Reviews with content warning for Death - Nemesis Games

A solid and inevitable reread. I don’t often buy books- so far I’ve only ever invested in two book series, and with the conclusion of the fifth Expanse book I now have to save up for buying these guys

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iono's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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caryndi's review against another edition

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adventurous dark sad tense medium-paced

3.0

Welcome to Backstory: The Novel! Given what I know about the timing of this book (released in 2015), I feel like its writing had a lot to do with someone in TV being like "hey so this is a good story but uhhhh we don't know anything about the where the characters came from and we sorta need that if we're gonna do this thing?" so they wrote a whole novel about it! Unlike previous books in the series,

this one's only POV characters are the members of the Rocinante, who are split up at the beginning for Personal Reasons and then kept apart for Conflict Reasons. With each of their journeys, we learn more about them--except Holden, because someone has to carry the larger plot arcs.

I was pleased to see the return of former characters including Avasarala and Bobbie (Clarissa was less exciting) even if they didn't have POV chapters. I hope it means they'll be sticking around in the series for awhile.

It was nice to know more about the crew, but I would have preferred it if everything we learned arise organically in the narrative rather than just being contained to one book. There were some pretty big backstory drops that could provide a LOT of interpersonal friction/conflict, but I think it's fair to say the authors of The Expanse are not as skilled in that aspect of storytelling. Though the larger conflict introduced in this book does make sense politically, it also had more distance from Holden & co., who somehow managed to once again <spoilers>insert themselves in the middle of a war, only this time, there weren't really any consequences for them as individuals.

I was also totally underwhelmed with the amount of emotional conflict in this book.

Naomi having a secret child that she hadn't told Jim about? Jim, who had been very openly interested in having children while Naomi didn't want to? And then she tells him all about it in one chapter and she feels better after crying it out and he's just like "okay cool"? Sorry, this doesn't track for me. Especially because Holden can be pretty emotional and straight up told Naomi he was super curious and jealous. While he did make it clear she didn't have to tell him what the deal was, I don't see that guy taking all these revelations and just being like "well, let's roll with it."

Then again, the Naomi/Jim relationship has never been extremely strong or fleshed out, so perhaps this is par for the course.

I don't know that I have a lot to say about most of the individual backstories because, as I said, this book sort of just seemed like a visit to these characters' pasts/their memories of their pasts in the middle of a large space adventure and I don't expect much of it to come forward into future books. Maybe I'll be wrong, but I felt all the stories were wrapped up by the end of the book.

I'm also not sure about what the direction for the next book will be; as I mentioned in my review for Cibola Burn, the first three books did a great job of building a larger arc using cliffhangers or raising questions at the end of a book to hint at where the story was going next. I didn't feel that coming into this book nor did it have a clear organic lead-in to what the next book will hold. I assume that's why they added the epilogue; though it did have ties to the story, they were little threads rather than strong foreshadowing.

I think part of this is because we turned away from the Weird Alien Shit to deal with personal crew matters. In terms of the protomolecule, it was hardly even mentioned

aside from the sample being a valuable item in itself that the Free Navy wanted to steal

. Previous books have at least centered the creators of the protomolecule in the conflict, asking questions about who they were, what they could do, etc. Again, because of its complete focus on crew backstories, we really did not get that in this book. I'm hoping book 6 will be a return to your regularly scheduled adventures because there is obviously a much wider, stranger universe out there that we still have left to explore.

Recommend? Expect the tone to be different from previous books in the series, but at the very least, it fills in some gaps and questions about the crew of the Rocinante.

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