Persepolis Rising (book 7 of The Expanse Series) by James S.A. Corey (book review).

‘Persepolis Rising’ by James S.A. Corey is the seventh novel in ‘The Expanse’ space opera series. Decades have passed since the Marco Inaros and the Free Navy were stopped from hurting Earth, Mars and other Inners. It has been a time of recovery from the rockfall damage and the colonisation of faraway planets. The Transport Union, formerly the Belters, controls space travel and, in particular, the ring gate to stop too much traffic, making spacecraft disappear because of its alien physics. They extract fees from space travellers for their service to keep their service going.

An unscheduled cargo-carrying spaceship slips through the ring gates from Auberon to Freehold without paying a fee. Drummer, the Transport Union’s president, decides no traffic will be allowed for either planet over the next three years to act as a deterrent for others considering doing the same. She gets Captain Jim Holden in the Rocinante to personally deliver the message to Freehold. When he and his crew arrive at Freehold, they realise lack of imports will effectively be a death sentence for the nascent colony. He arranges to take their leader as a prisoner to answer criminal charges back to Medina Station, which guards the ring gates. The moral injustice of what he has been asked to do sits so uncomfortably with him that he decides to retire from spacefaring with Naomi Ngata and hand over the captaincy of Rocinante to his crew member, Bobbie Draper, ex-Martian marine.

While finalising the transfer through the legal processes on Medina, the decades-silent Laconia’s dictator, High Consul Winston Duarte, sends through two warships built with alien technology to capture Medina. The people on the station do not stand a chance in battle. Holden realising this, rushes to the ops centre to persuade Belters to surrender peacefully, which will give them a chance to fight back later.

Thus begins another struggle for the moral high ground of humanity.

‘Persepolis Rising’ is space opera at its most intense, switching between big theatre battles and intimate personal interchanges that will change the story’s outcome. It’s exhilarating but, at the same time, familiar for those of us who have read the preceding stories in the series. All but one of the viewpoint characters have been seen before. They have the same foibles and are mostly set in the previous ways. The single new one, Santiago Jilie Singh, follows a development arc that is predictable from his first viewpoint chapter. New ideas in the series are thin on the ground, or should I say like gold-dust to be more astronomically correct? There is one towards the start that could have had a greater impact on the story, but I suspect that is being saved for the sequel. As to the overarching plot of the novel, it feels like the standard tropes of space opera.

What I found really disappointing was the naivety of the security strategies displayed in the policies of the sovereign states and main political factions. For example, Medina Station guarding the rings is an obvious military choke point. This type of weakness has been known about since the famous battle of Thermopylae in 480BC, the one where a band of a few Greeks led by the Spartans held the Persian empire at bay. Certainly, that wily Expanse politician Avasarala would be acutely aware of such a weakness and would have done something about it. That is the most blatant one, and there are others.

There were a few occasions where the language used by the authors jarred and threw me out of the reading flow. For instance, whilst in Robbie’s viewpoint, we have ‘She (Robbie) felt like she was hanging onto the belly of some massively vast whale.’ But Robbie was a Martian and lived most of her recent life on the Rocinante in space. Why would she compare herself to a creature she would not have met? Another was the use of the word ‘egghead’, a term that is hardly if ever used these days and certainly would not be expected to be used in the future.

Overall, this novel is like an old slipper, comfortable in the known universe of ‘The Expanse’ developed up to that point in its timeline. It’s a fun space opera read, written for thrilling the Earthers.

Rosie Oliver

January 2024

(pub: Orbit, 2017. 549 page hardback. Price: £20.00 (UK). ISBN: 978-0-356-51030-9)

check out websites: www.orbitbooks.net and www.the-expanse.com