The War for the Belt

The TV show The Expanse is a six-season run of some of the best serialized storytelling I’ve seen. It’s fantastic and, most importantly, I just found that they finally put the last two seasons out on home video (which I never expected, both due to the fact that it’s a streaming-only production in its latter half, doomed to Amazon PrimeWhile Netflix might be the largest streaming seervice right now, other major contenders have come into the game. One of the biggest, and best funded, is Amazon Prime, the streaming-service add-on packing with free delivery and all kinds of other perks Amazon gives its members. And, with the backing of its corporate parent, this streaming service very well could become the market leader., but also because home video is dying and everyone sadly knows it). This isn’t me shilling for a media company so you buy their stuff, it’s just that The Expanse is fantastic and I’d rather everyone gets it so that, if for some reason Amazon ever decides to remove it from their streaming service, we’ll all still have our copies. Video preservation is important.

It’s also apropo, though, because Babylon’s Ashes, book six of the novel series the show is based on, also marks the end of the television series as a whole. Sure, there’s a chance that the show could be revived in fifteen years or so, if some network wants to, if the stars all want to come back, and if there’s even any interest anymore. I certainly hope that’s the case but… well, we will just have to see on that. The novels (no big spoilers) take a massive time jump (nearly thirty years) and instead of just trying to age up the actors with makeup, or age down the characters on the show, the creators simply ended it with a, “maybe we’ll be back…”

That means that, with this book, we’ve caught up to the whole of the show and, from this point forward, we’re going to be headed into unknown territory. Anyone that has seen the show but hasn’t read the books won’t know what’s next. We’ve reached the series finale with book six, and this is also kind of a finale of sorts for the novels as well. As I noted in my review of Cibola Burn, The Expanse novels can be broken into three trilogies, in effect. The first set documents the discovery and rise of the protomolecule, leading up to the alien creation building a transit ring out past Uranus. The second trilogy sees the rise of tensions in the Belt due to all the new worlds opening up out past the ring, and that trilogy caps with the war for the belt lead by the Free Navy and her commander, Marco Inaros.

Of course then the last trilogy happens three decades later, but we’ll cover all that when we get to the last set of books. I have my copies on order. Should show up any day now…

Marco Inaros is an interesting character. On the one hand he acts like he’s the savior of the Belt. A Belter himself (unlike all its “false leaders”, like Fred Johnson and, unwillingly, James Holden), Inaros sees how the “inners” stomped all over the Belt, across all the years, leaving Belters feeling like third-class citizens. He took that anger, that rage against the inners, and directed it at them, throwing stealth rocks at Earth and leaving the home planet of humanity as nearly a wasteland. It would take decades upon decades for Earth to recover, and without Earth the Belt is “free” to do as they like.

He’s a charismatic leader, as the book shows us, a self-styled Alexander the Great… but as is also made clear, he thinks that because he has a massive ego. His charisma helps cover for his blunders, but he does make mistakes. Marco thinks he’s brilliant, and he has plans within plans, but much of his success comes not from doing things well, just doing the unthinkable. Throwing rocks at Earth and killing billions is something that worked because no one thought anyone would be a big enough monster to actually do it. That’s beyond terrorism; it’s genocide. Marco may think himself an Alexander, but there’s another dictator from far more recent history who seems like a more worthy parallel in many ways.

And that’s just it. Marco is a dictator, and he leads primarily by charisma. Like most dictators, though, when things go wrong they go very wrong, and Marco isn’t able to keep the reins on all he’s built forever. As we see from the perspective of other characters, most specifically Michio Pa (last seen in book three, Abaddon's Gate), Marco pushes and pushes and doesn’t really care about the fate of the Belt (unlike those around him that he initially drew in), he cares about power. He’ll play games with the lives of Belters (like draining Ceres station of all its resources and then leaving it with a humanitarian crisis, just to tie up the inners as they have to deal with his mess) and then skitter away, laughing as he thinks he’s “won”. He is a monster, and the realization of others as they see it becomes a main thrust of the story.

Unlike previous novels, where their stories switched around between two-to-four characters, Babylon’s Ashes has a rotating selection of characters (close to twenty, all told), some of whom only get a chapter or two as point-of-view narrators, while others get to be “main” characters for the length of the story. Holden, of course, continues to act as one of the leads, the captain of the Rocinante and a leader in the politics of the Belt. Michio Pa is another, a captain serving under Marco but, as soon as she sees the kind of actions Marco is willing to take against his own people, she defects, going off on her own as a pirate before eventually aligning with the unified Navy of Earth, Mars, and free-standing Belt colonies. Pa feels about as close to a character “in the right” as anyone in this book other than Holden. She knows what she wants for her people and she tries to do it, no matter the cost to her and hers, so long as it actually helps and saves people.

We do also get the perspective of Filip Inaros, who works as our direct perspective to what’s going on in the Free Navy. Son of Marco, Filip wants nothing more than to be loved by his father (especially since he blames Naomi for “faking her death” and leaving once more). He hates Naomi but, over the course of the book, he comes to realize just how conniving and controlling his father is and, eventually, abandons the cause and goes off on his own. That’s a huge plot point there because if Marco can’t keep his own son, who is bound to him by love, does he really have the charisma to lead the Belt?

For anyone that’s seen the show the story for the book follows a similar path. As before, it’s interesting to see what’s been shifted and changed from book to show to align with a slightly smaller, more recurring cast of characters. Michio Pa doesn’t appear in the TV series at all, having been merged into a side character from the novels, Drummer, who aided Fred Johnson on Tycho Station. She’s functionally the same, doing the same actions that Drummer did in the show, but it actually works better here, I think. While I liked the show’s Drummer, and I think her actress, Cara Gee, I will admit that the various storylines Drummer went through, from one season to the next, made her feel like different characters in each storyline. First she was a Tycho engineer, then she was Captain of the Behemoth, then she was a pirate queen (which no explanation how she got there), and that all comes because they had her show up in every season, and she took over the roles of four different characters. It’s awkward and weird, and it actually makes me like Pa better because her story makes more sense.

I also like the storyline within the Rocinante. Holden has his crew, and he’s struggling with the idea of it growing, how adding any new members would change the dynamic. But due to the end of the last novel, Nemesis Games, he now has Bobbie Draper (who he trusts) and Clarissa Mao (who he doesn’t) as part of his crew as well. Learning to settle in with new people, even if they are established in the crew now, throws off the mojo and Holden, in and around all the activity happening, has to realize that change is a part of life, and it’s good for his ship.

This is, again, a plotline that was handled differently on the show. It just sort of happens that Holden accepts everyone after an episode or two, which might in part be due to the fact that, unlike in the books, the show is forced to kill of Alex Kamal, the pilot of the ship (due to off-screen issues with the actor). That difference meant that the crew was already changing and the show couldn’t dwell. I prefer how the book does it because we get more time with the characters and see them adjusting to the shifting landscape of their lives. (It also doesn’t help that season six was a truncated season, given only six episodes, so there isn’t nearly as much time for character development, or politics, or anything else the book could handle.)

Don’t get me wrong, I love the show. This is a case, though, where the books are once again better. That has been happening more often in the later novels as characters are able to move around different, storylines can get more room to breathe, and everything feels far more cohesive within the internal continuity of the books in comparison to the show. The Expanse is great, and it’s a wonderful adaptation. The novels are now just better.

I really am looking forward to the last three novels, just so I can see where these characters are going to go in their future. The series couldn’t answer that (at least not yet) and we may never get to see those stories made in live action. But the novels don’t have that limit, and they exist now. Considering the quality we’ve seen in this storytelling through the six books we have so far, I have no doubt the final trilogy is going to be just as good as the rest.