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May. 23rd, 2012 09:51 amFinished James S.A. Corey's Leviathan Wakes yesterday. I hadn't figured on getting so far so fast. Monday night was supposed to be spent relaxing and watching the Ranger-Devil game, but there was a blackout, so I curled up with a good ebook. And then I discovered that Leviathan Wakes is a fucking addictive page-turner and soon I was 500 pages in and it was 12:45.
As I mentioned in my last post, the book is as conventional as it gets. The author apparently willingly applies the term 'old-school' to it. I found a reviewer who tears into the book for its conventionality here, and... I can't disagree with any of this. Embassytown was much more enjoyable, much richer, just an overall superior work of space opera, because it builds on 20 years of expanding the space opera tradition by Moore and Eick, Lois Bujold, Elizabeth Moon, Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, and numerous others. Leviathan Wakes reminded me of mediocre '80s fare like Ben Bova or Joe Haldeman, stuff that hovered between wanting to be full-blown space opera and wanting the street-cred of hard SF. It's regressive on gender politics, regressive on style (yet again, the SF noir detective makes his rote appearance), regressive on its ideas about heroism.
There's something attractive about that. With the cancellation of Caprica and SGU, we've had to endure the first year without a single space SF show on television since... since I don't know, at least the '70s. Leviathan Wakes is a callback to a time when it was okay to make mediocre space SF anchored by bad writing, wooden acting, and terrible special effects. And I miss shows like Andromeda, even though I know they were awful! I got invested in them for the way they blended camp and scientific aspiration. But at the same time that there's something attractive about nostalgia for the SF of the past, we have to recognize that there's a reason we put this stuff behind us. We can do better.
So there's, for example, a point fairly early in Leviathan Wakes where you realize that the main character's girlfriend has died, there's only one female character left in the book, and so the book is going to start pushing toward the main character getting together with the one female character. It is a tiresome and predictable storyline the book could have done without. It is rare in SF that we get female engineers as awesome as Naomi Nagata, and it is not necessary for them to boff the main character for them to be awesome.
That notwithstanding, the book is an addictive pageturner. The story is well-paced, full of great action and convincing science fiction. The characters are really full-bodied and deep, their reactions are convincing, and as I mentioned, Naomi is one of the best engineer characters I've read lately in anything.
The politics is... okay, now I have another rant. The SFF Chronicles review also touches on this briefly, but I don't quite line up with his conclusion. The novel's political plot revolves around an act of corporate sociopathy so immense as to be bewildering. It's hard to process just how evil this act is, it's just so vast and coordinated. Corey, recognizing this, attempts an Sfnal explanation: The corporation took all of its scientists and brainwashed them into sociopaths in order to allow them to complete their work. This is fascinating, and deserves a novel of its own to explore. Sadly, Leviathan Wakes is not that novel. Sadly, Leviathan Wakes is scared of that novel, so convinced it is in the value of heroism in the battle between good and evil.
What is it like to be a scientist brainwashed into completing a project an order of magnitude worse than the Manhattan Project? Do you volunteer for that brainwashing or are you conscripted? Is there ever a point where you realize what you've done? What kind of interpersonal relationships do the scientists on Thoth Station have? If you're the army charged with stopping Thoth Station, how do you handle processing and imprisoning an army of genius sociopaths?
That is the SF novel I wanted to read. Leviathan Wakes is just a good action-adventure in SF clothing.
As I mentioned in my last post, the book is as conventional as it gets. The author apparently willingly applies the term 'old-school' to it. I found a reviewer who tears into the book for its conventionality here, and... I can't disagree with any of this. Embassytown was much more enjoyable, much richer, just an overall superior work of space opera, because it builds on 20 years of expanding the space opera tradition by Moore and Eick, Lois Bujold, Elizabeth Moon, Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, and numerous others. Leviathan Wakes reminded me of mediocre '80s fare like Ben Bova or Joe Haldeman, stuff that hovered between wanting to be full-blown space opera and wanting the street-cred of hard SF. It's regressive on gender politics, regressive on style (yet again, the SF noir detective makes his rote appearance), regressive on its ideas about heroism.
There's something attractive about that. With the cancellation of Caprica and SGU, we've had to endure the first year without a single space SF show on television since... since I don't know, at least the '70s. Leviathan Wakes is a callback to a time when it was okay to make mediocre space SF anchored by bad writing, wooden acting, and terrible special effects. And I miss shows like Andromeda, even though I know they were awful! I got invested in them for the way they blended camp and scientific aspiration. But at the same time that there's something attractive about nostalgia for the SF of the past, we have to recognize that there's a reason we put this stuff behind us. We can do better.
So there's, for example, a point fairly early in Leviathan Wakes where you realize that the main character's girlfriend has died, there's only one female character left in the book, and so the book is going to start pushing toward the main character getting together with the one female character. It is a tiresome and predictable storyline the book could have done without. It is rare in SF that we get female engineers as awesome as Naomi Nagata, and it is not necessary for them to boff the main character for them to be awesome.
That notwithstanding, the book is an addictive pageturner. The story is well-paced, full of great action and convincing science fiction. The characters are really full-bodied and deep, their reactions are convincing, and as I mentioned, Naomi is one of the best engineer characters I've read lately in anything.
The politics is... okay, now I have another rant. The SFF Chronicles review also touches on this briefly, but I don't quite line up with his conclusion. The novel's political plot revolves around an act of corporate sociopathy so immense as to be bewildering. It's hard to process just how evil this act is, it's just so vast and coordinated. Corey, recognizing this, attempts an Sfnal explanation: The corporation took all of its scientists and brainwashed them into sociopaths in order to allow them to complete their work. This is fascinating, and deserves a novel of its own to explore. Sadly, Leviathan Wakes is not that novel. Sadly, Leviathan Wakes is scared of that novel, so convinced it is in the value of heroism in the battle between good and evil.
What is it like to be a scientist brainwashed into completing a project an order of magnitude worse than the Manhattan Project? Do you volunteer for that brainwashing or are you conscripted? Is there ever a point where you realize what you've done? What kind of interpersonal relationships do the scientists on Thoth Station have? If you're the army charged with stopping Thoth Station, how do you handle processing and imprisoning an army of genius sociopaths?
That is the SF novel I wanted to read. Leviathan Wakes is just a good action-adventure in SF clothing.