Review: Persepolis Rising – James S.A. Corey

The Expanse keeps on expanding and with a TV series fueling more fans and interest, you can’t begrudgeTy Franck and Danial Abraham for keeping the nearish-future history of manking going. Still, this feels like a new stepping off point for the books and I was surprised that there wasn’t a chunky recap at the start for new readers.

The book is set several years after the last one. With the addition of ex-Martian marine Bobbie, the core crew of the Rocinante are still running contracts but Captain James Holden is looking at retirement. This jump forwards skips through the complex political change that the previous six novels had been building up to. The old reality of earth and Mars at loggerheads and the asteroid/space-station society of the Belters treated as a social underclass has gone. The dream of terraforming Mars is over, Earth has been recovering from disaster and above all else the access to other star systems and remote colonies has utterly changed humanity’s direction.

So multiple plot lines from Expanse 1-6 have been resolved. The ancient alien proto-molecule has led to a system of interstellar gateways controlled by the Belters and new economic realities. But the double-headed mind of James S.A. Corey has ensured that there are still two lingering plot lines:

• The civilisation that created the proto-molecule was wiped about by something…and nobody knows what.
• In the previous books, a faction of the Martian Navy stole a sample of the proto-molecule, a pile of warships and set up their own inaccesible colony in another star system.

No surprise then that this latest book brings both of these issues back. The formula is the same – multiple viewpoints including the crew of the Rocicante and two new characters. Just enough depth of character to make new figures interesting and enough action to give the characters something to do.

The Laconians (a name that plays on both Sparta & the systems previous radio silence) are suitable villains – militaristic and technologically advanced but still human and with plausible motives. Corey largely avoids cartoonishly bad people and once again provides a sympathetic point-of-view antagonist, giving insight into their motives without validating their views.

Explosions, space-battles, plots, schemes and plans that just-might-work. As always, this is well put together stuff that is entertaining and reliably well structured. There’s at least another couple of books worth of unresolved plot threads there to make you want more but a definite arc that doesn’t feel like a longer book cut off in the middle.