Leviathan Wakes, James SA Corey

[iansales]

Review of "kickass space opera" Leviathan Wakes posted to SFF Chronicles here.

[Rodders]

I really enjoyed this book.

[biodroid]

Was it really that bad?

[iansales]

I thought it was bad, yes.

[biodroid]

I heard a lot og other reviews make it out to be good even GRRM says it's what Space Opera should be.

[Werthead]

It's entertaining fluff. It doesn't take on board all of the strides made in Space Opera over the last 20+ years (mostly by British authors, indeed) but then very little American SF has. Dialling down expectations when confronted by an American space opera novel is very much par for the course these days.

I find Ian's suggestion that it is impossible for another Holocaust to take place because humanity has learned better from history to be preposterous, however. If that was the case we wouldn't have had ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, atrocities in Darfur, civil war in Rwanda and the massacres and the religious strife in Iraq. In addition, the overwhelming lesson of history is that people don't learn from it, only what they've experienced themselves. After the Napoleonic Wars and WWI, it was vowed never to let such a devastating conflict happen again, and both times it did. Maybe television and film depictions of WWII and the Holocaust would serve better to educate people and prevent something similar happen again, but given that millions of people in the world believe the Holocause never happened in the first place despite the titanic and overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I fear not.

[tonphil1960]

Good book yes, nothing to write home about though. Let's see if the sequels are any better.

T

[iansales]

Originally Posted by Werthead

I find Ian's suggestion that it is impossible for another Holocaust to take place because humanity has learned better from history to be preposterous, however.

What holocaust? I'm not talking about one nation going to war and committing atrocities, or one group of people committing atrocities on another. In the book, a single executive decides to test an alien virus on one and a half million people - and no one tells him this is a remarkably stupid idea? Imagine of the director of R&D for ICL decided to test a new poison by introducing it in to the water spuply of Birmingham?

[spider from mars]

Yeah Ian to be honest I was following your review without problem until you got to the holocaust bit. Not only do I find that an exceptionally naive view of history, I also think that if an author wants to introduce an amoral corporation or individual into their narrative then why the hell not? Sure I guess we've learned certain things, but a lot of the atrocities in Nazi Germany were down to the personality of Hitler himself - not particularly far fetched to imagine that another psycho gains some sort of authority (if you look back at Stalin, Pol Pot, about 2/3 of the Roman emperors...). And we've had all kinds of horrible, horrible events since then. (And I don't even want to get into some of the stuff done in the name of profit for the big companies over the years). I don't think that one guy going rogue in the future is beyond the realms of possibility.

[iansales]

Hitler - and it was not him alone - created a political environment in which certain actions not only became acceptable but desirable. Being at war certainly helped. A corporate director who will perform a fatal experiment on an unknowing public is another matter altogether. Given present legislation, safeguards, and public values, the president of Glaxo SmithKline would never consider secretly adding some drug to the water supply of New York City which would likely kill everyone. A terrorist, perhaps. But an executive? For profit?

But it's not just the lack of plausibility in the action, it's that the authors decided to use it in their story. They invented a one-dimensional villain, a cartoon Hitler, to drive their plot. And that's a failure of craft.

[Werthead]

It's a cartoon exaggeration, sure, but then it's also a deliberately old-school, soft-SF space opera, more STAR WARS and STAR TREK than Alastair Reynolds or Paul McAuley. Villains have done worse in that field before.

And we do live in a century when the heads of tobacco companies went to vast lengths and spent billions of dollars trying to bury the truth that their products killed people, in order to ensure their profit margins were maintained. We see the same now going on with some oil companies desperately trying to halt all attempts to crack down on pollution and global warming so they can continue making profits, regardless of what happens to certain low-lying areas of the planet, endangering a lot of lives.

Given the parameters of the story and the setting (these execs can sit on remote space stations and do things to people in a constained asteroid on the other side of the Solar system), the ambitions of the villain are not entirely implausible. Exaggerated and outrageous, sure.

[iansales]

Interesting analogies but I don't think they quite map onto the situation given in the book. Cigarettes - and alcohol, for that matter - are detrimental to your health, and people die from diseases caused by them. But they are not 100% fatal. And if they had been, no amount of money would have kept the cigarette companies in business. (For one thing, their market would have died out very quickly.)

The same is true of Union Carbide, who ignored a report by a safety engineer, didn't make the proposed change to their plant, and as a result thousands of people were poisoned and died. Not fixing that valve did not make it certain that people would die, only that if something happened, the valve would fail and the gas would leak.

In the book, the corporate executive hires mercenaries and gangsters to seal the asteroid so he can then release the alien virus - which he knows to be 100% fatal. This is akin to Philip Morris International spiking all its cigarettes with cyanide just to see what happens, and if they could perhaps profit from it.

As for the book being old school space opera... Why write old school space opera? What's next? Someone writing a racist, sexist spy thriller like Fleming did back in the 1950s?

[Werthead]

Why write old school space opera? What's next?

Why not? At the basest level, it's where the money is: old-school US space opera authors like David Weber make much, much more money than any British 'new space opera' author bar Peter F. Hamilton. Certainly that's the reason to write it for any author starting out in the field (like Ty Franck) or who writes to feed himself, like Daniel Abraham, especially after the bombing of his fantasy series showed what happened when you try to write a more original, possibly even experimental work rather than something commercial (though Tor's inept marketing didn't help; it's gone down much better in the UK with a more competent publisher at the helm).

Also, it was probably not quite right for me to call LW totally old-school. It's clearly not in the same far-out space fantasy sphere as the likes of Weber. It may not be as 'realistic' as say Reynolds, but with its non-use of FTL and its restriction to only the Solar system, it's clearly nodding a bit further towards that end of the spectrum than a lot of the American space opera stuff.

Someone writing a racist, sexist spy thriller like Fleming did back in the 1950s?

Well, someone did just publish a new JAMES BOND novel. Whether it had sexism/racism in it, I don't know.

[iansales]

The lack of FTL doesn't qualify as old school - the Lensman series had Kimball Kinnison flitting all over the galaxy via hyperspace. If anything, it's more of a nod towards hard sf than space opera. But in attitudes and sensibilities, then yes, LW is certainly old school - cf Smith's planet of evil naked lesbians who only needed the love of good men to become nice ladies.

I think the latest Bond book was by Jeffrey Deaver. Before that, it was Sebastian Faulks. But there have been 007 books going back decades. John Gardner wrote loads of them. I suspect most of them feature the sensibilities of the time they were written. I've read some of the Gardner ones, and they were ordinary 1990s thrillers and nothing like Fleming's originals. I also have the Faulks one on the TBR, so I guess I'll find out if that one's regressive.

[belowforty]

If you like Space Stories, Leviathan Wakes is a write book for you. The author James A. Corey creates a epic story in a reasonably near future, with an excellently conceived of environment and a fun story that is both action packed and thoughtful. Leviathan Wakes is the embodiment of what good space opera should be: there's a bit of a scientific background that helps to inform the plot, but the focus of this story is on the characters and major events that blast the story forward. Truly I like the book.