Leviathan Wakes

In my teens and 20s I read science fiction as though it were about to be banned. I couldn’t get enough: Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Sheckley… every author I could find. That waned as I grew older. Not out of any snobbish move to something more ‘important’; it was just that my tastes changed and I found I enjoyed other forms of fiction more.

I mention this only to observe that my opinion here can’t in any way be considered informed. I enjoyed this book a lot, but I have absolutely no idea how it fits in with whatever else is being written in the field. I can’t tell whether it’s derivative or original. What I do know is that, even at 560 pages, it moves along at a cracking pace; it’s pleasantly unpredictable; and the characters are engaging without being overwhelmingly cerebral. We’re not in Virginia Woolf Land.

It's also the first book in a series of seven, something I find both interesting and irritating. Interesting because I definitely want to read more about a solar system where interplanetary travel is a given and war is brewing between Earth, Mars and colonized asteroids. Irritating because it’s one more example of the Netflixation of entertainment. Does everything popular these days have to be expanded, explored and serialized to exhaustion?