Babylon’s Ashes by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I very, very much appreciate the faithfulness to physics. Any sci-fi world has got to have some technology in it that’s not real (yet!) but it’s really very thrilling to have space battles in a universe with as little of that tech as possible. From bone density to G-force to the basic physics of interplanetary spaceship momentum, Corey keeps it very close to realistic. He didn’t have to build a world where it takes just as much time and fuel to slow down a spaceship as it does to speed it up — but he did, and I love it.
Also, it takes a lot of guts to treat the military power differential caused by the Earth’s gravity well seriously. I think the only other novel I know of that does that is Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I’m sure there are others. But if you’ve ever stopped caring about an episode of Star Trek because you thought, “You know, the Enterprise is in space. They could just drop rocks on this planet until the problem goes away. They don’t have to beam down or whatever.” — well, in Babylon’s Ashes, James Corey takes us right down that particular dark theoretical road, all the way to the end.
There’s also a wonderful side plot in which a character risks everything to help total strangers, and the deed goes entirely unnoticed: neither punished nor rewarded. But we, the readers, from our broad historical viewpoint, can see that he saved millions of lives, although he’ll never know it, and they’ll never know it either. The realism of the technology, military strategy and politics serve to drive the point home: do the difficult, good thing, even if you can’t see the end results.
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