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.