Cibola Burn

Cibola Burn continues James Corey's experiment with new POV characters every novel, which means there's a chance that the new ones are boring. Additionally, the author decides to take an isolated colony plotline that's been done a thousand times by other science-fiction writers, and stretch out hundred pages of plot into five. The result is a slog through chapters of filler where nothing happens, people monologue and threaten but never act, and you find yourself wondering how you were ever entertained by these novels.

Let's start with the characters: they're shallow and one-dimensional. Prax had two qualities and they've been split into Basia and Elvi. The former is only a husband who is afraid for his children, full-stop. If he's going to say something, it's about saving his children. Similiarly, Elvi is only a scientist so wrapped in their own work that she'd probably forget to breathe. Her internal monologuing compares everything to biomes and resource competition. It's what a non-scientist thinks a scientist acts like. This is combined with a cringe-inducing subplot where most of her character growth comes from a literal climax.

Next: many readers complain that Cibola Burn feels like filler. That's because of the plot. First, it's unimaginative. You could pull up an Age of Sail shipwreck story with the same basic plotline: shipwrecked humans at conflict on an isolated island. Add to that a flat and empty plain as your setting, and then provide our characters with nothing to do.

Our POV characters never take the initiative to resolve any of the problems they're faced with (with the exception of Basia's first chapter). Things just 'happen' and our characters respond to external stimulae. Even Jim Holden arrives at humanity's first extra-solar colony to solve internecine conflict, but has no plan other than "sit down and talk to people in a cafeteria." The real main character is Murtry, whose actions drive much of the plot but is not a POV.

In the past, whatever its faults, I was entertained by the Expanse. This time, I'm skimming pages looking for the plot. There's nothing redeeming here. Read the last chapter as the prologue to Book 5.

Not recommended.

All of nature was a record of crisis and destruction and adaptation and flourishing and being knocked back down again.

Going in to Cibola Burn I braced myself and expected there to be a decline in quality. The book was very much enjoyable but the constant setting on Ilus / New Terra did have a negative impact.

We fly out here to this new place, and because we're civilized, we think civilization comes with us. It doesn't. We built it.

What bothered me the most is probably what the book was trying to illustrate: humanity is always in conflict with each other. There may be external forces at play but history has shown that people don't get along at the best of times and when there are racial and class differences on an entirely new and unfamiliar world then it's a recipe for disaster.

Humans fighting with each other on a distant planet isn't new but after encountering it in Seveneves by Neal Stephenson and going in to a bit of a deep dive on that I am more for an eye roll and an internal "here we go again" when it comes up.

And they were all of them days from dying. And, maybe oddly, it was that last fact that made all the rest all right. He was a dead man. They were all dead men. So there was a sense in which he did now didn't matter. He was free to follow his conscience wherever it led.

In November 2014 Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted this in respect to Interstellar:

In #Interstellar: On another planet, around another star, in another part of the galaxy, two guys get into a fist fight.

It was applicable for Seveneves and it's applicable for Cibola Burn. In the end, humans are always looking for a fight.

There was no point to the attack except spite and the kind of violence that passed for meaning in the face of despair.

Weak link or memorable villain? Adolphus Murtry, head of RCE security on the Edward Israel, is a polarizing character to me. While he was explicit on his mission and ensuring that he followed the mandate of the Royal Charter Energy (RCE) to the letter I wasn't sure how I felt about him. At times I agreed with him and admired his strict diligence, and others (and majority) he was a straight up asshole.

He felt like a caricature of someone following things exactly as they should be, deaths of "squatters" be damned and it didn't feel realistic, but it also did. When Murtry faces down imminent death and knowing there is no hope his first thought is to ensure RCE has the final say and there is no opportunity for human compassion or logic.

Can this be how it is? Would humans let others die for their cause? At first it bothered me how strict Murtry followed his orders but then I realized what the book was illustrating and Murtry is no different than any other person involved in confronting inhabitants of a new world/location and forcing his views/beliefs on them.

"The frontier always outpaces the law," Holden said.

As Murtry said, wait until the post office is set up and then Holden and those lawful good characters can show up and have the world they want. But before that can happen there needs to be blood and pain. This may not make for a riveting sci-fi read and it's closer to reality than we would like, but that may not necessarily translate in to a riveting read.

This happens in real life so why did it feel out of place here?

Natives, foreigners and a difference in beliefs and causes is a common enough trait in mankind that "of course" it would continue on a foreign planet in a distance solar system. But still, it was kind of a drag.

The alien world and ecosystem was a fun read and having four biomes together was a unique twist. I would have liked to learn more about the alien planet but there are literally a thousand others so I'm sure the itch I want scratched with fantasy new frontier exploring will come.

His little girl going up to safety. Temporary, sure, but all safety was.

To be fair, there were positives about the book, and they took place off of Ilus. There were still "us and them" tensions and all needed to determine how best to survive with each or not. Once Rocinante, Barbapiccola and Edward Israel all suffered the same fate and realized they were in a decaying orbit the fun factor really increased. I enjoy a light amount of orbital mechanics and crossing that over with MacGyver scenarios was fun to read through.

Even the aliens that had made the artifacts, the protomolecule, the rings, had suffered some vast and cosmic collapse.

The "big bad" is slowly being discussed and while it is kept in the background there is definite foreshadowing that our plucky team of ice haulers will be coming face to face with some unimaginable terror.

Cibola Burn was enjoyable and I applaud their efforts to tackle a topic like colonization and the problems that exist within humanity but the story was a bit scattered. The recipe of the book was squatters vs. RCE, global climate disasters, survival horror and a sprinkle of sci-fi but if the ingredients were in a different order I may have found the book more enjoyable.

"Names matter, boss," Amos said after a moment, a strange look on his big face. "Names change everything."

"We're all here together. Working together. We're taking care of each other. Maybe this is what it takes to resolve all the violence. There were three sides before. There's only one side now."

But, like so many things in life, when you come to the spot where you're supposed to do rituals, you do them.

They'd either agree or they wouldn't. Havelock would kill more of them or he wouldn't. The captain would assert authority or he wouldn't. None of that changed Basia's real problem.

As I read more of these books, I am increasingly impressed with houw the authors can keep widening the scope, such that every time ou as a reader think you have nailed what kind of book this is, they manage to "zoom out" and reveal thwt so far we've only been looking at a smaller part of the greater picture.

Also, I am impressed with how they use their world in a new way in each new book, making each book a different kind of experience even though they are all part of the same greater narrative. Cibola Burn was no exception, possibly the best of the books so far, in my opinion.

I partly agree with some other reviewers that not all the new POV characters are equally interesting. Especially, Havelock was a bit boring IMO. But I liked Basia well enough, and Elvi was a great addition to the gallery.

And the Big Rescue was so well thought out it made me want to learn to paint, just so I could make a painting of it. Good stuff.

The first couple of chapters was quite hard to get through (took me months).

I’m a person who read series because I like the characters in them. The Expanse series tends to start each book with new characters, new worlds, build the scenario and then bring the old characters into it.
For me this means I need to sludge through chapters about people and situations I don’t care about - and it’s not enjoyable for me.

Luckily the story does pick up again when Holden enters the scene and I was able to power through it quite quickly after that.

To be completely honest, this book was the least interesting one out of all the books in this series so far. I don’t know why but the new planet felt kind of bland to me and the characters annoyed me. It seemed that there was an overwhelming need by everyone not to kill dangerous people, and thereby allowing up to put everyone’s lives in danger.

At the risk of it being a spoiler, the epilogue was fantastic and certainly made up for the less than stellar book.