Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

This book was featured in some sort of online Sci-Fi forum that I was reading for ideas about what books to read if I enjoyed certain other books. I really loved "Project Hail Mary" and when I was reading it I had no idea it was being turned into a movie.

Someone in the forum suggested that people who liked Andy Weir (the author of "Hail Mary" and "The Martian") would also enjoy Leviathan Wakes so I took the internet's word for it and got this book.

I have to admit that I kind of struggled to make it all the way through this one and by the time I got to the end of it I was kind of glad that it was over with. This book was adapted into a SyFY series but I never saw it or even heard of it, which is probably common for all SyFy shows.

This is quite a long book that focuses on two apparently far distant people named Miller who is a cop on some massive space station and Holden who is a captain of a mining ship who encounters some military like activities that take place mysteriously while he and his crew are out simply gathering ice or something like that.

The idea is that there is a tense semi-alliance and power struggle that is taking place between Earth, the Mars colony, and a large group of people who work in the asteroid belt that are referred to as "Belters."

All of these people are human, but because of the environments they were raised in (mostly gravity) they have different physical features most notably their weight and height.

The stories of Miller and Holden seem as though they are not connected and for the first around half of the book I think most people are going to find Miller's story a bit drab because he is always on a space station, while Holden's side of things are more interesting because he is running around in space and being involved in explosions and precursors to war along with that time-period's "battleships."

It becomes pretty clear after a while since Holden and Miller take up alternating chapters, that they are eventually going to meet and meet they do. That was one part of the book where things started to be more interesting, but for the most part I would say that the overall book, while interesting overall, is going to be a grind for the average reader, especially those who are not huge sci-fi fans. In this regard "Project Hail Mary" is a superior read because it appeals to everyone apparently, including my younger sister who recommended it to me and as long as I have known her she has never been interested in Sci-Fi.

So if you are just a casual fan of sci-fi, read something by Andy Weir, and ignore Leviathan Wakes

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While there have been multiple releases of this book the number of pages is around 550 across all of them. Since I was reading it on a Kindle this doesn't really apply to me but I did feel while I was reading it that it did seem excessively long. I would imagine that two authors feel differently but what do I know? I'm not an author.

Something that is kind of a sign for me about not truly enjoying a book is if I start to scan paragraphs instead of reading them. I start to understand how an author writes and realized pretty early on that the authors (there are 2 of them despite the pen name) put important parts of a paragraph for the most part, i the first and last sentence of each paragraph, the rest, in between, is normally grandiose descriptions of things that are I think, mostly unnecessary for the sake of making the book longer. After a while I was only reading the first and last sentences of every paragraph until something became really interesting.

The book was good enough to justify the making of a series and I don't know if it was popular or not. The book managed to win some sci-fi awards and I guess I am just not smart enough to understand why because even though I did finish the book, I wouldn't say that I truly enjoyed it.

For sci-fi nerds that are nerdier than I am, this might be an amazing read. If you want a test there are 3 short stories that lead to this becoming a full-on novel and they are entitled "Drive", "The Churn", and "The Butcher of Anderson Station." These are all under 100 pages and are a good test. If you enjoy those short stories there is a chance you will also enjoy "Leviathan Wakes" because they are precursor stories and are referenced in some way, inside of the main novel.

If you do end up really enjoying Leviathan Wakes you are in for a treat because this is the first in a very long sequence of books that totals 9, 550-page books. I have very little intention of reading beyond the first one because it just didn't really dazzle me the way that I would like a book to do.

I have already moved on to some light reading from Tom Clancy and I am quickly finding out that this guy includes a ton of information that while I am sure it took a ton of research, really moves slowly in the presentation. I'll talk more about that as I decide whether to bail on the book in the next few days.

tl;dr

Leviathan Wakes isn't going to appeal to the masses but for people who enjoy science fiction that kind of happens in a more plausible way deriving from technology that we almost kind of already have with a few tweaks, then this might be for you. For the most part though I think that most people will end up bored with this one as it seems to be intentionally long so as to drag it out across 9 novels, which is exactly what they ended up doing.