Babylon's Ashes
The sixth book in The Expanse series concludes the war that was begun in Nemesis Games. As Holden and crew rally everyone in the solar system to stand against Marco Inaros, he faces mounting pressures from his own people.
Inaros is an interesting villain in that he's doomed to failure from the beginning. It's inevitable. His vision is too great and too short-sighted. He's temperamental and incapable of taking responsibility for his failures. Everything is part of the plan, which served him well until he gained too much power to wield it effectively.
So the concerns in this story aren't so much about defeating him. That's a given. It's more about repairing and minimizing the damage he's causing. It's about how people come together to help each other, about making peace with the unknown, and forging ahead anyway.
This was an incredibly timely book, being concerned as it is with the tug between free will and destiny. Are the big things inevitable or can they be changed by small actions? How many small actions do you need to alter the course of history? And can you ever know that that's what you did? And all of this against a background of surviving a horrifyingly selfish and small-minded person with entirely too much power.
I continue to love this series. It has a lot of smart things to say about humanity. This book in particular looks at our ever-changing, ever-cyclic history. Nothing is forever, but everything comes around again. And all you really have to know is what you're doing next. That's all you really can know.
The next book picks up after a thirty year gap, and I just want to make note of something. I don't know whether it was intentional or not. When the series began, all the major heads of government were men. Over the next fifteen years or so of in-universe time, there are two massive wars. By the end of this book, the three major heads of state are all women, and we're about to head into a stable, thirty-year period of peace. At least I'm assuming that nothing interesting will happen in the next thirty years, hence the time jump. This isn't the first series to correlate these two things, and I can't say for sure whether it was intentional or not on the author's part. But it's a fun little detail that makes me feel just that little bit warmer towards a series I already love.
Inaros is an interesting villain in that he's doomed to failure from the beginning. It's inevitable. His vision is too great and too short-sighted. He's temperamental and incapable of taking responsibility for his failures. Everything is part of the plan, which served him well until he gained too much power to wield it effectively.
So the concerns in this story aren't so much about defeating him. That's a given. It's more about repairing and minimizing the damage he's causing. It's about how people come together to help each other, about making peace with the unknown, and forging ahead anyway.
This was an incredibly timely book, being concerned as it is with the tug between free will and destiny. Are the big things inevitable or can they be changed by small actions? How many small actions do you need to alter the course of history? And can you ever know that that's what you did? And all of this against a background of surviving a horrifyingly selfish and small-minded person with entirely too much power.
I continue to love this series. It has a lot of smart things to say about humanity. This book in particular looks at our ever-changing, ever-cyclic history. Nothing is forever, but everything comes around again. And all you really have to know is what you're doing next. That's all you really can know.
The next book picks up after a thirty year gap, and I just want to make note of something. I don't know whether it was intentional or not. When the series began, all the major heads of government were men. Over the next fifteen years or so of in-universe time, there are two massive wars. By the end of this book, the three major heads of state are all women, and we're about to head into a stable, thirty-year period of peace. At least I'm assuming that nothing interesting will happen in the next thirty years, hence the time jump. This isn't the first series to correlate these two things, and I can't say for sure whether it was intentional or not on the author's part. But it's a fun little detail that makes me feel just that little bit warmer towards a series I already love.
Comments
Post a Comment