a red EVA suit and they're using a welding kit. Uh-oh! Havelock tells his team and that, given they don't know how many people are there and whether they're armed, their new objective is to scare them off. After all, they're only carrying paint guns. Havelock and his militia burn over toward the shuttle. Red EVA Person -- aka Naomi Nagata -- sees them coming and starts running for it, kicking off from the shuttle. Havelock is relieved, and the militia aren't able to pursue. But they fire their grapnel lines at Naomi. One gets her, then two, then five. Naomi tries to cut her way out but is unable. Havelock heads over to her and takes her into custody. Well, that less risky plan backfired awfully quick, didn't it? Interlude: The Investigator (3) It's still reaching out. It's reaching out to everything it can find on Ilus, pressing buttons and activating what it can. Well, I wonder if that has anything to do with everything that's been waking up? But, by doing this, it's building a model of everything on Ilus. And there's something in the model that is a blank void that kills anything the Investigator sends into it. The more it probes and pokes, the more it figures out the state of the void, the more it realizes where it is. That, the Investigator thinks, is called a clue.
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Jun 19, 2022 06:21
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 23 - Chapter 26 Holden attempts to impose a unilateral de-escalation policy. Elvi and Basia just kind of exist, but Alex says more lines that he's said in the entire series up until this point! Meanwhile, in Havelock's brig, Naomi appears to be talking from another genre. Chapter Twenty-Three: Holden Holden's out in the middle of nowhere trying to get Miller to show up and talk to him, but no dice. I assume this has something to do with how the Investigator is off flipping switches and pressing buttons. While, he's out there, Holden reflects: Cibola Burn, Chapter 23 posted:This new frontier would last throughout Holden’s lifetime. Conquering and taming a thousand-plus planets was the work of generations, no matter how much of a head start the protomolecule’s masters had given them. But in his heart, Holden knew that conquered and tamed they would be. And then there would be a thousand Earths with steel-and-glass cities covering them. Holden felt a shadow of that distant future’s loss of mystery as though it were his own. Holden goes to walk back to town. Alex calls him up and gives him the bad news: the security team happened to catch Naomi sabotaging their shuttle through dumb luck. Havelock's told Alex that Naomi is okay but she's in the brig. Holden figures Murtry "authorized" it and asks if anyone else knows. Alex says Amos does. Holden breaks into a run, worried that Amos is about to demand Naomi's release or he'll put a bullet in Murtry. When he gets back, Amos has his gun to Murtry's head, and a RCE team has Amos under their sidearms. No one dies. Holden gets Amos to leave and he talks with Murtry. Holden tells him that he asked Naomi to deal with the shuttle, which isn't quite true, but then says he only did it because Mutry had turned it into a bomb. They need to stop escalating things, Holden says. To that end, he suggests Murtry disable the shuttle and hand Naomi back. Holden, for his part, will do... nothing. Murtry says, of course, that he's just been doing exactly what he's been ordered to do -- defend the RCE assets and personnel. Holden says he's killed colonists. Murtry says more RCE people have died than colonists. Holden says he kidnapped Naomi, Murtry replies that she was in the process of sabotaging RCE property and she'd being held pending an investigation. Holden accuses Murtry of wanting to make things worse and tells him that he and his RCE people could've just left when they were bombed the first time. Murtry's a bad dude but Holden is, really, being a bit of a poo poo. Holden leaves and Miller shows up, with Holden telling him that everything's going badly. Miller agrees: with Naomi essentially a hostage aboard the Israel, the Rocinante is now a non-factor. Miller tells Holden he wants to go check out something to the north of the settlement, what he calls a big ball of nothing. It's either a big broken part of the planet, or a sign of whatever killed it. Holden meets up with Amos. Amos mentions that Alex is going to demand that the Captain of the Israel treat Naomi well and is otherwise keeping the Roci's railgun locked on the ship's reactor. So much for all that talk of not escalating, huh? Holden says they'll worry about getting Naomi out of Murtry's clutches first, and then go find whatever "scary alien bullet" is left in Ilus. Chapter Twenty-Four: Elvi Elvi's having a dream sequence. It's pretty whatever, just like the other dream sequences these books have had. Images and thoughts that seem deep but are just somewhat obtuse. The only thing notable about is that Holden shows up and touches Elvi's bare breast, which is about the most sexually explicit these books have ever gotten. Fayez wakes Elvi up before the dream goes any further. Up in the sky, one of Ilus' moons appears to be melting and no one has any clue why. Elvi says she's going to go tell Holden and Fayez is like, sigh, of course you are. As she reaches Holden's sleeping area, she spots Jacek and suspects he's about to get violent. They talk for a bit -- Jacek has come to ask Holden about his dad and he's armed. They go inside. Elvi asks if Jacek can talk to his father and Holden is like, well, yeah, of course. Situation solved, Jacek leaves and Amos points out the kid was armed. It's an odd little scene. Not a bad one, just odd. Amos mentions that their XO got arrested by Murtry. Elvi -- and I'm not sure the leap she makes here, I don't think she's met or heard Naomi -- immediately figures that 'the XO' is Holden's lover. So, she brings up the melting moon and Holden points out he can't really do anything about it. Elvi thinks it's like hibernation. The planet is waking up, only some of it isn't quite managing it. Elvi thinks they're only seeing the things that are waking up wrong and that, going by models of hibernation rates and such, there are probably a lot more things waking up and activating in places they're not seeing yet... Chapter Twenty-Five: Basia Up on the Rocinante, Basia is talking with Jacek. It's a fairly nothing conversation given that Jacek was just packing heat and agitation. After it, Basia heads up to the cockpit and Alex and him look at the melting moon. Amos calls up Alex and and the two of them have a brief chat about Naomi. Alex still has the Israel under the railgun. Basia and Alex talk, and we get the first real indication of Alex's backstory in the series: he flew for the Mars navy for twenty years and was married to a software engineer named Talissa. They had a pretty good life and looked after some of the public green space together. But then one day, Alex thought about signing back on with the MCRN. He didn't but then when he got back home, he and his wife had a big fight over something stupid. The next day, he signed on with Pur'n'Kleen on a five-year contract. Looking back on it, Alex understands that it wasn't that he didn't love his wife but he needed to fly and that conflict was what the fight was truly about. He thinks flying ships was what he was born to do. "A person can fail the people they love just be being who they are," he says. And that's what he did. After twenty years of making his wife wait for him, he basically left her out to dry. He draws an equivalence to Basia by telling him that Basia made the decision to do what he did down on Ilus and he needs to understand that he hosed things up. With that conversation done, Alex says he'll never let someone he cares about down again -- and that's why he's about to hail the Edward Israel. Chapter Twenty-Six: Havelock Aboard the Edward Israel, Havelock's noting that Naomi's attempted sabotage has galvanized the crew into thinking everyone is against them -- including the UN mediators. Alex, Havelock thinks, isn't doing anything to help matters as he's threatening to disable or destroy the Edward Israel if the ship attempts to break orbit or if anyone aboard harms Naomi in any way. This is somewhat interesting because Holden hasn't commented on this. Back in Chapter 23, Alex says that he and Amos are putting together a list of demands and such. Holden, it seems, just let Alex threaten the crew of the Edward Israel without clearing it with him. Wouldn't it be better if the message came from Holden, given he's the commanding officer and official UN/OPA representative? It feels like a missed opportunity. Have Holden do it. Have Holden tell Alex not to do it but he does it anyway. As it is, despite all his talk of not wanting to make things worse, Holden's let one of his crew threaten to fire upon and potentially destroy another vessel because of a plan he let happen. As Havelock sums it up... Cibola Burn, Chapter 26 posted:“Sneeze, and he shoots us,” Havelock said. “Look like we’re going to sneeze, and he shoots us. Make sure his chief engineer doesn’t catch cold, or he shoots us. Give her a blankie at night and a cup of warm milk, or he shoots us.” Apparently, Havelock's people had wanted to take the Rocinante when they caught Naomi. But Havelock, who has apparently seen point defense cannons used against human bodies, decided against it. It's been two days since then. Havelock goes to see Naomi in her cell. He plays the video for her and asks for Naomi to make Alex back off. Naomi says Alex doesn't make threats, he just tells it how it is. It's a bit, ugh, really? Naomi says that Alex isn't the one to worry about though, that's Holden. She says that he'll keep doing what he's doing but then he'll just tip over the table, assault the Israel with Amos, and free her. Havelock is like, ugh, really? and Naomi mentions that Holden was on Ganymede, the ring station, the Agatha King, and Eros. Cibola Burn, Chapter 26 posted:“Because he does what he says he’s going to do,” she said. “And if he says he’s going to pop me out of this cell, then either that will happen, or he’ll die.” I don't know if Naomi's trying to psyche Havelock out and get him off-kilter, but it doesn't seem like it -- and Havelock isn't particularly disturbed by her matter-of-fact tone anyway. He calls Murtry. Murtry thinks they're in a good position providing they keep Naomi on the Israel. Havelock wonders if it might be better to release her before they're ordered to do it, earn some goodwill, and Murtry basically says they can go through the official channels and they'll drag their feet every step of the way. Turns out Naomi heard the whole conversation though. Havelock mentions that his old partner was on Eros, too, and Naomi is like, what the gently caress, you knew Miller? Havelock sums Miller up as "one of the maybe six" decent people on Ceres Station. Yet he also thought of him as the worst partner just a few chapters ago... Havelock says RCE isn't the bad guys, they're following the rules and did everything legitimately. Naomi says the people of First Landing don't agree. No one points out that maybe Finders Keepers isn't the best way of handing out new planets. Naomi says Havelock should let her out as it'll keep Holden from doing something stupid but Havelock says he can't. As an aside, it sticks out to me a little that Havelock -- who has been pretty drat racist so far -- has absolutely nothing to say about Naomi's status as a Belter, not even in his internal monologue. Ending the chapter, Naomi mentions that some other people got off Eros, too. Not during the outbreak, but just before it, when Star Helix had started shooting people. "Who?" asks Havelock. Noami shrugs. "Me."
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Jun 26, 2022 07:40
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I've always wondered why they cut this whole bit from the TV series. Part of it, I assume, comes from the fact that they couldn't get Havelock's actor back. I don't think Havelock feeling like a different character was an insurmountable problem, for example. But this chapter, particularly the whole section with Naomi sounding like she walked out of an action film, feel like a solid indicator as to why it was cut. See, it isn't so much that Naomi's tough talk to Havelock is bad. I mentioned that she could be lying or bluffing. The reason why it is bad is because of what it says about Alex and Amos. I feel like I belabor this point but Alex has been a non-entity for the first three books. He pilots the Rocinante -- that's it. In the climax of Leviathan Wakes, he drove the ship. In the climax of Caliban's War, he drove the ship. In the climax of Abaddon's Gate, he vanished because he could not drive the ship. He's practically a component of the Rocinante. He's never quite overcome being the dedicated pilot from the RPG that bore this novel. If this series had AI characters, Alex could be the Rocinante AI system. His characterization is about as thin, too. He's paunchy and he has a funny accent -- wait, those are physical characteristics, not characterization. Uh. I suppose he's the heart of the crew? But that feels almost like an informed characteristic -- that is, one we are told about instead of one he displays -- and arguably shared with Naomi. It's something the TV series leaned into. Outside of driving the ship, Alex barely says anything and I've mentioned before he's absent from a lot of the 'crew planning' scenes. Clarissa considered him as resembling a school teacher, but I remember saying at the time that didn't feel accurate. Basically, Naomi's declaration that makes promises not threats isn't backed up by anything we've seen of him. As mentioned, it feels like a ploy on her part, except that nothing about Alex's demands or his firing solution on the Edward Israel feel like a bluff from her or Holden. Alex is, to borrow a phrase, not that guy. And arguably, neither is Holden. Holden is opposed to violence, even if only treating it as a last resort. His opposition to it has degraded somewhat, and the novels didn't quite depict this aspect of his personality changing very well, but he has still become more comfortable with it. But I don't think that matches Naomi's description of him as being okay until he decides to flip the table and storm the Edward Israel, stacking up bodies until he busts Naomi out of the brig. See, I'd argue Naomi either didn't understand her litany of Holden's achievements or was purposefully misinterpreting them. Let's run through them. She mentions Holden got a load of people off Ganymede when it was a war zone. It took me a little bit to think of what she's referring to. I assume it is the stuff in Chapter Eleven, where there's a ship blocking refugees from getting aboard. Holden almost shoots the guy and it's the moment where Naomi accuses him of acting like Miller. But there's another thing, too. It's Naomi, in fact, who gets the people on the ship -- by telling the guy that, if he doesn't let the refugees on, she'll have the OPA apprehend the ship by force. That is, unless she's referring to Prax and the Pinkwater mercenaries, and I don't think she is. Naomi mentions Holden went "onto the alien station at Medina." Which is true, except all he did was have a weird vision and get apprehended by the Martian marines. She mentions the Agatha King and how he scuttled it himself. And how he fought his way off Eros. It reminds me of the "humor" she's displayed regarding some of the events that Holden still has trauma from. Do you think Holden mentioned Larson, the guy who helped Holden but got left behind because he had a suit breach? Do you think Naomi thought about how Eros has left Holden with mild PTSD and a reliance on cancer drugs for the rest of his life? Because that's sort of the crux of the issue. Yes, Holden has done some remarkable things -- but a lot of people who aren't Holden have suffered for it. Holden hasn't done these things single-handedly, not really. Half the time, Naomi is telling Holden not to run in guns blazing because she thinks it won't end well for him. From a more meta perspective, these books aren't ones where violence is consequence-free. To have Naomi talk Holden up like this it feels like, to be blunt, she's become a bit high on her supply. And maybe that's the point. Naomi's become a Holdenite zealot. Maybe it links in some way to Elvi's hero worship of him -- but that whole plot is basically predicated on her realizing that he's just a man (and an idiot at that!) But as much as I've said this doesn't fit Alex, I don't think it fits Naomi either. Naomi, who we're told back in the first novel, isn't comfortable in weapons. Who, in the second book, wasn't comfortable with Holden sliding down the path of vigilante justice even with good ends in mind. Naomi who argued for Clarissa after she attacked their ship-home and almost killed her. Now she's threatening a bunch of people who are just doing their jobs? Who apprehended her in the course of sabotaging their property? Who were attacked first and now face a fairly biased mediator? It's that protagonist-based morality shining through again. RCE is bad. Holden and co. are good. It doesn't help that Havelock and Murtry are the two representatives of RCE, but it makes it all feel a little cheap. The prospect of Holden and Amos shooting their way through the crew of the Edward Israel isn't as terrible as it otherwise should be. Anyway, this is a bit of a digression. There was a point I wanted to make about Amos. The thing about Alex's attitude and what Naomi's saying aligns perfectly with Amos. And they work well for Amos. He's the best character the Coreys have. But Holden and Alex are not Amos. It feels weird when they're both slotted into the Amos role, for lack of a better term. You could fix this pretty easily. Put the emphasis on Amos. We've just had a chapter where Amos almost killed Murtry. Have Naomi stress that even Holden may lose control of Amos and, without Holden holding his leash, Amos will happily kill every single person on the Edward Israel to get Naomi back. Maybe Holden will let go of his leash. Maybe Holden will just turn a blind eye. I don't know. I think there's better ways to get across the same idea without feeling like you're twisting all four of the Rocinante crew into a knot. Which is why this whole aspect of the book was cut from the series because the Roci crew have much stronger characterization in the adaptation and this chapter would've felt more out of character than it did just now.
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Jun 27, 2022 14:28
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 27 - Chapter 31 Passing the halfway point, things go from bad to worse when a part of Ilus violently explodes in something close to an extinction-level event, and then get worse still! Chapter Twenty-Seven: Elvi Elvi's hanging out by herself some distance from First Landing, watching some Ilusian not-butterflies sweep through the air. She samples one of them with her lab gear and gets an error message. Worried that her gear might be breaking down, she runs diagnostics. But the error isn't with her gear but with the butterfly. She runs back to tell Fayez. Basically, she thinks the butterflies aren't animals but some kind of machine, some form of protomolecule-based life, and she's upset that the planet seems to keep changing the rules on her. Fayez mentions that he's been going over some data from the Israel -- there's a chain of islands on the other side of the planet that have started giving off weird volcanic readings. But if this planet doesn't have tectonic plates, then where's the volcanism coming from? Elvi thinks she should go tell Holden, but Fayez asks her to stop by Doctor Merton's place. There's a boy there, Jacob, who has something wrong with his eyes: they're all bloodshot and faintly green and he's having trouble seeing. He's the first case of whatever it is. Elvi thinks he might have some kind of organism living in his eye, something from the rainwater. Elvi will tell the RCE people and Lucia will tell the colonists. Elvi thinks they can fix it, Lucia isn't so sure. After that, Elvi's off to see Holden. He's listening to a message from a woman within the United Nations: Cibola Burn, Chapter 27 posted:“—squeeze all the balls I can get my hands around until someone starts crying, but it will take time. And I know you’re thinking of taking this public, because you’re loving stupid, and that is what you always think of. You and publicity are like a sixteen-year-old boy and boobs. Nothing else in your head. So before you even begin—” Chapter Twenty-Eight: Basia Basia's spacewalking outside the Rocinante, fixing up a torpedo tube hatch. Apparently, Alex and Basia have been discussing films over their meals. Alex is into 'Noir Revival' films. This might've been nice to have it come up earlier than what was almost the last book in the series. As he works, Basia asks Alex if they can talk to the Barbapiccola and Alex allows it. Basia and Felcia talk and it's okay. Not much to say about it. Standard 'I'll miss you, I'll miss you too' stuff. Afterward, he wonders if he'll ever come back to Ilus. Whether Lucia will find someone else. He mentally tries on the stuff Alex told him about in the last chapter, and thinks he isn't the kind of man who'll just be okay with it. Basia enters the Rocinante. As he does, something explodes on Ilus' surface. The dark side of the planet has lit up as if the sun has risen. He thinks he sees a massive tsunami. Basia pisses himself in fear, which is a natural reaction, but ever since Omi pointed out that it's a bit of a recurring thing... it feels odd. Either way, that massive shockwave is going to hit First Landing. Alex is like, holy poo poo, are you seeing this?! Basia says he has to warn the people on the planet. But, as Basia thinks, what can you say when the planet is trying to kill you? Chapter Twenty-Nine: Holden Holden's ruminating on his problems as he's overlooking First Landing. There's a bit of stuff about how peaceful the town is and the pleasant wind and temperatures. It works really well given that we know there's a massive shockwave tearing the planet apart. "I miss planets," Holden says to Amos. This is a sequence in Cibola Burn that has stuck with me: Cibola Burn, Chapter 29 posted:“I don’t,” Amos replied. He’d been so quiet during their afternoon walk that Holden had sort of forgotten he was there. Holden says that if RCE is going to let Murtry hold onto Naomi then he has to wonder if keeping the peace is better than saving her and turning it into a shooting war. Holden is "pretty sure" he knows which option he's going to pick, even if he acknowledges that his us-and-them logic is the reason why this whole problem with Ilus has kicked off in the first place. Given everything I've just said about the captive Naomi situation, I don't think there's anything wrong with Holden thinking he'd rather save Naomi than keep the peace, but it just feels a bit off. It isn't just a binary save Naomi/maintain the peace option. There's always the third option: Holden kicks off a shooting war and someone throws Naomi out the airlock. No one among the Roci crew seems to consider this. It's tough. I think Holden's being Holden so that's fine, but I think the story misses something for not having a single person in the 'good guys' being the voice of reason. Naomi is being held by a bunch of people who you think are corporate goons led by someone you think is looking for an excuse, any excuse, to kick off Space RaHoWa. If you go after Naomi, you will probably not be able to do so covertly. If the Rocinante fires on the Edward Israel, they have Naomi as a hostage and all the reason they need to harm her in response. If Alex goes down to pick up Holden and Amos, Murtry can warn his people on the ship. They also have a team of people who were able to capture Naomi with grappling lines and haul her in. While we know they're just the engineering militia, the Rocinante crew don't. The odds are, I think it's fair to say, stacked against Holden and his crew. And, again, Holden's a former military man. It'd be nice to see that come up. He may want to bust Naomi out but he could be the one making these tactical points to Amos. Anyway, Alex gives them a call on the high-priority line that's reserved for crew in danger. Holden thinks something's happened to Naomi, but a terrified-sounding Alex tells him that something massive exploded on the other side of Ilus and they have maybe six hours before something akin to the wrath of God hits the colony. It's a bit underwritten, though. Holden's just like 'Oh, send me the video, Holden out.' Later, Holden's showing that footage to Murtry and Carol. Murtry says that his team on the Israel agrees, suspecting it could be some kind of alien power plant failing. Neither Murtry's people nor Alex think they can put down inside six hours to evacuate. And, even if they could, they might not all fit on the two craft. Amos suggests going to the mines but Carol points out they'll flood in the oncoming end-of-the-world storm. Holden suggests the alien ruins. Murtry agrees and they all go off to gather everyone into the ruins within four hours. It takes them longer than Holden thought. Turns out faced with blue skies and gentle winds, people don't think it's happening. I feel it's a bit odd that Holden thinks he had to explain it to people. They have video! Just show them the video of the world-ending shockwave! Everyone's taking food, water and blankets. Elvi wants to bring the chemical analysis deck because it can sterilize and distil water. Holden gets Amos to take care of it. The sky begins to darken. Everyone gets into the ruins but there's a problem -- the Dahlke family is missing. Amos gets a nice moment where he's like, hey, I'm not leaving a little girl out there even though it's a six-kilometre round trip and the shockwave is about to hit. It's a nice little reminder of Amos' need to protect kids and I appreciate the Coreys don't make a big deal out of it. Holden calls Alex to get an update on the storm status and it's too late -- all Holden has to do is look west where a a massive black curtain is hurtling toward them. Too late to go get the Dahlke's. Maybe even too late for everyone in the ruins. Chapter Thirty: Elvi The storm hits. Elvi's reminded of the crash, and finds herself preferring it. The crash, at least, was over quickly. Mud pours into the ruins and covers their ankles. It takes about sixteen hours for it to subside and pass. Elvi takes a look outside and the surroundings have just been annihilated. She weeps over the loss of the ecosystem she'd only started to understand. Holden comes by and holds her hand and comments about how the RCE and Belters are helping each other bail water out of the ruins. Amos shows up with some of the colonists and says they're going to go look for the Dahlke family. Wei, one of Murtry's people, offers to come and help and so does Fayez. Elvi doesn't want Fayez to go but he's like, hey, I'm a geologist and I doubt anyone's going to need me to talk about geology. The winds are still howling outside. Elvi goes off to help Lucia and some others seal up the ruins to stop water from getting in. Eventually, Elvi sleeps. She wakes up to find Fayez and he tells her they didn't find anyone and that things are basically hosed. Basically, nuclear winter. They've got the batteries and food and water they brought up with them and that's about it. Elvi thinks it'll bring everyone together. Cibola Burn, Chapter 30 posted:“So that’s a good thing,” she said. Chapter Thirty-One: Holden In one of those Expansian openings, Holden is reflecting how he once saw a tornado clean up the local farmer's market when he was growing up in Montana. Standing in what had been the center of First Landing, Holden reflects that what's happened is "worse." Alex suspects a big fusion reactor might've gone up as the rain may be radioactive. Holden mentions he's running low on his cancer meds and that's a fun little wrinkle he'll have to deal with. The plan is to get off the planet before the next catastrophe. A bunch of weird slug creatures are being forced to the surface by the rain. Amos hates them. Holden manages to get a connection to the Rocinante but can't get anything but static. They can send messages but don't have comms. Holden gets an update from Arturo Ramsey, RCE's lead counsel -- tl;dr: unsure legal situation, leaving Naomi in RCE's protective custody until that's sorted. Amos wonders why Holden hasn't let him off the leash. Holden says that killing Murtry wouldn't have aided their mission which, again, do the Coreys realize that's the kind of thinking that Protogen and co. exemplified? When Holden gets back to the ruins, Elvi finds them and she's freaking out about the slugs. Turns out the slugs are incredibly toxic. Someone grabbed one of them and suffered "almost instant" total, fatal paralysis. Murtry's organizing people to get rid of all the slugs. Holden says, quite oddly, that it's time to change his priorities. Murtry's trapped one of the slugs under a bowl and is sort of studying it. Holden tells him that the whole colony is gone, that the rain is radioactive, and there may be things living in it. Murtry has already asked the RCE shuttle to bring supplies down and Holden's like, okay, great, it's time to get everyone off-world. Each shuttle supply trip will take some colonists with it on the return journey. If the Roci and the Barb can't take everyone, then the Edward Israel will take the rest. Murtry isn't okay with this. Why can't the ship that brought the colonists here take them away? Because, Holden says, it no longer has the room to do so. Murtry points out that maybe they should ditch the ore they "stole" from the planet. Holden ignores him and says the ship simply doesn't have the supplies to take that many people. Feels a bit shaky. Maybe I don't understand logisitics but if the Barb doesn't have supplies then the three-ship flotilla is going to have trouble taking care of the total number anyway. But whatever. Holden also thinks that he has a Plan B: have Amos kill Murtry right now. Like some of the other stuff I've mentioned, I'm just going to point out that Wei is here and she's got her rifle in her hands. Amos still has to draw his weapon. Assuming he can do that and kill Murtry, how quickly can Wei light the two of them up in response? Like, I get it. Murtry's a bad dude. Holden isn't the smartest guy but surely he's bright enough to realize that if he kills Murtry then maybe no one gets off the planet. But, in the end, Murtry agrees to Holden's suggestion which actually stumps Holden for a moment. I feel like this has come up a few times with Holden expecting Murtry to stonewall him only for him to agree with him and it leaves their relationship feeling a little odd. There's a fun little moment where Murtry tries to be all "Oh, if only you'd let us build some actual structures, maybe we wouldn't have ended up like this dot dot dot" and Elvi responds that the winds were too strong for anything to survive and Murtry forces a smile and thanks him for correcting her. As we've hit the halfway point, I'm going to summarise my thoughts on Cibola Burn so far in another post. I still think it's one of the better books in the series, but it does have some issues. Namely that I feel like there hasn't been much of a plot since Chapter 12 or so.
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Jun 29, 2022 12:06
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At the halfway point, all in all, I think Cibola Burn is one of the better books among the first four. It feels more consistently paced and the fact that all the characters are in the same locale works to its benefit. But what sticks out to me are the usual Coreyian bugbears -- a plot that's just too long for what it is, characters who don't feel like protagonists, and a general sense that it feels like there's a lot of sitting around waiting for something to happen. In a way, Cibola Burn feels closer to that RPG sense of storytelling that we saw in Leviathan Wakes but now the GM is rolling on the random planetary disaster table every few chapters. The plot kicked off with a literal bang. Holden being brought in to play mediator and unwitting accelerant between colonist insurgents and uncompromising corporate-types is a neat setup. But the plot feels almost irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, even before Ilus had a thermonuclear meltdown. I like Murtry as an antagonist, I think he's one of the best in the series, but I don't like how he was swapped in, so to speak. The fact that Ilus itself has taken over as the antagonist is okay, but I don't think the Corey team is able to pin it down as well as they want. It makes all the characters feel very reactive and they all tend to agree that they need to work together. It makes sense but it isn't very fun. The other thing that is letting it down is the shallowness of the conflict. It's good Belters versus bad RCE goons. With the exception of Elvi and Fayez, everyone in the RCE party is a pretty bad dude. Our two windows into the RCE are Havelock , who has seemingly become a massive racist in the few years since Leviathan Wakes, and Murtry who feels like he'd rename one of the Edward Israel's cargo holds Dead Belter Storage. Murtry, especially, comes off oddly. Yes, he's a prick. Yes, he's a bad person. But just about every encounter he has with Holden fits the following template: HOLDEN: I want you to stop doing what you're doing, Murtry. I want you to do as I say. MURTRY: Captain Holden, I think you are biased. My company has legal rights in this situation and they attacked us first. Perhaps a compromise is in order. HOLDEN: You're a goddamn rear end in a top hat. (Amos or I should kill this dude...) MURTRY: Well, I agree with your suggestion, but I'm not happy about it. I'm reminded of Babylon 5's classic antagonist, the Psi Cop Al Bester (especially with how Burn Gorman portrays Murtry in the TV series.) That kind of smarmy character who knows he is protected by the law. But whereas John Sheridan and co. often needed to outmanoeuvre Bester via wits, cunning or legal loopholes, Jim Holden is just like, hey, I could just shoot him. To borrow an overused meme, it feels like the Coreys are aiming for that 'Calm Hitler' idea. "Gee, Captain Holden, I just want to use the law as it's written, it seems like you have some growing up to do." The problem is, I really don't think Murtry has done anything to justify the antagonism I think the novel wants me to feel for him. I feel like it wants me to be itching for the inevitable moment Holden is willing to break his ideals to give smug Murtry his comeuppance, but... See, I genuinely don't know if the Coreys are aware that Holden is usually responding to the same tendencies he himself has. Holden doesn't like that Murtry is exerting an iron grip to protect his people? Holden's willing to start a shooting war to save one of his people -- and it's his girlfriend at that! What would Holden have done had half his crew been killed when they were landing on Ilus? I feel like it's a flaw in the novel that it's not really engaging with this. It feels like the Coreys want to draw a distinction because Holden cares about his found family whereas Murtry cares about his corporate subordinates. As per usual, I think a weakness of our multiple protagonist setup is that it feels like they're running four stories that don't really align together as a cohesive whole. Basia (8 chapters) Honestly, Basia is the worst of the four viewpoint characters. The most interesting part about him was his reluctant insurgent status and that was basically wrapped up in the first quarter of the book. 'What will happen when people find out Basia blew up the shuttle?' Not much, really. 'What will happen to Coop and his bloodthirsty goons when Holden gets there?' Coop will be executed off-handedly and then the insurgency will be wrapped up by the true antagonist, Murtry. 'Will Basia face any justice?' He'll go up to the Rocinante and pal around with Alex and cry about things. The Merton family plot with his daughter wanting to go off to university just isn't particularly interesting. Lucia has some nice moments, sure, but that's about it. I don't think anyone was really crying out to see the Merton family again after Caliban's War. There's a kernel of something interesting there, what with how he was related to the events of that novel, but overall I feel like Basia's part in the novel is the weakest part. It feels like he's on the Rocinante just so we have a window into that side of things and to give Alex some screen time, so to speak. I can see why you'd have a character like Basia in a story about two competing factions, but the way it's been handled in this one? Elvi (8 chapters) I don't mind Elvi. I think she's a fine character. I don't like her as much as I did Anna, and I get why people think she's annoying or childish, but I think she's okay. The problem I have with Elvi is similar to Basia: the story just doesn't really have anything for her to do. Just like Basia, I can see why you'd include someone who was involved in the shuttle crash, yet it feels like she just kind of exists as an observer. She's a scientist who wants to do science but can't -- well, okay, now what? Really, Elvi's basically a way for the Coreys to dump in their worldbuilding notes on Ilus and I just don't rate worldbuilding that highly. It's hard not to sound dismissive with what I'm about to say next but, well, just about anyone can do worldbuilding. There's whole subreddits where people worldbuild for stories they'll probably never write. The real test is integrating it into the story. As usual, Cibola Burn does it okay without it coming across as too much of an infodump but it seems to come at the cost of Elvi doing much of anything else. I like Elvi's crush on Holden but it comes off more like she's a teenager than a mature woman. Holden's a remarkable man, so, it's fine but it's a one-note thing that they haven't really done anything with. But Elvi the scientist with a crush on Holden isn't really enough of a pillar for 25% of a novel. Havelock (6 chapters) Havelock is an unfortunate case. He just doesn't feel like the character we met in Leviathan Wakes. I would've said that Havelock was a young guy who hadn't experienced racism before. A naïve youngster with his future ahead of him to contrast against old man Miller. In this novel, I'm really not sure why they included Havelock at all, beyond to have that moment where Naomi is like, holy poo poo, you knew Miller? When Cibola Burn was going to be the last novel, perhaps there's some value in having Havelock feature as he was mentioned in the first novel. I think the novel missed the opportunity to have Havelock be out of his depth and caught up in Murtry's anti-Belter rhetoric. But what bothers me the most is how the story hasn't mentioned at all how he escaped from Protogen. Havelock isn't so bad but I just don't see why he's Havelock. Holden (8 chapters) Holden is Holden. I think everything I covered in the general overview is what I'd say here. He's okay but a bit difficult to get a bead on. I think the novel's desire to have Holden be the cynic prepared to make the hard decisions robs the Holden-Amos-Murtry planetside dynamic of some interesting energy. Perhaps it's more generic, but if Murtry was a bit more unreasonable, if Holden felt he had to keep Murtry around for whatever reason, and if Amos was like the pragmatic devil on his shoulder being all 'Cap, we're gonna need to do it, better now than later' then I feel like the planetside intrigue might be more effective. Especially if the story investigated that idea that Murtry and Holden are basically the same dude, someone who puts the lives of their crew over the lives of others. Maybe that's why Holden wants to keep him around, because of sympathy. Maybe Holden could start on the side of the Belters, then sympathise with Murtry, before flipping back after Murtry wants to take things further. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Jun 30, 2022 |
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Jun 30, 2022 03:08
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I am VERY curious how you're going to feel about the Great Slug War. I think I had in my head that this book was going to be our first real, Rama-like adventure into protobuilder mystery world, with lots of spooky things and Mysterious Anomalies for Elvi to puzzle out. And around when the slug thing happened I realized "boy, this is what this series is about, isn't it? You go to your first alien planet and it's all mud and slugs."
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Jun 30, 2022 04:15
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General Battuta posted:I am VERY curious how you're going to feel about the Great Slug War. I think I had in my head that this book was going to be our first real, Rama-like adventure into protobuilder mystery world, with lots of spooky things and Mysterious Anomalies for Elvi to puzzle out. My memory of what comes next is hazy beyond just the plot points, which I remember being neat enough. Ilus turning off fusion, Holden's cancer meds keeping him the one seeing person... but everything is very hazy until we hit the end. The ending is about where I had my similar moment of realization about the series. Specifically, the moment where Amos gets shot and has his trigger hand blown off and you think, oh, he's going to die while Holden solves the mystery. It's a really good moment and a fitting ending for that character. But then he's alive and well at the end. I assume it's a consequence of the book series being extended out, but it very much made me realize that this is a series that was not going to throw curveballs and no one was ever really in danger. Like, it's weird, but sometimes it feels like the Coreys aren't interested in their own concepts. We're setting this story on an artificial planet with protomolecule-based life and technology that defies the laws of physics, Holden's got a Miller AI in his head who must crack the case of who killed the Builders! So, what if there was a lot of mud, and slugs that killed you if you touched them, and Basia Merton was back but he was a terrorist now? It's like how Abaddon's Gate ends on this amazing promise of Holden and Head Miller solving the cosmic mystery -- and then Cibola Burn is what it is. I can't help but feel it's repeating Abaddon's Gate on some level: a bunch of people go to a spooky place and they must recognize their shared humanity and overcome their prejudices to survive. Like, it's not bad but we just had that! Give us spooky alien world!
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Jun 30, 2022 10:25
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 32 - 34 Begun, the Great Slug War has. I wanted to cover this all in one update but, well... It's a long subplot. Longer than I remember. Probably longer than it needs to be. Chapter Thirty-Two: Havelock Havelock's not coping well with the loss of contact with the RCE surface team. He can't sleep and he's wondering what he should do about the Israel, the Barb, or the planet itself. Naomi seems to be taking it remarkably well. Meeting up with Koenen in the mess, the Chief Engineer tells Havelock his theory: the timing of the massive explosion is a bit convenient, isn't it? Just after they caught Holden's XO messing with their ship? Now, something blows up and all the attention is taken off her. The squatters got there early -- who knows what they set up on the sly? And Holden, Koenen argues, is a known OPA asset. And he's sleeping with the prisoner. And he went to that alien station near Medina and all the Martian marines who went with him have met with incidents ranging from strange deaths to quitting the military since then. There's even a "secret report" that suggests that the Jim Holden that came back from the Ring Station is actually a doppelganger. Honestly, I love this bit. Remember how I said how it could be more interesting if we never saw the series from Holden's perspective? This is like a shadow of that. It's a ridiculous comedic moment when we've been riding along in Holden's head, and therefore doesn't really say anything about conspiracy theorists that isn't haha, they believe stupid things, but it's still a bit with a sense of fun behind it. Havelock returns to the brig and asks Naomi if she's a secret alien spy with a plan to blow up the planet as part of a Belter conspiracy to distract the media. Naomi laughs it off and so does Havelock. He tells Naomi that no one "really" thinks she's in league with the protomolecule. Kind of erodes their own previous scene. Six hours later, Murtry calls up and gives a report -- some Belters have died but no one from the RCE team. Murtry wants Havelock to bring down food, water and medical supplies and bring the squatters up. Cibola Burn, Chapter 32 posted:“We’re getting them off the planet and putting them under our thumbs,” Murtry said with a smile. “His Holiness, Pope Holden, thinks he bullied me into it. That man is about as smart as a dead cat.” After Murtry hangs up, Naomi is like, wow, is that your boss? Havelock says he doesn't come off so badly most of the time. Naomi asks Havelock to take down some anti-cancer meds for Holden. Havelock agrees to do it. The Naomi/Havelock friendship feels a little undercooked and doesn't help the overall feel that it doesn't seem like the Coreys had much of an idea to do with Havelock. He's a racist! He loves Murtry! He's the only friend to the prisoner! He's like a beaten spouse! Anyway, then Naomi says: Cibola Burn, Chapter 32 posted:“A lot of people have underestimated Jim over the last few years,” Naomi said. “A lot of them aren’t with us anymore.” Anywya, Havelock puts the relief supplies together and sends it down to the planet and, just as the shuttle dips into the clouds, it violently detonates. One of Ilus' moons shot it down. As Havelock discusses the situation with Captain Marwick, the Captain lets him know that they have a problem. They're on battery power. Not because they got shot, but because something has turned off their fusion reactor -- and it won't restart. Chapter Thirty-Three: Basia Alex and Basia are discussing what's happened. Well, Alex is. Basia's just kinda freaking out. The Rocinante's reactor is down, too. All three ships above Ilus have lost their reactor power. The Barb's orbit is decaying, which is a problem, but not for a few days at least. Basia wants them to go save the Barb but Alex points out that, without their reactor, they need to conserve power or they'll just end up falling into the planet, too. While Basia wonders the halls, Alex goes down to try and figure out what happened to the reactor. He ends up on the command deck taking a message from Holden but Alex comes in immediately. Alex gives a report: it isn't that the reactor is broken, the reactor is completely fine, but something has busted the concept of fusion. As far as the ships in orbit -- Alex isn't concerned about the Roci, it has more that enough power to remain in orbit for many years or to come down for a planetside landing. The Edward Israel has ten days or so of energy. The Barb has less. Holden says the defense grid has started up because one of the power stations blew up. Holden wants Alex to call up the Edward Israel and get them to allow Naomi to figure out what's up with the reactors. Alex ends up talking to Havelock. Havelock doesn't see why he should release Naomi until Alex says she's the best engineer there is. Havelock says he'll see what he can do and comes off like he's not going to do anything about it. Alex calls him an idiot and a sack of poo poo. It makes Alex seem like a prick. Afterward, Basia reflects on the journey the Barbapiccola took from Ganymede, to the Rings, and to Ilus. I still find it a bit strange that a refugee ship just happened to be carrying enough medication to allow Belters to live on a relatively Earth-like world. Interlude: The Investigator (4) It reaches out it reaches out it reaches out. The Investigator is still flipping switches and figuring things out. It builds the investigator, kills it when it doesn't know the answer, then makes a copy of it and restarts the process -- but something goes wrong (or right) during that process, and the Investigator appears to gain a bit of self-awareness, and seemingly escapes the pattern of birth -> knowledge -> death. Cibola Burn, Interlude: The Investigator posted:The investigator licks his lips, he doesn’t have a mouth. He adjusts his hat, he doesn’t have a hat. He wishes in a distant way that he had a beer, he has no body and no passion. He turns his attention to the dead space, to the world, to how you solve unsolvable problems. How you find things that aren’t there. What happens when you do. Chapter Thirty-Four: Holden Holden informs Amos that the supply shuttle has been shot down. They reflect that it's similar to the events of Abaddon's Gate, but this time the protomolecule has seemingly shut down their reactors for them. This is somewhat interesting because it implies that Ilus and the Ring Station were in communication. The upside, Holden says, is that he'll die of hunger before he dies of cancer. Holden heads to the back of the tower so he can talk to Miller. He wants Miller to fix it. If not for them, then for the fact that his protomolecule nodule is in the Rocinante's hull. Miller says he can't do that. He's a wrench, the Ring Station happened to be a hex nut, and he can't do the same thing here. Cibola Burn, Chapter 34 posted:“The thing that’s turning all this crap on? It just does stuff. If the Rocinante arms and fires a torpedo at someone, what are the odds a wrench in her machine shop can bring the torpedo back? That’s who you’re talking to.” Still, Miller thinks you can maybe bypass the defences if you do so without much energy and do so slowly. Holden thinks they can drop supplies via airfoils and parachutes. Miller's just about to say something about investigating the dead spot to the north but Amos shows up and says "the cute scientist" is looking for Holden. Cibola Burn, Chapter 34 posted:It took Holden a moment. “The biologist?” Holden says he expected Murtry to fight him on it. Murtry says he just wants the squatters to go away and having them die doesn't help him. Holden's like, wait, you don't actually care about them? You'll only help them because it'll get them to leave? You'd be happy if they all died, wouldn't you? Murtry says yep. Holden goes to find Amos who is working on death-slug defence. They're using plastic and buckets and makeshift moats and trenches to prevent them from entering the ruins. Holden pitches in with the trench digging but they don't have anything but makeshift digging tools and it's tough and frustrating. Still, Iit helps Holden take his mind off Naomi potentially dying as the Edward Israel falls out of orbit. It's a nice moment. Holden goes off to get another tarp and Miller reappears, saying they need to go north as there's a transfer network they can use to get them to the dead zone. Holden doesn't care. Miller think there's something up there that can turn off the defences. If Holden helps him get there, Miller will do whatever he can do turn the defence grid off. Holden says he can't do it until the colonists are safe. Once some supplies have dropped down and the colonists have shelter then he'll go along with Miller. A Belter shows up and reflects they're not Belters anymore because they're just colonists like anyone else, but this seems to be downplaying the physiological changes they've undergone. Once again, the TV series made a smart (if budget conscious decision) to make Belters more of a cultural group. The Belter mentions an "RCE puta" and Holden is like, oh yeah, I have to go see Elvi. Rather nice of Holden to go, oh yeah, the RCE whore -- that's Elvi! I understand why the colonist might call her that, but Holden just lets it pass. I feel like Mister We Should All Get Along should've said something. But then I remember the weird 'I would've taken advantage of Naomi' bit from Leviathan Wakes and, well, maybe Holden's just a misogynist. So, he goes off to see Elvi and she gives him the bad news: in about four days, everyone in the colony is going to be blind.
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Jul 5, 2022 02:49
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 35 - 38 The Great Slug War grinds onward. Elvi gets over her crush in a way that can best be described as 'really?' Havelock and Naomi just kind of exist. Chapter Thirty-Five: Elvi This switch from Holden to Elvi is perhaps the only time so far where I feel like the Coreys have really nailed the strengths of a narrative with multiple perspectives. We get the dramatic notice of a blindness plague to Holden, a nice sting to end the chapter on, and then we swap to Elvi, the scientific expert, to explain it. Holden just bursts into laughter at her warning, and then asks what she means. Elvi says there's an organism that lives in the clouds and, when it rains, it can end up elsewhere. It finds nice places to live in the human body and resists salt -- so, specifically, it ends up in the eyes and tear ducts. Remember back in Chapter 27 when Lucia had that boy with the green tinge in his eyes? He was the first case. This is probably the best use of foreshadowing the Coreys have had across the first four novels (if not the second, which is also contained in Cibola Burn.) And the earlier comments, about the possibility of organisms being able to 'mine' the human body and such. The issue is not that the organism causes blindness per se, but that the conditions on the eye are really good for it, so, it reproduces so much that it blinds people as a side effect. Holden says: Cibola Burn, Chapter Thirty-Five posted:“Apocalyptic explosions, dead reactors, terrorists, mass murder, death-slugs, and now a blindness plague. This is a terrible planet. We should not have come here.” Later, Elvi is off studying the green sludge organisms. Unfortunately, she's too busy crushing on James Holden to concentrate much. Fayez shows up and asks her what's up. Elvi says she has to go find Holden and tell him that she's in love with him. Fayez tells her it's a terrible idea and that she's not in love with Holden because she's in love with his persona, the man she saw on the news. It's a bit blunt. Fayez basically says, Elvi, you're horny but you ignore your sexual impulses and you think Holden is the solution to it but I'm right here. So, after the sex, Elvi reflects that she doesn't actually love Holden. I don't know how to put this without being a bit crude but, well, I don't like how the story basically says that all Elvi needed was a good dicking. Especially when, now that she's had sex, she's pretty immediately able to start figuring out the organism... I think it's pretty obvious why they cut out this whole subplot from the TV series. I know this aspect of Elvi's character and the novel is pretty heavily criticized and, frankly, rightfully so. Elvi having a crush on Holden is fine. But getting over it because she got laid? Less so. Chapter Thirty-Six: Havelock Up in space, Havelock is getting a little bit stir crazy with the Israel running on battery power. Koenen says he can work on the grid to buy them two or three days. Koenen and Marwick have a bit of an argument but Havelock shuts it down -- they don't do anything until they get another supply drop down to the planet. Afterward, Marwick thinks that Koenen is a bit of an rear end in a top hat. Just because he's played a few paintball games doesn't make him "Admiral loving Nelson." Naomi thinks Havelock will be famous when they get back to Sol, if only for the amount of 'I'm busy, please call our offices on Luna' messages he's been sending back to people. He doesn't like that prospect. Naomi says that's basically what happened to Holden, being the face of something. It's not quite the same because Havelock's just doing his job and Holden blabbed things to the whole Sol system and kicked off a war. Cibola Burn, Chapter Thirty-Six posted:“Come on. You’re telling me he doesn’t get off on it? Just a little?” Anyway, Naomi asks Havelock how well he knew Miller. Havelock says he was his partner and he kept him out of trouble a few times. Naomi asks him if he thought Miller was "weird" and Havelock is like, hey, every cop on Ceres was. Then, it's time for their daily outing (which we haven't seen or heard of before.) Havelock takes Naomi down to the gym. Some of the inners are grumpy at Naomi, some of the Belters are grumpy at Havelock. Naomi and a Belter named Orson Kalk say something in their dialect and I've got no idea what it means but neither does Havelock (I think) so it's fine. They go back to the brig, Naomi goes back in her cell, and Havelock sends more canned responses. Murtry calls him and asks for an update on the supply drop. Havelock says it's about six hours away. Murtry wants Havelock to construct a shelter that will last for a few years. One with the RCE insignia on it. That way, if everyone dies, whoever shows up next will not only have a roof waiting for them but proof that RCE was there. After the call, Naomi asks Havelock if he's alright because "the man you look up to like a father" seemed like he was about to die. Havelock denies that he looks up to him, but he cries and Naomi cries and they both mention how scared they are and Havelock realizes Murtry doesn't care about anything and that he thinks he took the wrong contract. Chapter Thirty-Seven: Elvi Elvi's going through more data. With the slugs, it's simple: it's a neurotoxin, there's no antidote, don't touch them. The eye gunk is more complex, where they're not quite sure if it's organic or a mineral, but the blindness can probably be reversed if you can get them out of the eyes. No one seems to know that part. The body is trying to fight them off, given a white blood cell spike, but can't seem to do it. And Elvi's started to notice that she's losing her vision, too. It seems to be hitting most of the people in the camp. Carol comes in to tell her that they caught forty-one death-slugs today. Elvi thinks the overall trend is down but thinks it will cycle up again. Also, they're running low on food. Elvi reflects that her grandmother was blind and able to function perfectly, only she wasn't blind on a planet with no sustainable agriculture and filled with death-slugs. Fayez returns with food and Lucia. Lucia says that almost everyone in the camp is infected, RCE and colonists. But there's one man who doesn't seem to have any in his eyes -- it's Holden, of course. When they go to see Holden, Elvi has this moment where she sees him without her crush-tinted goggles: Cibola Burn, Chapter Thirty-Seven posted:His hair was slicked back and greasy. The beginnings of a spotty, moth-eaten beard mottled his cheeks and the top of his neck. Her failing vision softened away the lines of age and stress and left him a pleasant-enough-looking but unremarkable man. She remembered all the times she’d generated excuses to spend time in his company. It hardly seemed plausible that it was the same person. Cibola Burn, Chapter Thirty-Seven posted:“Captain, you are a very special, very important person —” Cibola Burn, Chapter Thirty-Seven posted:“Because I thought… Well, I’m sorry. I misunderstood —” Some hours pass. Elvi's taken the blood tests in the intervening time and she's waiting for the results to come back. Fayez seems to have caught a case of the feels and basically asks if they're more than casual sex buddies but Elvi's a bit too intent on her work to pick up on it. Fayez thinks that she'll get them out of their current predicament. If anyone can do it, he says, it's her. Chapter Thirty-Eight: Holden Cibola Burn, Chapter Thirty-Eight posted:Holden shuffled his way around the tower again. Holden finds a work crew digging a moat. One of the men has a death-slug on his clothes. Holden yanks the dude's pants off and hurls them away being like, holy poo poo, didn't you know you had a slug on you? Were you leaning on that wall? I've told you not to lean on the walls. The man says his eyes aren't doing so well. In fact, the whole work team's eyes aren't doing so well. So, Holden sends them all inside. Elvi gives him a call and tells Holden to come in so she can get his test results by having them read to her by Holden. Holden says he has to finish his patrol. He finds Amos working on a bunch of mechanical things and blasting any death-slug that gets close with a blow torch. His eyes are going, too. Amos refuses to go into the tower, citing that the stuff he's working on his toxic and doesn't liek the idea of other people touching his stuff. Holden says if Amos doesn't go inside then he'll have to make him. If Amos is blind, Holden likes his chances. Amos laughs and disagrees but still doesn't want to go inside. He thinks he'll start getting into fights if he's around too many people. It's a nice little moment between the two. Elvi calls Holden again and he heads back, running into Murtry who is just heading out. Murtry's heading out to get a supply drop. He wants Holden to help get his structure set up. Holden says that's not really an immediate concern. Murtry is like, hey, my team is bringing in all the supplies, if I want to put up a few walls then you can help me put up a few walls. Holden fantasizes about dragging a blind Murtry out to the middle of nowhere and leaving him for the death-slugs. Holden goes off to find Elvi. There's a fun bit where Holden and Elvi have to team up to use the screen while Holden reads her the data. They take some more of his blood but Elvi isn't sure how close they are to solving it. This is a bit of a semi-spoiler, but there's one thing that you'd really think Holden would bring up. Holden goes back outside, and... Cibola Burn, Chapter Thirty-Eight posted:Holden shuffled his way around the tower again. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Jul 7, 2022 |
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Jul 6, 2022 06:55
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 39 and 40. With Holden grappling with being the one seeing man in the kingdom of the blind, Basia and Havelock's stories finally converge in space... and it's actually pretty fun! Chapter Thirty-Nine: Basia Basia's watching and rewatching a recording of Jacek explain the stuff about the death-slugs and living in the alien ruins and so on. Unsurprisingly, Basia misses him. Basia is also obsessing over the timer Alex has set up noting down the time until the Barbapiccola hits the atmosphere and begins to burn up. Something's gone wrong. The timer has dropped from eight days to five. The Barb has less charge in its batteries than people thought. Basia thinks the ship has lost three days but Alex says she never had them to start with. But, he adds, if the Barb is going to go down then they'll be sure to recover his daughter from the ship. Alex calls Holden and tells him about the Barb. Holden wonders if they can tow the Barb. Alex says its possible but they'd need Naomi. Holden says he'll chat with Murtry about it. Basia tells Alex that they will have to get Naomi themselves when talking fails. Alex goes down to train Basia on the light vacuum armor and the standard sidearm of the MCRN. If he has to use it, Alex says, he's hosed. Later, Holden calls back and says that Murtry isn't going to bend an inch so gently caress him and go get Naomi. Alex says that he can get him over to the Israel but can't get him inside. Basia gets what is maybe his best moment so far by far when he goes, hey, I use to be a welder, I can get into any ship. Then Basia is out, drifting toward to the Edward Israel. Alex is hailing the ship and blasting them with noise and light scatter to keep their attention on the Rocinante. It should buy Basia a minute or two to cut his way through. He hits the ship at the midship maintenance airlock and readies to cut his way through. This is actually a pretty decent Basia chapter, from when he's not rewatching the videos and brooding over the timer. It's a shame it's the thirty-ninth chapter of the novel. Chapter Forty: Havelock Marwick's shut everything down on the Israel beyond the essentials, which wil give them seventeen days. Given that they're in space, Havelock realizes the ship is getting rather hot. Marwick suggests dropping people down to Ilus to buy the ship more time. Havelock is like, what, so they can starve or get shot down by the moon defences? Marwick and Havelock have a moment where they reflect that their problem of the Barb is about to solve itself when it burns up in the atmosphere. Marwick is worried about a ship riot, one they'll lose. Havelock is like, hey, who gives a poo poo, it won't stop us from burning up in the atmosphere. At the end of the call, Havelock punches the monitor and splits his knuckle. Naomi says: Cibola Burn, Chapter 40 posted:“You know,” Naomi said, “if you’re looking at hundreds of people burning to death as a problem solving itself, that may be more evidence that you’re on wrong side.” During the patrol, when Havelock's wandering and musing, he get a security alert. Marwick and Murtry are shouting about the Rocinante -- it's targeting them! Marwick says they're making threats but Murtry of all people says it's hyperbole. But someone is trying to cut their way into the ship. Murtry knows they're going for the prisoner and so does Havelock. Havelock suggests giving her up. Murtry refuses. Cibola Burn, Chapter 40 posted:“We’re all dead anyway,” Havelock said. And then there it was, spoken aloud. The one thing that all of them were thinking. All of them but Murtry. Cibola Burn, Chapter 40 posted:“My men are ready,” the chief engineer said, not missing a beat. “Just let us know where the sons of bitches are coming through, and we’ll be there to meet them.” Naomi says that if they shoot Alex, she'll never help them. Elvi calls up and asks for a supply drop and Havelock hangs up on her. Naomi tells Havelock it doesn't have to be a shoot-out -- if they give her up, she can leave without issue. Cibola Burn, Chapter 40 posted:“There’s a way we do this,” Havelock said, loading bag rounds into the shotgun. Havelock contemplates shooting Naomi -- then lets her out of the brig. While I can quibble about the particulars of these chapters, I think they're actually pretty exciting. When we reach the end of the Great Slug War, I plan on doing a bit of a post where I run through some thoughts about plotting and pacing using the GSW (and Basia and Havelock) as a bit of a study. The Corey methods of writing the chapters separately as individual stories means you end up with this rather bizarre sense of pacing at times (and, arguably, plot development.) Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Jul 7, 2022 |
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Jul 7, 2022 12:14
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 41 - 44 A solution for the slugs -- but maybe one that should've been mentioned earlier. Chapter Forty-One: Elvi Elvi is reflecting on how you come up with scientific nomenclature for new organisms. She's deciding to call the thing living in their eyes Skippy, if only to make it less scary. As an aside, the mention of a 'Fityani hypothesis' is just sci-fi worldbuilding. There's a bunch of detail about the Skippy organism. For example: Cibola Burn, Chapter 41 posted:The interesting thing – one of the interesting things – about the organism was that it didn’t have chlorophyll or apparently anything like it. Either way, Elvi is completely blind -- she has to do things via touch and memory or by listening to them. The first reports about Holden's genetics don't appear to provide any hint as to how he's immune. The thought was that it was his status as a genetic mix from his eight parents might've done it but, nope, no dice. Fayez wonders if it's protomolecule related but it doesn't appear to be clear, either. Still, Luna is testing out that idea. Holden's basically keeping the place running by himself. Fayez thinks he should've waited for the second wave of exploration before going through the rings but Elvi says she still would've been in the first wave anyway, even if she ended up on Ilus all over again. Both of them think they're going to die soon. Elvi wonders why Holden's immune. She doubts Fayez's take that "his eyeball juice tastes bad." She thinks about his immune system, then radiation, and then gets it -- it's Holden's oncocidal drugs, his anti-cancer meds! I've mentioned how I like the foreshadowing of the Skippy blindness plague, but I think this moment is the best use of foreshadowing across the entire series. Holden's anti-cancer meds have always been there but they've never had much attention drawn to them. They're just an aspect of his character, a scar from his time on Eros. Seeing them come up and again is just a nice little continuity nod. In Cibola Burn, he wonders about keeping up with them when the supply line is cut (as anyone would) and Naomi implores Havelock to send some down to him (as anyone would.) They've always been a quiet presence in the text and, so, it feels normal and natural and -- dare I say it? -- clever when they come up to solve something like this. My issue with this is more that Holden didn't mention this information at any point. Not when they did his blood work? Not when Lucia conducted the intake interview? Not at any time? "Hey, just in the interest of full disclosure, I take anti-cancer meds." It feels artificial, like Holden just neglected to mention the drugs he has to take to live so the story could go on for a few more chapters. Either way, Elvi thinks if they can get enough cancer meds then they can stop the blindness, and people shouldn't need to remain on them like Holden does. She tries to call Murtry but there's no answer. Tries to call Havelock, and we see the brief exchange she had from him but from her side. She calls Holden and Fayez tells him she knows how to make them not blind. Holden shows up and there's a brief comment as to the ethics of using Holden's life-saving meds to make people not blind. Holden, of course, gives his consent and doesn't have a problem with it. Cibola Burn, Chapter 41 posted:“Ethically, it’s actually a little problematic,” Lucia said. “If I’m going to do this, and I very much want to, I need to know that you understand —” Chapter Forty-Two: Havelock Havelock is arming himself in the Edward Israel's armory. A ceramic/kevlar suit of armor and a shotgun. Naomi laughs at him as he grabs some disposable handcuffs and tasers from the gun locker. No one's talking on the tactical comms and he refuses to give Naomi a weapon. A pair of militiamen enter the armory and confront Havelock about Naomi. Havelock says he's moving her. They retort that Koenen didn't clear it and Havelock says he's head of security, not Koenen. Apparently, Koenen told them to come and 'guard' the prisoner. Havelock leaves the two of them to guard the armory as he takes Naomi out. There's some primo Expansian description of spaceship corridors. Cibola Burn, Chapter 42 posted:All the corridors in the Israel were narrow, but more so here. The nearer you got to the outside, the tighter the space became. The cloth and padding along the walls ate the sounds of the ship. Numeric codes printed on the material listed what conduits and technical systems were buried in the bulkhead underneath them, the model of panel, and their replacement dates. The idea behind the foam and cloth was to make everyone safer in case of a collision or unexpected burn. Right now, it made him think of a padded cell. Havelock knows he's committing mutiny to help a saboteur but reflects that everyone will be dead in a few days, so, who cares? Now he can live exactly as his conscience wants him to. It falls a bit flat because I don't think Havelock's displayed much of a conscience before this point. He said and thought a lot of things that indicated he wasn't exactly ignoring it -- it just never spoke up. The turning point for Havelock, it appears, was Murtry's plan to construct a marker on Ilus for anyone else to know RCE had claim to the planet even if everyone died. Cibola Burn, Chapter 42 posted:Staking a claim that the corporation could use to protect its assets after they all died just wasn’t good enough. Havelock gets close to where Koenen has Basia pinned down. They've locked Basia down but he's hit another of the guys, Salvatore. Koenen wants to rush him but Havelock says it's a bad idea. Havelock advises them to pull back. Koenen calls for Honneker and Walters and, at that, Havelock disables another of Koenen's men. Koenen comes roaring in, and Havelock brings him down. Then the next three of them with one shot each. He's using beanbag rounds. Koenen calls him a traitor and Havelock tases him. Havelock gets closer and Basia tells him to stay back or he'll shoot. Naomi is like, oh hey, Basia. Basia's armor is scratched from where the militia managed to hit him. Then, Naomi asks Havelock if he'd like to come with them. Chapter Forty-Three: Basia We immediately switch over to Basia. As Naomi asks if Havelock wants to come with, Basia recounts to himself how he got inside. He cut into the airlock efficiently, went down some corridors, then suddenly got shot at. He went and hit right in the lavatory. As he's thinking about that, they're suddenly shot at again. Havelock shoves them into the lavatory and -- well, there's no other way to put this -- becomes an action hero. Cibola Burn, Chapter 43 posted:“I’m Basia,” he said. While Havelock distracts the shooters, he tells Basia and Naomi to run. They do. Basia takes a hit but it doesn't get through his armor. "Less talk," Havelock says, "More escaping." As they retreat, Havelock advises them to switch to a certain frequency. It's the band the security team is using and they're not using encryption. While Koenen complains that Havelock broke their ribs with a beanbag round or two, Havelock quips "Then I guess this a decision I don't get to take back." I'm not sure which decision he ever 'took back' from Koenen. "I'm gonna shoot you in the face, rear end in a top hat," comes the reply. "Mostly you're shooting the ship, chief." While Naomi is getting herself into an emergency EVA suit, Havelock holds off the approaching militia. Cibola Burn, Chapter 43 posted:“Hey, Mfume?” Havelock said. Cibola Burn, Chapter 43 posted:“How’re those ribs, chief?” Havelock said, a smile in his voice. “You see, right now, you’re acting out of anger. Not thinking it through. This is why I didn’t want to break out the live rounds.” They jet back toward the Rocinante. Naomi calls to Alex and tells them they're on their way and Basia is fine. Cibola Burn, Chapter 43 posted:“You’ll be picking up three,” Naomi said. “Come get us.” Like, it just doesn't work. Havelock has never struck me as a smartass. Never struck me as a character who is reining himself in under Murtry. This idea of him embracing himself in the face of inevitable death, so to speak, feels rather abrupt and ill-fitting for a guy who's spent most of the novel following the company line, embracing an anti-Belter clique in his militia (hey, remember that? Whatever happened to that?), generally supporting Murtry, and only really expressing doubt because he had some quick talks with Naomi. Anyway, four militiamen are following them. Alex offers to blast them with the point defense guns but Havelock asks them not to. Alex asks Naomi about it and she says it's up to Havelock as they're his people. Havelock action-heros his way through getting his four tails to stop following them. Then, they land in the Rocinante. Naomi thanks Basia and he says he didn't do much but get shot at. That's kind of the problem I have with this chapter beyond Havelock's sudden action hero confidence -- why is this a Basia chapter? You might notice in this recap that it's Havelock this and Havelock that. Because Havelock is the guy doing everything. This ties into what I'll discuss in my next update concerning plotting, and a question I'll leave you with at the end of this chapter. Alex comes in and he and Naomi hug. Havelock takes off his helmet and we get our first look at him: Cibola Burn, Chapter 43 posted:He was wearing a sheepish half smile. Without his helmet on, Basia saw his short, light-colored hair, a square jaw, and dark eyes. A sort of generic rugged handsomeness. Like a video star playing a cop in an action movie. Naomi asks Alex for a status report: the Barb is going to go down first, then the Israel, and then the crew of the Rocinante will have to make a choice -- dying in orbit, burning to death in the atmosphere, or getting blown up by aliens. So, here's that question for anyone following along -- say we cut Havelock and Basia from this novel, what, exactly, would Cibola Burn lose? Chapter Forty-Four: Holden Cibola Burn, Chapter 44 posted:Holden shuffled his way around the tower again. Anyway, Holden's been without sleep for a long time -- he can't even think to calculate how long it's been. As he walks around the tower, his armor shoots him up with more amphetamines. Wait, more amphetamines? When did Holden start taking amphetamines? Well, we don't know -- this is the first mention that he's been shooting up with drugs to stay awake. I feel like this should've come up earlier. It's actually mentioned in Caliban's War, when Holden gets injured throwing the monster out of the Roci, but specifically meaning in Cibola Burn. The idea that Holden might need to be shooting himself up with amphetamines to stay awake -- or even has that capability available to him -- feels like it maybe needed to be mentioned before now. Regardless of the drugs, Holden's doing much the same as he did in Chapter 38. He knocks some slugs off the wall with his shovel and so on. He runs into someone outside, too, but this time it's Murtry. Murtry is talking about taking immediate action because "they" have escalated. Murtry is blind at this point, so, Holden asks him what he's doing out there. Minding his own business, Murtry says, suggesting Holden should do the same. Given the Expanse's habit of hopping back in time with some chapters, I thought this chapter had done that, too. I swore to myself that Murtry's dialogue was in an earlier Havelock chapter. But it isn't. Holden suggests Murtry head back inside. Murtry says he has something to finish up and that, if he dies, he'll be sure to leave a note saying it wasn't Holden's fault. Holden calls Alex and asks him if Naomi has escaped. Alex is like, heh, yeah... that part where you said I should go rescue Naomi? Well, I sent Basia. But Alex is like, hey, I think she's doing fine and saving Basia. So, we have hopped back in time. Holden figures Murtry is coordinating the pursuit of Naomi, so, he marches over and yanks the terminal out of his grip and shoves him to the ground. "Stay down there or I'll beat you unconscious," the sleep-deprived and amphetamine-driven Holden says. Alex mentions that three people have come onboard and he's going to see who the third person is. Murtry rightfully points out that Holden's acting real tough when he's blind. Holden says they're fixing that right now and he can come for him when that's fixed if he wants. Murtry says he will. Holden gives this rather pathetic response: Cibola Burn, Chapter 44 posted:When he was far enough away he wouldn’t hear, Holden said, “Looking forward to it.” Elvi says Holden has been awake for four days. Holden says it's fine because he's taken "a lot of speed." He reflects: Cibola Burn, Chapter 44 posted:It was both a relief and, if he were being honest, a little unflattering how quickly every bit of sexual tension had been drained from their interactions. Holden takes a nap. Miller wakes him up and is like, okay great, you've done your bit here -- now you need to help me out. Miller tells him to find a certain room with a weird pillar in it. Elvi asks Holden who he was talking to. Holden tries to play it off as the Ghost of Christmas past, but then says they're hallucinations of the alien mind control variety. Elvi takes this remarkably well. Holden tells her that he needs to go disable the defense network so no one falls out of space and dies. Again, how much more interesting would this be if we were seeing this from Elvi's perspective? Where the guy she had been crushing on started talking to himself and going on about alien mind control visions? I wonder if this is a deliberate echo of what Koenen told Havelock. Why not have Fayez be the one to mention the idea of weird protomolecule mind control Martian conspiracies so this admission of Holden's might mean something? Just spitballing. Holden goes to find Amos. Amos is hanging out with Wei -- or Chandra, as he calls her. Both of them know that Naomi has escaped but seem fairly polite about it. After asking Wei to step out for a moment, Holden tells Amos that he attacked Murtry and that Amos will need to protect the people in the ruins, particularly Elvi and Lucia, in case Murtry tries for revenge. Amos asks if he could just kill Murtry. Holden says... no, as he's done enough damage already. Amos asks Holden where he's going. Holden says he has to go with Miller to turn off the alien artifacts which will then solve all their problems. Cibola Burn, Chapter 44 posted:Amos frowned. Holden could see the big mechanic’s face twitching as he formulated questions and then abandoned them without speaking. Finally he just said, “Okay. I’ll keep an eye out here.” Holden steps into the small round opening and finds himself in a small metal cube. Miller begins to explain it's part of the "old material transfer system" but Holden is already asleep. And that, my friends, brings us to the end of the Great Slug War. Next time, I'm going to talk about plotting, about how gosh dang long the Great Slug War is, and why it feels like half of this novel doesn't need to exist.
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Jul 11, 2022 15:01
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It kind of feels like Havelock was not suppose to be Havelock but some other new character, but then the Coreys decided they needed an established character so it could be two new, two old characters. Which might have been fine but they decided it after they wrote all of his chapters and they didn't feel like rewriting everything to be in line with Havelock from before so they just threw in some references early on and that's it.
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Jul 11, 2022 15:25
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Kchama posted:It kind of feels like Havelock was not suppose to be Havelock but some other new character, but then the Coreys decided they needed an established character so it could be two new, two old characters. Which might have been fine but they decided it after they wrote all of his chapters and they didn't feel like rewriting everything to be in line with Havelock from before so they just threw in some references early on and that's it. I was wondering that about Havelock during these chapters, actually. He doesn't feel like Havelock at all and the most interesting parts of his history (how did he escape Protogen? Didn't he know Miller?) barely matter. I hadn't put the two new/two old bit together, though -- good thinking. I also wonder if it factors into how Cibola Burn was going to be the final book. Bringing the series full circle, so to speak, with Holden and Miller('s partner.)
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Jul 11, 2022 16:05
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in regards to the action movie comments, Havelock points out that the Chief Engineer is talking like he's in an action movie back in Chapter 40 and how that makes the whole operation a bad idea
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Jul 12, 2022 03:31
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I really do feel like the biggest structural issue/s these novels have is their sense of pacing and their general plotting. The Great Slug War is a bit of a slog. If we assume the GSW begins on Chapter 31 with the reveal of the death slugs, then ends when Holden makes the blindness cure and heads off on Miller's Magical Express in Chapter 44, then that means it is fifteen chapters long. That's about a quarter of the novel for a sequence that's ultimately something Holden has to solve just so he can finally get to the actual interesting stuff -- resolving the dispute and solving the Builder murder-mystery on Ilus. Or is it? Because the GSW is really only four chapters long -- the Holden chapters. Those are the only chapters that deal with it. This is the issue I've mentioned a few times, the weird pacing and plot developments that arise from these stories being constructed as x number of different stories where x is equal to the number of perspective characters instead of one story told through four sets of eyes. (For reference, Caliban's War time on Ganymede has Holden landing in Chapter 11 and getting off the moon in Chapter 22 -- and a whole lot more happens on Ganymede during that time! We meet Prax, we get some good Amos stuff, they find the protomolecule in the lab, there's a shootout, etc.) The GSW is probably paced perfectly fine as a four chapter event. There are killer slugs -> Oh no, we're all going blind -> Holden is somehow immune to the blindness -> They find a cure in Holden's oncocidals. Nice and simple, right? But it feels long and overbearing because it's stretched over about a quarter of the novel. Every chapter that isn't a Holden chapter, the GSW might as well be in stasis. Every chapter we spend in orbit is a chapter we are not getting closer to seeing the interesting stuff and fulfilling the premise of the novel. This is not helped, I think, by the way these novels often muddle a bunch of different plots. These novels aren't one story with multiple perspectives but x amount of different stories. The Coreys write them separately and arrange them in chronological order, presumably editing them together to make them slot neatly. But this just makes everything feel uneven because very rarely do the stories feel actually relevant to whatever the core idea of the book is. Cibola Burn's biggest issue is that there's only one story that feels necessary to this novel, and that's Holden and his efforts to keep everything under control. Basia and Havelock might as well be entirely irrelevant which is bizarre given Basia plays a key role in the inciting incident and first actual chapter. Elvi, too, doesn't really do anything. Basia and Havelock feel like they've hit their climax, yet there's twelve chapters to go and Holden and Elvi haven't hit theirs (no pun intended) so the energy of the novel feels a little disjointed (which comes back to that idea that there's wasn't any consideration of the overall 'emotional arc' of the story.) This lack of what I suppose you could call a 'whole story view' is why you end up with small weirdness like a few 'first chapters' in a row, but also larger weirdness like Basia and Havelock in general, where Basia goes to launch a rescue mission... only to immediately fail and get saved by Havelock who relegates Basia to a secondary character in his own chapter. Is Naomi's jailbreak event a moment for Basia or for Havelock? Is it a time for Havelock to break free and follow his own moral compass or for Basia to prove himself and atone for his sins, but potentially killing more people in the process? Well, Cibola Burn tries to do both and I think you can make the case it succeeds at making neither a fulfilling moment in the story. And I'd argue this is something that dogs these novels. In Leviathan Wakes, Miller gets a great ending where he goes into the mouth of the leviathan and finally meets his quarry, Julie. Meanwhile, Holden has to... uh... chase Eros and get into an argument with a nameless military officer simply because he needs something to do and the story introduced him first. Caliban's War has a bit of that issue, too. Bobbie has her showdown with the monster, only it's rather anaemic but not in a sense that her quest for revenge was futile or unfulfilling -- it's just bland. Fighting one monster doesn't hold much relevance when the conspiracy has been producing dozens. Similarly, Prax finds Mei but the story has eclipsed him entirely. Holden executes Nguyen in a way that feels contrary to the conflict between him and Naomi. Avasarala is basically extraneous. It's all just kind of okay. Abaddon's Gate gets it somewhat better, if only because everyone is involved in one mutiny and everyone has a part to play -- but even then, it feels like the novel reboots itself halfway through to make that work. Bull goes out with a bang and Clarissa redeems herself somewhat while Holden kind of peters out in a corridor and Anna is, ultimately, a cog in Clarissa's story. However, I'd say Cibola Burn is the first novel we've run into where some of the perspective characters feel entirely superfluous to the story and plot. It's very easy to imagine a story without Basia or Havelock and it's one that flows much better, I think. That could even be why the TV series went down the path it did. But say you cut them both from the novel, what would you lose? The whole Captured Naomi side plot is merely there to give them something to do, and one could argue it has no relevance to Basia's premise of being the guy who accidentally killed a bunch of people. The Holden chapters might even be enhanced if we had no idea what's happening in orbit. It's that way the stories are constructed again. The stories are written by two people in a vacuum and so there's little consideration given for, I think, what the audience knows and whether the audience knowing something or not knowing something might enhance the drama. Havelock and Koenen speculate that Holden might be mind-controlled and, while it's amusing, it's rather pointless because we know he isn't. Holden mentions it to Elvi but, as she is neither Havelock nor Koenen, it feels like another little amusing moment with no actual meat to it. Why not have one our perspective characters genuinely believe that Holden is some mind-controlled protomolecule patsy? What's bothersome about it is that Cibola Burn sets up some interesting questions early on, but then either prevents the story from answering them, or simply drops them as early as it can. Will Holden solve the issue without bloodshed, will he crack the case? Will justice catch up to Basia, how will he handle Coop? But, for example, Holden's whole thing just spends time essentially resolving side quests and dealing with rolls from the Ilus Disaster Table and running in circles with Murtry. Basia's story is, arguably, derailed entirely by the execution of Coop and so he's shuttled off into space so they can invent some supposed relevance for him but just leaves him feeling like a camera for the characters who are actually interesting. Havelock seems like he's supposed to provide a conflicted RCE perspective but he's a bit too odious and not really conflicted enough to have it work. And Elvi? Well, uh... She's a decent enough character who doesn't really have a reason to be someone we follow so closely. If I had to try and pick out the part of Cibola Burn where things start to come undone, I would really have to finger the execution of Coop. Not only is he tied so closely with Basia, but I think a radical OPA terrorist would be a more interesting type for Holden to deal with rather than Yet Another Corporate Goon. Perhaps Holden and Murtry could work together to handle Coop as the first 'arc', only for Holden to realize that Murtry is a bit of a loose cannon will get rid of him, too. This could lead into the unsettling, unstable truce as conditions on Ilus deteriorate with Holden knowing he probably can't take Murtry and his goons in a fight even though he suspects RCE will come for him sooner or later. On top of that, he's got Miller in his head pushing him to crack the case but Holden figures he can't start poking around alien ruins while there's a. people on the planet and b. Murtry might shoot him in the back. Murtry is a fun antagonist but it's a bit disappointing how, for all of Holden's bluster about him being a corporate thing, he's merely responded tit-for-tat. Yes, Murtry is a bad dude, yes he probably shouldn't be in charge, etc... Yet so many of his interactions with Holden are defined by Holden being a tad unreasonable and Murtry going along with it anyway (culminating in a sleep-deprived, drugged up Holden assaulting him while a member of his crew and has employed a Belter terrorist to raid the Edward Israel.) I feel like having Holden and Murtry work together to bring in Coop and his insurgents would make that antagonism work better. Hell, have the two agree to bring Coop in for trial in Sol -- and then Murtry blows his head off while, back in the colony, his people are doing the same to Coop's core group. Nice work Holden, you inadvertently helped Murtry do this! Otherwise, it feels like the inability for the Coreys to decide what kind of story Cibola Burn is, means we end up with a story that rapidly shifts all over the place. It's about colonialism and natives versus invaders -- well, that doesn't make much sense in the context of the novel. So, now it's about terrorism -- well, the terrorist leader just got killed. Now it's about mediating an intractable conflict -- well, Holden doesn't really mediate anything. The planet explodes, so now it's about surviving in a hostile environment! And, well, we can't make that interesting for more than a few chapters, so, I guess we can explore some protomolecule stuff. It's like a mash-up of a Western, a wilderness survival story, and a Big Dumb Object sci-fi story. Oh, and Havelock is there in orbit. On a smaller note, back in Chapter 35, Holden mentions the list of things that have gone wrong since they came to Ilus: "Apocalyptic explosions, dead reactors, terrorists, mass murder, death-slugs, and now a blindness plague. This is a terrible planet. We should not have come here." While I can't find the quote quickly, I believe the Coreys have said that they wanted Holden to be the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind and to give him this air of a Biblical prophet. I don't know how well it works or even what relevance it has to the themes and ideas of the novel, although it clearly links up to the section where he (oddly) reflects how much it sucks being the messiah when your gods are mad and capricious. But I mean, since when haven't gods been that way?
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Jul 12, 2022 04:25
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 45 - 48 Holden and Miller (and Elvi and Amos and Fayez) investigate while Havelock and Basia find things to do in orbit. Interlude: The Investigator (5) At a rate of one hundred and thirteen times a second, the investigator continues to reach out. Everytime it reaches out to that dead place, it dies, so it stops reaching out to it. Something had existed there once, but now it didn't. An artifact that doesn't fit in with the rest of the world of artifacts. Could it be a prison, a vault, a bullet, a bomb? The investigator thinks it may be one of those last two. Chapter Forty-Five: Havelock Havelock is reflecting on Naomi. While he still isn't convinced she's the best engineer in the system, he thinks that whatever she lacks for in degrees or specialities she makes up for with "sheer, bloody-minded wildness." I can't say that feels like Naomi. She's presently catching up Amos on the events in orbit. The Barbapiccola is hours from burning up in the atmosphere. Outside, Basia is welding the outside of the Rocinante to create a tether. The Barb's crew is creating their answering version. They'll link up and the Rocinante will pull the ship into a more stable orbit. Havelock's been trying to call Murtry but he keeps refusing the call. Havelock reflects that he's "never walked out of a contract" before. Again, curious as to how he escaped Protogen because someone I feel like the evil conspiracy group wouldn't just let you quit. The crew begins to enact the rescue operation. The Rocinante doesn't take it too well -- but the timer of the Barb's death begins to count up. But then the Rocinante detects an incoming threat, and Havelock realizes it's the shuttle. He isn't too concerned though, it doesn't have any working reactors. Except, Naomi says, it has a lot of kinetic energy behind it. Naomi orders Alex to bring up the PDCs and prepare to fire. Havelock is like, hmm, that won't work, but why? You might be able to guess it because it's pretty obvious and it's odd that neither Alex nor Naomi figure it out. They fire on the shuttle and shred it. But now, the shuttle has gone from one big hunk of metal to a large number of metal pieces -- the same mass at the same speed. Sure, it's better to take a lot of little hits than one big one, but it doesn't feel like a 'we have no choice' situation but more they don't get it. Alex even has this weird moment of surprise when they blast the shuttle to bits and they're still in danger from it. It's odd. So, the Rocinante gets nailed by shrapnel. Havelock gets an arm shredded. The Roci has too many holes to seal. The port side is basically messed up -- no PDCs, no sensors, no thrusters. Naomi gives Havelock first aid. And the Barb is still okay. Naomi asks Havelock what his people are going to try next. He doesn't know, but he suspects it'll be bad for everyone. Chapter Forty-Six: Elvi Back on the surface, Elvi is getting her eyesight back. Her chemistry deck is having trouble creating clean water but herself and Fayez have created an impromptu still. Still, they'll all probably be dead from hunger in a few weeks. Murtry drops by to chat with her. He asks her about her last conversation with Holden. Elvi says he's tired and talking to himself and insisting he had some way to shut down the defense network. Murtry asks her if he mentioned going north. He's tracking Holden's hand terminal and it's going north at a rate of about two hundred kilometers an hour. Elvi's surprised he can drive a cart in his condition. I'm surprised the cart could go that fast. Anyway, Murtry says he isn't driving a cart and that he'd like to know how he's going so fast. Murtry leaves to grab a cart to go after Holden and Elvi goes to find Amos. Murtry took their only working set of wheels. Amos says Holden said some stuff about getting Miller to help. Elvi doesn't know who Miller is. Amos says Holden left him behind to make sure Murtry didn't start killing anyone. If he's going after Holden, he isn't sure if that makes his job harder or easier: Cibola Burn, Chapter 46 posted:“Well, the way I figure it, I’m supposed to make sure Murtry doesn’t hurt anyone. He ain’t here, so all these folks are looking pretty safe. Might as well go where he is, make sure he don’t hurt no one there either.” Elvi thinks that the alien moon defense only targets certain things -- the shuttle, the fuel cell drop. But it's let food and medicine come through, so, it must be only targeting things that aren't organic. If the Rocinante can drop something with chemical energy then she can [technobabble] a [technobabble] to the [technobabble] so they can get the cart working off it. Later, Fayez asks her why she's chasing after Holden again. Elvi says she isn't, that she wants to see whatever Holden thinks he's going to find. And they're all going to die. At this point, Amos says Murtry has had a day's head start. They head off but Fayez runs after them and, once she gets Amos to stop, climbs aboard. Chapter Forty-Seven: Basia Basia is patching up the Rocinante. The Barb is back down to about twelve hours. The Rocinante's batteries are sitting at sixty-two percent. Basia is working in between the hulls, near the railgun. When he returns to the ops deck, Naomi says that the Barb is going to drop out of the sky and they don't have the power to bring her out of her descent -- they have to cut her loose. Naomi says they'll ask the captain of the Barb to transfer over Basia's daughter and a few other people. They can't take more as the Rocinante can only support twenty-two people. And ultimately that just means they'll burn through their supplies faster. I like the moment where Havelock nods and Basia corrects him. Cibola Burn, Chapter 47 posted:“Roger that,” Havelock said with a nod. An Earthman’s nod. Tipping the head back and forth. A move totally invisible in a space suit. Without thinking about it, Basia tipped his fist back and forth to show him how to do it right. Havelock ignored him. Cibola Burn, Chapter 47 posted:“It’s not a trivial problem,” Naomi admitted. “We’d need to make sure we fire at the exact millisecond the two ships and the cable are aligned. No way a human could judge it. But the Roci can if I tell her what we need.” Anyway, Naomi gets to coding up a navigation system package for the Rocinante. Alex is helping her out. Havelock's preparing for if the railgun plan doesn't work and they need to evacuate as many people from the Barb as they can. They try the plan, it works. But the Edward Israel has showed up again, and it's dropping off something -- men in suits, Havelock's militia. And while they might not be great militiamen, they were engineers first. And engineers would know just how crippled and vulnerable the Rocinante is... Chapter Forty-Eight: Holden Holden's out of water, Miller doesn't much care. Unfortunately, the "fancy alien train" is broken and they have to travel on foot. Cibola Burn, Chapter 48 posted:“My fancy alien material transfer system has been sitting unused for over a billion years and half the planet just exploded. Your ship was built less than a decade ago and you can barely keep the coffee pot running.” Cibola Burn, Chapter 48 posted:At first glance, it looked like a massive collection of appendages and cutting tools. It stood on six of its limbs, and waved four others in the air like a crustacean made of steel and knives. Whipping through the air around the heavier cutting arms were a dozen or more tentacles of what looked like black rubber. As he watched, two of the tentacles gripped the inside edges of the doorway and bent them out with fearsome strength. After some hesitation, Holden climbs aboard. Cibola Burn, Chapter 48 posted:“Hey Miller,” Holden said, watching the robot peel up a two-meter section of the tunnel’s metal flooring and rapidly cut it into tiny pieces. “We’re still friends, right?” They reach what Miller calls the processing station. It's all recognizable as protomolecule technology and mechanisms. It's cavernous enough that Holden thinks a battleship could fit inside it. Miller thinks that this planet was basically a lithium power plant. Cibola Burn, Chapter 48 posted:“This planet is a gas station. Process the ore, refine it, send it down to the power plants, then beam the collected energy out.” "Something worse," Miller says. Miller says that this spot was the point of the place, why the whole exists as it does. And somewhere nearby is where the dead zone is. Which means that whatever did it wasn't from around here, and whoever did it knew "to shoot for the heart." Despite everything I've said about Cibola Burn, this mystery of who and what killed the aliens who could turn planets into power plants is a very intriguing one. It's a shame that the other three characters are a bit whatever.
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Jul 16, 2022 04:08
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 49 - 51 Everything in orbit is a bit whatever, but everything on Ilus very much not. Chapter Forty-Nine: Havelock Havelock is walking on the hull of the Rocinante. Hiding behind one of the inoperative PDCs, he spots the incoming militiamen from the Edward Israel, and they're hauling some improvised missiles with them. Havelock tries to talk them down -- why are they coming to screw up their rescue mission when, ultimately, the Barb and Roci are just buying a little bit more time? Havelock tries to reach out to some of them, but it just doesn't work very well because the guy he tries to reach -- Walters -- was only mentioned in his action movie gunfight escape chapter. It reminds me of the climax of Abaddon's Gate, where this importance was put on characters who'd only been mentioned in passing. It's a shame that the Coreys don't seem to think, for example, that if you're going to have Havelock try and talk someone down, and you want it to be interesting, maybe that character needs to be setup more than not at all? That's kind of the problem with this chapter. Honestly, it feels like Havelock and Basia's story was done with the operation to rescue Naomi. Unfortunately, their climax came about ten chapters before Holden so they're just... going through these motions. Koenen, who oddly isn't mentioned by name, tells him that they know the Rocinante is defenceless and that they have orders to drag him and Naomi back to the brig. Havelock says that he could have shot them all right now but has chosen not to. In response, the militiamen fire off four of their missiles. For all his bravado, Havelock only manages to bring down one of them. Another veers off-course. Two more strike the Rocinante and one strikes close enough to throw Havelock into space. Alex asks Havelock if he's okay and he is -- he's taken some hits but he's not losing air. Despite Havelock's protests, Basia comes out to get him. Throughout this, Havelock spots the Rocinante and thinks that it's a "tough little ship" because the lovely improvised missile didn't put a hole in it. I feel like I don't need to mention that, okay, it's been a few years since Leviathan Wakes, but the Rocinante was a cutting-edge military warship. It is presumably still a pretty remarkable ship. Why would Havelock be somewhat astounded that it weathered an improvised missile? It's not some jury-rigged freighter ala the Millennium Falcon! Basia manages to hook Havelock with the grapnel and draws him back in. The militiamen fire a second salvo at the Barb and while the missiles don't do much damage, they're imparted enough momentum that it's spinning and shredding the tethers connecting it to the Rocinante. Naomi tells Alex to drop the cable but he can't, the mechanism is jammed. Basia says he'll go check on the Barb and Havelock offers to cover him from the Rocinante. Havelock says he'll count to then and then fire upon the rest of the militiamen. Chapter Fifty: Elvi Elvi, Amos and Fayez are still on their journey to catch up to Holden. After a lot of paragraphs describing the landscape and the particulars of the journey, they find the cart belonging to Murtry and Wei, seemingly abandoned. Wherever they went after that, they went on foot. And they're close to Holden. As they go through the ruins, we get another nice little note of worldbuilding about Earth: Cibola Burn, Chapter 50 posted:She had the sense of being at the edge of one of the huge industrial ruins of the European west coast, a place where something world-shatteringly huge had once made its power felt, and now had left its carapace behind. It's Murtry, and he's still shooting! The bullets don't get through Amos's armor and he turns, roaring, and blasts Murtry with his shotgun. Murtry's armor holds, if only barely, and his next shot takes Amos in the thigh. Wei is dead. Murtry regrets he couldn't save Wei. Fayez explodes: Cibola Burn, Chapter 50 posted:“You set this up. You set all of this up. You put her there to distract Amos and you shot him from behind. This isn’t just something that happened and you did the best you could and poor loving Wei. You did this!” Cibola Burn, Chapter 50 posted:“What I’m not doing, and I hope you understand this, is running around in a circle with my dick in my hand whining about how nothing matters because we’re all going to die. We all knew when we got on the Edward Israel that we might not make it back. That was a risk you were willing to take because it meant you could do your job. I’m no different.” So, there's something I really want to talk about here, but I'll save it for a later chapter. But overall, I really like this confrontation between Murtry, Amos, Wei and Fayez. It's not perfect but... Yeah, I'll need to discuss this in a few more chapters! Chapter Fifty-One: Basia Basia is examining the tether while Havelock's countdown hits zero. Basia refuses to cut the cable -- cutting it will mean the Barb will hit the atmosphere and burn up. Not cutting it may mean the Rocinante gets torn in half and the Barb goes down anyway. Havelock starts shooting the EVA packs of the militiamen. Koenen's people return fire. Interestingly, Basia calls Koenen 'Koenen' whereas Havelock -- who knew him longer, who worked with him -- just kept calling him 'the chief engineer.' Basia keeps insisting he can fix the cable and Naomi keeps telling him it's impossible. While Havelock shoots it out with the militia, Basia keeps trying to solve the cable issue. Naomi gets on the comms and tells him they're putting Felcia in a spacesuit and throwing her out the airlock. Then, once she's aboard the Rocinante, he needs to cut that cable. Basia realizes they could use two emergency airlocks, attach them to each other, and basically create a life-support bubble for everyone on the Barb. If they use the twenty or so the Edward Israel has, that'd be enough to get everyone off the Barb. Koenen tells Marwick not to do it. Marwick decides to do it because, what is RCE going to do, cancel his contract? Alex blasts Koenen with a railgun round. After three hours, they've got everything ready to get the crew off the Barb. The Israel's militiamen contact Havelock and blame Koenen for everything. Then it's two hours to get everyone off the shop, and the Barb is about to hit the atmosphere, and all the life support bubbles drift out of the Barb and start getting rescued and taken to the Edward Israel. Basia has a bit of a PTSD flashback to him pressing the detonator and realizes that everyone on that shuttle was basically just like his daughter. Cibola Burn, Chapter 51 posted:He hadn’t meant to. He’d been trying to save them. That was the little lie he’d kept close to his heart for months now. But the truth was much worse. Some secret part of him had wanted the shuttle to die. Had reveled in watching it fall from the sky in flames. Had wanted to punish the people who were trying to take his world away. Havelock meets him in the airlock just as the Barb hits the atmosphere and begins to burn up. It's somewhat disappointing that for all the emphasis put on the lithium aboard the Barb and such, the ship going down with a full cargo load passes by without a thought. For all that arguing about lithium and all that effort, it's ended like this. And it still might end similarly for the Edward Israel. For all this effort, they've bought everyone just four days. Chapter Fifty-Two: Elvi Elvi's hiding in the darkness, checking her hand terminal for any trace of Holden. Her hand terminal will at least warn her if Murtry's getting close. She thinks Amos and Fayez are probably dead. Elvi maneuvers through the ruins but it's difficult, they don't appear to have been made for any sort of ease-of-use, much less anyone with a human form. Just what were the Builders? There's a whole thing where Elvi realizes she can basically use trigonometry and some technobabble from her hand terminal to figure out who is where. She's about one hundred and ten meters from Holden and about one hundred and fifty from Murtry, which means she is located here and Holden is likely there. So, she goes to find Holden. She finds Holden, and the Miller-bot -- which speaks to her in Miller's voice. Elvi takes that pretty well as she tells Holden about the stuff with Murtry and how he shot Amos. Holden says Amos can't be dead. Cibola Burn, Chapter 52 posted:“How do you know?” Holden goes off to intercept Murtry while Elvi heads off with the Miller-bot. Miller fills her in on everything -- he's a semi-conscious construct based on a dead guy and he investigates Ilus because investigating is what Miller does. They stop outside the dead zone and Miller says it was a "nerve cluster" for the planet and, as they step inside, something is there. Cibola Burn, Chapter 52 posted:The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous. And within that boundary, darkness swirled. It was more than an absence. She could sense a structure within it, layers interpenetrating, like shadows casting shadows. It throbbed with an inhuman power, tidal and deep and painful. Look at this too long, Elvi thought, and I will lose my mind in it. She took a step toward it, feeling the structures in the blackness respond to her. She felt as if she could see the spaces between molecules in the air, like atoms themselves had become a thin fog, and for the first time she could see the true shape of reality looming up just beyond her reach. Elvi points to the thing and is like, you mean that? Cibola Burn, Chapter 52 posted:“That. In the middle of the room. That.”
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Jul 28, 2022 12:25
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I love bullet For all the poo poo I give this series I do think the writing around the bullet and its perception-altering effects (which we see a lot more of later) is quite cool.
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Jul 28, 2022 14:42
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General Battuta posted:I love bullet  Absolutely. Whenever you see the bullet or something like it, such as the epilogue of Nemesis Games, you know you're getting something really cool and, at least for me, all those bits are ones that have stuck in my mind since reading them.
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Jul 28, 2022 23:18
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The human conflict in this book totally misses me. Like on the whole we're just expected to expect that the corp are bad guys cuz they are a corp, but the colonists absolutely are at a fault for a lot of the mess and somehow. The book somehow made the corp come off as the sympathetic party despite how they clearly wanted to make them the bad guys from the start. The whole Basia thing is the big indicator that they kind of planned on it being a 'both sides have issues, or the corp isn't the pure bad guys' thing since the guy in charge of the bombings is executed immediately and everyone else is presented as more or less innocent and just good fellas protectin' themselves from the unjustified corporate thugs... but it shows up at the 90% mark and doesn't seem like anything is gonna happen from it because they've already committed to killing all the Bad Corp Guys. Also, it kind of feels like Holden suffocates the air out of the rest of the character's plots. Kchama fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 00:36
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I think this book might be the one most improved by the TV show so far. Burn Gorman in particular just kills it as Murtry, who I found actively unpleasant to read about in the book. Amos also gets to shine as a character (and actor!) Come to think of it - does the book at all explore the angle of Murtry being some kind of evil Holden figure? The executin’ a guy scene is a bit Millerish, and Holden has of course been accused of turning into a Miller lite. But I don’t remember if the book explores this at all - Murtry’s total dedication to the letter of his job isn’t very Holden at all.
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Jul 29, 2022 13:34
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Kchama posted:The human conflict in this book totally misses me. Like on the whole we're just expected to expect that the corp are bad guys cuz they are a corp, but the colonists absolutely are at a fault for a lot of the mess and somehow. The book somehow made the corp come off as the sympathetic party despite how they clearly wanted to make them the bad guys from the start. The whole Basia thing is the big indicator that they kind of planned on it being a 'both sides have issues, or the corp isn't the pure bad guys' thing since the guy in charge of the bombings is executed immediately and everyone else is presented as more or less innocent and just good fellas protectin' themselves from the unjustified corporate thugs... but it shows up at the 90% mark and doesn't seem like anything is gonna happen from it because they've already committed to killing all the Bad Corp Guys. That feeling, I think, comes from the fact that Holden is the only character with a plot. Basia, Havelock, Elvi -- they really just have premises. What I mean is, Holden has two things going on in this story. The first is the negotiator plot, where he has to try and find a way of resolving the situation on Ilus/New Terra even though it seems like the powers-that-be would like him to fail -- will he succeed, will he fail, will people die, will Holden sacrifice his ideals? The second is the protomolecule mystery that was brought up in Abaddon's Gate: what happened to the people who made the rings, what catastrophe befell them? These are generally pretty interesting questions. Is that something we get from the other three? I'd say yes for Basia: will he be held to account for his role in the bombing, will he manage to stop Coop from going further? But for Havelock and Elvi, I really struggle to define what their plot is (or even what their story is!) The fact that both Basia and Havelock get drawn into this weird orbital confrontation about the Barb feels really odd. It's very much a plot that exists to give them something to do. So, Havelock is just kind of there aboard the Edward Israel, providing a window into the RCE side of things and really not getting any kind of story until he meets Naomi and begins realizing that maybe RCE aren't the good guys. Elvi exists as something of a neutral party, but doesn't really have any desires beyond 'doing science' and 'doing Holden' and feels more like a way to drop exposition than a character with goals and motivation to achieve them. If these characters have a part to play, it's merely as part of Holden's plot. For example, Elvi needs to be there to find the terrifying bullet phenomena because Holden has to go off and have a showdown with Murtry. I wonder how much of this stems from how the Coreys plan these novels. Generally, the climaxes are pretty good! I get the suspicion they pin them down first and then write backwards to make them work. 'Okay, so they find a bizarre bullet in the ruins, but Holden goes off to have a Wild West showdown with Murtry, so we need someone to help Miller out... How about Elvi, who has a crush on Holden, and... Then, in orbit, the guy behind the bombing has this emotional moment where he realizes everyone is someone's child just like his dead child-- What if he was Basia Merton?' I don't know, I'm spitballing. But, with that in mind, I don't think it's much of a surprise that the conflict ends up feeling flat and oddly artificial. Holden's there to resolve it by any means necessary. Basia is the conflicted, unintentional terrorist. Elvi is the victim. Havelock is our window into the bad guys. But Basia wants out almost immediately, Elvi is relatively passive, and Havelock is stranded in orbit (which is where Basia quickly ends up, too) and doesn't really have any perspective on it beyond 'it's a living.' Despite this conflict being the spine of the narrative, only two of our four 'perspective characters' are concerned with it and, frankly, Basia feels like he spends more time angsting about his daughter going to college than his role as a terrorist. It's like we mentioned earlier, how it feels like the Coreys wanted to make a point about colonialism and being on the ragged edge of civilization (Murtry will basically talk about this in his showdown chapter) but the Belters aren't indigenous to Ilus. Okay, they were there first, but how much claim does getting somewhere first really amount to? If a new continent appeared in the South Pacific tomorrow, would the world really let the first people to break ground have legal claim to it? And that new continent isn't a massive risk to anyone who settles there (and, potentially, humanity as a whole -- remember the Ring Station autoclave?) There's just a lot of little things that are more interesting than the strained indigenous versus colonial powers metaphor that's going on and it's disappointing that Cibola Burn just doesn't deal with them. I think I've mentioned them all before: the similarities between Holden and Murtry, the fact that the refugees are really just the first wave of the exploitation of Ilus, the rather odd detail that the Barb was carrying enough drugs to allow all the Belters to live on the surface, how RCE is plainly and obviously the victim of various premeditated crimes. I feel like if you wanted to construct a story about this sort of conflict, you'd arrange things very differently if you were proceeding from that initial idea of 'Holden the negotiator has to resolve a colonial conflict but he's expected to fail.' The first thing, I think, would be to extend the timeline out a bit -- instead of Coop's action being the first big event before RCE has even landed, but have it be response to RCE already being there. At first, RCE and the Belters generally got along, working to mine out the lithium and split the profits, but Murtry started cracking down and maybe some colonists got killed in an accident due to his policies and now Coop thinks they need to throw a wrench in the works because RCE doesn't want to be sharing the spoils but, whoops, he's a bit of a psycho and a bunch of people die. The UN was okay with this arrangement because they like getting the lithium on the sly but they're refusing to pay the Belters OR RCE due to legal stuff until the situation is resolved (read: the Belters are dead/no longer have any moral claim) but now people are beginning to die and the OPA is threatening to impound the lithium as it passes through Medina and so, when Holden is sent, the UN hope he'll solve the problem for them but the OPA reaches out to him too and are like, hey, that's their planet, get those RCE thugs out of there. Who will Holden support? Avasarala or Johnson? What if supporting one over the other might lead to war? Can he find a third way where everyone wins? And what does Miller want him to find out there? Would something like that be better? I don't know. But I feel like it'd make the conflict a touch more interesting and make Murtry more of the malignant presence I feel the novel wants him to be. Then, I don't know, put Havelock on the planet so he can do his whole conflicted thing in a place where it matters, do more with Basia and Coop, and involve Elvi more in the protomolecule stuff (if Holden's plot is the negotiation, then Elvi's plot is the protomolecule stuff) and then you get the tension because Holden is also there because of Miller and he has to cross paths with Elvi, etc. I don't know, I feel like there's a lot more you can do just with the pieces on Cibola Burn's board, so to speak. General Battuta posted:I think this book might be the one most improved by the TV show so far. Burn Gorman in particular just kills it as Murtry, who I found actively unpleasant to read about in the book. Amos also gets to shine as a character (and actor!) Yeah, the Cibola Burn adaptation knocks it out of the park. It was the perfect one for Amazon to kick off with, but then I personally think their adaptation of Nemesis Games and Babylon's Ashes were... well, not the remarkable improvements that the previous seasons were, we'll put it that way for now! Gorman absolutely nails Murtry, but I think also the writing of the series makes him a much darker character (I vaguely recall an exchange where he explicitly states he's happy to spill blood on behalf of corporations because he gets better hazard bonus pay or something.) Otherwise, no -- the book never really explores that. I've even skipped ahead to the confrontation between the two and it doesn't come up, even though there's a few exchanges where it really should. Murtry does what Holden does, and he does it for the same reason as Holden does (for his people.) The big difference is that Murtry is dedicated to the letter of his job whereas Holden has that self-righteous dedication to his ideals. But what they are identical on is the idea that they'll unleash hell on anyone who harms their crew. Naomi ends up in a brig? It's go time. Murtry has twenty-something people get blown up or murdered? Now, hold on, hoss... I imagine the Coreys draw a distinction between the purity of Holden's dedication to his friends and found family crew, whereas Murtry is insincere or has impure motivations because he's a company man. But, what, people like Murtry can't have friends? Surely a lot of those RCE people who died were like Wei, Havelock, Fayez or Elvi and they were (like Basia tearfully reflects) friends to someone. Is there really a distinction between Holden's friendship-driven revenge and Murtry's subordinate-driven variant? It's kind of what they're getting at with Wei, that Murtry deliberately put her there so she'd die and not giving any thought to that when dealing with someone like Amos, Holden's remarkably competent attack dog, maybe it's the tactically-advisable option? Unpleasant's an interesting word, though! What made you have such a reaction to Murtry? Like, beyond that he's a slimy corporate stooge. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 14:30
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He’s just the kind of guy who gets off on power and knows how to use the rules to put himself in positions where he can use that power to hurt. It’s a very real personality type but not one that can unfold much in a book, yknow? It’s not like he’s some kind of Wild West lawman with personal magnetism and folksy charm, a proper Little Bill from Unforgiven type. He’s a killer cop. He’s a killer cop for a company. He’s a hateful dude.
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Jul 29, 2022 15:23
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General Battuta posted:He’s just the kind of guy who gets off on power and knows how to use the rules to put himself in positions where he can use that power to hurt. It’s a very real personality type but not one that can unfold much in a book, yknow? It’s not like he’s some kind of Wild West lawman with personal magnetism and folksy charm, a proper Little Bill from Unforgiven type. He’s a killer cop. He’s a killer cop for a company. He’s a hateful dude. He reminds me of Al Bester, which is something I've mentioned before, but entirely lacking the love-to-hate aspect that made Babylon 5's Psi Cop such a fun character. But where Bester genuinely believed in the ethos of the Psi Corps, Murtry only seems to value RCE (and his mission) because eveyrthing went off the rails and let him live out his tough guy fantasies. Bester would get some fun moments that showed he was intelligent, erudite, and funny -- and still a monster with a government mandate who you'd never turn your back on. Meanwhile, Murtry's just a killer cop. It feels like it's related to that idea that feels like it underpins these books, where being boring or 'true to life' is more real/authentic. Murtry is a thug with power and no redeeming qualities, he doesn't make you laugh or smile or wish he was on your side. Most people are like that in his position in reality, perhaps. But to hang a whole novel on his shoulders as your antagonist? You just want Holden to blow his brains out and get on with everything.
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Jul 30, 2022 10:22
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I just don't think the authors have a clue how to write villains at all.
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Jul 31, 2022 00:40
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Kchama posted:I just don't think the authors have a clue how to write villains at all. The funny thing is, we've got the best and the worst of the Expanse's villains coming up. Marco Inaros, who is the bad guy of Books 5 and 6, and then Winston Duarte, who is the bad guy of the last three. We've said how Murtry has vibes of being a dark, distorted Holden -- Inaros is almost explicitly that to a perhaps ludicrous extent, replete with his own Corvette-class light frigate/corvette fleet escort ship/torpedo bomber and being Naomi's terrorist leader ex-boyfriend. The latter which has not been foreshadowed at all.
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Jul 31, 2022 12:57
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It just cracks me up how it took until Nemesis Games for them to decide 'man we should give the crew some personality'.
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Jul 31, 2022 21:35
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General Battuta posted:It just cracks me up how it took until Nemesis Games for them to decide 'man we should give the crew some personality'. It's wild, isn't it? It's kind of like how the series is hailed as this cinematic action-adventure through the Solar system when I think you can make the argument that there's just not much action or adventure. People mention how good these characters are, but are they really gripping personalities? I've given this some thought and gone back to some earlier posts to double-check some things that came to me. One thing that sticks out to me perusing Leviathan Wakes is how no one really feels like who they become around Cibola Burn and/or Nemesis Games. It's not so much character development, although there's certainly some incongruities, as a tonal shift. Leviathan Wakes has all these moments that feel lifted out of the RPG sessions. Amos makes phallic jokes about guns, Holden drops a bunch of casual self-pitying misogyny, Alex drives the ship, Naomi doesn't really do anything. It's also interesting that we can see what players in that game said, specifically the players of Naomi and Holden, and it's quite clear that the Coreys made significant changes to the characters in the process of, essentially, adapting them. They did their best to make Holden generally heroic, Amos is a gestalt of two characters, and Naomi went from being the Mao-Kwik scion out to prove herself in the belt to, well, a talented engineer. Yes, that's right -- much of Naomi's character was basically put on Julie. This is probably a good thing if you're basically jumping off someone else's intellectual property. However, they didn't exactly replace it with anything. As an aside, I'd just like to note that my comments about Naomi possibly having an intimate relationship with Sam, gets an interesting shade as Holden's player mentioned that Naomi was a lesbian in the game. Holden is the party leader, and it's unclear whether people overlook his self-righteousness and hypocrisy because he's a 'good person' or if the authors just don't get that he's worse than he thinks. Amos' doesn't get established until The Churn, which came out just before Cibola Burn, and arguably contradicts his earlier development. Alex drives the ship (and got some fleshing out in Cibola Burn: he likes driving ships so much he broke up with his wife, well then!) Naomi -- and I'm not kidding here -- has the only obvious thing that links her to what we're going to learn in the next novel being a single exchange with Basia where she knows what it's like to bathe a child in a sink. I'm having a lot of trouble reconciling some of the stuff the first two novels told us about Naomi with what we learn in Nemesis Games. I'm very curious to see if it can be fitted together. I feel like a lot of the more colorful moments in Wakes were taken from the RPG. It can't really be proven short of getting access to the forum posts, but it feels right simply because we don't really see them again. The characters are very different in Wakes but they have a certain 'friendly tabletop quips' vibe to them. Amos and Holden both get some development in Caliban's War, but Holden's whole vigilante arc peters out because he ends up in a situation where shooting a guy is fairly justified because he'll save Earth and Mars. Well, okay. Alex drives the ship. Naomi is Holden's love interest. Amos remains generally entertaining but Holden suffers for not having a strong foil in Naomi who, as we're going to see in Nemesis Games, should be far more concerned about Holden's darker moments than she is. Still, there's always going to be a part of me that wonders -- just how much does James S A Corey owe to the various people who, essentially, drafted out the story and characters (and came up with the Belter patois?) Virtually all the major characters came from other people and Leviathan Wakes is anywhere from one half to two-thirds built around the online game. Is it any surprise that the character development is a bit lacking when, well, even if they've rewritten and altered them, the characters weren't originally theirs? Miller stands out because he was Abraham's guy. I do wish the Coreys would talk more about the transition from collaborative online game to authored book series because it's one of the most interesting parts of the series' history. Anyway, here's an experiment I did because I was curious. It's just the prevalence of character names in the texts (without accounting for chapter headings, I'm lazy.) Kindle only counts up to 500, it seems. I got curious to see just how little Alex shows up compared to everyone else and, while this isn't as precise as I wanted, he consistently comes in last short of characters who often don't appear for much of the novel. No real conclusions to draw from this, but it was just something I got curious about. Leviathan Wakes Holden: 500+ Miller: 500+ Naomi: 500+ Amos: 406 Alex: 331 Julie: 199 Havelock: 154 Caliban's War Holden: 500+ Avasarala: 500+ Bobbie: 500+ Prax: 500+ Amos: 500+ Naomi: 396 Alex: 271 Mei: 213 Abaddon's Gate Holden: 811 Bull: 758 Anna: 640 Melba/Clarissa: 375 (192+183) [note: surely this can't be right, did she have any other aliases?] Ashford: 333 Naomi: 323 Sam: 299 Amos: 204 Alex: 130 Cibola Burn Holden: 500+ Havelock: 500+ Elvi: 500+ Basia: 500+ Murtry: 473 Amos: 341 Naomi: 318 Alex: 310 Fayez: 214 Miller: 185
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Aug 1, 2022 11:27
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Holden out for a hero
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Aug 1, 2022 15:10
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Cibola Burn, Chapters 53 - Epilogue Things come to a rather... sedate conclusion. Chapter Fifty-Three: Holden Holden is waiting for Murtry on the bridge that leads to Elvi and the Millerbot. I feel like this scene between Murtry and Holden is something that the Coreys had in mind from pretty early in the process of writing Cibola Burn. This visual of two men having a showdown on a narrow bridge above a chasm, one of them an idealist pushed to the brink and the other being an insane thug. Who's going to shoot first? One of them will die, or perhaps both of them. Murtry appears surprised that Holden came by himself. The better plan, he says, is to have someone out front so you can shoot the target in the back. "That the one you use?" Holden asks, which it is. It's the exact tactic that Murtry used on Amos, but that isn't really brought up. Murtry gives Holden a "flat, meaningless smile" which feels like another little bit of mirroring (this time, to Amos' meaninglessly amiable smile he gives people) but, again, is passes by without anything being noted. Basically, here's the deal -- Holden wants to stop Murtry from disrupting their attempt to save everyone on the planet and the ships in orbit. Murtry wants to stop them because... he thinks everything on the planet belongs to the RCE and no one has the authority to damage any of it. Everything on the planet, Murtry says, must be worth trillions of dollars. The two talk a whole bunch. To sum it up, Murtry thinks that his ways that seem "cruel and inflexible" are what you need to "conquer a new world." Once he's done the dirty work, then Holden can come in with his morals and ideals. Cibola Burn, Chapter 53 posted:"This isn’t something humanity can do halfway, Captain. It never has been. Even Cortez burned his ships.” Holden and Murtry keep talking. Holden says he wants to kill Murtry for what he did to Amos. Murtry is like, well, he's not dead. Holden is hit by such relief that he recognizes that Murtry has the perfect opportunity to shoot him. Murtry does not shoot him. Fayez is alive too, Murtry says. Murtry will let Holden go check on Amos and Fayez, but he gets to go over and stop Elvi. Holden refuses and waits for the shooting to start. It doesn't. Murtry decides to monologue: Cibola Burn, Chapter 53 posted:“Civilization has a built-in lag time. Just like light delay. We fly out here to this new place, and because we’re civilized, we think civilization comes with us. It doesn’t. We build it. And while we’re building it, a whole lot of people die. You think the American west came with railroads and post offices and jails? Those things were built, and at the cost of thousands of lives. They were built on the corpses of everyone who was there before the Spanish came. You don’t get one without the other. And it’s people like me that do it. People like you come later. All of this?” Murtry waved his left hand at himself and Holden. “This is because you showed up too early. Come back after I’ve built a post office and we’ll talk.” Cibola Burn, Chapter 53 posted:“Maybe you killed Amos and Fayez and maybe you didn’t. Maybe you’re right about the frontier and I’m just a naïve idiot. Maybe every single person you killed on this world had it coming and you were always in the right.” Cibola Burn, Chapter 53 posted:Holden smiled at him. Mimicking Alex’s drawl he said, “Come on, Black Bart, you always knew it would end this way.” Chapter Fifty-Four: Elvi The Millerbot has a plan. It's going to connect itself to as much of the planetary network as it can then walk into the bizarre spherical void. This should crash the planetary system and fix everything, and will probably take him with it. Suddenly, the Millerbot comes under attack from other constructs and Elvi leaps to defend it/him. She uses the dead zone against the robots, tricking one of them into getting too close to the dead zone and being rendered inert. It feels like the sudden robot attack came out of nowhere, and not in a good way. Still, they stop the robots and Miller gets connected to pretty much everything. But he needs Elvi to pull his CPU out and walk it into the dead spot. Miller has no idea what will happen to Elvi if she steps into that dead zone but she manages to get there, only to trip and fall and... Cibola Burn, Chapter 54 posted:The closest analogy, the one her brain reached for and rejected and reached for again, was splashing into a lake. It was cold, but not cold. There was a smell, rich and loamy. The smell of growth and decay. She was aware of her body, the skin, the sinew, the curl of her gut. She was aware of the nerves that were firing in her brain as she became aware of the nerves firing in her brain. She unmade herself and watched herself being unmade. All the bacteria on her skin and in her blood, the virii in her tissues. The woman who had been Elvi Okoye became a landscape. A world. She fell farther in. Interlude: The Investigator (6) The Investigator reaches out and connects with everything it can find on Ilus, and all the other minds trapped as part of the protomolecule. He wishes he'd gotten to known Elvi better, but he's not afraid. It reaches out and it reaches out and then... it stops. Chapter Fifty-Five: Havelock About three weeks later, Havelock is on the surface of Ilus, watching the Rocinante unload supplies for the colonists. Naomi is there, and Alex is there, and Basia is there, and Lucia is there, and Amos is there. Back in Chapter 50, I mentioned there was something I wanted to talk about and this is it. It's Amos. I'm not going to say he should've died in that firefight, but it felt like he was going to. Had Cibola Burn been the last book in the series, maybe it would've stuck. But as a reader, even on my first time through the series, the revelation that Amos had survived was when I realized that these books would not throw curveballs -- or, really, risk upsetting the reader in any way. It's unfortunate. It's a pretty boring chapter, all in all. Sudyam van Altricht, a character mentioned in passing now and again, is promoted to field lead. There's supplies for the colony coming. Half of the crew of the Barb have elected to stay on Ilus, as have half the RCE staff on the Israel. Everyone's basically content to forget that both the destruction of the shuttle and the burning of the terrorist cell all happened in the past. The news in Sol is playing footage of the rescue operation with the bubbles and Marwick and Havelock are heroes. The two of them have a fairly meaningless conversation about how good things are now but maybe things will get bad again, and that's about it. Chapter Fifty-Six: Holden Holden's looking at the Rocinante and taking stock of the damage, mentally itemizing it so he can bill Avasarala. Then, he returns to First Landing -- or New First Landing -- and finds Naomi and Amos. Amos is fine, all in all, he's just regrowing some new fingers. Holden asks Naomi how she escaped the Israel's brig and she implies jokingly that she hosed Havelock to get out of there. Holden says his goodbyes to Carol Chiwewe, then the Merton family. Turns out he's not taking Basia back to Earth to face trial for what he did -- wow, how nice of Holden! Later, the Rocinante is taking off and everything's having a cup of coffee. Then, Holden goes off to don an EVA suit and a portable blowtorch. He tears the cargo bay apart until he's found the protomolecule nodule, seals it in a bag, chucks it into a probe, and has Naomi fire it into the local star. To the probe, Holden says that Miller has saved two worlds now, and Holden wishes he'd been nicer to him. Afterward, Naomi and Holden have just had sex. Naomi mentions that Havelock was Miller's old partner and Holden is like, wow, that's weird. Naomi asks him why he let Basia go and Holden says he just didn't want to break up their family. And that Murtry said they were beyond the borders of civilization anyway. Yeah. Holden goes off to see Murtry, bringing Amos with him (who, as it turns out, is not allowed to see Murtry.) Murtry is handcuffed to a crash couch. Holden says that in the two year journey back to Sol, his friends in the UN are going to figure out how to bring Murtry up on charges, then gives Amos a minute alone with Murtry. But he listens in from outside. Amos says he appreciates that Murtry shot him in the back, smart move. But not that he made him kill Wei. Murtry says, what, are you going to beat a helpless man in a hospital bed? Nope, Amos says, but when he does finally beat him up, does he really think not being helpless will help him? And that's it. Epilogue: Avasarala Avasarala is just finishing a dinner meeting with Vyakislav Pratkanis, Martian congressional Speaker of the House. As she's leaving, she runs into Fred Johnson and they chat about political stuff. Bobbie Draper is waiting for her in a private room in a high-class restaurant. They discuss things. Bobbie's working in veteran's outreach, Avasarala has a new hip and hates her new job. As the novel speculated earlier, Avasarala confirms that she sent Holden out there to make everyone see how much of a "clusterfuck" things were out past the rings. Except it backfired and the guy who couldn't stop starting wars somehow brought peace. Bobbie doesn't follow -- why would she want conflict? Because, Avasarala says, she had to save Mars. Avasarala's point of view is as follows: there are now a thousand suns out there and all of them seem to have a planet with a breathable atmosphere, seemingly selected by the protomolecule builders. Planets that are more like Earth than Mars is. Mars, Avasarala points out, has the second largest fleet in Sol. Fifteen thousand nukes, sixteen battlecruisers. Ships that are newer and meaner than their Earth counterparts with fancy technology like "proton cannons." Bobbie thinks they're a myth, Avasarala assures her they're not. Huh, I don't think that ever comes up again. And now Mars is dead. Who is going to keep terraforming an inhospitable world when there's that many out there for the taking? Who's going to stay on Mars and devote themselves to a multi-generational work? If people leave Earth, that's great for Earth. If people leave Mars, everything collapses. And, as far as Avasarala is concerned, it's now inevitable. So, if Mars starts breaking down, where are their warships going to go? Their nukes? Their military? James Holden was supposed to make people think it would be better to stay home, and he hosed it up. Now, Avasarala is here to recruit Bobbie Draper and get her "back on the board." And that brings us to the end of Cibola Burn.
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Aug 13, 2022 12:24
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Cibola Burn and Season 4 of The Expanse Cibola Burn is an odd book. An epilogue novel that became the launching novel of a second trilogy. As I mentioned at the start of it, people think it is the worst book in the series. While it's a pretty messy novel, I don't think it's the worst. It's a neat twist on the Expanse formula with an interesting premise that gets squandered by the authors. The whole time, Cibola Burn feels like it should be more of a dramatic capstone than it ends up being. For example, Amos gets shot in the neck, the thigh, and his fingers blown off, left writhing on the ground -- but it's all good, he's fine. Havelock, Elvi, and Basia all feel flawed in some ways. In general, I think the authors aren't quite up to the task of exploring the RCE/colonist conflict, leaving Murtry to fall into the trap of being "DUMB AND SO drat CRAZY" by the end of the novel when he is otherwise one of their more interesting antagonists so far. The most interesting ideas -- that Holden was sent to fail, the Martian exodus -- are relegated to the prologue and epilogue. As mentioned, the bizarre object (soon to be known as a 'bullet') and everything that surrounds it is a series highlight. A recurring issue the Expanse books have, and the one that was perhaps most prevalent in Cibola Burn, is that the characters sometimes feel like they're waiting around for the plot to happen. I called this feeling like a DM was rolling on the Random Ilus Encounter table at one point. The characters don't really do much and, when they do, it often feels very reactive. Sometimes I think this is a consequence of how quickly the Coreys churned these books out. It is much easier to write a story where your characters react than act. So, with all that in mind, it's very interesting to see what the TV series changed. Cibola Burn was adapted into the fourth season of The Expanse TV series, turning the novel from 156,000 words to 10 episodes. The most immediate difference is that Havelock is absent entirely, something which was put down to the actor (Jay Hernandez) being unavailable due to commitments with Magnum PI. But, as I've speculated before, I think that's just because there's little point to having Havelock in this season. Another significant alteration is that Basia Merton is absent -- from a certain point of view. The Merton family is replaced by the Mazur family with Basia becoming Jakob. Lucia and Felcia keep their names. The general thrust of the story is similar but with some key differences. One of the more prominent ones is that we meet the Mazur family as the Barbapiccola is running the UN blockade of the Sol gate, not as Basia is setting out to blow the landing pad. In fact, the whole sequence of events is changed. Avasarala, who is still Secretary-General in the TV series, sends Holden to Ilus prior to the shuttle being downed. Holden is explicitly sent in order to investigate the protomolecule ruins and, if they're a threat, get the people off the planet (Holden is also told, in fact, not to bother with trying to figure out what happened with the shuttle, Avasarala tells him the situation is hosed up enough as it is.) When the shuttle goes up, we see it from the perspective of Murtry, Elvi and Fayez -- and there's no clue whether it was an attack, accident, sabotage, or something due to the alien ruins. This is a good change. As mentioned previously, having the story begin with Basia (inadvertantly) downing the shuttle creates with it certain expectations -- who is going to figure out he did it, what price will he pay, how will the divide between him and Coop widen or shorten? Except the story isn't really interested in any of that. It makes Murtry easy to sympathise with (we know it's a terrorist plot!) and puts the colonists in a bad position, which the story tries to kind of ignore. See also: Governor Trying, a character who is absent from the TV series. There's another important difference with Murtry. Murtry is not the ranking officer of the RCE mission. There's a unnamed mission commander who he reports to and is killed in the crash. It gives you this idea that Murtry was never supposed to be in charge in the first place, unlike the books where Murtry is basically just following orders in spite of a terrorist attack and a biased negotiator. As an aside, Burn Gorman plays Murtry so well. Elvi's actress, Lyndie Greenwood, is perfect in the role, as well. When Holden and co. arrive on Ilus, the whole crew goes down to the planet and helps out with the colony. Amos goes with Murtry to inspect the crash site and it's Amos who figures out it was a deliberate attack, Alex helps Lucia out screening for protomolecule infection, while Naomi, Holden and Elvi go off to investigate the ruins. Because we don't know who blew up the shuttle pad or why, the bickering between Murtry and Chiwewe is more interesting. Sure, Murtry seems to have proof someone did it and blames the Belters... but why would the Belters blow up their own landing pad when they need it to get lithium into orbit? When Holden, Elvi and Naomi start investigating the ruins, Holden (on advice from Miller) accidentally kicks off a lightning storm that strikes First Landing. This goes back to that comment on reacting or acting -- the TV series is much better about having characters act. There's also a lot more tension between the characters and the RCE. At some point, Amos grabs a generator part that the RCE team isn't using to repair a Belter generator that was blown out by Holden's lightning strike and is just about shot for it, only saved by the intervention of Chandra Wei (who has been sleeping with Amos.) Which, speaking of sleeping with people, Elvi's crush on Holden is entirely absent. The murder of the RCE team by Coop and co. on the ground is absent. In its place is, basically, the scene where Murtry and friends shoot up the terrorist cell. It's a small change but, again, helps wipe out Murtry's reasonable edge. Murtry still executes Coop in broad daylight. But it's Lucia who is the unwilling member of the terrorist cell, not her husband. So, when they take her aboard the Rocinante, they don't yet know she was the one who triggered the detonator. Murtry also behaves a bit more like a despot, preventing communication between the expedition and Earth. When we learn about the shuttle attack, it's about halfway through the season and it goes somewhat differently. The key things are the same: wire the landing site to blow it, shuttle early, Basia/Lucia doesn't want to do it. But there are changes: Coop 'accidentally' knocks Lucia out and, as they're escaping, she regains consciousness immediately presses the detonator. This leads into a discussion between Naomi and Lucia later, where Naomi confides in her some of her history with a characters that Season 4 has introduced in a sideplot by this point, one Marco Inaros. Both of them killed people without meaning to. It's a really interesting change, and much better than having Alex give Basia a pep talk about being a disappointment or whatever. At one point, after Murtry tries to kill Lucia and threatens Naomi, Holden beats him up and tells him he's not in charge anymore. This feels more true to Holden's overall arc, especially given Caliban's War. Holden's thing with the lightning basically kicks off the planetary reactors melting down and such, and Holden is much more proactive about the danger of a protomolecule planet waking up. He even 'goes public' with seeing and talking to the Investigator and his role on Ilus, which only has Elvi wonder if Holden showing up on Ilus is what made everything wake up. Which, given the Investigator has been 'reaching out' is true. It's about here when the reactor blows up and the defense grid shuts down the concept of fusion and shoot down a shuttle. The earthquake and tsunami hit. Elvi realizes the blindness plague is happening and this is something that's been hinted at with little tidbits over the past few episodes. Holden is the only one immune, just like the books. Murtry also gets some scenes where he's much more proactively terrible -- he mentions having killed a whole ship of Belters before and wants to find a way to sell the protomolecule technology to Earth. The murder slugs show up, too. One of my favorite changes is Amos' behavior -- in the novel, he's just kind of Amos, but the blindness hits him hard in the TV series (it links back to his childhood) and you get the impression he might just go mad and start killing people (and he even does kind of disassociate and attack Holden.) Unfortunately, the TV series shares the slight flaw the books have: it feels like it takes too long for Holden to go, oh yeah, it's my anti-cancer drugs. The Great Slug War takes precisely one episode. The Investigator gets a bit of a different thing, too. Basically, Miller tells Holden that the protomolecule has been using them both and killing him over and over to stop it from finding the answers he's seeking. It's a slight difference than the novels. In the novel, The Investigator/Miller feels like it's doing what the protomolecule wants when it's finding the thing that killed Ilus. Here, it's the Miller part of the entity wanting to solve the mystery, whereas there's another aspect that just seems to want to get Ilus humming again. I'll pause here and mention that the drama with keeping the ships in orbit is present, too, with Alex, Naomi, Felcia and Lucia working together to buy time and so on. It's probably the weakest part of the season (it or the Avasarala subplot, more on that later) but it isn't as, well, glaringly stupid given the lack of Havelock and so on. RCE still tries to get the Rocinante with the shuttle, leading to Naomi needing to jump out into space to grab Lucia when she's sent spiralling away. They use the railgun as a thruster, etc. It's pretty similar to the novel. Anyway, much like the novel, Holden goes off with Miller to crack the case and then Murtry, Chandra, Amos and Elvi go after him. Miller concocts the plan to connect to everything in Ilus then walk into the glowing orb -- again, noting that the protomolecule doesn't want that to happen. It's here where Miller tells Holden about the protomolecule node in the Rocinante and the two have a nice moment. Amos and Chandra, however, do not have a nice moment -- Amos shoots her, she shoots him, and Murtry blows Amos' fingers off. A difference is that Holden leaves to go confront Murtry before Miller's done his plan, meaning Elvi then gets to meet "Holden's ghost" and drag him into the orb. She falls into it, has that strange experience, and so on. Murtry gives his speech about civilization and Holden is less 'Twittery' and more angry and commanding -- and the two shoot each other at the same time, which is a better change that ruthless shoot-first Murtry somehow getting shot by Holden because he can't stop monologuing. Holden and Elvi pass notes about the feeling they get from going through the rings and the orb respectively. Holden doesn't just let Lucia stay with her family for no real reason, but rather actively lies that she died during the events on Ilus to prevent her from being thrown in a cell for the rest of her life and giving her a chance to atone. However, and this is notable for me here, but this is about where I think the cracks start to show in the TV adaptation. Up until now, I've really done nothing but sing its praises. But this is the point where it stops being, well, practically perfect. The first thing I'm going to do is comment on Amos' big 'thank you' moment where he attacks Murtry in the Rocinante brig. I don't have much to say about it other than it's dumb and less interesting than how the novel does it. Chatham overacts Amos' 'crazy eyes' and it's just an overall poorer shade of the events of an earlier season where Amos attacked Miller and had an unsettlingly perfect expression on his face. Sure, fans love it -- but fans get it wrong. It's just bad. The second is the Avasarala subplot. The recasting of Arjun is a joke that I think I've talked about before. But throughout this season, Avasarala is dealing with an election battle for UN Secretary-General against Nancy Gao. Avasarala doesn't want people to go through the Rings, Gao does. In the end, Gao wins and Avasarala ends up with a new job on the moon. More on this during Season 5, but one thing the novels can do which the TV series can't is just put characters in the background. But when you've got Shoreh Aghdashloo in your main cast, you can't really just relegate her to a few cameos in the broader season. There's a Bobbie subplot which I think is mostly derived from a short story. She's working as a demolition tech and dealing with being a bit of a pariah while she's living with her brother Ben and nephew David when the latter gets wrapped up in drug stuff which ends up getting her involved with a peculiar Martian-Belter conspiracy revolving around stolen Martian tech. This is the subplot that both shows and tells us the fate of Mars in the wake of the rings opening up. Lastly, there's a subplot with Drummer and Ashford that explores the Belter perspective. Drummer is running Medina Station while Ashford works as an OPA navy pirate hunter. After a Belter extremist spaces a shipful of Earthers, Drummer and Ashford realize it is the work of Marco Inaros and resolve to handle it before Earth gets involved. We'll talk more about Marco in Nemesis Games but Keon Alexander nails the role. Either way, linking with the Bobbie stuff about, Ashford and Drummer realize that someone on Mars is helping Marco plan something big. In the end, Ashford realizes that Marco is planning to use stealth-coated asteroids as weapons of mass destruction, probably Tycho and Ceres. Ashford raids Marco's ship and apprehend him, only for Filip -- Naomi's son -- to turn the tables on him. Ashford is spaced and Marco reveals his goal. Not Ceres. Not Tycho. No, he's got bigger plans than that. Marco is going to hit Earth. This is all setting up things in Nemesis Games and later novels, and I think is one of the strengths the TV adaptation has over its book counterpart (possibly stemming from how Cibola Burn was going to be an epilogue novel, not book one of a new trilogy.) But, as mentioned, this is the point where things start to get shaky. Both Season 5 and 6 have a significant problem, and that is there's simply too many subplots because they can't drop cast members for a season. We'll discuss that with Nemesis Games because the construction of that novel combined with the changes the TV adaptation had made means that the show simply had too much ground to cover. But that's a discussion for later. Soon, we'll begin what people consider the best book in the series, and probably my personal favorite of the series: Nemesis Games.
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Aug 16, 2022 13:03
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Book 5: Nemesis Games Nemesis Games is the fifth novel of The Expanse series and is generally regarded as being the best one, having been called the "Empire Strikes Back" of the series. I think a significant reason for this is the focus on the Rocinante crew, their personalities and backgrounds. As Battuta said, it's the novel where the Coreys finally decided to give the crew some personality. However, I think the novel does something that plays to the strengths of the Corey team -- or, perhaps, means they have to rein in their worse impulses. That is, the novel splits up the Rocinante crew and puts them out there dealing with their own stories. Our perspective characters are Holden, Naomi, Alex and Amos. For the majority of the novel, these characters are doing their own things in their own corners of the universe. We get to see how they react without their support network. What's Holden like without his crew? What's Amos like without his moral compasses? What's Alex like when he's not driving the ship? What's Naomi like in, uh, general? This might make one think Nemesis Games is a bit of a filler novel. A very character-focused story with little ramification for the wider world of the series. But this is not the case and, frankly, the major event that hits between Chapters 21 and 22 really took me by surprise. There's an audacity to it that I don't think the Coreys displayed before this novel and, arguably, never display again. It is also the novel where the TV series began to stumble in the adaptation. As mentioned in the previous post, it's the first season where I think you can't immediately and easily declare the TV adaptation is better than the novel. The reasons for this stem from issues compounding from the previous seasons, some odd creative decisions in the adaptation process itself, and the terrible controversy around Cas Anvar who plays Alex Kamal. But that's a discussion for later. Much like Cibola Burn, I don't think the writers have mentioned who writes which character. Given it's four characters, I assume it's a 2/2 split with Franck writing Holden. Maybe we'll be able to figure out who is writing who as we go. My guess is that Franck is writing Holden and Naomi with Abraham taking on Amos and Alex. Prologue: Filip On Callisto, there are two shipyards -- one Earth, one Mars -- that are in "a lot more trouble than they guessed." A man named Filip is leading a covert team and a plan is afoot. This prologue, I'll note, is set prior to the end of Cibola Burn. The fight on Ilus is still yet to be "worked out." As Filip advances on the shipyards, a Belter transport ship, the Frank Aiken, is maintain its course -- and assisting Filip below. Filip and co. set up some targeting lasers around the shipyard and, as one of Filip's timers hits zero, a loading mech goes haywire. The mech damages part of the sensor array, buying Filip and his team an hour -- with twelve minutes on his timer, that's plenty of time to spare. Whoever Filip is, we know he's someone of importance to these Belters. He's the only one who knows what the mission is and repeated mention is made of the importance of his father. The targeting lasers light up and paint the defences, the guardian marines, and facilities. The lasers guide in some tungsten lengths with short-burn rockets that'd been dropped in eighteen days before, and the defenders on the ground and the two warships in orbit get blown to bits. With ten minutes and thirteen seconds on the timer, Filip's team make their way into the rubble. There's a bunch of procedural stuff, cutting through doors, gunfights and so on. But in the end, Filip finds some canisters of High Density Resonance Coating -- Martian stealth tech. Four minutes to go. Some of Filip's people run into trouble. While he's able to save some of them, he has to leave two of them behind. They exfiltrate right on cue, just before an asteroid slams into the base and wipes it off the face of the Earth -- uh, Callisto -- and Filip awaits the arrival of his ship, the Pella, and wonders why he doesn't feel bad about losing two people under his command. The last line of the prologue mentions that it's Filip Inaros' fifteenth birthday. All in all, I think the Nemesis Games prologue is one of the weaker ones. Filip is okay and the clockwork plan element is fun, but it just doesn't hold my attention. It's probably because I don't really know who Filip Inaros is and there's no immediate hook like Julie the missing girl, Mei the child, etc. It really suffers from Filip never being mentioned before by Naomi. Spending this whole chapter going, wait, is this Naomi's son? or something along those lines would've made it much more intriguing.
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Aug 23, 2022 04:31
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