Skip to main content

Abaddon's Gate - James S.A. Corey (Review)

 Abaddon's Gate - James S.A. Corey

Contains spoilers for The Expanse books 1 and 2

By - Karl Vu

DOWNLOAD | READ Cibola Burn (2014) by James S.A. Corey in ...

Abaddon's Gate is book 3 in James S.A. Corey's The Expanse series. The Expanse is a sci-fi space opera takes place in the future where humanity has colonized almost every single planet and some asteroids and dwarf planets in the solar system.

To explain Abaddon's Gate, I need to give a short summary of what happened in books 1 and 2. In book 1, Leviathan Wakes, our main character Jim Holden and his crew help a rogue detective throw the once populated asteroid Eros, now infected with an alien molecule, into Venus. In book 2, Caliban's War, Holden and his crew, a Martian soldier, and scientist find a group of people on the moon Ganymede using the alien molecule to infect children and change them into super soldiers. Holden and the martian soldier break a bunch of the kids out and nuke Ganymede into oblivion.

In Abaddon's Gate, we find out that the alien molecule that was launched into Venus was building something while book 2 was happening. A big ring gets launched out of Venus at high speeds and stops near the orbit of Uranus. All 3 major factions in the solar system, the United Nations, the Martian Congressional Republic, and the Outer Planets Alliance, send an expeditionary fleet to the Ring. Holden also decides to go there. Melba Koh, formerly Clarissa Mao, hitches a ride on one of the UN fleet's ships. Her personal goal is to humiliate and kill Holden for imprisoning her father, Jules Mao, who was discovered to be one of the people behind infecting Eros with the alien molecule. Melba remotely detonates bombs on one of the UN fleet's escorts, destroying it, hacks into Holden's ship, the Rocinante, and broadcasts a message basically saying that Holden did it and anyone who gets close to the Ring will be fired upon. Trying to stop the message, Holden escapes into the Ring. The other fleets outside of the Ring decide to follow him in and arrest him. Inside the Ring is a large spherical glowing "station" with other rings like the one Holden came through orbiting it. The station decides that the big collection of high energy things that just came through are threats and pulls all the ships into orbit around it. The ships cannot escape from the orbit no matter how hard they try, so everyone is trapped and has to figure out how to get out. 

I give Abaddon's Gate an 8/10. It can be pretty slow in the beginning while introducing new characters and the setting, but the climax of the story is amazing and the action scenes are pretty epic. One thing that's a bit annoying in this book is that each chapter is dedicated to a different character. Sometimes the book will leave 1 character's chapter on a cliffhanger and switch to a character who's doing something less exciting. This doesn't happen too often and the story is still great, so I recommend this to anyone who likes sci-fi.

Comments

  1. Evan W.September 18, 2020 at 5:32 PM

    There aren't many multi-perspective books that I've found, which is a shame. They let you know everyone's worldviews by putting you in the mind of each character. This story sounds intriguing!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Introduction to the SCP Wiki (Karl)

    The SCP Wiki is an expansive public creative writing project housed on  scpwiki.com . The SCP Foundation (the Foundation) is a secretive fictional organization inside the SCP universe which contains thousands of people, objects, and places that have anomalous properties. These range from a cardboard box which origami dragons fly out of to a deer god that can turn any matter into a hexagonal column. The anomalies that the Foundation contains, how they are contained, and the stories linked to them are detailed in Special Containment Procedures, which take up the majority of the content on the wiki. Currently, there are six "series" of these procedures, each with a thousand articles.     If you go into a random article on the wiki, you will probably be overwhelmed by acronyms, numbers, and unfamiliar names. There are a few articles that detail what some of these things mean. Useful links are always provided in articles whenever they're mentioned. Object classes...
3 comments
Read more

Why Do Writers Use Pen Names?

By Andrea Li Pen names, also known as a pseudonym, literary double, or nom de plume, are made-up names adopted by an author that they use on their works in place of their real name.  A simple Google search reveals that a surprising amount of well-known authors use pen names, including J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Lewis Carroll, and Dr. Seuss. Daisy Meadows, from the childhood-favorite and never-ending Rainbow Magic series, is disappointingly a collective pen name for the four different authors that wrote the books (it was too perfect to be true). Then for the opposite effect, you hear the name Rainbow Rowell and are inversely betrayed to hear that Rainbow Rowell, is in fact her real name. The next time you are wondering why famous people all have cool names, the answer is that they might not!  Pen names may seem like a surface level change and simply for aesthetic purposes, but pen names have existed for centuries and have historical significance. In earlier times, when women w...
9 comments
Read more

The Aid of Illustrations to Writing

By Rose Benjamin Illustrations in books, especially novels, can either be useful visual aid or unnecessary. Sometimes, the charm of the story is how the reader can envision the characters and setting themselves. When a character's physical appearance has little do with the story or the mood of the book, vague verbal descriptions (or none at all) are enough. Other times, however, visuals can help set the mood of the story and give characters personality. When the text already provides extensive description or properties of the environment are written to be vague, illustrations break the intent of the text, providing detail that should have been imagined by the reader. Unnecessarily showing how characters look can also ruin the reader's unique experience and make it more similar to everyone else's. People may have in their heads a certain design for a character, and be set on it. An illustration of said character would ruin their perception of the character, especially if the...
4 comments
Read more