Skip to main content

Cibola Burn - James S.A. Corey (Review)

 
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.



Comments

  1. GT ChenOctober 12, 2020 at 4:20 PM

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ben DeMarcoOctober 14, 2020 at 2:06 PM

    The 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.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jaewoon JungOctober 16, 2020 at 5:46 PM

    I 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.

    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