"The odds of -"
"Don't think about the odds," Bobbie said. "Think about the stakes. think about how much we lose if we take the risk and it goes wrong."

I exceeded my typical reading pace on this book because it was real good. Any misgivings I had about previous books was swept away with Nemesis Games. This book was everything I needed but also realize it couldn't exist without multiple books before it to support and build characters.

No, it wasn't. It was the scariest fucking answer to Fermi's paradox I can think of.

The variety of the POV chapters was excellent. I would see who the next chapter was about and push through to read more and in record time the book was over. Each POV offered needed backstory on characters and a very riveting story to move it along.

Learning about Amos, Alex or Naomi wouldn't have been possible in the first few books and I'm grateful that the reader was given an opportunity to learn who those characters are now and then get insight to their past through the individual chapters.

"There aren't any new starts," Bobbie said. "All the new ones pack the old ones along with them. If we ever really started fresh, it'd mean not having a history anymore. I don't know how to do that."

I am a sucker for an Ender's Game style "war to end all war" and Nemesis Games delivered a devastating blow to humanity. There are billions of lives impacted, a planet that receives a total reset like Ilus (from Cibola Burn) and yet the story of humanity and family was the shining light in all the madness.

It wasn't something about himself he'd ever had to face before, but Holden was coming to realize how much he needed family.

This was what family looked like, sounded like, how they acted. Even the new crew who he'd been trying not to resent felt more like distant cousins who'd come for a long visit than interlopers.

Between the destruction and chaos this is a story about family and growth. Families that existed in their past and the family they have now. This was the reason why I gave the book five stars because it played against the carnage and violence in a beautiful juxtaposition.

The crew of the Rocinante struggles with their past, their choices and being away from each other. The realization that they are stronger together than apart is reinforced and somehow, someway, across the vast emptiness of space, they rejoin each other.

They'd given humans the opportunity to destroy themselves, and as a species, they'd leaped on it.

He couldn't help but feel like humanity kept learning the wrong lessons from its traumas.

And yet the biggest thread to humanity is itself. There was a bit of reference to the big bad hiding beyond the ring but for now humanity has all the tools it needs to destroy each other and it will do so merrily.

Expanse is showing that humanity is set on destroying itself but also that people can change. The growth of characters like Amos or Clarissa (and how others perceive them) is some of the most enjoyable aspects of this series. How is ones past transgressions different from another? Can they be forgiven simply because you like that person more?

It's a fine line the story walks and Nemesis Games fires on all cylinders as it raises ethical questions in the face of an apocalypse.