And now for something completely different. For those who would rather not delve to deeply into the oddities of “hard” science fiction, the novel Leviathan Wakes is like a written version of an action packed TV show. (Coincidentally, it has been made into an amazing TV series, airing every Wednesday night on SyFy.) Written by the two author team of Ty Frank, and Daniel Abraham, both close collaborators of Game of Throne’s George R.R. Martin, Leviathan Wakes is the first novel of the Expanse series.
Set in a future 200 years ahead, Leviathan Wakes is focused on human conflicts within our own solar system. Mars, once a small colony, has grown into a heavily militarized republic in an uneasy peace with the United Nations government of Earth. Smaller other colonies dot the asteroid belts and the moons of Jupiter, home to humans (“Belters”) who have become adapted to life without constant gravity. Relations between these three factions are filled with racism, colonialism, and xenophobia, which have driven the whole solar system to a boiling point.
Leviathan Wakes develops this detailed world through the eyes of two characters, Detective Miller, a police officer tasked with finding a missing girl, and James Holden, an officer on a rickety comet mining barge. When Holden’s mining barge comes across a wrecked ship blaring a distress beacon, a chain of events leads the whole solar system into war. The mystery of who set the beacon leads Holden, and Miller, on a collision course with a powerful hidden entity that has its own designs for humanities future.
Read this book. Seriously, read this book. After finishing Leviathan Wakes in the summer of 2014, I went through the three other books in this series in less than three weeks, and each book is almost six hundred pages long. They are that good.
SDSU Sci Fi 