Babylon’s Ashes (book 6 of The Expanse Series) by James S.A. Corey (book review)
‘Babylon’s Ashes’ by James S.A. Corey is the sixth novel in ‘The Expanse’ space opera series. Earth has been devastated by rocks thrown from space by Marco Inaros’ Free Navy. Everyone, Earthers, Martians and Belters, are all scrabbling for resources to stay alive, even the Free Navy. Meanwhile, they continue to throw rocks against the Inners while blocking anyone from using the gateway to transport people out of Solar System to distant stars with life-sustaining planets. The Inners space navies are either busy defending their planets against the incoming rocks or ferrying desperate people off Earth to the safety of the Moon and other places in the Solar System.
Holden and the crew of the Rocinante, Naomi, Amos, Alex and Clarissa, are sent by veteran politician and Earth leader Chrisjen Avasarala to take out the Free Navy’s hidden rock-throwing ship, Azure Dragon, with Bobbie Draper, ex-Martian-Marine in charge. They succeed, which frees up the remnants of the Earth and Martian Navies to start attacking the Free Navy. It also results in Bobbie joining the Rocinante as part of the crew.
Michio Pa belongs to Marco’s inner circle, assigned to be in charge of conscripting people and supplies into the Free Navy, basically being a pirate. She and her family-crew have just captured the Hornblower, when she gets an order to high-g it over to Ceres for a full meeting of the inner circle. There Marco tells the best tactic against the coming attack from the Inners is to withdraw from their working headquarters on Ceres and other places. It will let the Inners take them, but then they would have to look after the people who are struggling to survive. He cites the history of how Afghanistan could never remain conquered by various empires as his justification.
Marco’s inner circle of Dawes, Sanjrani and Rosenfeld are unhappy about this strategy, particularly Dawes, as he effectively runs Ceres. However, their leader’s charisma pulls them along this trajectory of inaction. When Pa is back on her ship, Connaught, she realises that abandoning people who need help is not what she signed up for. She breaks away from Marco and the Free Navy, taking some of her other ships with her.
Meanwhile, there is the mystery of why some spaceships disappear when they enter alien Ring, gateway to the stars. Everyone wants it solved if only to guarantee safe transit to the habitable planets, no matter who is in charge.
So, the battle for human survival in the Solar System starts.
Like many novels in ‘The Expanse’ series, this is good space opera, where battles are reminiscent of those swashbuckling adventures on the high seas in the 17th and 18th centuries. At times, I felt they did not reflect expected battle progress and characteristics. For instance, why is it left to Medina’s maintenance crew to spot where Bobbie’s spacecraft are truly heading for? That should have been worked out by experienced military minds or AIs.
‘Babylon’s Ashes’ was published in December 2016. A lot of technological progress has been made since then. Even so, the frightening fast development of AIs was noticeable even then. So, I find it surprising there is not more input into the story from them.
The lack of AIs does leave more space in the novel for character development. This is nicely done for the main protagonists, Pa, Holden and Filip Inaros, who have eleven, ten and seven chapters respectively out the fifty-five as viewpoint protagonists. Not enough to really get to some of the potential in depth nuances of such changes. In all, this novel has nineteen viewpoint characters. So many makes the story seem to have a lack of depth.
The overall world-building is a stupendous achievement. It has been in development a long time, taking five predecessor novels and quite a few shorter stories to get to this stage. With anything this mature and well done, there are details that annoy the cognoscenti. For instance, amber is ‘the one stone that spoke of Earth’, because it needed ‘a tree and a few million years’. So does jet, a stone that was made famous by Queen Victoria wearing it for mourning the loss of her husband. The gravity on Luna is stated as ‘one-tenth g’. It is actually one-sixth! As for a spaceship trying to identify ‘a threat without radar or ladar’ without being detected…both sensor types, when used in the right way, can act in passive mode to identify threats without giving their position away. These nuisance details are similar, thankfully, did not make any difference to the plot or characterisation.
The expectation for this novel had been high because of the success of its predecessors. It veered away from what would be considered pure space opera of the near future kind to a more widely dispersed view of the how characters developed and managed in the aftermath of a disaster. This comes as a surprise and disappointment to those who want more of the same. Equally, it is a delight for those who want to see development in the writing style to match the maturing of the familiar characters, a kind of literary device. Whichever view you subscribe to, ‘Babylon’s Ashes’ is still a very good read.
Rosie Oliver
December 2023
(pub: Orbit, 2016. 581 page hardback. Price: £20.00 (UK). ISBN: 978-0-356-50426-1)
check out websites: www.orbitbooks.net and www.the-expanse.com