So these books have been sitting on my shelves for a while. Now I’m finally getting to it and I am planning to do the whole series including short stories in full chronological orders. So after three initial short stories now it was time for the first full novel.

First let’s talk a bit about my background with this material: I started watching the TV show when it initially came out, was a bit bored by it and a few years later tried again and was loving a lot of the show especially during its earlier seasons (2 and 3).

As someone who has watched a ton of TV shows in his time I can confidently say that this book reads a lot like a TV show and yes the similarities are very prevalent. Just in general the writing is very dialogue heavy, lots of shorter scenes / chapters and as a result a pretty fast pacing. All in all that makes the experience pretty engaging to me and if you’re only reading a couple of chapters at a time it’s pretty hard for any boredom to occur.

For now the series is limited to two POVs and those are Holden and Miller. And in many ways they are polar opposites of each other. Holden is the righteous idealist from Earth while Miller is the cynic, nihilistic Belter. Of the two I absolutely think that Miller makes for the more compelling protagonist while Holden tends to get a little bit annoying but at least his idealism and self-righteousness are used in interesting ways to move the plot forward. 

The story begins as one part space adventure, one part detective novel. Both parts aren’t great but definitely work in itself. And then as the storylines converge we get some horror sprinkled in and also a bit of a buddy comedy feeling which absolutely made the whole book more fun.

Fans of the show will pretty soon notice that the whole political plot on Earth and Luna are missing from this book. They will be in the second book. I am very excited about those parts and also (aside from one of the short stories) to get our first glimpses of Mars which does feature a very much liked character of mine from the show. 

My favorite character from the TV show, Amos, was present in this book but did not have that much to contribute (except some hilarious one-liners) to the greater scheme of things. 

Overall yes I enjoyed this first book quite a bit but there is still a whole lot of room left for improvement. I will jump into Caliban’s War immediately. (Well, one more short story first)