Leviathan Wakes

Ah, Leviathan Wakes. Now there’s a book that promises the grandeur of a space epic but delivers all the literary subtlety of a Saturday morning cartoon. I slogged through its 500-odd pages like a miner trudging through Martian dust.

The authors (yes, it took two of them) seem to believe that tossing in a few swear words, a bit of noir posturing, and some half-baked “space zombie” nonsense somehow makes for sophisticated science fiction. It doesn’t. It’s pulp dressed up in a flight suit. The characters speak in the same interchangeable, quippy voice—every one of them a stock figure pulled from a dusty sci-fi shelf: the brooding detective, the boy-scout captain, the tough female officer who exists primarily to bark orders. You could swap their dialogue and no one would notice.

The world-building, I’ll grant, is competent but only in the way a well-funded TV pilot might be: impressive sets, no soul. Everything is explained to death. Every corner of the solar system feels like it’s been workshopped by a committee. There’s no sense of mystery, no poetry in the stars. Just bureaucracy, gunfights, and people yelling into comms.

It reads like someone took the bones of Firefly, stripped away all the charm, and then hired a middle manager to narrate the whole thing. There’s no rhythm, no music, no moment that lingers. The sentences march along dutifully, accomplishing their task but inspiring no emotion stronger than mild irritation.

By the end, when the “big reveal” finally rolls around, I found myself caring less about the fate of humanity than about the fact that I’d wasted several evenings of my life on this galactic soap opera. It’s a book that mistakes momentum for meaning and spectacle for story.

In short, Leviathan Wakes is what happens when space opera grows up without ever actually maturing. It’s loud, shallow, and completely devoid of air.