This is the fourth book in The Expanse series, and sees the focus both narrow back to our main crew while also expanding into genuinely new worlds. I have been making my way through both the books and the TV series at the same time, and am now at the point where my reading is how way beyond my TV progress, but it’s ok.
In this series, focal character James Holden is a perennial optimist, with noble ideas about humanity and truth and morality. He’s endlessly hopeful about people and the choices we can make, and he is perennially both disappointed and proved right as the person at the centre of events.
In this novel, people have gone through the recently discovered ring gates to find a habitable planet in a place that is very far away from our solar system. These people are refugees from disasters in earlier novels, and are desperate to find a place to live after having been turned away from closer planets and stations. The planet they stumble upon is rich in lithium, so the government factions back in Sol have designated a company to take control of the planet officially. There are refugees, there are explorers of the wilds, and there is overwhelming greed and a need to be right. Holden and the rest of the Rocinante crew, being seen as a truly independent party, are sent to mediate. As you might imagine, things do not go particularly well. There are some great characters in this edition, but there are two returning minor characters from older books who show up out of the blue. One of them makes sense, and one of them was unlikely and made the expanding universe feel a little more Skywalker small than it should.
Cibola refers to a Spanish legend about fictional cities of gold – that wasn’t a word I was familiar with, but one of the seven cities was El Dorada, which was one I did know. This reference is helpful in looking at the themes in this book in particular, but the series overall. People, en masse, are always looking for the next gold rush. This novel is very much a Western in space, with a some humanitarian crisis thrown in for good measure, then sprinkled with ancient alien technology. There is a bit in there where the terrible villain creates an overzealous militia to grab control and it feels a bit to on the nose for me to review today, watching what is happening in Los Angeles right now. People will alway be people, choosing to be “right” and to exert control at the expense of everything else.
Overall, the Corey series is pretty remarkable to me. The books remain tightly plotted, things continue to move quickly, and there isn’t the sprawl I tend to see from authors like Martin and Sanderson. This particular book had some weaker parts, in that we don’t get to spend enough time with the non-Holden Rocinante crew members, but still more than in the previous book.