[Review] Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Friday, March 27, 2015 K.Z. Freeman 0 Comments

Dear god what is this. The title is so misleading that I want to slap the person who came up with it. If it was one of the pen-named authors (very most likely), well then, sir, you have mislead me tremendously!

The sheer grandeur of the title is not matched AT ALL with what goes on in this book. 

But let me tell you what this book is trying to do, at least from my skewed perspective. It is trying to be Game of Thrones typeish romp in space, and that's why, for me, it ended up being so boring. Perhaps that was not the intent, but it sure felt like it, at times it even felt like one of the authors outright copied RR's style of writing.

It may just be me, actually, fuck it, I know it's not just me, but when I read a sci-fi novel, I want mystery, grand ideas and crazy stuff happening. You can virtually do anything! And by crazy I mean STUFF THAT CAN'T HAPPEN ON EARTH. And that does not simply mean spaceships and some other bullshit.

So here we have a space-fairing race which we have become and people can live on asteroid belts and Mars, and yet almost everyone has developed this insane xenofobia? Bullshit. Why? Because the book needs conflict as it doesn't have anything else really.

When they found the derelict in the beginning of the book the scene was awesome, the foreboding was great, but what ended up happening was the most boring thing that could have possibly happened. It was like the two authors couldn't come up with something awesome...

On the other had, the book is trying to be GoT is space (to a degree), so the scene makes sense in that regard. However me understanding this on an intrinsic level gives no added value to the book.

The writing is good, it really is. It gets the job done and paints great images, but the characters are plain and uninteresting, while the dialogue mostly feels like two pilots in Top Gun shooting ZING ZING comments all the time. Well, to be fair, that one is a mostly.

Then there is the god damn damsel in distress type story which you can tell has something more behind it, but ... eh... the main characters are just not interesting and neither was the setting, it simply boiled down to these two factors for me. And considering that these were the two things that were supposed to work for this book, they failed.

Holden is an idiot.


5/10