Caliban’s War (Review)

Caliban’s War (Review)

nother installment of my up-in-the-favorites scifi series, the crazy-interesting books by a writer team carrying the pseudo name of James S. A. Corey, and what you can view as Season 2 of the Expanse on some of your streaming services.

You’ll remember that in our last review, James, Naomi, Amos and Alex had discovered that there was an alien molecule that was being dicked with by a soulless corporation – their thought: hey, we can really save on space suits if we could alter humans by changing their bodies, down to their DNA, to make them into whatever we want (that’s really pretty much it). To see sorta how this worked, they infected an asteroid station (a big one, with a million test-subjects). The plan did not go as intended, and the fab four (with a porkpie-wearing gone-to-seed detective) had to move Heaven and Earth (mostly Earth) to crash the rogue station into Venus. So, hey, you want more details – read it. Here’s your link to that review.

The deal in this installment is that now, some spin-off corporations are still dicking with the protomolocule. That massive die-back wasn’t enough, but now they want to weaponize it specifically, to make super-soldiers that they can sell to Earth or Mars of the Belt or develop the market. And yes, to make it work, they’ve rounded up a couple of dozen children with weak immunity systems that will be better situated to be turned into crazy blue monsters.

In the first book, we had chapters divided between Holden and Miller (the detective I mentioned). Now, with Miller presumably mushed on Venus, we’ve got new alter-POVs. There is Bobbie (a Martian space marine who is present when the first super-soldier is fire-tested against them). And there is Avasarala, the Indian grandmommie who happens to be a high-ranking Earth official in the UN, and whose language is so foul it needs to be read to be believed. And there is Prax, the little biologist whose daughter has been kidnapped for corporate conversion, pretty much the example of how much suffering a human can go through. So the adventure continues, more secrets are revealed, and crazy shit is just around the corner.

This one is a great read. If you want to get into a solid series that makes space a lot dirtier that your scifi movies do, where it’s actually a working, realistic universe and the characters can be nasty and brutish and loving and funny, you need to pick these up. Easy to find on your bookstore shelves – these mothers are thick!