Abaddon's Gate

I didn’t love this one as much as the first two. A ton of offscreen people died. Plenty on-screen too, of course, and some that I really liked. The idea, I think, was to redeem some folks who made terrible decisions. We were definitely supposed to sympathize with Clarissa Mao, for instance. Forgive her, maybe, by the end. I don’t really buy it, myself. I mean, I’ll probably think about her - assuming she comes back in subsequent stories - how the authors intend, but it’ll only be by ignoring her past entirely. It’s impossible to forgive the stuff she did. The lives she took. This ended with just the barest hint of what the alien investigator is still expecting from Holden. If there weren’t the rest of the series sitting on this kindle waiting for me to read it, I might be kind of pissed about how little of that story was revealed in this book. I mean, some tiny steps were taken, but mostly this was about humans being stupid and hurting each other for stupid reasons.

The end of the second book was SO GOOD to me. Like we got this sort of extension of a war over the unknown from the first book, but the politcal games had much higher stakes. And then EVERYTHING GOES SUPER WEIRD and you're left with the "To be continued..." floating on the proverbial screen.

This is my first re-read of the first 3 books, but this was the book I remembered the least about. And it's something of a bottle episode, but in the tradition of the best bottle episodes, there are stakes afoot. And better yet, there's a massive grey area for those stakes, at least from the point-of-view of some characters.

The finale is easily the best action-movie plot we've gotten in the series so far. It was simple, well executed, and a helluva lot of fun to read.

My only complaint is that Bull almost seems like a stereotype of a character, but we also don't get much of his background. But then we get an incredibly awesome and 3-dimensional character from Anna Volovdov, who is somehow more altruistic than James Holden and seems to be just what the series needs after Holden is taken down a dark path earlier in the series.

I also felt like some of the quippiness in the writing was lacking, but that's just a personal thing. I loved the humor of the second book, and maybe it just didn't match with the stakes of the third.

I've now re-read everything I'd read of the series so far, and I'm venturing into unknown territory with some shorts, and then Cibola Burn!

So there were stories in here I loved. GRRMs story about The Turtle was a lot of fun, and I thought the one about the Four Aces during the Red Scare was pretty compelling. The last story of the book, "Comes a Hunter" was absolutely fantastic.

But then some of it seems like filler. Some of it, like "Strings" seems to exist for shock value and to make the world seem darker. That story in particular isn't necessarily badly written, but the content was pretty dark/edgy and a bit out of my personal comfort zone. YMMV.

I remember reading this before and really liking it, but now I'm a little less in tune with it. It very much reads like a ode to an era of comics I never really experienced (Silver/Gold age) seen through the lense of the grimdark comics of the 80s/90s (aspects of which haven't aged well, there is a contant and unironic undercurrent of toxic masculinity that gets pretty tiresome). I might read the second, but I'm not in a hurry.

Since I listened to the audiobook: Luke Daniels does a FANTASTIC job as the whole cast. His chapters as Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson were spot on. He manage to give each character a uniqueness that made it fun to listen to.