The Expanse Books End Well After a Frustrating Start

 I usually don't pay full price for books over, say, $5 but with the final book of The Expanse series, Leviathan Falls, I decided to say fuck it and pay (mostly) full price.  I think I had a $1 discount or something but still I wound up paying like $13 for it.

So it was a little annoying to me when I got around to starting to read it in January that the first 80% of it was pretty rough sledding.  I mean it was fine if you like a bunch of talky pseudo-science about unknown alien shit like Star Trek The Motion Picture.  There were a couple of action scenes sprinkled in, but mostly it was frustrating just waiting for things to come together.

The last 20% or so redeems all that wait for the most part.  Finally everyone gets together in the "ring space" and there's a desperate battle while Holden does what Holden does best:  something stupid and dangerous and heroic.  Along with the return of the ghost of Detective Miller, it really threw it back to the first three books when the alien rings (gateways to other star systems) were being established thanks to Holden.  So, really, who should be the one to end all that?  

My only problem with the end was that it was pretty predictable; I literally predicted what would happen a while before it did.  In a way I suppose it was the only thing that made sense.  The only other option was to wire everyone's brains together like this crappy book I read called Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman.  In that book the secret to world peace was for basically everyone to create a hive mind by having an implant installed in their neck.  And those who wouldn't (or couldn't) do that were stranded on islands so they wouldn't bug everyone else.  If you know anything about human nature, exactly none of that is plausible. 

Fortunately the authors opted for another course, one that sort of put everything back to how it was at the start of the series, except now there are humans spread out all over the galaxy and not just the Sol System.  The epilogue is neat in that it sort of riffs on 2001 or Planet of the Apes (the movie) or maybe that song 2525.  I'd have liked to get one last update on all the characters we followed through 9 books, but at least we have some idea what happened to one of them.  And maybe the final novella will fill some of that other stuff in?  Or not. 

My only other complaint with this book was the villain, a woman named Tanaka, was too villain-y.  She was just a bit too one-note, like most Marvel movie villains.  She goes around being a total bitch, screwing subordinates and killing without remorse; she might as well have had a sign over her head saying EVIL!  But I suppose the point of that was how she struggles when her brain gets wired with other people's and she starts having thoughts leading to compassion or empathy.  Yuck. lol

Anyway, if some of the pseudoscience had been taken out to streamline the book more, it would have been better, but it wasn't a bad way to end the series.  Much better than Rise of Skywalker or Endgame anyway.

At the end, I suppose the most unsatisfying thing is we never really know who the aliens are who created the rings or the ones trying to destroy them--and humans.  I suppose introducing the latter aliens would have been hard to pull off.  Really I think the whole Laconia trilogy could have been one book if Holden had just gotten some protomolecule and went to the alien station to blow up the rings in book 7.  I'm just saying.