As The Expanse Nears its End, Tiamat’s Wrath Only Raises the Stakes
Across the eight previous books in James S.A. Corey’s space opera epic The Expanse, we’ve seen humanity evolve from contentious tribes fighting for our solar system’s scant resources into a galaxy-spanning empire. With a little help from mysterious alien technology, of course.
Tiamat's Wrath (Signed Book) (Expanse Series #8)
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Tiamat's Wrath (Signed Book) (Expanse Series #8)
Hardcover
$27.00
$30.00
As the series nears its conclusion with the penultimate volume, Tiamat’s Wrath, it’s clear humans have still found plenty to fight about—and that there’s a cost that comes with reaching for distant stars by way of pilfered knowledge.
As the series nears its conclusion with the penultimate volume, Tiamat’s Wrath, it’s clear humans have still found plenty to fight about—and that there’s a cost that comes with reaching for distant stars by way of pilfered knowledge.
[Spoiler alert: This review includes details of plot revelations in prior books and presumes a general familiarity with the series’ worldbuilding and characters.]
Thanks to its mastery of 1,300 interstellar gates (and its absolute military and technological domination of the Sol system), the Laconian Empire—led by autocrat Winston Duarte—is undisputedly in control of humanity, to the extent that propaganda is able, successfully, to paint them as interchangeable: to be human is to be Laconian. This is the type of scenario that might be the beginning of (or the backstory to) a different science fiction series, but the broad scope (and high page count) of this one means that we’ve been able to watch the humans stumble their way from a plausible future into one a bit more…out there—without ever losing the thread of feasibility (at least within the context of epic space opera).
It helps that we’ve followed the same characters, more or less, for decades of story time, and that most of them are as shocked by these developments as we are. Rejoining them, we find Jim Holden an honored guest (read: prisoner) under Duarte’s direct control on Laconia; Holden’s experience with the alien protomolecule makes him too valuable to bury. Naomi and the rest of the old Rocinante crew are divided, and each has a key role to play in a separatist movement that has numbers on its side, but not much else. Considering the face that the Laconians were recently able to demand the complete and unconditional surrender of all of humanity with one ship, the scrappy resistance doesn’t offer much in the way of hope.
Leviathan Wakes (Expanse Series #1)
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Leviathan Wakes (Expanse Series #1)
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Paperback
$16.99
$19.99
Consider also the canny, PR-friendly nature of Duarte’s leadership: he offers peace, order, and a degree of freedom to those colony worlds and individuals willing to toe the line, while the underground is largely populated by old belters who have defied Earth and Mars for generations. Naomi isn’t the only one worried coming generations will surrender to inevitability and give in to velvet-gloved domination. Military conquest weakened the Roman Republic, but it died because the Emperor Augustus played a canny game that allowed citizens to pretend that nothing had really changed. In Tiamat’s Wrath, humanity is beginning to adapt to circumstances that would have once seemed abhorrent, and Naomi understands that the underground needs a win, and soon. A captured ship and a bit of pilfered tech are enough to keep hope alive, but not by much.
Consider also the canny, PR-friendly nature of Duarte’s leadership: he offers peace, order, and a degree of freedom to those colony worlds and individuals willing to toe the line, while the underground is largely populated by old belters who have defied Earth and Mars for generations. Naomi isn’t the only one worried coming generations will surrender to inevitability and give in to velvet-gloved domination. Military conquest weakened the Roman Republic, but it died because the Emperor Augustus played a canny game that allowed citizens to pretend that nothing had really changed. In Tiamat’s Wrath, humanity is beginning to adapt to circumstances that would have once seemed abhorrent, and Naomi understands that the underground needs a win, and soon. A captured ship and a bit of pilfered tech are enough to keep hope alive, but not by much.
Fortunately for the resistance, even the most clever autocrats are prone to overreach. Unwilling to leave well enough alone, Laconia launches an audacious plan to make contact with the mysterious, heretofore utterly silent alien engineers of the protomolecule. “Contact,” to the militarily minded Duarte, involves, essentially, dropping a bomb into whatever space lies beyond the gates in order to awe the aliens with our offensive capabilities and force them to show up at the negotiating table.
It’s not giving anything away to posit that such all-powerful beings might not be so impressed with that course of action. Laconia’s easy success at bringing human civilization to heel bred an arrogance that unleashes hell. Bad news for the powers that be, slightly better news for the separatist movement. Laconia’s struggles create an opportunity that they might never have gotten otherwise. But in the universe of The Expanse, there’s no victory without great loss.
As this definitive modern space opera moves toward its conclusion, it’s clearer than ever that the series is more than anything an exploration of control, and the limits thereof; of how the human urge to dominate can lead to outsized consequences, causing problems far greater than if we’d just let things be. Over the course of eight books (and the smattering of shorter works), the erstwhile crew of the Rocinante has represented a variety viewpoints on the value of order as a primary driver of human expansion. By this near-endgame point, they’re each willing to fight to the death against authoritarianism, even when cloaked in the enlightened benevolence of Laconia.
If you’ve followed The Expanse this far, there’s absolutely no reason to stop. The duo that make up the writing team known as James S.A. Corey has never been shy about surprising us with dramatic twists, even as they’ve remained true to the characters who have guided us from the decks of an insignificant ice hauler to the front lines of a human civil war on a galactic scale. Tiamat’s Wrath shows that this series hasn’t lost a single step, and paves the way to a conclusion that we’re dreading as much as anticipating.
Signed copies of Tiamat’s Wrath are available now in limited quantities from Barnes & Noble.