I just finished the series last night, and I have feelings. This series is of epic proportion, but grounded solidly as a story about people. While the TV series on Amazon Prime certainly serves as a companion and also a standalone, the book series is different. I suspect that the TV series will end with season 6 due to reasons that I won't divulge due to serious spoilers. Also, there are things they changed in the series due to the constraints of a televised series, and at least one thing due to the behaviors of one of the actors on the series. From here on when I refer to "the series," I will be talking about the books, unless I specify otherwise.
The series begins with events that happen in our solar system. The time is the future and we have expanded beyond the earth. The factions as they stand at the beginning of the series are Earth, Mars, and the inhabitants of the asteroid belt, aka "The Belters." While there are political machinations going on throughout the series, the politics aren't the center piece, which is fortunate, because if it were all about political maneuvering, I wouldn't have finished the series. The individuals who drive this story are the central force in all of the books, and no matter how fantastical the series gets, the characters in the story are what you care about.
The series explores a lot of things that interested me: how other intelligent life in the universe might evolve, how humans might react to the reality that we aren't the only life in the universe, and how humanity, even after time and technology evolve, are probably going to remain quite the same. This could be heartening or depressing, depending on which aspects of human behavior the series focuses on. For the most part this is a human tale, and while it sees the bad behavior, there is a lot of honorable behavior here as well. What humanizes the story the most, at least to me, is that the story is told completely through the point of view of the characters in it.
The series is penned by two authors, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. They authored the books under the pen name of James S. A. Corey. Unlike some other books I've read that were co-authored, this series doesn't have that disjointed and sometimes jarring feeling that one can get when a series uses two different writers to accomplish a task. Somebody smarter than me might be able to pick them apart more by writing style, but I didn't see any breaks.
The Critical Drinker did a video on the TV Series, and he recommended it highly. One of his observations of the TV series was that it did diversity well. The characters are completely diverse, but it isn't remarked on, nor is it something that smacks you in the face. The future, as the writers have conceived of it, has a lot of mix of white, Asian, Hispanic, black, male, female, etc., and nobody cares. People are just people. The books from which the inspiration derives are similar in that the characters are of various colors and backgrounds, but that is simply what they are, not what they do or who they are. Likewise the female characters are all three dimensional, and their strengths aren't due to "grrrrl power," but instead derive instead from how they have lived their lives and the experiences and training they got from their past.
If I would throw one half-hearted critique of the series, it is that Jim Holden, the main character, has a lot of crazy shit happen to him, more than one would expect due to reality and the relativistic universe. When you start talking about events taking place in multiple solar systems and galaxies, having one character span them all seems a bit far-fetched, but that one thing aside, that centrality also drives the narrative.
In the end, the series is big. Like alien inteligences, light years, and time beyond comprehension. It is also small, like a person, a group, or a family. It juxtaposes both of those concepts so well that the balance happens without you having to consider it. Every time it throws big concepts at you, it does it through the eyes of the people experiencing it. When I finished it I was both overjoyed and sad, and that is a rare feeling for me when it comes to reading a series.
In short, I recommend it!
No comments:
Post a Comment