Caliban's War - James S A Corey

 Caliban's War is the second instalment in The Expanse series - space opera, certainly, but with ambitions.   What space opera often lacks is characterisation and overarching premise.  'James S A Corey' (collaborators Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) tackle the problem head-on.   The premise was where it all began as proposed game-play and thus the characters and storylines have all derived from the premise.  The fact that authorship is a collaboration and, moreover, they each write third-person-limited chapters from the viewpoint of certain characters, guarantees differentiation.

Thus our focus characters start with Captain Jim Holden, Earth-born but now working for the Outer Planets Alliance (OPA).   In the first book, which I haven't read but will soon, he is the survivor hero who stops the bio-engineered protomolecule escaping from the lab on Eros. 

Praxidike Meng is a botanist on Ganymede.  As an ecological disaster unfolds his daughter Mei is kidnapped.   His quest to find her is the driver of this novel.   The ecological disaster however is this novel's take on the overarching premise.   Holden soon realises that the protomolecule he is supposed to have destroyed is what caused the collapse of the station on Ganymede.   Mars Marine Roberta Draper already knows this - she watched her corps get literally torn apart by a indestructible mutated monster that ultimately destroyed itself.  

The Eros station crashed onto the surface of Venus.   Now Venus itself is morphing.   This brings in the UN, in particular our final focus character Chrisjen Avasasrala, potty-mouthed Indian granny and high-ranking bureaucrat.

Caliban's War is almost 600 pages long - space opera needs to be epic - but it races along.  There is humour, camaraderie, action, high politics, big business - even elements of romance.   There is real peril. Most important of all, though, there is the underpinning high concept: humankind, even more diverse than in our times, the solar system divided between three fragile alliances (Earth, Mars, the Outer Planets) needing to come together to defeat the existential threat to the existence of all or any.   It works really well.