Cibola Burn - James S.A. Corey
Contains minor spoilers for The Expanse series
By - Karl Vu
Cibola Burn is book 4 in The Expanse series. After the events of book 3, where a thousand "ring gates" open, each to a solar system in the galaxy, the crew of the Rocinante (the main characters throughout the series) are sent through a ring gate to the planet New Terra/Ilus to act as a mediator between 2 factions on the planet. The first faction is the colonists, which illegally ran straight through a military blockade on the Sol system's ring to get there, and the second is RCE, a company who had permission to study the planet and would have been the first to land on it if the colonists hadn't burned through the blockade. The colonists who went to New Terra/Ilus are all poor, and think that RCE will prevent them from shipping valuable minerals they found on the planet back to Earth to make money. A militant group within the colonists shoots down an RCE shuttle that had a bunch of scientists and equipment on it to try to discourage RCE from continuing. As the crew of the Rocinante try to calm down the rising tensions between the colonists and RCE, the massive alien structures dotting the planet start waking up...
It was interesting to see The Expanse leave our home Sol system for a bit to go to an alien world. Of course, exploring a new world requires scientific study of the native flora and fauna. The major flaw I found with Cibola Burn is that one of the main characters, a scientist working for RCE, uses way too many weird, complicated, and long science words that I don't understand. I think that The Expanse is trying to be a bit more plausible and realistic than other sci-fi space novels by not throwing random made-up space words at my face, and instead using a bit of science and physics to solve and make problems. The problem is that this is the only novel so far in the series that uses this much science, and I have to skip past a paragraph of complicated words just to understand what's going on. It didn't hinder the plot too much, but having to read around these words did tarnish the reading experience a bit.
Other than all that, Cibola Burn only had a few minor problems that just come with the multiple-perspective format it's written in. I think it handled the alien part of the book pretty well, making the monolithic alien structures very weird and mysterious, but not so much that I couldn't believe that an alien species had built them. At the same time as the conflict happening on the surface of New Terra/Ilus, there was a conflict happening in orbit around the planet between all 3 faction's ships, which gave some pretty cool zero-gravity space action. Overall, I would rate this book an 8/10 mainly because the science problem kept it from being a 9/10.
Nice review. The book series sounds really interesting and makes me curious on how the crew got to where they are now in the fourth book. I agree that complicated science terms probably made the read-through more complicated, even though the author was just trying to keep it realistic.
ReplyDeleteThe expanse has been on my reading list for a while now, and while this is the 4th book in the series, the summary you give actually shows at least some of the core concepts of the series fairly well. I agree that too much science makes anything harder to read. A novel should read like a novel, not a scientific journal article. I would've liked it if you could've said more about why the book is good though.
ReplyDeleteI had no idea this series existed, I have never even heard of it, but as a fan of sci fi movies, I think I'll enjoy it. I think you did a great job explaining the plot and bringing this to my attention. Definitely an interesting book.
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