James S.A. Corey is the pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Both authors have science fiction and fantasy books to their credit, though nothing they've written individually approaches the Expanse series in terms of popularity.
Leviathan Wakes is the first book in The Expanse series. I also bought the second book, Caliban's War, which will be reviewed here eventually. The Expanse was adapted into a TV series by the Syfy Network and later Amazon. I haven't seen the show, so I can't comment on how it compares to Leviathan Wakes.
The novel's plot is straightforward space opera, with just enough "science" thrown in to make the thing seem plausible. In the relatively near future mankind has colonized a zone which extends from roughly Earth's moon to the asteroid belt on "the other side" of Jupiter, with different geographical factions developing alongside successive waves of colonization. There's the home planet, Earth, a Martian federation and a newer, less regulated area known as The Belt. Near the beginning of Leviathan Wakes a brisk trade relationship exists between Earth, Mars and The Belt, though political tensions cause this relationship to deteriorate over the course of the story.
Against this backdrop we meet a crew of ice haulers and sometime scavengers operating in The Belt. This crew is led by Holden, a man of rigid principals who happens to be hopelessly in love with a member of his crew. Holden's ship comes into contact with an abandoned spacecraft, and the circumstances surrounding this abandoned spacecraft reveal a web of conspiracy threatening to engulf the entire solar system.
Within this novel there's also a dialogue concerning people's right to be informed. On one side of this argument is Holden, who believes that everyone should know everything, and that withholding information is wrong. On the other side of this argument is Miller, a seasoned detective who's more worried about the harm unrestricted access to certain facts can cause. This disagreement between Miller and Holden is the book's real strength, and it adds a lot of weight to what would have otherwise been an enjoyable if forgettable side quest into space travel, space politics and shape-shifting space monsters.
Leviathan Wakes reminded me a bit of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shards of Earth, which was also reviewed here recently, but where Tchaikovsky's book revels in zoological details, Corey's book is more a character study, populated by more memorable personalities and situations. I appreciated the horror aspects of Tchaikovsky's novel, but I think Leviathan Wakes is the kind of book guaranteed to have a wider appeal.
I'll be reading Caliban's War in a few weeks and I'm really looking forward to it. James S.A. Corey (both of them) are good writers, and I'm curious as to how they develop the ideas set forth in Leviathan's Wake.
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