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lprongs's review against another edition
Loved The Expanse, didn't love this - for a few reasons.
1) this felt much more like the classic "white man's scifi." Just wasn't as interesting and felt like it had a much narrower, mansplainy audience (not that the authors are neckbeards, but that the people who seem to like it are the "well, actually" type).
2) way too dark for my taste. Just so much senseless violence, death, and gore for no other reason than to establish a colonizer. I see way too much of that in real life to enjoy a fictionalized version, and I'm honestly tired of colonizers (or colonizer sympathizers) writing colonial violence as entertainment, even if villainized. It's just trauma porn and contributes to desensitization of seeing it happen to real life people. Reading this book made my mental health plummet (sad result after the jubilation of discovering a new SA Corey series).
3) almost all the characters were insufferable, and they were all extremely privileged. Literally everyone else was murdered. Almost feels like a self-victimizing colonial fantasy.
Maybe the story gets better - it seems like the payoff is still at least a hundred pages away - but the mental health dip and trauma of explicit (fictionalized) colonial violence is stopping me from getting there. Maybe I'll pick it back up later, maybe I won't, but right now I'm gonna read something way less white and depressing.
1) this felt much more like the classic "white man's scifi." Just wasn't as interesting and felt like it had a much narrower, mansplainy audience (not that the authors are neckbeards, but that the people who seem to like it are the "well, actually" type).
2) way too dark for my taste. Just so much senseless violence, death, and gore for no other reason than to establish a colonizer. I see way too much of that in real life to enjoy a fictionalized version, and I'm honestly tired of colonizers (or colonizer sympathizers) writing colonial violence as entertainment, even if villainized. It's just trauma porn and contributes to desensitization of seeing it happen to real life people. Reading this book made my mental health plummet (sad result after the jubilation of discovering a new SA Corey series).
3) almost all the characters were insufferable, and they were all extremely privileged. Literally everyone else was murdered. Almost feels like a self-victimizing colonial fantasy.
Maybe the story gets better - it seems like the payoff is still at least a hundred pages away - but the mental health dip and trauma of explicit (fictionalized) colonial violence is stopping me from getting there. Maybe I'll pick it back up later, maybe I won't, but right now I'm gonna read something way less white and depressing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Death, Genocide, Gore, Violence, Murder, Colonisation, and War
Moderate: Body horror, Blood, Excrement, and Classism