The Churn

The best of the Expanse novellas I've read so far. Amos' origin story. Love the character so no surprise I loved his backstory.

Back to the solid novellas! Really interesting dive into Amos and his start in life! For the first time ever I saw the “twist” coming a mile off

This genuinely made me uncomfortable. If you're wondering if you NEED to read it and aren't someone who has to consume every side story that isn't essential, don't read it. You really don't need to. It's just uncomfortable.

Amos is one of those characters that has an air of mystery and charisma surrounding him, so much so that you start to wonder what's the story behind the man. The Churn manages to offer a glimpse into his coming-of-age (and coming-of-self, of sorts) story while providing a small window of Baltimore, Amos's home city, which allows for a grounded approach to the Expanse universe as a whole. With the story being straightforward, there is not much downtime from start to finish. Very to the point and focused. Not a necessary read if you'd rather focus on the main story at hand, but a good one throughout.

Kinda frightening to think what the research was like, preparing the details for this story. Happy I don't live in this world.

Nice to have the background of one of The Expanse's most intriguing characters. It's the broken ones putting themselves back together that always garner my highest attention.

I felt this story really let me know Amos better and I'm really glad I read it before [b:Nemesis Games 22886612 Nemesis Games (The Expanse #5) James S.A. Corey https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1407524221s/22886612.jpg 42456264].

Good grief. This is the sort of shorter work that Corey puts out just to show off. “Yes, I can write hard sci-fi, but I can also effortlessly push out whatever other genre I feel like too.”

Executive Summary: Amos is one of my favorite characters of the Expanse novels, and it's nice to finally get his backstory.

Full Review
For someone who doesn't really like short fiction, I seem to be reading a fair amount of it recently. Of the few Expanse short stories, this is the one that was the top of my list.

I finally decided to pick it up in preparation for the next Expanse novel. I thought it was just “alright” until the last little bit. The ending really made reading this worthwhile for me. It pushed it from a 3 star to a 4 star rating.

You don't get any of the cool setting of the normal Expanse books. There are no ships or space stations. Everything takes place in Baltimore. For the most part this almost could be an organized crime story more than Sci-Fi.

I'm not sure how important reading this story is to the series as a whole, but I'm glad I read it. I'm not sure I'll bother with the other short fiction. This one is really more of a special exception for me.

The short stories set in the Expanse universe have all been interesting character studies, but the authors have outdone themselves with this origin tale. Very nice. Read it!