Cibola Burn

Oh, well, this will be a difficult review to write, I guess. I really like this series and its ideas, its wonderful characters, the brilliant writing, etc. etc.Along came “Cibola Burn”: We find ourselves accompanying Holden and his crew through one of the rings into the great unknown - into which a band of settlers from Ganymede made it before him and pretty much started colonising the planet, Ilus, there.Unfortunately for those pioneers, the UN has awarded the “Royal Charter Energy” (RCE), a big Earth corporation, the rights to the afore-mentioned planet - which they refer to as “New Terra”. When RCE tries to get a shuttle down to the planet, it gets blown up by the settlers.Holden is sent to Ilus/New Terra to mediate between the settlers and the RCE guys, only to get caught between both of them.This leads us into a long story about the conflict between the settlers and the RCE people, the “awakening” of the stuff the protomolecule's creators left on the planet, a catastrophic disaster, Miller investigating and, again, leading Holden around. There's sabotage in space and on the planet, a one-dimensional villain whom Amos would have shot on the spot in the previous books and a scientist whom Corey makes fall for Holden - right until she gets laid by someone else and finds out that guy's the real love of her life... Not to mention episodes about “death slugs”, eye-infecting parasites and lots of other “filling materials”.All this just plain made this entire book way too long for its own good. While there was still a lot of suspense, long stretches of describing the atmosphere on the planet after a disaster kept boring me.Last but not least, apart from Holden himself, the entire crew of the Rocinante was somehow not themselves - Alex felt mostly absent, Amos was weirdly subdued, almost completely submissive to Holden and Naomi spends weeks in a brig which we get to witness for far too long.I'm going to take a break from “The Expanse” in favour of another book or two. Blog Facebook Twitter Instagram