James

April 21, 2019

Cibola Burn (Review)

his one’s the fourth book of the series that would turn into TV’s Expanse, a sprawling space saga that deals with humans, their curiosity (or greed or lust for power, something like that), leftover weaponizable alien goo from a long-dead race, a star gate, a virgin planet, and the crew of the Rocinante. In a nutshell – refugees from the war over Ganymede cooked through the jumpgate opened at the end of book three. They claim (i.e. they land on) a planet in one of the newly-opened system. Turns out its also a planet a corporate has claimed, and their […]
November 11, 2019

Nemesis Games (Review)

nother installment of the Expanse series (is that what it’s really called, or is that just the amazing scifi show it spawned?). Fake writer James S.A. Corey (he’s actually two guys) keeps this chapter in the big sprawling series back in our own solar system. The whole thousands-of-colonies-await-you bit is kept to a minimum – this books is about the four principles – Jim, Naomi, Alex and Amos, as they part ways for “small errands” that should have been corner-store-walks but don’t end that way, given the fact that the OPA (Outer Planets Alliance, i.e. the skinny low-grav belters) are […]
January 5, 2020

Babylon’s Ashes (Review)

he Expanse. A series about near-space, the space of something like 200 years in the future (the date never seems to come up). This sixth book of the sprawling series picks up the action – Earth just got slagged by three “military grade” asteroid strikes, leaving the planet dust-shrouded and home of billions of new corpses. Mars has its own problems – a large chunk of its fleet just took off on its own. Some of it popped through one of the new stargates, helling out for the unknown. The rest of it was tossed to the Free Navy, the […]
January 26, 2020

Persepolis Rising (Review)

t’s been thirty years since Captain James Holden sent the last fleet of the Free Navy into a strange unknown using instabilities of the ring gate. Everyone’s getting old. So old, in fact, that Holden and his companion Naomi are cashing out their share of the Rocinante and retiring. Everyone else is sticking to it (with Bobby Draper as the new Captain) except poor Clarissa Mao who is dying from her leaking implants. So they make their plans. And you know about plans. It is then that through the gates sail two ships of the long missing Martian effort to […]
February 23, 2020

Tiamat’s Wrath (Review)

nd with this, the eight book of the Expanse series (or is that The Expense?), I’m caught up. Now, like everyone else, I’m going to have to wait for the next one. There aren’t unread Expanses on the bookstore shelf anymore. The worlds (all 1300 of them) were pretty screwed. In the last book, the Laconians (a break-away fleet from Mars that discovered alien-tech shipmaking platforms) had sent a battleship through their gate. They trounced Medina Station (which held the hub in a Gibraltarian grip) and then munched the massed fleets of Earth and Mars with their spooky ironclad. And […]
April 3, 2022

Drive (Review)

his one comes from the collection of short stories in The Expanse universe, all balled together in Memory’s Legion. It’s a collection of all the short stories and novellas the two writers who make up “James S.A Corey” have published in various platforms. But I’d not wanted to buy them for a device – I wanted paper. And now, thank God, I’ve got it! So Drive is the story behind Solomon Epstein and the creation of his ship drive that allows humans to spread out across the solar system in an easy and economic way (and not the months and […]
April 10, 2022

Steamboats Come True (Review)

ound this in our little corner bookshop, an old textbook which i stained with coffee and Tabasco as I read it over many mornings at Juniors. But it’s a fascinating and very detailed account of the development of the steamboat. And if you think that Robert Fulton did it all alone in some sort of vacuum of engineering, no, he didn’t. When you think about it, the steamboat was one of the most technologically amazing crafts men of the time could envision. Think about it – America had just gotten through its revolution. The wilderness still besieged the coastal seaboards. […]
April 17, 2022

The Butcher of Anderson Station (Review)

nother quick review out of the Memory’s Legion collection of Expanse tales. This one concerns Fred Johnson, Soldier for Earth who ended up as levelheaded spokesman for the Belt, running Tycho Station and repurposing the Mormon’s generation ship out from under them (and, good for that since it turns out they would have been literally wasting the time of generations). So there is a side story about Johnson, how he was involved in a massacre on a belter station. As I remember, the show has the belters attempting to surrender and Fred ordering them in. Well, it wasn’t quite like […]
June 26, 2022

The Churn (Review)

veryone knows the few facts about Amos Burton of the Rocinante in The Expanse, that he is a mechanic and also a likable yet unstable crew member. When it comes to total zen violence, Amos is your man. Other facts we know – he grew up in flooded Baltimore, a city of people either involved in criminal acts or on government assistance. We know that his real name was Timmy, that he lived with an old woman, Lydia.That his childhood friend Erich is a cripple with a shriveled arm who now runs the crime in Baltimore. And that Timmy took […]