…and so here I am, writing a review for a book that I haven’t even received in the mail yet, and I realize just how upside-down the world has turned. I mean, YES, I was uber-excited to get the story early, but there’s just something that I miss about being able to turn the actual pages of a real book. The feel of the paper in my fingers, the visual cue of the turning of the page, the smell of it. It all just seems a bit MORE when I get the physical book. When I can see it on my shelf, sitting there staring back at me. For some reason, ebooks just make a story seem somehow…easier than they should. Less substantive. So am I over-exaggerating at all when I tell you I’m even more excited to get my actual book in the mail later tonight, on the date of “publication”, than I was to get the eARC I actually read? Not in the slightest. In fact, I may just have to start reading this one again. When I get home from work tonight. Just…you know…don’t tell my boss or anything. Cause I really should be reading the next book in my queue. 🙂

PERSEPOLIS RISING is the much anticipated seventh book in The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), and I’d by lying if I said that the first thing I did when receiving this one wasn’t finding the chapter list and seeing who the POVs for the book were going to be. Could. Not. Wait.

Nearly thirty years have passed since the uprising led by Marcos Inaros was defeated. A lot has happened since then, but our friends from the Rocinante have settled in nicely. Medina station, still located within the slow zone, has transitioned into the central hub of the worlds connecting the dandelion sky of portals surrounding it. Settlers are continuing to push out into the 1300 worlds available to them, and Medina, home of the Transport Union (TU), now acts as the port authority for travel and trade between them all. And the crew of the Rocinante is on their payroll.

Life has settled into a semblance of normalcy. Holden and his crew get sent out early to enforce some punitive action upon one of the colonies, Freehold, because of their history of repeatedly ignoring the rules of the TU. Soon after the crew’s return, however, the ring gate to the lost colony of Laconia beings to blare a concerning announcement: Prepare to receive our emissaries and our new role amongst humanity. That’s when things start to go south for the good guys.

Despite how immensely fun this whole series has been, I’ve still been champing at the bit to finally see where all of this protomolecule stuff is going to go. AND wondering how long it was going to take to see the crazy-big alien guns come out. The authors have been building toward this massive ending ever since things started in LEVIATHAN WAKES. That’s nearly the best part about this series. The authors have known exactly where they’re writing to since before they ever started, and everything that has come before this point in the series has been building to this point. And it doesn’t disappoint.

Characterization in this book was on point. In fact, it’s likely the best they’ve done in the series. There were so many moments that had me holding my breath, or whispering “no…”, and seriously tearing up. For the most part, we get Drummer (yes, Fred Johnson’s Drummer), Bobbie (Love it), Holden (Can’t do without him), and a Laconian, Santiago Jilie Singh.

Drummer was the political viewpoint of the story, and easily my least favorite. Then again, I’m not a fan of politics. She did, however, hold a trump card for me, and that was that she’s our connection to Avasarala in the story. An older, crankier, even more profane Avasarala than we’ve yet seen. Singh spends his time on Medina, and even though he was “the bad guy” in this story, he was also very sympathetic. Two cheers for the authors for being able to pull that off. Bobbie and Holden each take their turns, but near the last third of the book, we also get POV time from the rest of the crew of the Rocinante. And man, those chapters don’t pull any punches. Seriously good stuff.

I also have to mention the pacing and tension. Franck and Abraham did their due diligence in these categories too. The “time bombs” (33 days until…108 hours until…) that the Laconians used to build fear in the hearts of their enemies translated perfectly into the story and my head. There was such an overpowering feeling of dread in the thoughts and actions of the heroes and leaders to which we are privy. Very well built, and very well revealed.

I’m having difficulty believing that I’m done reading it, and now I’ll have to wait another year for book 8. I mean, I’ll wait without complaint. Sure. Probably give the series a re-read at some point before then. The story in this series is just too dang good to leave alone for long. Maybe we’ll get another novella or something to hold us over. Then again, there’s always season three of the Syfy series to watch for, now that principal photography has been wrapped up.

If you haven’t read this series yet, you seriously need to start. Great writing. Brilliant character. Structured story. And A NOVEL EVERY YEAR. I mean, seriously. Who else will give you that? Not many, I’ll tell you. Not many. Grab it up, people, and never let go.

At the end of Babylon’s Ashes, as many narrative threads seemed to have come to a conclusion, I wondered where the authors would next take the story, and after reading the novella Strange Dogs I had an inkling that the focus might be shifted toward the colonies established in the worlds beyond the alien portals accessed through Medina station. In a way, I was both right and wrong: the colonies – or rather, the world of Laconia, which figured prominently on that novella – are there, but not in the way I imagined.

For starters, the action takes places some 30 years after the events of Babylon’s Ashes, showing how the balance of power and the political landscape have changed in the aftermath of Marco Inaros’ faction’s attack on Earth: the home planet of humanity has recovered from the massive upheavals caused by the asteroid impacts, but its influence has somewhat lessened and is now shared between the inner worlds and the Transport Union, the successor of the OPA, now a legitimate association that monitors traffic to and from the colonies beyond the portals, with Belters having finally reached equal status with the rest of the system. The social and political balance might not be perfect, but they are certainly better than they were in the past.

The crew of the Rocinante has gained two permanent members, ex marine Bobbie Draper and Clarissa “Peaches” Mao, once their adversary and now Amos’ engineering buddy. Through the years in which they worked for the Union the six have coalesced into an easy family, so that Holden and Naomi’s announcement that they are going to retire, and leave the ship to the others, is received with a mix of happiness for the couple and the well-deserved rest they’ve earned, and sadness at the loss of a piece of their group. It was something that troubled me, as well, because I wondered how removing these two from the equation would change the dynamics aboard the ship – and the narrative as well.

A worry quickly forgotten, though, since the Solar System finds itself faced with an unforeseen menace: in the decades since he carried a third of Mars’ naval forces (and a protomolecule sample) through the Laconia gate, former Admiral Duarte – now self-elected High Consul – has created a powerful empire that he means to extend to the rest of the explored worlds, starting with the Sol system through a surprise attack on Medina station, with a giant ship that’s a hybrid between Martian technology and applied protomolecule tech. What follows is a huge game change, a series of events that transform the face of the story as we knew it until now: if, in the tv series inspired by these books, the dividing line between the events of books 1 and 2 was titled “Paradigm Shift”, here we encounter another shift, one of massive proportions that will in all probability encompass the final two volumes of The Expanse.

Change is indeed the focus of the story here, and primarily the changes in the characters: the people of the Roci have grown comfortable with each other, and of course they have grown older, so that a good portion of their thoughts or good-natured exchanges focus on the small indignities of advancing age that seem to afflict both people and ship, as if they were one and the same. Seeing them affected by the passing of time was something of a surprise for me, because we tend to think about characters as somewhat physically immutable, but these people accept it with equanimity and with the awareness that they can overcome anything as long as they keep taking care of each other and of the Roci, because – as a bulkhead plaque reminds them – doing that will ensure that they will always come home. It was the slightly melancholic, bittersweet mood that accompanies these first glimpses of the Rocinante crew that made me realize how fond I’ve grown of them, how they have become real to me, not unlike flesh and blood people, and how much I care about what happens to them. And trust me, here a LOT happens to them…

However, the original crew does not enjoy the spotlight here, at least not all of the time, since the point of view shifts between them and some new characters, most notably Drummer and Singh. The former we already met as second-in-command to Fred Johnson at Tycho station, while here she’s the president of the Transport Union, a very influential woman facing some hard choices once the Laconian invasion starts. I quite liked Drummer, her no-nonsense approach to power that comes both from her origins as a Belter and her past as an OPA operative, and I felt for her when she had to compromise some of her hard-won principles for the greater good. For Drummer, the only bright light in this gloomy situation comes from the shrewd advice of a greatly beloved character who manages to steal the brief scenes where she appears, her keen intelligence and foul-mouthed expletives undimmed by age: the verbal confrontation between the two women, different in age, background and political views are nothing short of delightful.

Colonel Singh, on the other hand, is a newcomer to the Expanse’s cast: a bright young Laconian officer on the rise, he’s sent to Medina to act as governor and facilitate the “transition” in government. He’s a very interesting person, mostly because of the dichotomy between his kindness as loving husband and doting father and the hardness he needs to exert as a soldier of the conquering empire. His story-arc brought me to alternate between compassion and hostility, even though I understood that the less savory aspects of his personality were the product of his indoctrination. In this he’s very much like the other Laconians, not much different from anybody else on the surface, but dramatically so in outlook and psychology: the few glimpses of the society built by Duarte on Laconia offer a quite chilling context for the way these people think and act, for the deeply rooted certainty they harbor about being right, about being able to win over the rest of humanity to their way of seeing things.

This new story-arc in The Expanse series promises to rise in intensity far above the previous ones, and considering how outstandingly amazing they have been so far, we are in for a remarkable journey: given the total, not-coming-up-for-air immersion I enjoyed here, I know the remaining two volumes will prove even better. And I can hardly wait…