Leviathan Wakes — Book Review & Quotes
Review
I don’t read a lot of fiction, and I certainly don’t read a lot of science fiction. Leviathan Wakes was the first book in a new book club my brother Chad and I put together called The Fiction of Future. The goal of the group was to read science fiction that specifically framed a perspective lens on what the future of our reality could look like, both in the near-term and beyond. Leviathan Wakes fits in the “beyond” category.
Quick plot summary from our good friends at Wikipedia: Leviathan Wakes is set in a future in which humanity has colonized much of the Solar System. Earth, governed by the United Nations, and the Martian Congressional Republic act as competing superpowers, maintaining an uneasy military alliance in order to exert dual hegemony over the peoples of the Asteroid belt, known as “Belters.” Belters, whose bodies tend to be thin and elongated due to their low-gravity environment, carry out the gritty, blue-collar work that provides the system with essential natural resources, but they are largely marginalized by the rest of the Solar System. The Outer Planets Alliance (OPA), a network of loosely-aligned militant groups, seeks to combat the Belt’s exploitation at the hands of the “Inners,” who, in turn, have branded the OPA a terrorist organization.
After reading the book throughout the month of January, we got together as a group to discuss. We didn’t get through all our talking points, so I’ve included them at the bottom of this review. I’ve attempted to limit any spoilers, but I’m not your mother. Read at your own risk.
Freedom of Information
A recurring theme that drives the plot in the book is Captain Holden’s decision to share information with the solar system, sometimes before he has the whole story. This is particularly pertinent as the world becomes more complex, and what information we have is often colored not just by reality but by perspective and bias. People pick and choose what they want to share (or what they’re able to share, like in the case of Holden) and it warps our perspectives
Chad is an attorney, and coming at it from that angle, considering the legal defensibility, Holden’s actions stress him out. Just because you put your perspective out there doesn’t mean it will be understood. There are times when you can’t share information without an adequate understanding of the full situation. There is a reason that government agencies don’t share individual details as a situation develops because it can lead people to false conclusions, or even cause massive panic.
Granted. If we can take some liberties and apply common law in the US to intergalactic conflict, if Holden had said what he said, he would probably be protected because what he said was true. But does that make it right? Or a good idea to share information that may not present the whole picture? Discuss amongst yourselves.
His logic is that “if everyone knows everything then nothing stays secret. It’s not that people know too little, but that they don’t know enough.” He justifies the sharing of key information saying that “they wouldn’t be fighting if they knew what [Holden] knows.” The counter to that is if he had waited to share the information until they had the whole story, maybe they never would have started fighting.
For the most part, it seems like people typically have the perspective of Miller. He’s perspective isn’t about not telling anyone anything, but just making sure what is said will be understood the way it should be.
On the other side of the coin, there are a lot of people that feel like they can own the truth because they know “the story” and they can tell the details with a bent towards that story because that story is based on how they feel, and that story needs to be told, regardless of whether its true or not.
Population and Livability
For a long time, people have had concerns about overpopulation and the earth running out of resources as we continue to have more and more children. In the book they mention there are 30 billion people on earth and a huge majority of people just can’t find resources. That’s what draws people out to the belt looking for a new life.
Even as we see population increases, there is a heap of evidence that indicates that overall, life for people on earth in the aggregate is constantly and dramatically improving. On top of that, most scientists agree that the population will level out around 11–12 billion because as people get wealthier and the infrastructure improves, the average number of kids per couple goes down. The US has an average of 2 where countries with lots of poverty has averages from 3–7 in part because the infant death rate is so bad.
When people predict the 30B+ population climax, they’re thinking population will keep going up in this trajectory that it has for the last 100 years, which doesn’t seem to be the case. There are other examples where population is not just screaming up and up. Places like China and Japan have their own issues, whether self-inflicted, or not, where they run into massive population gaps and huge portions of the workforce being over the age of 50.
In our discussion, we talked about the Dan Brown book Inferno that talks about population growth and exceeding our population. We discussed the question of whether the world really is running out of resources. There is evidence to indicate that it’s more about distribution than lack of adequate resources. Efficient space use is a big question as the population continues to grow. If you want to live at home and go to school in Mumbai, it’s so hard and so populated in a suburban way. And you’ve got Houston that is just a massive suburban sprawl. Alternatively, Shanghai is so efficient with the space. There are some that argue if we all lived at the space density of New York, we would actually be significantly more efficient.
In the book, you see those efficiency principles boiled down on these stations where every breath, every drop of water, every inch of real estate, is a precious commodity.
Lack of Gravity
Fun fact. You lose 15–20% of your bone mass when you’re in weightlessness for 6 months because your body doesn’t think you need anymore.
Less fun fact. Women are at a much higher risk of osteoporosis (bone weakness) because they already have a higher risk of that. Also, scientists aren’t sure of pregnancy capability in weightlessness because they have sent rats into space and they can’t get pregnant
Some Highlighted Quotes From The Book
“There’s a right thing to do,” Holden said.
“You don’t have a right thing, friend,” Miller said. “You’ve got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.”
“Too many dots,” Miller said. “Not enough lines.”
“He hadn’t been aware he’d felt wrong until he suddenly felt right again.”
“It was a real book — onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.”
“Liquor doesn’t make you feel better. Just makes you not so worried about feeling bad.”
“A hundred and fifty years before, when the parochial disagreements between Earth and Mars had been on the verge of war, the Belt had been a far horizon of tremendous mineral wealth beyond viable economic reach, and the outer planets had been beyond even the most unrealistic corporate dream. Then Solomon Epstein had built his little modified fusion drive, popped it on the back of his three-man yacht, and turned it on. With a good scope, you could still see his ship going at a marginal percentage of the speed of light, heading out into the big empty. The best, longest funeral in the history of mankind. Fortunately, he’d left the plans on his home computer. The Epstein Drive hadn’t given humanity the stars, but it had delivered the planets.”
“Posthuman. It was a word that came up in the media every five or six years, and it meant different things every time. Neural regrowth hormone? Posthuman. Sex robots with inbuilt pseudo intelligence? Posthuman. Self-optimizing network routing? Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of.”
“Everyone too busy trying to survive to spend any time creating something new.”
“The abyss above him shone with unflickering stars. One of the dots of light was Earth. He didn’t know which one.”
“There were two sides fighting — that was true enough — but they weren’t the inner planets versus the Belters. They were the people who thought it was a good idea to kill people who looked or acted differently against the people who didn’t.”
“Holden had once dated a Buddhist who said that death was merely a different state of being, and people only feared the unknown that lay behind that transition. Death without warning was preferable, as it removed all fear.
He felt he now had the counterargument.”
“It was easy to make fun of the marines when they weren’t listening. In Holden’s navy days, making fun of jarheads was as natural as cussing. But four marines had died getting him off the Donnager, and three of them had made a conscious decision to do so. Holden promised himself that he’d never make fun of them again.”
“Either help or give up. Right now devil’s advocate is just another name for asshole.”
“I didn’t switch sides. I stopped playing.”
“Downtime’s easier to enjoy when I know it’ll end.”
“But after a few decades, you come to a place where you realize that there’s really no difference between trying and not trying. I still travel. I still talk to people. Sometimes we talk about Jesus Christ. Sometimes we talk about cooking. If someone is ready to accept Christ, it doesn’t take much effort on my part to help them. If they aren’t, no amount of hectoring them does any good.”
“He’d never been to military pilot school, but he knew that years of training had compartmentalized Alex’s brain into two halves: piloting problems and, secondarily, everything else.”
“And for a moment, he was tempted. In that hesitation between drawing breath and speaking, part of him wondered what would happen if he shed the patterns of history and spoke about himself as a man, about the Joe Miller who he’d known briefly, about the responsibility they all shared to tear down the images they held of one another and find the genuine, flawed, conflicted people they actually were.”
“It’s the problem with politics. Your enemies are often your allies. And vice versa.”
