Babylon's Ashes - James S.A. Corey (Review)

Babylon's Ashes

Contains minor spoilers for The Expanse series

By - Karl Vu 

Babylon's Ashes is book 6 in The Expanse series. Unlike the other entries in this series, this book takes place right after events of the previous book, Nemesis Games. After the crew of the Rocinante regroup, they head back to Luna (the moon) to receive repairs. The Free Navy has taken control of the Sol ring gate and the slow zone, a weird dimension beyond it that connects all the ring gates. The leader of the Free Navy, Marco Inaros has attached destructive guns to Medina Station and the alien space station in the slow zone. Chrisjen Avasarala, secretary general of the United Nations is trying to handle damage control on Earth after multiple asteroids hit it, war with the Free Navy, and figuring out what happened to the Martian government. WHILE ALL OF THIS IS HAPPENING, Michio Pa, a Free Navy captain, defects from the Free Navy, bringing much needed relief supplies to Earth. After all this, the remnants of the Earther and Martian fleets, plus the Rocinante and a large ice hauler come together for a major attack on the Free Navy to take back Medina Station.

If the summary above was a bit confusing, it's because in my opinion, this book has two major problems. Number 1: there are way too many point of views in this book. Past entries in the series had maybe 4 or 5 characters that the book alternated between, plus 2 more if you want to count the characters used at the prologue and epilogue of the book. Seems like the perfect number right? Well, Babylon's Ashes has a total of 17 characters it uses for viewpoints. The problem is that some of these characters get only 1-3 chapters in a 50+ chapter book! Each time a new character is introduced, I have to store information in my mind of who this character is, where they are, their relationship to the main characters, their relationship to the side characters, what their motives are, and if they're a good guy or a bad guy. I only had to do that 4 or 5 times for previous books, but 17 for this one! In previous books, all the major characters would get introduced one after the other, and get rotated around throughout the story. In Babylon's Ashes, every time you think you have a rhythm going, the book decides to throw a new character at you, and then never give them another chapter! One of the characters, Praxidike Meng doesn't even really contribute anything to the main story, but gets 3 whole chapters to himself. I think the whole point of his chapters was to show how oppressive the Free Navy was, but we've already seen that numerous times throughout Nemesis Games and chapters before Praxidike is even introduced to the story! And after that, the book doesn't even mention him again. For the rest of the story. I don't know which characters' information I'm supposed to keep, and which information I shouldn't waste space on.

Problem number 2: there's not much action and the plot is just boring. With all the new character's being introduced, everyone must be doing something cool right? Even with the whole war thing going on, the book is boring. There is one semi-memorable action sequence in this whole 50+ chapter book. It's the final fight, which should definitely be the most exciting moment in the book. Everything has led up to this. But it kind of sucks. Previous books may have had the same amount of action, but at least those rare moments were actually exciting. They also more than made up for the sparse action with plots that were actually engaging.

There are a few other extremely disappointing moments throughout the book, which I don't want to reveal since they're major spoilers. The Expanse TV show however, remedies one of these moments, and is extremely good. I highly recommend watching every episode of that over reading this book. It's disappointing to see this book getting nominated for and receiving awards, but maybe all the Sci-Fi books released in 2017 weren't very good. I give this book a 5/10.