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Leviathan Falls - spoilers tagged on first page only


Kalbear
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If Kit and family only show up to fulfil the purpose they have in the story, they don't fulfil the purpose they have in the story, because we don't know them and have no reason to care. They become obvious story levers instead of characters.

Those earlier chapters with them set the scene. There's a bunch of stuff in there about how Bakari has personality (at least in the eyes of his father) despite being very young, and about the family dynamics that let us care about their fate.

I don't feel the first part of the book drags so I don't see a problem to solve, but if I did, this wouldn't be the solution.

ps recalling those early scenes, I have to say poor Giselle. I guess she wouldn't exactly have been dropping by Nieuwestadt weekly but as things turned out, she never got to see Kit or Bakari again. But somehow Alex wound up getting to spend the rest of his life with them. And it was all because of Alex's best friend in the world. I feel like Giselle gets a seat at the high table at the We Hate James Holden Club meetings, which I believe are very well attended. :P

Edited by mormont
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Finally got around to reading this. I liked it pretty well, thought I agreed that it dragged a bit and was overly repetitive of earlier character arcs. The lack of any hint at what Filip is up to stood out to me as very strange--not that he needed to play any role in the story, but like damn Naomi could at least know he was alive?

I did really enjoy the whole series, but it never was quite as good as I thought it could be. Solid B+ from me. Miller was my favorite character so it was probably hard to fully reel me in after killing him off in the first book. Seeing him return again was a nice touch, especially to have someone besides the kind of insufferable Holden there at the end.

I really did not like the "dreamers" interludes here. Felt like I was wading through nonsensical bad poetry, but that I couldn't skip it in case there was plot relevant information there. 

I did cry at the end. Alex getting the Roci, but losing his crew, but finally being there for his family. Naomi losing Jim and never knowing Filip made it. Amos dying and then being not-Amos and having to watch everyone he knows die. And James Holden got to fulfill his deepest fantasies by dying a martyr that no one asked for. 

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Finally got around to reading this book too. I liked it and thought it was a strong conclusion to a book series I haven't always loved or liked.

I agree with pretty much everyone here that the first half of the book had major pacing issues. It's not just that Tanaka is (at least at the beginning of the book) yet another one note Expanse villain ranting about how much she hates Jim Holden, and the endless cat and mouse chase. It's also Teresa Duarte - she was a really hard character to care about. The universe is in constant danger of disintegrating. Who cares if she gets to live with her aunt and go to school? It doesn't help that she doesn't do much in the end, and that her character arc ends on a really depressing note.

But in the second half of the book, Teresa aside, things picked up. Tanaka as our main POV into humanity sharing consciousness was surprisingly effective. To me, the book series has always been better when it focuses on alien weirdness than human was and politics, and I loved pretty much everything from that perspective. I was expecting more traditional exposition on the Romans and Goths, and I was surprised that I enjoyed the fact that everything wasn't explained. I feel like I got a good enough grounding in what the two sides were about while they still feel alien and mysterious. That's pretty cool. And then the climax was a big success, especially with the return of Miller. There's nothing wrong with predictable if you do it well and deliver on the emotional stakes.

My only couple of late-game plot quibbles was that I didn't really understand how Duarte's hive mind effect was able to become so powerful and affect people all over the universe, even if they hadn't passed through the ring gates. I also felt we could have used some more denouement. I loved the epilogue, but it did feel strange to end both Teresa's and Naomi's arcs right after the big battles where they lose nearly everyone they care about.

Kudos to "Corey" on wrapping this series up well. And I am very excited for Abraham's return to fantasy.

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I think the key to Tanaka and Teresa is the climactic scene with Duarte. Recall that Teresa is the first to try to physically separate him from the station, but Tanaka is the one who actually does it. Teresa and Tanaka are there to contrast one another. Teresa is Duarte's actual daughter, his chosen heir, the one person who (until now) he's had a human connection to, but she rejects his ideology, rejects the protomolecule and the destiny he sets out for her, runs away and spends the book making human connections with James and the crew. Tanaka is Duarte's metaphorical daughter, someone who was with him from the beginning and bought into his fascist ideology, and who spends the book rejecting human connections. Tanaka only cares about her independence and views human interactions through a lens of power dynamics (including that final confrontation), while Teresa has genuine compassion for her father. That's why Tanaka can succeed at severing Duarte's connection to the station (and thus to the rest of humanity) while Teresa cannot. But the cost to Tanaka of asserting her independence is her life.

That's a theme we see throughout the book - the benefits of human connections weighed against the importance of being an individual. It's humanity's individualism (contrasted with the collectivity of the protomolecule builders) that saves them from the Goths long enough for that scene to even take place. And it's Holden's individual decision and self-sacrifice that saves humanity in the end as well, and that's even called out as ironic in the text, given his professed beliefs.

Anyway, to get to that we have to spend a bit of time with both characters and while I agree the school diversion could have been cut or at least replaced with something else, I think it worked OK for me. It's really setting up that later conflict: Teresa is saved in the school scene because of her connections to the crew, while Tanaka fails because she doesn't work with her team, she just tells them what to do.

Edited by mormont
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On 1/6/2022 at 12:48 AM, mormont said:

If Kit and family only show up to fulfil the purpose they have in the story, they don't fulfil the purpose they have in the story, because we don't know them and have no reason to care. They become obvious story levers instead of characters.

Those earlier chapters with them set the scene. There's a bunch of stuff in there about how Bakari has personality (at least in the eyes of his father) despite being very young, and about the family dynamics that let us care about their fate.

I don't feel the first part of the book drags so I don't see a problem to solve, but if I did, this wouldn't be the solution.

ps recalling those early scenes, I have to say poor Giselle. I guess she wouldn't exactly have been dropping by Nieuwestadt weekly but as things turned out, she never got to see Kit or Bakari again. But somehow Alex wound up getting to spend the rest of his life with them. And it was all because of Alex's best friend in the world. I feel like Giselle gets a seat at the high table at the We Hate James Holden Club meetings, which I believe are very well attended. :P

... and this is why I'm staring a #ReleaseTheNamiAndWeiCut campaign. :P

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Just finished the book and overall I enjoyed it.

It did drag, especially early on, but the second half was quite good. Not the best installment of the bunch, yet I found the ending satisfying. After more than a decade, I'll miss these characters. . .

Definitely one of the best SFF series of the new millennium!

Edited by Lord Patrek
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Just saw that Dan and Ty are going to be on Amazon live (whatever that is) with Cara Gee and Shohreh Aghdashloo talking about Leviathan Falls, the show, and the Expanse in general.  It's at 430pm ET US, so two hours from now.  

Link:

https://www.amazon.com/live/broadcast/9a93cba9-44ba-46c7-9313-fd4909b0caca/ref=live_prod_jamessacorey_01222?location=discover

 

Edited by Lermo T.I. Krrrammpus
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I finished reading it yesterday. It was not the strongest entry in the series, but the ending to the series as a whole was quite good. I also liked the fact that they more or less offered an explanation for Duarte's actions from the previous books -- they make a lot more sense if he was influenced by the protomolecule from the time where he started his transformation.

The one thing I did not quite like is the entities beyond the gates messing with physical constants. It's an interesting idea, but it's not clear how this would work over only a certain volume of space and interval of time. Also, I would have to double check, but I think disrupting chemistry is not actually that hard if you can mess with things like the speed of light or the mass of the electron.

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On 1/9/2022 at 7:51 AM, Caligula_K3 said:

My only couple of late-game plot quibbles was that I didn't really understand how Duarte's hive mind effect was able to become so powerful and affect people all over the universe, even if they hadn't passed through the ring gates.

So this is somewhat partially explained in the last 3 books, but essentially: human minds are effectively entangled at a nonlocal level when they interact with each other in any way. Duarte sees this entanglement in PR when talking with Singh's child at the epilogue, and we see other bits of it later here and there. This entanglement is partially what Duarte uses to return his consciousness to his body.

When he uses the ring space station to stop and reverse the Goth attack, he does so by directly utilizing this entanglement on every mind in the ring space at that moment - using their mental power to 'lift' more and utilize the tool that the hive minds originally did. This has the immediate effect of tying all of those consciousnesses together in the same way that the Romans normally existed, with Duarte's mind being the primary given its power at the space station. That entanglement with Duarte and the station and each other starts spreading to anyone who has been entangled with those people, with the faster spread due to deeper or longer connections with that person. Because it is a nonlocal connection it started hitting everyone everywhere, spreading not on distance or proximity lines but on connections to other people. 

This is also why the Goth weapon worked against the hive mind - because the hive mind was interconnected everywhere, so affecting one person and obliterating that consciousness spread instantaneously across the mind network. 

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1 hour ago, Kalsandra said:

This is also why the Goth weapon worked against the hive mind - because the hive mind was interconnected everywhere, so affecting one person and obliterating that consciousness spread instantaneously across the mind network. 

That fact confuses me.  I would think that kind of “Human Hive mind” would make us more vulnerable to the Goths rather than better able to resist the Goths…

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1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

That fact confuses me.  I would think that kind of “Human Hive mind” would make us more vulnerable to the Goths rather than better able to resist the Goths…

It does! Ish. If the goths were able to fire their weapon again, it would destabilize the network and probably make people either not be able to communicate that way or would frag their mind like Duarte. 

But it wouldn't be able to end us, because we have those heavy meat bodies and brains associated with our consciousness, whereas the Romans' consciousness was likely an entirely distributed alocal consciousness around light transfer and never had a physical hard brain which stored that info. 

And because we had so many consciousnesses - instead of just one - we could utilize the system in the ring gate to push back far better than the Romans ever could. 

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Over in the show thread was talking about great scenes from the books that are especially cinematic.  One I would love to see on film would be Bobbie vs the Tempest.  Didn't want to mention it there for spoilers but maybe my favorite end of arc for a character ever that i can think of right now.  

 

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1 hour ago, Larry of the Lake said:

Over in the show thread was talking about great scenes from the books that are especially cinematic.  One I would love to see on film would be Bobbie vs the Tempest.  Didn't want to mention it there for spoilers but maybe my favorite end of arc for a character ever that i can think of right now.  

 

I assume you mean other than the tabby cat in The Second Apocalypse. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Finished late last week.  Glad this thread was here...I think I got a better understanding of the Goths/Romans from reading here than in the book itself. 

The epilogue I found simultaneously interesting/disappointing.  I would have liked a quick note on what happened to all of the major characters.  Are Cara and Xan alive as 1000 year old children?  I'm curious how Amos is viewed by everyone else on Earth - as some sort of quasi-diety?  Does Amos even remember much of his time on the Roci at this point - it's been 1000 years since then!

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

I just finished the book, and I felt like as an individual book, it was a pretty weak entry (possibly the weakest of the series).  The pacing is poor, several key characters are weak, and the Dreamer sequences are IMO a real chore. 

But as a finale of a 9 book series, it is totally successful.  The final showdown goes the way we expected, but it really works.  Bringing Miller back was great, I actually laughed out loud from his first line.  The buildup over nine books had a real payoff and made sense, something many good authors have failed to deliver. 

In all, being a successful conclusion is much more important than being a strong single entry.  A bad conclusion could undermine the 8 books that came before, and this instead enhances it.  This series has been a great ride, and I look forward to rereading it in a few years. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I honestly don't know how I felt about the finale, as I finished it this afternoon .. but the final two or three chapters, prior to the epilogue, was giving me anxiety...

Edited by Jaxom 1974
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Finally finished it and thoroughly enjoyed the conclusion and send-off of the characters and story. I really liked bringing Miller back and having the references to Julie Mao and Eros. That happened so long ago it was almost refreshing to see it tie back so far. The final chapters had a nostalgic longing that I feel when I know a good story is coming to an end. Jim and Naomi's final conversation was endearing and the events that followed felt completely in-character. I was worried that there weren't going to be enough pages left to address the goth situation but upon reflection, I feel they provided a good enough explanation for them and the romans. @karaddin's summary post earlier in this thread was a great cliff notes version of it. I agree that the Kit chapters seemed pointless and the dreamers chapters were difficult given it was almost meaningless, poetic exposition.

So a very good finale that had me thinking about it for hours afterward which is a great sign. Will definitely be looking forward to a future re-read in a couple of years, as well as any of the new content Abraham and Franck come up with. 

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Memory's Legion (the short story collection) showed up at my office today.  The advantage of preordering so many things and losing track of them is that sometimes you have an early birthday present show up!

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