The Final, Big Adventure

This is it, the last book of The ExpanseThis series is set in a future where humans have colonized the Solar System, but then have to contend with alien tech that upends their whole civilization.. Across nine books we watched the crew of the Rocinante come together, find their ship, fight the protomolecule, and become symbols of the Solar System. They fought, bled, and even died to try and ensure freedom, not just from alien organisms but also tyrannical dictatorships. They haven’t always been viewed as heroes but they’ve done what they thought was right, whatever the costs or consequences. They’ve always been there, despite being a tiny crew on a single vessel; the one team ready to lay it all on the line for every human.

Now, in this last book, you have to assume that some of them aren’t making it out of this adventure alive. In book seven, Persepolis Rising, we lost Clarissa Mao, the daughter who wanted to get revenge against the crew of the Rocinante for her father’s fall from grace, and who then gave her own life to help the cause against tyranny. We lost Bobbie Draper in book eight, Tiamat's Wrath, flying into battle like a valkyrie even when she knew her life was over, all to ensure that a blow was struck against a rising empire. Those two deaths ensured that we had to know no one was safe, that anyone could die. The plot armor was gone and someone, at least one of the main characters, surely had to bite it in the end.

Going into Leviathan Falls, then, the question for me was, “would anyone survive.” This was the finale and, in any truly great finale, all bets are off. Now, yes, coming into this book series in 2022, I do realize there are a few extra adventures that we haven’t covered, one of which comes after this ninth and final book. Memory’s Legion is a novella and short story collection set before, during, and after the events of the book series, but its adventures do not affect this story, or the finality of it. For all that we know, right now, this is it. There are no more major events in The Expanse universe, so whatever happens now is the real major conclusion.

And, well, it’s certainly a conclusion in a number of ways, many of them unexpected. I won’t spoil anything major about the end, but suffice it to say that if this is a story about the crew of the Rocinante, they’re adventures together on their ship, then this truly is the end. Whatever else may occur, whatever happens, the book series conclusively ends in such a way that those adventures, with that crew, can not continue again. Whether that ending will satisfy all readers is a conclusion they will have to make for themselves. Like most endings, it’s bittersweet, with a certain lingering quality that makes you wish for more even as you know there won’t be any further adventures. You don’t want it to be over, but there’s no clear path forward for these characters, in this time period, on this path again.

Leviathan Falls picks up some months after Tiamat’s Wrath, with the remaining crew of the Rocinante – Holden, Naomi, Amos, and Alex, joined by Teresa Duarte, teenage daughter of the leader of the Laconian Empire, Winston Duarte, along with her dog – as they’re trying to recalibrate and figure out their next steps. Getting back together was hard enough, after the crew was separated and two of them died. But now, even with the Laconian Empire weakened, their ability to build ships crippled, they still have more firepower and more powerful technology than any of the associated rebellion camps can muster. On her own the Rocinante can’t take down one of the mid-sized Laconian warships, not without a whole lot of luck, and they certainly couldn’t take out the remaining flagship of the fleet. It’s an uneasy balance the crew finds themselves riding, waiting for the next shoe to drop.

That next shoe comes from the attacks of the angry gods living in the space between the ring gates. They were the aliens that destroyed the old race of protomolecule engineers, and now that they’ve been awoken by the Laconians, the old gods are looking to wipe out all of humanity, once and for all. So, system by system, the ancient aliens test different attacks, attempting to find a way to combat humanity and send them all on the path to extinction. Duarte, now awoken from his weird coma, rides out on a ship because he thinks he has a solution. He can adapt the protomolecule within himself to transform humanity into a super-organism, one capable of fighting off the elder creatures. The only issue would be the loss of humanity’s free will in the process. The crew of the Rocinante has to find a way to unite the factions and fight this two-pronged threat before the very thing that makes humans into humans is wiped away for good.

As I credit The Expanse, time and again, it’s a marvel that each book in this series is its own story, each with their own unique twists. The protomolecule technology was seen as a kind of zombie plague original, adapting and transforming its victims into something strange and hideous, but in each book a new twist was added, a new evolution of the technology, and each new twist created new storytelling wrinkles, and further dangers, that had to be stopped and solved. It’s never the same story twice, even as each book builds on the foundations of what came before, and that creates a satisfying conclusion each time as a new solution for the problems are required as well. I appreciate the creativity of the writing.

This time around, the protomolecule is being used to tap into human minds, to turn them into one large, super-organism. It’s different and strange but it also doesn’t feel like something created whole cloth. This is a natural evolution of the story threads we’ve seen before, learning about how the protomolecule engineers acted as a kind of hive mind, how their empire spread across thousands of worlds was an interconnected super-network. Using that same technology and adapting it to humans makes sense, from a storytelling perspective, and it adds a new level of threat to the adventure we’re reading. How do you fight a technology when your very mind could stop being your own.

I like this idea, and I like the chapters that lead up to the climax as the heroes try to find a way to save everything. At the same time, though, and without spoiling anything, I do feel like the climax of the story isn’t quite as bombastic and propulsive as I would have liked. The novel builds to a big battle, a huge fight between good and evil, but then it feels like it deflates, pulling the danger away in a twist that almost feels like an anti-climax. I get how the story got there, why the writers took it in that direction, and I don’t even mind the final result and what it means for the heroes, and all of humanity. I just feel like there’s a piece missing, for me, that didn’t quite fit into the overall story structure. Something wasn’t quite right in the ending.

I don’t think it ruins the book, mind you, I just think it feels a little off. This is, of course, the issue with writing an ending: it’s almost impossible to find the right conclusion for a long running series that will satisfy all readers. I loved the time I spent in this universe, with these characters, and any ending I got would be bittersweet because I wouldn’t get any further adventures with them (ignoring some short stories, novellas, and a few comic books that have come out since). I want more, which is the sign of a good series, and if this ending wasn’t quite right for me that just shows that it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting and, just maybe, I needed to adjust my expectations.

As I said, I like most of the ending. I’d say this book nails its ending at about ninety-five percent of what it could or should have been. A few small details, a little bit of the conclusion, maybe could have been tweaked to really nail a bombastic finish and send the characters out in a trail of some kind of glory. For me, it ends a little too abruptly, a touch weirdly, and not quite where I would have liked to see it go. This was the ending the authors wanted, and I respect that, it’s just maybe not exactly the ending I wanted.

But then, you never know. There could always be some other story written later to add a few extra grace notes for a character or an idea that helps to answer some of my lingering desires. Some characters introduced earlier in the whole series don’t get a mention here when I expected they would. Certain characters are left in a haze of mystery about where they’d go next or what they’d be expected to do. There’s a lot left unsaid, which always feels unsatisfying in a grand conclusion. As a reader you want more. If this is to be the last word on the series, you want it to truly feel like a conclusion. In some, small ways, Leviathan Wakes does not.

But I recognize that also my desire to see more talking. For nine books, and thousands of pages, The Expanse is a credit to its writers. This is a massive achievement that manages to engross and excite for all of its volumes. If it doesn’t answer everything I wanted it to answer, the way I wanted it, when it came to a close, I can’t deny how impressive the overall body of work has been. A few shaky moments at the end won’t spoil an otherwise exemplary series. There are long-running series that never finish, and others that completely fail their endings. The Expanse got to the end, and it did it the way the authors wanted. I’ll set my expectations aside and cheer for how good the ride was, right up until the end.

But man… I feel like I’m going to have to write a follow up article because, that ending, it really changes the game…