This is a collection of short stories from the Expanse universe. They were published concurrently with the novels, but I haven’t read them before this.
And I was thinking… “yay! an opportunity to spend some nostalgic time with all those characters I loved!” And this is not that at all.
Instead we get the backstories of a whole bunch of minor characters. Well — not minor minor, but not part of the main team. (Except for one story where we’ve kept guessing WHO COULD THIS KID BE IS IT
These stories just feel so unnecessary. Sure, they tell you the backstory about things you might have wondered about — like, just how fucked up could those people who killed the people at the Eros station be, really? (answer: “Yes”), but, like, none of it matters? Nothing we learn in these stories make us reconsider anything about what happened in the novels, or affect any kind of change.
It’s more like the tedious “lore filling” that you see fan fiction writers do, where they take a background character and imagine how that character came to be there, and there you are.
But oldee tymey sci fi TV series used to have what they called bottle episodes, where they took a week off of the main plot and focused on some character, and then they had a little side adventure. Sometimes that felt pointless, and sometimes it was fun.
And at least one story was made into a TV episode, or perhaps the other way around: It read like the novellaisation of a TV episode.
But: Are these stories fun? Yeah, they’re OK. None of them are anywhere near as good as even the worst Expanse novels (is that number four? the one they spend on the dirt planet?), but they’re OK. It’s got 4.4 on Goodreads, so people who liked the novels were fine with it.
Or as they say, it’s a let down, but it’s recommended.
The author(s)’s notes are somewhat grating, though. These aren’t deep stories, but they explain them at us anyway.
Memory’s Legion (2022) by James S. A. Corey (Buy new, buy used, 4.37 on Goodreads)