Leviathan Wakes
Update 12/23/15: I've been watching the TV adaptation of this on Syfy and after seeing the first three episodes I am really liking it. I'm finding the TV show more compelling than I found the book.Leviathan Wakes is a mix of space opera and mystery which brought to mind Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams, only I liked that book a bit better.
The prologue drew me in immediately, I was really interested in Julie and how she was going to get out of the situation she was in. Unfortunately we don't find that out for a huge chunk of the book. Once I hit the first chapter the book became rather dull and the characterizations felt a little flat. Holden and Miller were both pretty cliche characters who are the polar opposite of each other and I really had a hard time liking either of them or caring what happened to them.
Miller was very cynical, but smart and observant. He is supposed to be good at his job as a detective. But his being in love with a woman he doesn't even know. Ridiculous. I pretty much knew he was crazy from the beginning. A grown man with imaginary friends is never a good sign for sanity. I found it odd that no one ever noticed he was carrying on conversations with people who weren't there; unless it was all going on in his head. I couldn't help think of Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica.
Holden was painted as the naive idealist who has good intentions, but messes everything up because he sees everything too black and white. Honestly I really hate when the "good" guy is characterized this way. I need someone to really like in a book for me to love it. Why could there not have been a character written somewhere in between these two extremes?
A couple of other complaints I have about the book would be: Do I really care or need to know what is happening to their testicles when they hit a certain amount of Gs? No...no I don't. And I don't care about the fact that they have catheters stuck in them in the med bay either. Too many references to body parts, yep males definitely wrote this book. It was like they couldn't let us forget it. It just seemed a bit juvenile for the writers to keep going there.
Also the big revelation that Miller has near the end of the book about Eros and what it has become should have happened long before it did, I figured out early on in the book what was happening to those people who got infected. For Miller to be characterized as someone so smart and observant about people, he really wasn't too smart and observant there.
Over all I liked the book ok. It didn't blow me away, but it wasn't terrible either. I'm not sure if I will read any further into this series.
