Scattered Thoughts: Nemesis Games

Hey there. I read and enjoyed the fifth entry in the Expanse series, entitled Nemesis Games, by James S.A. Corey, who is actually two writers writing together, and I never really understood why two people wouldn't just put their own damn names on a book rather than inventing a nom de guerre for the both of them as a collective. That's a little weird. Anyway, I suspect that Daniel Abraham does the bulk of the writing of these books, so more power to him if he wants to accede to a collective. Some spoilers will follow, but nothing too severe.

I really liked the first few books in this series, and I was hoping that it was angling towards a relatively self-contained group of three or four books that would tell a story simply and let it stand on its own. Nemesis Games seems to imply that there are at least two or three books left in the series, which isn't necessarily ideal. I like these books; I like the writing, and I like the characters, and I would like them to end at some point. I don't necessarily have the patience to follow them for another five or ten years' worth of novels.

That’s probably not entirely true, of course: I’m still reading all of the Old Man’s War stuff that John Scalzi pumps out, even though that series also shows no real sign of dying down or coming to any kind of summation. I’ll give Abraham and Ty Franck credit for pulling the series back into a knowable reality with Nemesis Games, though, after shooting for the extraterrestrial with the last two books. The ring and gate system gives them an almost unlimited array of worlds on which to tell stories, but Cibola Burn felt limp compared to the other books in the series, and I think the authors work best when they’re dealing heavily with the politics of the Earth system. I’m sure they’ll want to resolve the mysteries of the protomolecule before they wrap up the series, but I have a feeling they can do that without getting too far down the rabbit hole of superluminal drives and time travel that they’ve avoided so well thus far.

Anyway, I’m cagey on the specifics here, obviously, just because I don’t like even hinting at plot points for media these days, but I will say that the strategy of finally breaking up the crew into individual plotlines for once works well, putting each crewmember into credible danger with largely satisfactory resolutions to their plights. (Although the speed with which the crew is broken up is hilariously rapid.)

I guess I hope that the authors don’t drag things out too long, especially not if it’s for the sake of dreaming up future plotlines for a kinda-shitty-looking SyFy series. Cibola Burn already feels like a bit of a filler novel if you sketch out the arc of the series thus far; hopefully the events therein will loop back around to some kind of importance. I’d be happy if they wrap this thing up in a couple more books and not make it some kind of ten-novel megaseries. I can already think of one reason why that might not be a good idea.

What's next? I have the new Kim Stanley Robinson book and the rest of the recent Old Man's War novellas queued up on my Kindle, although I'm going to try and hold off on them until I jet down to Mexico this weekend for a bit of a stay in the fun and the sun. (I am required to be out of the country when a new Ernest Cline book is published as they act like very powerful emetics for me.) Kim Stanley Robinson's arguably my favorite living writer, and his new book sounds really promising after the misfire that was Shaman. I'll try to crank through it on a beach somewhere and maybe write about it when I get back.

I claim to despise books that continue on with the same characters book after book after book without any real end game in sight, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the occasional John Sandford novel. I get the hesitation to move along from a business standpoint - if something sells, it's relatively risk free to keep on keeping on, especially in the writing market where fans are fickle fuckers. But I also think that understimates the intelligence of readers as a whole and does them a disservice. Eventually Wheel of Time became a giant running joke rather than something remotely interesting. Game of Thrones stopped being entertaining and became more of an exercise in squeezing water from a stone, what, two books ago?

I guess it boils down to what a writer wants, and that's not a black and white picture. It's easy to look in from the outside and say that they should complete a story, but food on the table is a pretty cool thing. Even big names in writing, when facing a bad year of sales, see their income tank. It caan be really hard to let a book go, too. I'm not sure writers - particularly those of genre fiction - get to necessarily have the closure we as readers get.

But for the lucky few writers who can either afford or are crazy enough to not give a fuck, we usually wind up with something more special as readers when we hit a firm The End. I wish that was the case with more and more of these long-running, long-winded sci-fi and fantasy affairs, but the remarkable quality of the books we're getting from both genres these days (as well as horror, to a slightly lesser extent) more than makes up for the volume.

It's one of the coolest times to be a reader. I love it.

I, too, first suspected this may have involved Resident Evil in some way. But then with the way my mind is wired I'm seemingly always trying to link everything to Resident Evil in some manner...

@rorie yeah Nemesis Games is way better than Cibula Burns and bringing back some "crowd pleasers" never really hurts, though the some of the plot development is a bit crazy. What is your opinion about the epilogue, I personally disliked it for what it is hinting at.

Orbit announced today the acquisition of three new novels by James S.A. Corey, to be books 7-9 in their New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-nominated “Expanse” series.

I can no longer read the word nemesis without thinking of this:

I only remember it vaguely, alas, but I'm all in favor of more inter-system chaos if it propels the books forward.

God, I must have missed that. That's probably too many books for the series, but hopefully they'll wrap it up satisfactorily.

@rorie: well yeh kinda hard to talk about it without spoilering it to much; but eh we'll see how the the additions to the roci turn out. Probably a lot of dumb fun

Thanks for the blog, Rorie. In thanks, I present you with a dog that has discovered in-car air conditioning:

Good stuff Matt. I just started Cibola Burn last week. Hoping it pulls me through. I like the politics stuff as well, but I also really like the sci-fi protomolecule stuff as a ever present "threat" of something else. Can't wait to see where it goes. Part of me started thinking how fun would the books be if in the end, even after accessing the gates it was determined humans were in fact the last bastion of sentient life in the entire UNIVERSE (big echo).......pretty friggin scary and lonely.

Woah hold on I didn't know there were more Old Man's War stories, I only read the first one. you've just blown my mind I'm going to have to investigate these immediately

Yeah, he's added a bunch of stuff to that universe. It got a bit scattered after the first novel, but it's all well-written. His other stuff is good, too.