Cibola Burn by James A Corey
Cibola Burns, 2014, is the fourth book in the The Expanse series by James A Corey (pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). The ninth and final book of the series, Leviathan Falls, is set to be published 16 November 2021.
It isn’t necessary to have read the first three books of The Expanse to enjoy Cibola Burns. In fact, this fourth book marks something in a sea change in the series. The previous novels were set in a future Solar System wide civilization. The underlying technology necessary for something like that to be achieved is, for the most part, in the realm of the possible. This novel moves the characters out into interstellar space and, therefore, requires the usual fudging and sci-fi ‘magic’ in order to make this possible. This change is most evident in the ‘world building’ the authors have engaged in. We know a great deal now about the system of planets we reside in and the conditions on them and their accompanying moons. And what it would, theoretically, require for humanity to reside on them. This allows for a continuity with our own time of all the political, logistical and economic modelling aspects of the series plot lines.
While, as stated, this fourth novel doesn’t require reading the pervious, I would recommend them and to reading them in order. They fit quite nicely into the classic ‘space opera’ science fiction sub-genre and pay homage to its 1950-60s ‘Golden Age’; with the added fun of a Raymond Chandler-esque ‘noir’ crime plot thread thrown in. It does have, as per ‘for the most part’ qualification above, a mysterious, and deadly, alien invasion of sorts.
Imagining a world, complete with alien archaeological remains, light years away, and what it would require to survive on it is, of course, great fun for writers. It does pose problems as well. Would life evolve there along the same lines as our own world, or wildly different? Would we recognize alien, and be able to engage with, technology? Science fiction writers have, through the ages, dealt with these questions by projecting our own situation and history onto the blank canvas of an unknown alien world. They, also, tend to simplify ecologies, making them very monolithic, to the point where one, if one bothers to think about it, wonders how such a system would function.
(A good way to illustrate the above points is to consider something like the classic TV series Star Trek. Alien worlds all looked a great deal like Southern California. And, judging by the initial shows from the late sixties, women hundreds of years in the future affected beehive hair-dos and wore mini-skirts. Note: The first three books have been turned into a TV series; one whose mise en scene owes more to films like Total Recall, Bladerunner and the Alien series than to Star Trek or Star Wars.)
Cibola Burns does commit some of the ‘sins’ delineated above, but that is as expected and probably only noticed by the likes of me.
What the authors do, also, is bring along a lot of the plot lines and situations from their previous books. This, if one has read the first three, makes for a degree of predictability. There is a certain sameness to the ‘banter’ and the way the ‘villains’ always seem to fatally underestimate the ‘heroes.
No matter, the characters are engaging, the banter is witty, the villain satisfactorily vile, there is peril aplenty and more than enough thrilling action and fighting to keep you turning the pages.
Published in paperback by Orbit a £9.99 in the UK, $17.99 in the USA