Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse #8)

The eight book of The Expanse by James S.A. Corey. Spoilers ahead.

I’ve recently realized that I kind of spend too much time summarizing things without spoilers, but I’ll just share the summary from the website and then share my thoughts about stuff, I guess? By now, eight books later, you are not, or you should not, be reading this review unless you are already with me, or you read the book and want my thoughts, so yeah, whatever.

Tiamat’s Wrath finds the crew of the Rocinante fighting an underground war against a nearly invulnerable authoritarian empire, with James Holden a prisoner of the enemy.

Thirteen hundred gates have opened to solar systems around the galaxy. But as humanity builds its interstellar empire in the alien ruins, the mysteries and threats grow deeper.

In the dead systems where gates lead to stranger things than alien planets, Elvi Okoye begins a desperate search to discover the nature of a genocide that happened before the first human beings existed, and to find weapons to fight a war against forces at the edge of the imaginable. But the price of that knowledge may be higher than she can pay.

At the heart of the empire, Teresa Duarte prepares to take on the burden of her father’s godlike ambition, but Teresa has a mind of her own and secrets even her father the emperor doesn’t guess.

And throughout the wide human empire, the scattered crew of the Rocinante fights a brave rear-guard action against Duarte’s authoritarian regime. Memory of the old order falls away, and a future under Laconia’s eternal rule—and with it, a battle that humanity can only lose—seems more and more certain. Because against the terrors that lie between worlds, courage and ambition will not be enough. . .

The second book of the third trilogy was quite the read. There are a lot of things happening that I didn’t see coming, like at all.

Every character here is once again, separated from each other for half the book. This was an incredible choice, as well as the addition of Teresa, who gives us a look into how the Empire really works and how things develop from there. As young as she may be, the responsibilities on her shoulders are quite the burden, and it’s interesting how everything pans out through her choices.

This book barely features Holden’s perspective, as he’s trapped and unable to do a lot. Most of the time he’s just reacting to the choices of everyone else, completely oblivious, although he does make a play, and the way things go from there turn out to be extremely important for his survival.

Elvi is pretty important given her position as a scientist, it was nice to see her and Fayez again, I must admit. Her passion for science continues to be infectious, and through her chapters we will see the aliens at play once more. The cosmical events in this book were something I didn’t see coming at all. The alien artifacts and technology, the measures taken by the Laconian Empire to try and harness such power, and her involvement on a huge plot twist made her chapters truly remarkable to me!

Naomi continues to be an incredibly cool individual, and now her role is more important than ever as part of the Rebellion against the Empire. She really will be travelling all over the place avoiding the enemy, by herself. Dealing with all this without Holden gives way to some emotional moments too.

Bobbie will actually clash with Naomi as another leader, in a friendly enough way. As the captain of the one ship that could actually deal any damage to the Empire, her role will be quite vital on this story, aided by Alex.

Alas, Amos goes missing—said very early on the story—Alex is still a loyal, but tired pilot, and many other things happen.

The writing was as good as ever, the plot twists really got to me. It really felt kind of dark and hopeless and a bit sad at times, with a lot of writing decisions I didn’t see coming, including some unexpected losses or changes to the characters. Beware!

As much as I liked the writing, I think the story got a bit weird at times, like they setup a lot of stuff and powered up the bad guys on the previous book, and ended up backtracking quite a bit here. It makes sense within the story and it’s all justified, but a lot of things felt a little shoved aside to make things much more plausible. Still, I give it a pass.

With how things have gone, I am really looking forward to the finale, there’s still so much that needs to wrap up…

Good stuff.

This is day 84 of #100DaysToOffload