Review: Babylon's Ashes

Babylon's Ashes by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I love this series. A lot. But this book didn't really work for me; here's why. (I'll try to avoid or flag any major spoilers, but at the very least I'm going to have to talk about what _isn't_ in the book. Run now if you must.)

First and foremost, the book is a bit slow getting started. Essentially nothing happens in the first 250 pages except we are introduced to a new(ish) character, and get a nonsensical pasted-in action scene that has nothing to do with anything, and clearly only exists so that there would be an "except" when I said that nothing happens in the first 250 pages. Part of this slowness comes from, in essence, panning the camera back. Previous books in this series have covered huge issues of humanity-wide significance, but they've always done so from a very personal level. The epic events are our backdrop, sure, but it's really a very personal story about our collection of characters. This book changes that focus rather drastically. Here we have a story that is quintessentially _about_ solar-system-wide politics, and we just check in with our characters every once in awhile to see what they think about it all. All of our old friends are here - the banter between the shipmates is still wonderfully well-written and will still make you laugh - but they're mostly irrelevant to the plot of this book. Even when they're actively involved in events they feel sort of pasted-in. For instance, Bobbie the badarse space marine proves again and again how superior she is at this fighting stuff. So why, when they're sending a desperate guerilla mission to kick badguy arse, don't they just send the entire complement of Bobbies _that they demonstrably have_? Why are they sending the Rocinante and a handful of talented amateurs with handguns? Oh right; because they are our heroes, and this has to be about them.

And because they're so pasted-in to the story, none of our old friends really change much in this book. All that great development of Alex and Amos and Naomi from the last few books is gone, replaced by banter and Avasarala swearing comically. In actual fact, and much as I love Holden and the crew, I think this would have been a far better book if they were all left mostly out. Tell the story entirely from Michio, Avasarala, and Filip's points of view and you'll capture the essence of the story with characters who are actively evolving and growing, and as a bonus you'll have the time to flesh them out properly.

Meanwhile this panning back of the camera has another effect; we can see how silly the story to date has gotten. When it was the backdrop to Naomi's desperate struggle, it didn't matter that Marco and everyone following him is clearly an idiot. You just passed over niggling details as not what the story was about. But now we pull back to a wider view of politics and military actions, and we expect answers to those nagging questions. What was Marco hoping to achieve by blowing up Earth? We spent the first four books of this series getting hammered by the fact that the Earthers keep the Belters virtually enslaved by their dependence on things they can only get from Earth, like food and the drugs to encourage bone growth in zero-g. What was his plan to supply those, after he blew up the only known source? It better have been really good, or the Belters wouldn't buy it - they are, we have it continually drilled into us, super-focused on such issues, because anyone who wasn't died. But it's never explained to the reader, apart from a brief mention that they had a plan (unspecified), but sort of forgot to follow it in the fighting. Who'd have thought there'd be fighting when they blew up the world? *gasp* I've been wondering about the answer to this question for a book and a half, but happily lending the authors some Willing Suspension of Disbelief because it wasn't germane to the then-current story. To have a character suddenly yank it into plot-central and expect me to be shocked at the dire straights these idiots find themselves in was just insulting.

Likewise, in the last book we're happy to handwave some terrorists managing to briefly steal a military ship or two (as unlikely as that may seem to anyone who ever served in the navy) because it was just the backdrop to the story of the people on board that ship. But in this book it becomes the central plot that somehow they stole, not a couple of ships, but literally half of the Martian navy. Imagine terrorists stealing half of the US navy in the middle of the cold war. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying you'd better have a _really_ good explanation for how they pulled it off. "They just sailed away and fudged some paperwork" doesn't really cut it. And then they steal half the navy, but half of _those_ sail away over the horizon, and they magically manage to supply and maintain the quarter they have left, and manage to crew them without training well enough to fight off the other half _plus_ the entire pissed-off navy of Earth. And we can't ignore the silliness of any of this any more because it's not secondary; it's the core story that the book is telling.

So we have a ludicrous war story that continually forces us to examine its' own ludicrousness. And we have our cadre of old friends artificially pasted into the middle of it. But at least we set up a huge epic space battle for a climax... and then the book ends. I don't want to spoil how, but a Big Ole Deus Ex Machina drops in and the book just stops. We don't get our battle. Nothing is resolved. We don't learn a single thing in this entire book about the protomolecule or it's makers. We learn essentially nothing about Duarte's half of the stolen Martian fleet that was the big cliffhanger from the _last_ book. Previous books in this series have done an excellent job of telling a good stand-alone story, while still progressing the overall plot of the series in significant ways. This book fails on both counts; we get no progress through a story that doesn't really work.

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