Kemper's Reviews > Abaddon’s Gate

There’s a utopian idea in some sci-fi like Star Trek that humanity exploring space will bring out the best in us as a species. I think that anyone who believes that hasn’t paid enough attention to what we are actually like. That’s one of the big reasons that I’m loving this series. It shows that people suck whether they’re on Earth, Mars, a moon, an asteroid, a spaceship, or exploring an alien construct built by an ancient protomolecule.

This third book in the Expanse series picks up shortly after the events of the last one. James Holden and his small crew of misfits continue to earn a living by hiring out the Rocinante as a transport or escort ship around the solar system. The governments of Earth, Mars, and the Belt have all sent ships out towards the mysterious giant ring that the protomolecule cobbled together that is now outside the orbit of Uranus. (Feel free to make your own Uranus jokes.) As you’d expect the three rival powers are spending as much time watching and scheming against each other as they are trying to figure out exactly what the ring is.

Holden wants nothing more to do with the protomolecule, especially since he’s having some freaky episodes that are apparently connected to it, so he tries to get them a job that will take them as far away from the ring as the Rocinante can get. Unfortunately, he’s got an enemy named Clarissa who thinks Holden is responsible for her family’s misfortune, and she manipulates events to get him near the ring where she can destroy his reputation and kill him.

As usual with this series we’ve got Holden and his crew as the on-going hero characters while some new people are introduced. Clarissa is a key figure, and her desire for revenge, extensive resources, and some illegal implants that give her a limited amount of berserker fury make her a very dangerous figure. Carlos ‘Bull’ c de Baca is the security chief on the main Outer Planets Alliance ship sent to the ring, but his loyalty to the leader of the OPA means that he’s been secretly given the responsibility of making sure that the ship’s idiot captain doesn’t screw things up. Pastor Anna Volovodov leaves her wife and child behind to go to the ring as part of an Earth delegation made up of religious figures and artists to try and figure out the significance of the ring to humanity from a spiritual standpoint.

As I noted before, one of the things I love about this series is how it sets up the idea that even with the terrifying and astounding things that have happened because of the protomolecule that the different factions of people scattered around the solar system still spend most of their time focused on squabbling with each other and looking for an angle to use the alien tech for their own purposes. That remains one of the key drivers to the plot, and it’s all too easy to believe that when confronted with something huge and scary that people would rather fight with each other than think about what it actually means.

Another aspect that I enjoy about Expanse is that it at least nods towards real science in that if you’re going to create a story in which spaceships can go fast enough to make travel within our solar system feasible, then that means you’ve got to account for the force of that on the human bodies in those ships. That’s built into these books with special gel couches and drugs having to be used to offset thrusts that cause high g-forces, and those forces get used to catastrophic effect in ways that are horrifyingly clever. When you’ve got people casually referring to how someone got turned into pasta sauce, you know things have gotten ugly.

The only off note is in how the book gets pretty black and white with the good guys vs. the bad guys. I’d complained before that the first two books had the heroes facing off against a shadowy conspiracy with no indications from their side what the plan was so it made the threat kind of vague and cartoonish. Here, we know that one big threat comes from Clarissa, and we get plenty on her motivations and her schemes. The other thing endangering everyone is the scared and stupid behavior of small minded people, and that’s also a relatable idea.

However, when things go sideways it seems like all the good guys line up on the same side immediately, and there’s no doubt whatsoever that they’re way is the right way even though with the information available the other side isn’t entirely out of line. It would have been nice to get a few more grey areas or some doubts creeping in rather than having almost everyone lining up along exact battle lines and sticking to that for the most part.

That was a minor point and didn’t detract much from the overall enjoyment I continue to get out of this ambitious space opera with it’s all too human characters.