Caliban's War

“The thing inside looked up at the sound. It was a man, but he was naked and his skin didn’t look like skin. His eyes glowed blue like there was a fire in his head. And something was wrong with his hands.”

The introduction of the protomolecule hybrids foreshadows the threat to come: experimental super soldiers that escape the control of the scientists making them. Describing the creature through the eyes of Mei, a four-year-old child who cannot get a full grasp on what she’s seeing, allows the narrative to highlight the horror via ambiguous imagery that negates rather than identifies: skin that isn’t skin, a man that is naked in space, “something” wrong with his hands. The color blue is associated with the protomolecule throughout the novel.

“They’d managed to stop the human race from being wiped out by a corporation’s self-induced sociopathy and a recovered alien weapon that everyone in human history had mistaken for a moon of Saturn.”

This exposition sums up the first novel in The Expanse series, Leviathan Wakes, with the matter-of fact dry humor that characterizes Holden’s voice within the third-person close perspective narration.

“But the spring still came. The election cycle still rose and fell. The evening star still lit the indigo heavens, outshining even the greatest cities of Earth.”

This imagery of the returning seasons and the enduring heavens symbolizes the cyclical and enduring quality of nature, which “still” persists even as human civilizations change. Avasarala’s moment of philosophical reflection introduces the motif of the fragility of human survival. Avasarala plays the long game in her political maneuvering, but only on a human scale; here, she considers how short-term that scale really is in the grand scheme of planetary existence.