#reading

James S. A. Corey's The Expanse is perhaps my favorite space opera series. I don't think they quite stuck the landing, but it was hard to put down right up until the very end.

I read The Mercy of Gods, the first book in their new trilogy, when it came out in August of 2024, so when the second book, The Captive's War came out last week, I re-read that and continued on with the new one.

They're compulsively readable, and much like The Expanse, while there's a lot of plot going on, the characters are compelling. There's one death in the second book that was sad and shocking, despite the fact that they start the chapter where it happens with "The last day of so-and-so's life started with..." I spent the whole chapter knowing that it was going to happen, waiting for it to happen, and yet I was still startled when it actually happened. And they did a superlative job of setting up the reason for that death without (to me, at least) making it obvious that was what they were settng up.

I also find them interesting as books that are, at their core, really about politics---about how different people accommodate (or demand accommodation from) the world and others around them, who has patience in trying to achieve their ends versus who demands immediate change, and how you can best live in circumstances that are beyond your determination.

The capsule synopsis is: patient with terminal cancer is given an opportunity to take on a quest in the world of a fantasy series she enjoyed (but only half-remembers, because chemo brain); if she succeeds, she will be cured. Starts out treating everyone like NPCs and assuming she can fulfill the quest easily because she (sort of) knows what's going to happen, until a) she finds out that she's not the first that offer's been made to, and b) she starts skewing the plot from what she knew, removing her own advantage.

I enjoyed this just enough that I'm willing to take a chance on its sequel, which, it turns out, comes out in three weeks time. But I don't know that I'd really recommend it. There are some things about the presentation that are confusing, and there are some things about the protagonist that are very annoying. I think at this opint it's more about my need to know where the plot goes, because I really don't see how this plan is gonna land in one piece.

I fell out of the habit of reading over the last few years; chalk it up to a creeping inability to focus, what with the world being on fire and having lots of distractions that demanded less of me, but were also, in the end, less rewarding. Consequently, I started 2026 off with an intention to read more.

Still, I took something of a training wheels approach: the last book in Charles Stross' Laundry Files came out, so I started at the beginning and read them all (except for A Conventional Boy, which came out last year, and was a little bit out of main continuity, so I skipped it). I mean, this isn't even the first post I've written about reading a bunch of them, though the last was more than ten years ago. Like I said: training wheels.

I'm not inclined to go into too much detail about the experience. I will say that I think this is the first time around that the original primary character, Bob Howard really got on my nerves. In the early books, he's a bit of an asshole (which is presumably intentional: his alleged full name is "Bob Oliver Francis Howard", or "BOFH", look it up if you don't know the acronym). In the later books...he's just a bit too much of a man-child for me: too feckless to be as powerful as he is.

Conversely, I found myself feeling a lot more sympathy for Mhari Murphy, who starts out as an annoying "bad girlfriend", but ends up being very important to the back half of the series, and is imbued with a lot more substance in the process---perhaps a bit of a try-hard, but the only character with an internal monologue that seems to belong to a reasonably complete human being.

Just to be clear: I think this is all largely intentional. Stross is on record saying that Bob is an unreliable narrator, so one might assume that part of that unreliability might involve describing the actual character of someone he had a problematic relationship with. And Bob does grow over the course of the series, as you would hope for someone who starts out in their late 20s and is the high side of 40 by the story's end (assuming he's actually alive, which is something even the character is uncertain about).

I enjoyed it all, but I don't seem myself picking them back up for a good while.