Into the Ring We Go

Human exploration is limited by just how fast an object can be accelerated. When you have distances measured in the speed of light you've basically shown the upper limit for how fast something can go. In space, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That's a fixed measure, the boundary that prevents travel beyond that speed. You might be able to, somehow, approach the speed of light but there's no way to get beyond that, not sticking within the laws of physics as we know it. Some stories get around this by waving a magic wand and saying “warp travel”, but if you want something realistic you have to accept that light speed is the upper limit for everything. There is no way to travel faster than light; you have to move at relative speeds in normal space.

Of course, then you have the issue that just because you can accelerate a ship up to a fast speed (we're not even talking the speed of light, just a relatively quick speed that would let you travel between planets in the Solar System a matter of days or weeks) you still have to worry about the safety of the passengers within that ship. You might be able to get a ship up to the speed of light (if you had all the power in the universe at your disposal, of course) but it's doubtful that the humans within the ship could survive. This is especially true if the ship had to do any maneuvering, like turns, or brisk stops, or anything that doesn't involve just moving forward in a straight line. Navigating is tough when the meat bags you're transporting have to, you know, survive.

Abaddon's Gate, the third book in the Expanse series, is keenly focused on this aspect of space travel. The previous novels have noted that ships can only move so fast, that the humans within the ships have to get loaded up with a cocktail of drugs if they're going to deal with fast acceleration and high speed maneuvers. The higher the g-forces on the passengers, the harder it is for them to survive what the ship is doing. It set a hard limit for ships traveling through the Solar System, allowing us to know that if we were going from one planet to another, or one asteroid to another, travel would take hours, if not days. But then the game changes with Abaddon's Gate and the series, after this, is going to be very different.

The previous novel, Caliban's War, ended with the protomolecule structure on Venus rising up and launching itself out to the far reaches of the Solar System, out past Uranus. There, the structure assembled itself into a ring, which floated there, waiting. Abaddon's Gate then opens with a solar system race, an asteroid greaser in a cobbled together ship, launching himself out to the ring. He manages to get past the blockade at the ring, scooting through and into the ring… where he then is stopped dead, the ring slowing the ship down to a much slower speed, causing the runner in the ship to high-speed decelerate, turning him into meat paste. You can't travel that fast and slow down to nothing without consequences. This would prove important later.

With the ring seemingly open, and having its own rules about what happens when things enter, it also reveals that the zone past the ring, within its massive circle, is a different section of space than the area behind the ring. It's an opening into a pocket dimension and, although they aren't active, there are other rings floating out in that ring space, just waiting. A flotilla of ships is sent by Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets Alliance, and in the midst of all of them is Holden and his crew aboard the Rocinante. They've been hired by a media crew to document the ring, to show it off to the solar system. But when a ship blows up in the flotilla, and the crew of the Rocinante are blamed for it, suddenly Holden and his crew have to launch themselves into the ring to escape… and to hope they can figure out what is really going on.

It's pretty clear that the creation of the ring was the plan for the series from the very first book. There was always the lingering question of what the protomolecule was and why it was sent to our solar system. It had a purpose, it had a reason for existing, and since it was sent billions of years ago (before getting caught on a moon of Neptune to wait until it was unleashed) it wasn't meant to wipe out humanity (since we didn't exist yet). This wasn't an invasion force, it was something else. That, in turn, was the reveal of what the protomolecule did, how it took matter and rebuilt it, how, once it was dropped on Venus, it rebuilt the world around it until the structure of the ring rose up and, suddenly there was a megastructure out past Uranus. That was the plan. That was the goal, all set up back in Leviathan Rises.

The ring changes the dynamic of the series because, suddenly, we don't have to think about space as just what humanity can reach in the solar system. The ring promises that there are more solar systems through all the other connected rings, that humanity could potentially push out past their own star, and the only limit is the few months at each end, traveling between habitable planets. Instead of needing a century ship, like the rechristened Behemoth that the Mormons were building in the first book, expecting to travel for hundreds of years to a habitable planet, the journey could take less than a year. Far less, as a matter of fact. This fundamentally changes everything about where the series could go after this book.

Not that the characters in the book immediately understand what has happened. This book is focused on what the ring could be, and what dangers ring space could hold. When an attack within ring space occurs, the security systems within the ring cause a speed limit decrease, resulting in thousands of injuries (not unlike that first space hopper getting turned to mush when he was forced into a massive deceleration once he entered ring space). This, naturally, puts the humans within their ships on edge, and the petty squabbles of humanity could result in a dangerous counter-reaction from the security systems of the ring.

This is an interesting storyline because it allows the book to have an antagonist in ring space, built by the original protomolecule creators, without actually making this alien tech into a true villain. Naturally, the villainy is reserved for the humans, the scared apes on their ships that don't understand the technology around them or what it could mean. They're animals staring into a void, seeing science so advanced that it's basically magic in their understanding. How humanity handles this, whether out of fear or hope, is a major thrust of this story. We hope for humanity's better instincts but we understand the scared apes are going to act like, well, scared apes.

As someone that read the book after watching the TV series (with all of Abaddon's Gate fitting into the second half of the third season of the show) I was struck by how different the events of the book were from the series. While the first two books were adapted pretty faithfully into the series, this third book featured a lot of deviations. There are a lot of characters that are different, condensed into other characters in the series. Some of the major players, like Captain Ashford, act very differently here (and would go on to have vastly different stories in the show after this book). And the events play out differently, and in a far more messy fashion, in the book than in the show.

I think a lot of that is due to scope. The book doesn't have to struggle to depict the scope of events, like big ship battles, or multiple sets, or a ton of characters, because books don't worry about budgets or physical space for filming. The show, though, had to limit its sets, limit its characters, keep things constrained, so a book with massive scope like Abaddon's Gate needed a lot of massaging to become a show. I like the chunk of the TV series that adapted this book, but frankly I think the book is better. It gives more space for the story to breathe and it lets the threat of ring space, its security systems, and the characters involved have far more weight. This is the way the story needed to be told, no doubt, and the show had to compromise for it.

I think the hope for the future is the best part of this novel. By setting up a travel ring connected to other travel rings (in essence, physical wormholes, which are theorized to be possible, and more practical in comparison to warp travel) it allows the scope of the series to expand. New adventures on new worlds are possible. Humanity can reach beyond our one star with its few little rocks floating around it. There's the promise of a bigger future. The Expanse can expand out, and the adventures can become even more varied. This book gives us that hope and sets a promise for what to come. It's a solid adventure story that isn't just, “oh, look, the pesky protomolecule is back again,” that lets us know there is still more to come.

And I want it. I want the further adventures. This book is a great adventure on its own, but it hooked me in with its promises. There's more to know and I want to be there for all of it.