Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey: where The Expanse begins

Leviathan Wakes is the first book of The Expanse, a grounded mystery set across a solar system that humans have colonised but never tamed. It opens as a missing-person case, becomes a conspiracy, and turns into a war without ever stopping being about ordinary people. Start here if you want space opera with dirt under its fingernails.

The idea behind it

The Expanse begins from a simple, uncomfortable premise: humanity reached the stars, but only as far as its own solar system, and it brought all its old arguments with it. Earth is crowded and powerful. Mars is a generations-long engineering project turned into a society. The Belt is where the raw materials are mined, and the people who live there are treated as labour rather than as citizens. Nobody is evil in the abstract. Everyone is defending something they cannot afford to lose.

What separates the book from a great deal of space opera is its refusal to give physics a holiday. There is no artificial gravity. Ships accelerate and decelerate to create weight, crews strap in for burns, and long journeys take months because they genuinely would. Belters grow tall and fragile in low gravity, which turns their bodies into a political fact. The technology that made the system reachable, the Epstein Drive, is treated as history rather than as magic. When travel is expensive and slow, politics becomes local in a way that feels real.

Around that setting the authors build a story about information. Who knows what, who controls the version of events, and how quickly a rumour can become a war. Leviathan Wakes is often filed as military science fiction, and there is real combat in it, but its engine is a detective story. Both of its narrators are trying to find out what happened. One is doing it with a badge, and one is doing it because he cannot stop talking about what he saw.

The story, spoiler-light

The book runs on two narrators who have nothing in common and never quite agree about anything.

The first is James Holden, executive officer of the Canterbury, an ice hauler working the outer system. When the Canterbury answers a distress call and the situation goes catastrophically wrong, Holden and a handful of survivors are left with an answer nobody wants and a broadcast that makes them famous for the wrong reasons. He is decent, blunt and prone to saying the honest thing at the worst possible moment, which is both his appeal and the reason the plot keeps escalating.

The second is Josephus Miller, a detective on Ceres who has been handed a case he does not care about: find a missing young woman from a wealthy family. Miller is tired, compromised and working inside a system that does not particularly want the case solved. He keeps pulling at it anyway. His half of the book is the best noir writing in modern science fiction, and it works precisely because he is not a hero. He is a man with a job, a drink and a growing sense that the case matters more than the people who assigned it.

Their two threads pull towards the same discovery, and the discovery is not a person. It is a substance, or a technology, or something in between, that changes what the whole conflict is about. I will not say more than that. The book is generous with clues and it earns its reveals, and the reveals are better if you meet them in order.

What holds it together is the crew Holden collects: a medic, a pilot, a mechanic and an engineer, each with a past and a reason to stay. By the end of the book they are a family in the only sense that matters, which is that they keep choosing each other under pressure. The series spends nine novels testing that choice, and it starts here.

What makes it science fiction

Leviathan Wakes is the most grounded entry in The Expanse. Later books widen the scope considerably. This one stays inside the solar system and keeps its feet on the deck: thrust gravity, vacuum, radiation, orbital mechanics and the sheer inconvenience of distance. The politics are an extension of the physics. If moving water across the Belt is expensive, then whoever controls the water controls the Belt, and the Belt resents it.

The alien element, when it arrives, is handled the way a real discovery would be: badly, by people with agendas. Nobody understands it. Everybody wants it. That reaction, rather than the substance itself, is the science fictional point the book is making. First contact stories usually ask what the aliens want. This one asks what we would do to each other to get hold of something we do not understand.

If you have seen the television adaptation, the book is tighter and colder, and the version of Miller in particular is more damaged. The show ran for six seasons, first on Syfy and then on Amazon Prime Video, and it is one of the better adaptations of a science fiction series. The book still gives you the interior life the screen cannot.

Who should read it, and who should give it a miss

• Read it if you want a mystery that happens to be set in space, with a plot that keeps moving.
• Read it if you like world-building that comes from economics and physics rather than from magic.
• Read it if you want a long series you can commit to, with this as the front door.
• Give it a miss if you want a single clear hero and a straightforward moral.
• Give it a miss if you dislike multiple narrators who only meet deep into the book.

One fair warning: the book is roughly six hundred pages, and it spends its first hundred setting two separate worlds in motion before they touch. Readers who like the two-thread structure love it. Readers who want one protagonist and one problem may find the opening slow.

Where to start, and what to read next

Start with Leviathan Wakes. It was written to be the first book and it works as a self-contained story, so you can read it and stop if the series is not for you.

The nine main novels run in this order: Leviathan Wakes, Caliban’s War, Abaddon’s Gate, Cibola Burn, Nemesis Games, Babylon’s Ashes, Persepolis Rising, Tiamat’s Wrath and Leviathan Falls. Read them in publication order. There are also novellas and short stories that fill in backstory, and they are best read after the novels rather than slotted in, because several of them spoil reveals from the main line.

The series as a whole won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2020, and Leviathan Wakes itself was nominated for the Hugo and Locus awards in 2012. It did not take either individual prize, which is worth knowing if you are deciding whether to trust the reputation: the reputation belongs to the whole nine-book arc, and this is where that arc begins.

The verdict

Leviathan Wakes is the strongest possible start to a long series. It works as a detective story, as a war story and as a piece of world-building, and it does all three without letting any one of them take over. Holden and Miller are excellent company, and the fact that they disagree about almost everything makes both of them more believable than a single narrator would have been.

Read it if you want space opera that feels lived in, argued over and paid for. It is not the most ambitious book in The Expanse, and it is not trying to be. It is the one that makes you trust the next eight.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to read the whole series to enjoy it?

No. Leviathan Wakes ends in a satisfying place and can be read on its own. That said, the series is a single long story, and the later books assume you have read this one.

Should I watch the show or read the book first?

Either order works. The show is a strong adaptation and compresses the story well. The book gives you the interior monologue, especially Miller’s, which is the best thing in it. Reading first makes the show richer. Watching first makes the book easier to follow.

Is it hard science fiction?

It is close to it. The travel, gravity and politics obey real constraints, and the setting is built from them. The alien element is the one deliberate departure, and the book treats it as something nobody in the story understands either.

What is the best order for the novellas?

Read them after the main novels rather than weaving them in. They are backstory, and several of them explain things the novels deliberately hold back. Publication order for the novels, then the short fiction, is the safe route.