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Gods Of Risk (2012)

by James S.A. Corey(Favorite Author)

3.6 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

Orbit

review 1: This is a short novella set between books 2 and 3 of the expanse series. It follows David Draper, nephew of Bobbie Draper from book 2. David is a promising you chemist who gets caught up with some questionable people, and finds himself trying for free a young woman from Hutch (the bad guy in this story). There is nothing ground breaking here, which I think is what the author intended. I think the slice of life we are seeing on Mars is essentially the same that we see on Earth. The two cultures are not that different, they live and make mistakes and are trying to better themselves.It was well written and fleshes out the books, but I don't think it is essential for people to read it. (Note, I have not read books 3 & 4 yet, so I could be wrong there).
review 2: I ... morehadn't intended to revisit the Expanse series so soon after finishing "The Butcher of Anderson Station" and Caliban's War, but I needed something short to read while I waited for books I had requested to arrive at my public library, so these novellas set in the Expanse universe seemed like easy targets.The novellas seemed promising, since they focused on characters other than James Holden, whom I had described as the least interesting character in the Expanse series. "Gods of Risk" gives us a glimpse of Bobbie Draper after the events of Caliban's War, while "The Churn" provides an origin story to Amos Burton."Gods of Risk" is the better of the two; it gives us a taste of what life on Mars is like. However, it shares a problem with "The Churn" in how lifeless the depictions of low-level, everyday crime are in the Expanse series. "The Churn," by setting its story in Baltimore, consciously or not draws unflattering comparisons to The Wire and Laura Lippman's works. As antagonists, the criminals barely have one dimension, which translates to almost no dramatic tension. We simply don't know enough about the antagonists to care about the two protagonists' respective troubles.As in the other stories in the Expanse series, the most interesting aspects are about the cultures of the world around the characters. The Martian education system funnels students into developments based on their skills and performance; it reminded me of the Hong Kong education system. Baltimore doesn't make an economic recovery; it's a walled off city dominated by criminal syndicates, little fiefdoms that create an underground ecosystem and that get periodically wiped out and reset when government officials want to seem like they care. But that's the tragedy of the setting; why do the government officials care? Why do they hire private military companies like Star Helix to suppress these little criminal empires? We never get an answer; I don't think the authors care about the question. less

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