Book Review: "Abaddon's Gate" by James S.A. Corey

*Spoilers ahead!*

4.5/5 stars

"Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they'd never do if they were really thinking about it."

This pretty much sums up the adventures of Jim Holden and the crew of the Rocinante so far in "The Expanse" series. (Here, I am covering book three.) It would have been extra wonderful if Holden himself had said that, but alas, it is still a great quote. 

In book three, Abaddon's Gate (2013), a coalition of military and science ships from Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets Alliance (OPA) go to investigate the new anomaly at the edge of the solar system the protomolecule left at the end of the previous book. Termed the "Ring," it has claimed the life of one unfortunate teenage adrenaline junky, who tried to pass his ship incredibly close by the ring going at ridiculous speeds. However, the Ring shut that down pretty fast...

How does Holden & company get involved? A famous documentary crew hires the Rocinante to tag along with the rest of humanity's explorers and be where the action is. Pretty soon, things get crazy, as things do in these books. What could go wrong when humanity pokes the unknown thing with a stick to see what it does?

But I suppose that's science. 

After arriving at the Ring, an Earth ship gets blown up. Everyone attributes this to the bad vibes coming from the Ring, but someone has framed Holden's crew for this attack. What is pretty much a futuristic "deep-fake" of Holden claiming responsibility and threatening no other ships to come closer makes the round to other ships. They shut down the broadcast, but you know the saying: anything on the Internet is forever. 

The Rocinante crew just can't catch a break, it seems. 

To escape being blown up into their component atoms, Holden takes the Rocinante through the ring in a last ditch evasion maneuver. Except, the rest of humanity follows, because they are pissed at Holden. It's just a race to detain him at this point. 

(The Ring:)

The Ring, not amused by spacecraft accelerating what it perceives as aggressively towards it, casually changes the laws of physics, arresting every ship dead in its tracks. Everything in the ship gets slammed around in the sudden, violent stop. People are very fragile. It doesn't go well. All crews get decimated with deaths and injuries. The ships are basically held hostage by a sort of gravitational force via the station, which I think was the Ring's way of giving humanity a time-out.

While everyone is zooming in after Holden, and paying for it in the process, Holden's going to the heart of the "Ring," what seems to be a semi-organic station of sort. There, a ghost comes to him: Detective Miller. 

Miller is dead, but the intelligence of the Ring has chosen to speak to him in the form of the dead man, warning humanity away from what turns out to be a gate, one of many nodes in a network a now dead alien species used to traverse the galaxy with ease billions of years ago. Powerful enough (with enough energy) to destroy stars if anything threatened the larger network.

In the aftermath of the mass casualty event resulting in much damage to ships and humans alike, the OPA flagship, the Behemoth, decides to attack the gate in return, in an attempt to destroy it and protect humanity on the other side of the gate. 

Problem is, the ships would be stranded on the other side, unable to go home again. And not everyone wants to make that sacrifice.

The battle lines are drawn.

Plus, you know, we know the Ring can destroy whole stars and any such escalation in force against it by humanity would doom the rest of humanity (aka the whole solar system). 

Holden and his allies are trying to stop the other side from enacting this mass-suicide, and it quickly turns to a shoot-out inside of a very thin layer of metal protecting all of them from the void. Not to mention, his side is severely out-gunned and out-numbered, and everyone is pretty banged up from the sudden-stop incident. Oof.

Who's going to win out in the end?

I won't spoil the ending. Just read it! It's quite the ride from start to finish.

(Start from book 1, Leviathan Wakes, and book 2, Caliban's War, if you need to catch up. Trust me, the events of this book will make more sense that way. For reference, this review covers the third book in the series.)

Happy reading!

--Book Owl