Crossing the Expanse: A Discussion of Leviathan Wakes

Howdy, dear Chicers! I hope you’re staying healthy and safe out there. My Resolution Project for this year was to reread the Expanse series in its entirety in preparation/anticipation for the final book, for which the release date should be announced sooner than later. So, whether you’re looking for a refresher, are as big of a fangirl/boy as I am, or — for some very strange reason — only want to read the last book and yet still know what happened before, then I’m here for you.

Now, let’s continue Crossing the Expanse…

Leviathan Wakes (2011)
Written by: James S.A. Corey
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 561 (series page count: 608)
Series: The Expanse #1
Publisher: Orbit

The Premise:

Humanity has colonized the solar system — Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond — but the stars are still out of our reach.

Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, the Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for — and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to the Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations — and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.

SPOILERS

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Point(s) of View: Julie Mao, James Holden, Josephus Miller, Fred Johnson

This first novel is told primarily through the POVs of Holden and Miller, an Earther and a Belter (the term for someone born and raised out beyond the Asteroid Belt), as they end up searching for the same person and, in looking for her, stumble across far more than they ever anticipated.

Discussion:

“The Scopuli had been taken eight days ago, and Julie Mao was finally ready to be shot.” (p. 1)

So begins Leviathan Wakes, the first book in the brilliant series that has redefined the term “space opera.” In this world, humans have populated most of the even semi-habitable parts of the system. It has also divided into:

• Two factions: The Inner Planets (Earth and Mars) and the Outer Planets
• With three major governments: The United Nations (UN), which represents the whole of Earth’s interests; the Martian Congressional Republic (MCR); and the Outer Planets Alliance (OPA), a ragtag conglomerate of Belters trying to establish themselves as their own entity. The UN and the MCR, however, have been, and continue to, do everything within their power to stop that from happening.

Why? Money, of course.

While Corey’s view of humanity’s future isn’t entirely dark and dysfunctional, it’s hardly the shiny and “enlightened” version envisioned by the likes of Gene Roddenberry.

In the prologue, Julie is ready to be shot, but when she finally emerges from her inadvertent hiding place (a few members of the mysterious team that take the Scopuli toss her into a locker for making trouble and then seemingly forget about her), she wanders through the empty ship until encountering her crew mates in the engine room, where they’ve become…well, imagine if the Blob had femurs and spines jutting out of it…and are begging her for help.

We leave Julie, then, alone with her nightmare fuel, and the story begins in earnest aboard the Canterbury, an ice hauler on its way from Saturn’s rings to Ceres Station. Along the way, they encounter a distress signal, which, according to unofficial space law, must be answered. Corey does a great job of conveying just how large space is, even within our own system, and to ignore a distress signal is basically leaving those sending it to a certain death. So, they make a detour, following the signal right to the Scopuli. Holden, a vet of the UN navy and the Canterbury‘s executive officer (XO), takes a shuttle with a few additional crew mates over to the ship: Naomi Nagata (chief engineer), Alex Kamal (pilot and former Martian Navy), Amos Burton (engineer and scary man), and Shed Garvey (medic). They arrive at the Scopuli to find it scuttled and parked within orbit of a random asteroid. It’s also empty — Julie is long gone, as is the Blob — except for the out-of-place box sending out the signal that drew them in.

Suspecting pirates, Holden and his small crew make tracks for the Canterbury, but while they’re still en route, a stealth warship appears out of nowhere and, without so much as a warning, launches a nuclear weapon, turning the Canterbury and its crew into space dust.

Holden, who has spent the last 5 years aboard the Canterbury, is devastated and furious. He sends an angry missive — along with the names and faces of his former crew members — to the stealth ship. It ignores him, so he tears the distress signal apart looking for something, anything to suggest those behind this heinous attack. He finds nothing until he examines the battery and finds the initials MCRN — Martian Congressional Republic Navy. Aw, snap.

Worried that the Martians might seek him and the other survivors out and kill them as part of a cover-up, Holden then sends a message out to the whole of the system implicating Mars in the Canterbury‘s destruction. The MCRN responds tout de suite, requesting (aka demanding) that Holden and his cohorts rendezvous with the Donnager, their flagship. While they’re on their way, two things happen: 1) Fred Johnson — formerly a decorated officer of the UN’s Navy, now the commander of Tycho Station and a front man for the OPA — reaches out to Holden, offering his support, and 2) a group of unknown ships begins pursuing Holden’s shuttle.

Meanwhile, on Ceres Station, Detective Joe Miller, employee of the Earth-based security firm Star Helix, is given the task of tracking down the errant daughter of shipping magnate Jules-Pierre Mao. Yep, he’s supposed to find Julie and send her back to Luna (Earth’s moon) whether she wants to go or not. Miller starts digging into Julie’s life — she’s been living on Ceres Station and helping the OPA for quite a while — when Holden’s broadcast airs, causing riots on the station. It’s then that Miller discovers Star Helix’s riot gear is missing. Double snap!

On the Donnager, the captain denies Mars’s involvement with the Cant‘s destruction and points the finger at the OPA. Right about then, the mystery ships attack. Turns out they’re the same sort of ships that destroyed Holden’s ship, and they’re more than a match for the Donnager. During the attack, Garvey is killed, but — with the help of some Martian marines, all of whom lose their lives in the effort — Holden, Naomi, Alex, and Amos manage to escape aboard a light frigate called the Tachi. With nowhere else to go, they head for Tycho Station and meet up with Fred Johnson, who helps them change the transponder code of the Tachi. They also disguise it as a gas hauler and rename it the Rocinante, the Roci for short. (In case you missed the reference, Rocinante is name of Don Quixote’s horse in Miguel de Cervantes’ novels.) Johnson, unsure of what-all is going on, sends the Roci to Eros Station to find an OPA operative working under the pseudonym Lionel Polanski. (Guess what. It’s Julie Mao!)

Back on Ceres, Miller discovers that criminals have been fleeing the station in droves and that Julie’s father warned her of an attack in the Belt 2 weeks before the destruction of the Canterbury. (Rich dudes. Can’t trust them farther any than you can throw them, amirite?) He’s then approached by Anderson Dawes — leader of the OPA on Ceres and the man who recruits Fred Johnson in The Butcher of Anderson Station — who reveals to Miller that Julie was an OPA operative working aboard the Scopuli and warns him to back off the case. So, Miller takes his findings to his boss, and she also warns him to back off and orders him off the Mao case. Miller’s a detective straight down to his core, though, and he’s also become a bit obsessed/in love with Julie, which means he neither backs off or drops anything, and is subsequently fired. Detecting the crap out of a lot of disparate information, Miller heads for Eros for a chat with Holden, who he rightly assumes knows even more than he put in his broadcast.

As I’m sure you know, or have realized, these books are pretty complicated. There are a lot of characters and settings and moving pieces, but they all work in harmony, creating a rich world full of complex people and an exciting story that flies along at a very quick pace.

On Eros, the crew of the Roci and Miller collide, locating Lionel Polanski in a sketchy hotel. Up in the room, there is no Polanski. There’s only Julie, and she’s…not doing well. Some sort of organic growth has taken over her body, causing her to sprout both bony protrusions through her skin and vines curling out of every orifice, and it’s not cute. They find her phone, too, on which she’s written a note suggesting that the effects of the thing that was back on the Scopuli and now inside her is sped up by exposure to energy and radiation. Unfortunately, before Holden, Miller, and co. can bounce from Eros, a station-wide radiation alert is declared and station security personnel begins herding people into shelters. Except, some of the security is wearing Star Helix’s missing riot gear. Curious, no?

Holden and Miller stay behind to investigate and send the rest of the crew back to their ship with instructions to leave if Holden and Miller don’t show in a certain amount of time. At this point, the fecal matter truly hits the rotating oscilator. Holden and Miller discover that the people in the “shelters” are actually being exposed to the stuff from the Scopuli followed by a crap-load of radiation. (Holden and Miller are dosed with a gnarly amount of radiation in the process.) Anyway, this basically turns the people into shambling, vomiting zombie creatures that begin infecting everyone who didn’t enter a “shelter.” Holden and Miller fight their way past the vomit zombies and the fake security officers, whose job seems to be keeping people from leaving Eros, and even though it takes them much longer than expected to reach the Roci, they haven’t been abandoned. Which is very cool, considering they’re both halfway to dying from gunshot wounds and radiation exposure.

On Julie’s phone, they discover the coordinates of the Anubis, one of the mysterious stealth ships. The crew of the ship has gone the same way as the crew of the Scopuli and Julie and those on Eros Station, but Holden and Miller find a video explaining what the gross, Blob- and vomit-zombie-making stuff is: It’s a biologically-based replication mechanism created and shot into our solar system by aliens. Basically, they put it on a random asteroid and sent the whole kit-and-caboodle toward Earth with the intention of creating an unknown something. Instead, the death rock was sucked into Saturn’s orbit, became one of its moons, Phoebe, and saving humanity. Much, much later, members of the corporation Protogen stumbled across the death rock, dubbing the biological mechanism the “protomolecule.” The scientists studying the protomolecule eventually set it loose on Eros Station as an experiment, to see what would happen. They also attacked the Canterbury in the hopes of creating a system-wide war to distract everyone from what was about to go down on Eros. The Donnager and the thousands of Marines aboard it? Yet more collateral damage.

Who would so such heinous things? Well, it turns out that the fine people at Protogen have found a way to strip people of their consciences, allowing their scientists to experiment on their fellow humans without empathy or any other messy feelings getting in the way of their work. Protogen’s lead scientist explains this all to Holden and Miller, at the same time arguing for the importance of understanding the protomolecule, both for science’s sake as well as a means of understanding the aliens who sent it our way since they obviously present a danger to all of humankind.

Holden is livid for a myriad of reasons, including his realization that Protogen’s rationale will most likely be accepted by the powers that be on Earth and Mars (who died, anyway? Just some Belters), and that they’ll likely be allowed to continue their “research.” Despite his disgust, it’s Miller who, without warning, shoots the scientist, killing him then and there. Holden is hella pissed at Miller for this and lets Miller know that, once they reach Tycho Station, he’s no longer welcome aboard the Roci.

Back on Tycho Station, Miller and Johnson come up with a plan. Johnson commandeers the Nauvoo — a MASSIVE generation ship being built by the Mormons at Tycho for traveling between the stars — with the intention of using the ship as a cue ball to sink the eight-ball that is Eros Station into the corner pocket that is the Sun. Miller leads a crew to Eros, where they set bombs at all the ports. Ain’t nothing good left inside and ain’t nothing getting in or out before the protomolecule is destroyed. (As far as we know, there is only a little of the molecule left, and that’s locked inside a safe in Fred Johnson’s office.) But, when the bomb crew goes to leave Eros, Miller — his life a shambles and his heart and mind still fixated on Julie Mao — decides to stay.

And it’s a good thing he does! Because the plan…she doesn’t so much go as planned. Just before the Nauvoo hits Eros, the station — in defiance of most of the laws of physics — dodges the larger ship and launches itself toward the largest concentration of humanity in the system, Earth, at a speed no human-made ship can even come close to matching.

Miller takes one of the bombs meant for the outside of Eros and enters the station, hoping to destroy it’s maneuvering capabilities, but, as he travels through the creepy, infested halls of the station and listens to the sounds and voices on the internal communication system, he makes out Julie’s voice. She’s controlling Eros, believing she’s piloting her personal racing ship. Miller finds Julie, who has become one with the protomolecule inside her and the station, and convinces her to send Eros crashing into Venus instead of Earth.

After hitting the surface of Venus — HUZZAH! — the protomolecule begins assembling some sort of massive structure — huzzah? — which means that humanity hasn’t been saved so much as given a bit more time. The book ends with Fred Johnson preparing to speak at a peace conference, to hopefully start mending relations between Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets, to help everyone in the system look at the bigger picture. His address begins thusly:

“‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘We stand at a crossroads. On one hand, there is the very real threat of mutual annihilation. On the other…’

He paused for effect.

‘On the other, the stars.'” (p. 561)

And that’s only the beginning…

In Conclusion: In Leviathan Wakes, the primary voices of Holden and Miller serve as great foils. They’re both driven relentlessly toward justice, but, at the end of the day, Holden is optimism personified. In the series, he repeatedly gives individuals and humanity as a whole the benefit of the doubt. He believes that the good in people will eventually win out over the bad. Miller, on the other hand, has been ground down to a pessimistic little nubbin of a man. Ground down by his job, his relationships, his experiences. Through his eyes, giving someone a second chance is just giving them another opportunity to let him down. Which makes it all the more interesting that Holden survives and Miller doesn’t. The Expanse book series is often referred to as “dark” and “gritty,” and it definitely does have its moments, but Holden and his crew are the heart of the series, and that heart beats with hope, both for themselves and for the fate of the human race.

There are, of course, other events that take place in Leviathan Wakes — for instance, Holden and Naomi become lovers — but I think this is a pretty comprehensive recap. Finally, my dear and patient Chicers, below are my casting choices for the crew of the Rocinante, Miller, and Julie Mao.

Recasting Fred Johnson

Real quick: In my last “Crossing the Expanse” post, I cast Idris Elba as Fred Johnson. With further thought, I would like to use a one-time switcheroo. Recast in the role is James Pickens, Jr.

He’s probably most widely known for playing Dr. Richard Webber on all 300 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy (as a fan, I say that with love). Pickens is well used on Grey’s, but he’s also, IMHO, greatly underappreciated, and I think he has more than enough depth, gravitas, and likability to do the character of Fred Johnson proud.

Captain James “Jim” Holden

Holden is described as a hardy, blue-eyed farm boy from Montana. And even though Steven Strait doesn’t fit Corey’s physical description, that’s not my issue with him. My issue is that Strait… He just doesn’t give off the right vibe. Holden has so much charisma and charm that, in several instances, he’s given much more leeway than he should; he also gets himself out of more than one jam with nothing more than a quick joke and a smile. If we could go back in time, I’d chose an ER-era George Clooney — minus the Julius Cesar haircut, please and thank you.

But, since we’re casting my fictional production in the here and now, I gotta go with Jake McDorman. You may recognize McDorman from any number of shows or movies, such as HBO’s adaptation of Watchmen, What We Do in the Shadows, Lady Bird, or the sadly short-run, made-for-TV version of Limitless.

Sure, he fits the authors’ physical description more closely, but, more importantly, I think he fits Holden’s personality to a T.

Commanding Officer Naomi Nagata

I love Naomi, even though, for the first few books, she’s a bit of a cipher. Her saving graces are her brilliance, her extreme capability at her jobs — both as an engineer and Holden’s XO — and her refusal to ever give up. Her relationship with Holden is nicely portrayed as well. It begins as something cute and fragile and grows into something mature and unbreakable. For that reason, I was looking for someone who could play the confident, capable Naomi one moment and the shy woman who hides behind her hair the next. And I think I found her in Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

You may recognize her from Doctor Who, where she played Martha’s sister. Or from one of the best Black Mirror episodes of all time, “San Junipero.” Regardless, she’s gorgeous, smart, and has shown her appeal and her range.

Pilot Alex Kamal

I wish Cas Anvar was taller and that his hair was thinner, but other than that, I think his casting is spot-on. He’s got good comedic timing and speaks with that silly Martian drawl like he was born to it. (Side note: I don’t know why they can’t make the Martians and the Belters look more like how they’re described in the books. Since both groups grew up in areas with less gravity, they’re both quite a bit taller than humans, and Belters are also skinnier and have larger heads. I mean, if Peter Jackson could make the 6’1″ John Rhys-Davies appear as a dwarf in The Lord of the Rings, then why can’t Alex and Naomi be taller than Holden and Amos?)

Anyhoodles, my only real issue with Alex on the show is his backstory, which is very different from his backstory in the books. I suppose giving him a family is TV shorthand for giving him something worth fighting for, but the one thing that Holden, Naomi, Alex, and Amos all have in common is their lack of familial ties. Well, Holden has eight parents back on Earth — he’s the only child in a family co-op — but he’s far removed from them, both literally and figuratively, and that gap only grows as the stories go on. Regardless, the crew of the Roci have few outside connections, which only strengthens the bond between them. So, Alex doesn’t really need a nuclear family back on Mars because, by the end of Leviathan Wakes, he has one on the Rocinante.

Chief Engineer Amos Burton

Amos is the simplest, complex character of the entire series. He’s a sociopath who’s aware of his lack of a conscience, and while he occasionally uses that to his advantage, more often than not he seems determined to make up for his shortcomings. He starts as Naomi’s right-hand man, holding her opinions above everyone else’s, including Holden’s. However, as the books go on, and we learn more about him, his allegiances don’t so much change as they spread to cover others. And God help you if you mess with his people.

With this depth and duality, I could only come up with one name: Tom Hardy.

I know! I did also suggest him as Roarke in my imagined In Death TV series adaptation, but what can I say? The dude has range! And, I believe, the skill to play the fine line between Scary Amos and Endearing Amos.

Detective Joseph “Joe” Aloysius Miller

Ah, the reason for my recasting. So, Miller is the epitome of a hard-boiled detective. He’s beaten down and jaded beyond belief, and yet, somehow, he still falls for the nearly indomitable Julie Mao. (Or at least his version of her.) Have you seen Luther? Then you’ll understand my switcheroo.

Detective Chief Inspector John Luther is one of the best portrayals of a hard-boiled detective striving to work within the system on modern television, and that’s mostly to do with Elba’s nuanced performance.

Medic Shed Garvey

There is only one man who could fill this good, yet truncated role…

As I’m sure you’re aware, Bean has died in films and TV shows more than twenty times, usually near the beginning of what is known to be a larger series. He’s like the Angel of Death, if the Angel of Death only killed himself over and over and over again.

Juliette “Julie” Andromeda Mao

Florence Faivre does a fine job, and I see no reason to recast her. Ah, but when her sister, Clarissa Mao, shows up later in the series… I have BIG plans for her.

And that’s all the news that’s fit to print for now, dear Chicers! Next time around, we’ll tackle Caliban’s War, wherein one of the greatest literary duos of all time — Chrisjen Avarsarala and Bobbie Draper — is born.