Expanse series, James S A Corey
Sep. 7th, 2016 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI read the first book, Leviathan Wakes, a little while back, and recently got round to reading the second and third. Someone online said book #5 was really good, so we'll see what I think.
What I really like is the setting -- medium future solar system SF, when Mars has been settled, and Earth and Mars are the solar system's superpowers, but humans are still scattered round the belt and a few other places doing mining and research and so on, with a varying tension in how they're loyal to the inner planet governments they have almost no connection with.
It's old school in a way I like, to imagine humanity will eventually make inroads into the solar system, rather than assuming it will never happen, or will only happen by some magic alien tech which is dropped onto us. It feels like, it's at an *earlier* phase than some other books, in that we've settled *one* other planet, and some other asteroids and moons, and the situation is evolving from there.
Earth and Mars have military spaceships, bu they're like aircraft carriers -- they've rarely been tested seriously against OTHER serious military spaceships, only against smaller stuff. And they really exist as a last line of defence for the settled planets which might be futile.
Of course, into the middle of this, they DO drop some alien technology, which is simultaneously an incomprehensible physics-defying threat, but also automated and uncontrolled and potentially an opportunity if you're VERY VERY careful.
The second and third books are about as good as the first (which is good but not superb for a series :)). They still talk about the settled human places and the politics between, though it's evolved a lot. And I wish there were more of it. The alien tech is still there, not sidelined, still central to the plot of each, in what happens next, but not completely obviating the existing worldbuilding.
A few minor details bother me. "No lightspeed delay" is not impossible like "free energy" it's impossible like "garble warble farble" -- you need to say what it MEANS before you can attempt to claim it's something which has happened. *Different* details bothered other friends.
The second and third books are *better* at a varied representation. The first book focuses on Miller, a hardboiled detective archetype, and Holden, who has almost the same personality but runs a spaceship instead of being a detective. The second and third keep Holden but have (I think), an even mix of male and female viewpoint characters, many of which I really like. Although I feel it's still playing catch-up in some ways, like one fo the viewpoints in the third book is an antagonist, who doesn't feel as equal as the others.
And the viewpoints are not always very distinct -- when it's describing what's going on, it's easy to forget who's in theory seeing it. And I feel like something's missing it's hard to put my finger on. Like each character has stuff that happens, but it's not always much of an *arc*, it's sometimes hard to fit "challenges met and overcome" into the plot of the book.
What I really like is the setting -- medium future solar system SF, when Mars has been settled, and Earth and Mars are the solar system's superpowers, but humans are still scattered round the belt and a few other places doing mining and research and so on, with a varying tension in how they're loyal to the inner planet governments they have almost no connection with.
It's old school in a way I like, to imagine humanity will eventually make inroads into the solar system, rather than assuming it will never happen, or will only happen by some magic alien tech which is dropped onto us. It feels like, it's at an *earlier* phase than some other books, in that we've settled *one* other planet, and some other asteroids and moons, and the situation is evolving from there.
Earth and Mars have military spaceships, bu they're like aircraft carriers -- they've rarely been tested seriously against OTHER serious military spaceships, only against smaller stuff. And they really exist as a last line of defence for the settled planets which might be futile.
Of course, into the middle of this, they DO drop some alien technology, which is simultaneously an incomprehensible physics-defying threat, but also automated and uncontrolled and potentially an opportunity if you're VERY VERY careful.
The second and third books are about as good as the first (which is good but not superb for a series :)). They still talk about the settled human places and the politics between, though it's evolved a lot. And I wish there were more of it. The alien tech is still there, not sidelined, still central to the plot of each, in what happens next, but not completely obviating the existing worldbuilding.
A few minor details bother me. "No lightspeed delay" is not impossible like "free energy" it's impossible like "garble warble farble" -- you need to say what it MEANS before you can attempt to claim it's something which has happened. *Different* details bothered other friends.
The second and third books are *better* at a varied representation. The first book focuses on Miller, a hardboiled detective archetype, and Holden, who has almost the same personality but runs a spaceship instead of being a detective. The second and third keep Holden but have (I think), an even mix of male and female viewpoint characters, many of which I really like. Although I feel it's still playing catch-up in some ways, like one fo the viewpoints in the third book is an antagonist, who doesn't feel as equal as the others.
And the viewpoints are not always very distinct -- when it's describing what's going on, it's easy to forget who's in theory seeing it. And I feel like something's missing it's hard to put my finger on. Like each character has stuff that happens, but it's not always much of an *arc*, it's sometimes hard to fit "challenges met and overcome" into the plot of the book.
no subject
Date: 2016-09-07 05:16 pm (UTC)I sympathise with this point of view in principle, but surely in practice it's clear that a very great number of SF series involving FTL travel and/or FTL communication are implicitly using basically the same model of how this works? To wit, there is one privileged reference frame, and things that are simultaneous in that reference frame are the ones that are "really" simultaneous (in the sense that FTL communication back and forth between them would perceive them as such), and the changes in apparent simultaneity in any other reference frame due to general relativity are relegated from "fundamental ambiguity in the nature of reality" to "just some kind of optical illusion, doesn't really represent truth". So you can never travel into what the privileged reference frame thinks of as "the past", no matter what other reference frame you might be stationary relative to when you activate your FTL drive.
There are occasional cases where someone tries to be more interesting about it (though Singularity Sky et seq are the only case that actually springs to my mind right now), but otherwise, this is surely the more or less universal model of how FTL works in SF.
(It does of course raise further questions, such as "how come the privileged reference frame always seems to turn out to be basically stationary wrt the core of this particular galaxy?" which generally seem to get swept under the carpet. I occasionally think the Vingean zones-of-thought model might have been able to give a good answer to that, on the basis that it does include some specifically interesting stuff centred on the galactic core and affecting FTL travel – he could have argued that the same phenomenon that created the Zones also gave privilege to an appropriate local reference frame for the FTL to work with respect to – but clearly Vinge was more interested in exploring other things about his world than that.)
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Date: 2016-09-08 10:42 am (UTC)Yeah. I often think of it as "relative to the centre of mass", be that the sun, or the galaxy, or the universe. That sort of "it turns out there was an asymmetry that wasn't really visible to us" is the sort of thing that DOES happen in physics.
But it *annoys* me, because it seems to perpetuate the idea that relativity is some annoying constraint tried to impose on an actually "sensible" model, when that model is completely incoherent.
I didn't think of it until you asked, but now I wonder if you COULD get time travel. Like, the earth isn't completely stationary relative to the sun. Can you time things so a very short FTL hop relative to the sun translates to time travel in the earth's frame, even by a few nanoseconds? You could laboratory test all those paradoxes and see what happens.
Of course, that only works in some universes. Sometimes the FTL is via discovering pre-existing wormholes (eg. Mote in God's Eye), where they may just be set up so you can't practically observe that. Sometimes you can construct the wormhole but need to fly to the other end first. That's freaky time-wise but I think doesn't make any paradoxes. In Expanse, FTL seems to be the purview of alien tech we can't easily test out, so I'm sceptical of it, but it certainly hits the "shit, we don't understand this tech AT ALL" note.
Singularity Sky is a fascinating example; I wish it had dealt *more* with the end-of-time superintelligence, what we had seemed bodged, but it was a fascinating idea we'd not really seen elsewhere.
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Date: 2016-09-08 12:11 pm (UTC)Yes, I agree that the Eschaton seemed to be a bit of a bodge. Initially it made itself look as if it was in the far future (all that stuff about "I am descended from you" and "in my historic light cone"), but I recall that as things progressed through Iron Sunrise it started to seem to me that a better model was that it existed only just in the future – sort of staying a little bit ahead of us – because it seemed so good at real-time communication with its agents and keeping exactly abreast of what was going on 'now', without ever seeming to pull off any far-future predictions of the kind you'd expect an end-of-time entity to be able to do just as easily.
The more interesting part of the Singularity Sky setup for me was the part where the ordinary use of an ordinary FTL drive as available to non-godlike-entity civilisations could follow a closed timelike curve if you set it up right, which could (in principle, and if the Eschaton didn't keep interfering) be used as an outflanking technique in equiv-tech warfare. That seemed to be the bit that was actually thinking about how FTL and relativity might interact; the Eschaton parts were just 'reusing the same idea as a vague and handwavy justification for an effective god'.