Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (The Expanse #1)

A few years ago, I watched the TV series, The Expanse. I honestly don’t remember how many years ago it was, but it feels like a while, and certainly longer ago (somehow) than when the show finished airing in January 2022, which means I must have been watching it as it ended, likely swept up by the marketing push for the final season.

I only really watch television when I’m doing cardio (I find exercise depressing, boring and fundamentally humiliating, so need to have adequate distraction in order to do it (I need to exercise because I am not young)) and since beginning this habit in the Autumn of 2018, I’ve watched through long-running, serious(ish) shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Better Call Saul¹, The Affair and The White Lotus. I’ve also watched my fair share of trashier, entertaining stuff, most notably (because there was so much of it) The Expanse and HBO’s sexy vampire spectacular, True Blood.² (I’ve also recently watched Rivals, which is absolutely worth a go.)

I write the above purely as an excuse to mention True Blood, which is more relevant than anything else above, because, well… since finding a boxset of 10 of Charlaine Harris’ 15 Sookie Stackhouse books in a “pay what you want” honesty box charity³ bookstore in a bus shelter in the Lake District two years ago, I have read through all 15 low-ply paperback books that form the source material of that show. And I fear I may be about to do something similar again…

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Leviathan Wakes is what the first season (and about half of the second) season of The Expanse TV show is based on. Which means that, yes, almost every single plot twist, character, setting and storyline included in this plot-focused 600-page novel was something I recognised from the fog of the early post-pandemic world. But… did this limit my enjoyment? No. No, it did not. Because Leviathan Wakes is wall-to-wall fast paced excitement, and absolutely nothing else…

…it’s far from complex, but evocative, exciting, somehow addictive…

Leviathan Wakes may not contain much that is distinctly complicated or original or unexpected, and its prose may not be particularly electric or evocative or even, really, memorable, but what it does do is enumerate almost all of the potential genre markers of the trad “space opera” and not just tick them off, but do so in such a way that they feel engaging, exciting and less predictable than (in hindsight, afterwards) it all feels when you actually stop and think about it. Here’s a list:

• advanced alien technology!
• interplanetary war!
• heroes!
• villains!
• treachery!
• sleazy port towns in space!
• space battles!
• spooky things!
• fictional factional politics!
• freedom fighters!
• corruption!
• looking at the stars!
• romance!
• justice!
• hope!
• fear!

Yes, there’s nothing in here that comes as a surprise. But it’s written with such an intensity and relentlessness of forward motion that it becomes a near-addictive read…

Each chapter is relatively short and they all end on a slight cliffhanger and then switch to the perspective of a different character. Though sometimes the two protagonists are in the same location and on the same adventure and so the perspective shift only really affects the focus of the internal monologue the reader witnesses, yet elsewhere this repeatedly baits the reader into a compulsion to read not only one, but two more chapters in search of a momentary resolution…

It’s tiring, yes. But it’s also fun and frothy and descriptive and playful enough for it to never feel like the blunt, cynical, literary conceit that this kind of readerly manipulation is, at least not while reading and hungry to see what happens next to our space adventurers…

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One of the two main voices is a [space] detective seeking a missing [space] person, while the other is the captain of a small [space] ship and small [space] crew who seems to keep being in the wrong [space] place at the wrong [space] time as the established interplanetary peace collapses around them…

The missing [space] person is the (close third person) narrator of the Prologue and thus the reader knows this person has encountered something terrifying and strange and explicitly non-human from the start of the book, so there is no sense of the novel ever needing conclusions and explanations that rely on contemporary understandings of the “real” world.

Leviathan Wakes has a fantastical – or alien – setting. The unknown exists.

Which is freeing for a writer, I suppose, but does mean that the later plot is free to include “impossible” technologies and events without it feeling like an erosion of the created world: from the start, The Expanse is a place where technology-cum-magic exists.

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Yes, alas, this is probably exactly the kind of book that will end up getting written by AI prompt as we move into the too-digital and post-human internet. Because Leviathan Wakes is, yes, already a novel written by committee, as James S.A. Corey is the pseudonymous name for a two person authorial collective featuring George R.R. Martin’s personal assistant and some other guy.

It doesn’t explain within this book the method of their collaboration, though: were the two writers taking it in turns to write each chapter, or was everything written together? The chapters do (after the Prologue) bounce between those two tight third person perspectives, so if splitting the workload like this was the remit, it would speak quite negatively of the writer’s individual skills, as the narratorial voice is not distinctive in each one, so if all personalised flourishes had been dropped, would there be much point in that approach? I would presume – optimistically, then – that all chapters were written together, and that the voicelessness, the blander, pedestrian, prose, was a clear and shared choice to ensure that narrative and plot was paramount. Which is it, successfully so (on those terms)

This isn’t beautiful literature, and the characters are not rich and complex, though that doesn’t simultaneously mean they lack sufficient depth for believability.

Comparing it with the work of Charlaine Harris may seem fair at first glance due to The Expanse and the Sookie Stackhouse books being sources for long-running “premium-ish” drama, but I do think that, as much as I enjoyed Leviathan Wakes, I never felt like I was reading anything of any meaningful literary merit, in fact I’d go so far as to say that openly sanding down authorial individuality to a shared working name states, directly, that this is not a series of books to read for artfulness…

And I do genuinely believe that Harris’ prose and characterisation – while working fully within the genres of romance and fantasy – is devastatingly, almost unbelievably, flawless.

While one reads Harris and think “these might be some of the best books I’ve ever read, and I’ve read some great books”, at no point reading “James S.A. Corey” does one think “this team deserves a Nobel Prize”.

I say all this to clarify that I’m in no form of denial about the literary merits of this book, but – and this can happen simultaneously – I’d be remiss to not mention that I gleefully ploughed through it in a few days and, yes, acknowledge that I will be reading more of the series.

No, this isn’t anything special or excellent or important or powerful. But it’s brilliantly and excitingly plotted space bumpf, and if you want to hide from the world and be thrown around by an action-packed storybook, then this does do exactly that.

It’s fun. It’s frothy. It’s, yes, forgettable. But it’s a very good time while you’re there.

Yes.

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1. I’d already seen Breaking Bad by that point, though maybe one day I will rewatch that and The Leftovers (my personal favourite television before I discovered Nathan Fielder as a director) from a stationary bicycle or a moving treadmill… ↩︎
2. More recently I’ve been watching movies in truncated 45-60 minute bursts, as I had a great, discounted, Mubi membership for three months. That’s now over, but I’ve just got a great deal on an Apple TV membership, so I’ll be cardio-ing through Slow Horses, Bad Sisters, Silo and whatever that Colin Farrell detective series was called over the next few months (or until the great deal runs out)… ↩︎
3. It was raising funds for the restoration or maintenance (or whatever) of the village church, so arguably (I’d argue it) not a real charity. Thankfully, that set up meant I didn’t have to wrestle with the disgust of Gift Aid, which is/was an absolutely fucking cretinous UK government policy whereby the government would match a certain percentage of any donation of any declared charity gift, essentially meaning tax revenues were/are being used to fund supremely elite schools, buildings and institutions, as it has (historically, at least) been very easy to get charity status for your pet project if you’re very rich. GiftAid is theft from the poor to anything the rich choose to frivolously fund and I continue to be confused and shocked that no one other than me seems to find this outrageous and unacceptable. Yes, this is absolutely the place for these comments. ↩︎