Book 7 - Cibola Burn and a little bit of space empiring.

7 down, 45 to go !

I suspect I'm not going to hit that target of 52 books in the year. But I'll enjoy trying to get there.

Picture first !

Yep.
I'm at it again.

I have no shame when it comes to borrowing memes. Book ?

Book 4 of the Expanse series is Cibola Burn. Humanity is expanding and this book is about the interaction of 3 parties. A group of original colonists who are actually squatters, the second wave who got permission to inhabit the planet and our hardy crew again. (I'm trying to avoid the spoilers for the other books !)

What can I say ? Another enjoyable book in the series. It didn't outstay its welcome for me like Abaddon's Gate did. I felt it was allowed to tell its story in just about the right amount of time. I'm looking forward to the next one now but I have a case of WHAT NEXT before then. It may well be an Alastair Reynolds novel and I have Revelation Space on the Kindle app. I also need to finish the How To Destroy The Universe book.

The onrunning theme in the Expanse books is that they adhere to the rules they've set up. That means no cheating with things like warp drive ... Time spans like a couple of months to cross a solar system, things like that, limits of human physiology instead of cheating by having inertial dampeners to allow higher acceleration. The science fiction is not so much fiction as future science fact. I can see the universe of The Expanse (the human derived side of it at least) becoming science fact in the time scale of the books. The only techs we don't have yet are : cheap spacesuits, accessible fusion power, the massively efficient Epstein thruster and the power armour.

I'm wondering what book 5, Nemesis Games, holds in store.

About that other space empiring thing ...

A game I massively enjoy and am utterly addicted to at the moment is Stellaris. It has a one more turn/month/year factor about it that keeps me glued when I should be doing other things, like going to bed. It's a very pretty, well realised space strategy game and it'll hold my attention for a while yet I'm sure. Here's how my last game finished :

My people are the Elaaminid Prime hive mind race in the SW. We own maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the galaxy. There is an independent federation in the light blue and a race of Fanatic Purifiers (they're out to murder everyone else) in the dark blue. My hive has become a signatory to the other green empire in the NE.

That's a cunning plan actually ... I wanted to go as far in this game as the end game crisis, where invaders from within, from another galaxy or from another dimension come to try and murder everyone. The end game crises are tough, so I stopped in my conquering in order to keep some allies around ...

The end game crisis didn't occur though, so that's how the game ends. A very satisfying game which was closely balanced between the 3 power blocs ... until I was able to outmaneuver the enemy and start taking chunks of their territory. Patch is coming Thursday though, which I suspect will make this save game unplayable.

I'd want to launch into the new patch mechanics anyway.

But not this Thursday. Gonna be busy / otherwise occupied.

See you at the weekend or next week !