Tiamat’s Wrath: Choose your poison — heartbreaking or heart-stopping

Tiamat’s Wrath by James S. Corey

8 Reasons You Should Read Book Eight of THE EXPANSE — Tiamat’s Wrath

1. It comes after the seven others you’ve already read. Let’s not overthink it.

2. Space battles! Magnestar battleships, plasma torpedoes, rail guns, body armor, antimatter weapons, overwhelming odds, strategery, space sieges, tricky orbital mechanics, ambushes and armadas, Bobbie doing crazy marine stuff, Alex doing crazy pilot stuff, things going boom (though silently ‘cause you know, space)!

3. Moving reunions of people who have been separated far too long, from each other and us readers. Yep, I choked up.

4. All those quiet spaces in between the battles that have always elevated this series above its competitors. Moments of intimacy between characters or of introspection by a single character, either type often reflecting on the passage of time and the attendant change it brings. The way Holden can’t walk as far or fast as he once could, how Alex muses on how “there had been a time he could go for hours fine-tuning a flight plan. And he still could, but the price was higher,” the way Amos admits his eyes “ain’t what they used to be.” Even their ship, the faithful Roci, “was an old ship now. She’d never be state of the art again. But like old tools, well used and well cared for, she’d become something more than plating and wires…”

5. And as anyone who has lived any amount of time knows, as time ages us it also steals from us, and so along with those above reflections there’s also a litany of loss woven throughout, beginning with the very first killer line. Ghosts are referenced more than once, beginning early on with Naomi sadly pondering how:

Memories were like ghosts, and as long as Jim and Amos were gone, the Roci would always be a little haunted. And it wasn’t only Jim … Naomi had also lost Clarissa … Amos had … gone silent … Even Bobbie, healthy and well, but in the captain’s seat of her own ship now. They were all lost to her.

Sometimes the loss is the result of distance or time, leaving hope the hollowness can be filled and sometimes the loss is irrevocable (these are not authors who shy away from killing off main characters), though we don’t always know which is which, and sometimes we think we do but it turns out we didn’t. Yep, I choked up.

6. Doooggggs innnnn Spaaaaaaace!

7. That same deft shifting amongst multiple points of view we’ve gotten so used to in this series. Some of those voices are old friends by now, such as Alex, Naomi, Bobbie, and Holden (less of Holden than the others). One we’ve seen before — that would be Elvi from Cibola Burn, the scientist now working for the Laconians and their dictator Duarte on exploring the “dead” systems the gates lead to in hopes of learning more about what killed off the gate builders. And we get a fresh new voice (literally as she’s a teen) in Duarte’s daughter Theresa, who along with being the daughter of the god-emperor of humanity (as he likes to style himself, and it’s not wholly inaccurate), has regular teen problems — boy issues and daddy issues — and a regular teen attitude. She’s a welcome point of view for her difference — her youth, her being raised by the “enemy,” her lack of knowing just who she is yet.

8. Substantive (and often timely) explorations of politics and governance, human nature, the meaning of life. As when Naomi, high up in the resistance against Laconia’s empire, thinks, “That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s too late.” The way monsters can “look like someone’s chemistry teacher.” How Bobbie explains to Alex that a “win” is: “dying with the knowledge that humanity’s a little bit better off than it would have been if I’d never been born. A little freer. A little kinder. A little smarter. That the bullies and the bastards and sadists got their teeth into a few less people because of me.” Or Naomi’s epiphany that “wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence.” This series has never been hesitant to slow things down with big ideas or those aforementioned lovely little character moments (and I could quote a gazillion of them — so small yet so telling, so weight-bearing, so at times heartbreaking), and that holds true here in Tiamat’s Wrath as well.

9. I know, I know. I said eight, but really, there are so many other reasons which I’m going to just toss in together here and not bother naming save for this: a killer set of closing lines. OK, and this, it’s THE EXPANSE (did you really need more than that?).