Thursday 13 September 2012

CBR4 Book 76: "Leviathan Wakes" by James S.A. Corey

Page count: 504 pages
Rating: 3 stars
Date begun: August 2nd, 2012
Date finished: August 11th, 2012

Summary from Goodreads, because I'm feeling lazy, and I really need to get these reviews done:

Humanity has colonized the solar system - Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond - but the stars are still out of our reach. 

Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations in the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, The Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for - and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why. 

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to The Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that the girl might be the key to everything. 

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations - and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe. 

I don't read a whole lot of sci-fi, but I don't want to find myself stuck in a rut either, limiting myself to only one of two genres of literature. So I try new things occasionally. I read sci-fi a few months back, when Felicia Day's Vaginal Fantasy Hangout featured two books I hadn't read before. They were more to my taste than this, which turned out to be a bit to spacey for me. I didn't hate it, by all means, but the story didn't really grip me either, and I kept making myself go back to the book to get through it. I don't like it when reading becomes a chore.

There's some very cool world building in this book, and the characters are nicely multi-faceted, it's not quite clear who's right and wrong. The story is told mainly from Holden and Miller's alternating POVs, and for the first part of the story, they're in very different places. There were some very cool concepts in the book, and certain sections are rather horrible, but creatively speaking very well done. While this book just doesn't seem to have it done it for me, I can see why it's popular, and why it was selected as a monthly pick in the Sword and Laser book club.

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