In this opening salvo, Humans have colonized Mars and several of the larger asteroids in our solar system, from which they mine minerals. They are also mining ice from the rings of Saturn, but as yet they have not gone further out to other star systems. When the captain of an ice freighter encounters a derelict ship, the Scopuli, the crew is thrust into a seemingly unfathomable scenario. The Scopuli's crew has vanished or been subsumed into an alien presence that will not stop with taking over one ship. In a soon-to-converge parallel storyline, Detective Miller of the Ceres police force on one of the larger asteroids, has been assigned to look for a missing woman, who could be anywhere in the solar system. But this young woman, Julie, comes from big money and the fact that money talks never seems to change. These two men will cross paths when it turns out that the missing Julie was aboard the Scopuli. As the race to find Julie and contain the alien threat go forward, there is also politics at play, with Earth, Mars, and the "Belters" vying for control and someone is using the alien being, Leviathan, to try and shift the balance of power. A civil war is almost inevitable. The characters are reasonably complex and interesting; you feel like you could meet them on the street. The particularities of this expanded human habitation seem feasible and well thought-out. I would definitely read more and will try and track down the TV series, as well. Kirkus and Publishers' Weekly offer fairly positive reviews, and I really thought the Wall Street Journal captured the flavor and grit of the book, so have attached it below (since it is subscription and you might not otherwise get to read it!)
WSJ In Brief: Science Fiction (review, July 2, 2011)
This is the future the way it was supposed to be. From the Moon we'd step to Mars. Mars would become an industrial center, while the asteroid belt would supply hundreds of mountain-size rocks to be tunneled for habitats and mined for construction material. The gas-giant planets would remain gravitationally impossible for human life, but not their moons.
In James Corey's "Leviathan Wakes" this bustling interplanetary civilization has created a need for tourism centers, and the giant asteroid Ceres is one of them, up to a thousand ships a day docking to use its bars and casinos. "Belters" look different from Earthmen -- tall and skinny from being brought up in low gravity. They think different, too. Monkey with safety and you're out the airlock without a suit.
Mr. Corey's model isn't the now-common cyberpunk style. It's more like "L.A. Confidential" with fusion drives. One of Mr. Corey's two central figures is the tired cop, familiar from crime-noir fiction; the other is an Earthman from Montana, skippering a water-hauler. What he finds on one run, a hijacked spaceship with no survivors, sets off the latent hostility between Earthmen and Belters. But the discovery also suggests that humanity may have come into contact with a larger biosphere, something truly from the stars, something posthuman.
The story rips along, driven by two main characters who don't like each other, each of whom has his own uncompromising morality. Even more compelling than the pace, though, is the sense of possibility. Galactic empires, "Star Trek," "Star Wars": They aren't going to happen. Those futures have faded. This one, imagined in pixel-sharp detail -- it's still there.
Credit: By Tom Shippey
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