Another entertaining novella set in the universe of The Expanse. ( )

The most recent Expanse novella was published after Tiamat's Wrath, but takes place before it, so that's where I read it. This is one of the weaker ones, I'm afraid, though perhaps it will set up something in Tiamat's Wrath that will make me appreciate it more in retrospect. It's about a Laconian governor coming to grips with the difficulty of maintaining power outside of Laconia; too many of its beats seemed duplicated from the Governor Singh plotline in Persepolis Rising. They both struggle to apply their ideals in practice, they both have a situation spiral out of control, they both are devoted to wives in ways that make them impossible to live up to, they both are ultimately compromised. I liked the Singh subplot in Persepolis Rising a lot, but not so much that I had any interest in seeing it play out again in the very next book.

This is a novella in The Expanse series. It's book 8.5, obviously placed between book 8 and the yet to be released book 9.

This novella is fantastically well written and a pure joy to listen to. It involves a new governor arriving at a colony world to implement its place as part of the empire. Things don't go as you (or the colony world) expect. You'll enjoy the way the story plays out. If you have been reading/listening to The Expanse, you won't be disappointed. If you're just watching the TV show, hold off on this. It'll be a few years before the show catches up to the time when this takes place. ( )

Nice novella about the interaction between the conquerors and the conquered... ( )

Getting a new Expanse novella while I wait for the next (and last…) book in line feels like a way of shortening that waiting time, and it’s always a joy going back to that universe, even when the main characters I’ve come to know and love are not part of the story.

Auberon’s time-line is set somewhere between the last two published books, Persepolis Rising and Tiamat’s Wrath, as the Laconian forces are tightening their hold on the occupied planets: governor Biryar Rittenaur and his wife Mona have been charged with the running of Auberon, one of the most Earth-like colony worlds behind the Ring gate, and like all Laconians Rittenaur is very focused on his mission, on the ideals of order and civilization that High Consul Duarte uses to advertise his merciless military conquest.

While Rittenaur and his staff expect the usual resistance - more or less overt - against what is in truth an occupation force, no matter the mask it wears, they are not ready to face the deeply rooted system of criminal corruption headed by a man named Erich whose reach into Auberon’s society goes quite far, and who is not ready to give in to the self-styled new masters of humanity. The new governor will soon discover that it’s not easy to keep faith with one’s ideals when they are in direct conflict with what he holds most dear - or as Erich tells him at some point: “Ideological purity never survives contact with the enemy.”

The description of “old man” Erich, with his prosthetic arm covering for a malformed one, is a very intriguing one because it connects with a character I already encountered first in the novella The Churn (the one about Amos’ past) and then in the full novel Nemesis Games, where again Amos and Erich’s shared past came to the surface. If you read both of them, you will find that the present story gains even more depth, but even without this kind of information, Auberon remains an intriguing snippet in the overall Expanse background, because as usual the characters and their journey are at the core of it all.

What makes the two main characters in this novella interesting is that neither of them is likable, and at the same time neither of them is utterly despicable: we are made privy to their motivations, and from their point of view they are acting for the good of the people under their authority. Erich is a crime lord, and there is no measure of white-washing that can make us forget he’s a gangster ruling his territory with a blood-drenched iron fist (no pun intended here…), but he’s also fighting - in his own way and for his own purposes - against an invader bent on ruling the galaxy, so it’s difficult not to root for him, at least a little bit. Rittenaur is the voice and arm of the conquerors, people who use other humans as guinea pigs for protomolecule alterations, people who execute their own as an example against mistakes, but he’s also a man with a deep love for integrity and a sincere belief in the good of the “Laconian dream” - he’s a decent man, very unlike Medina Station’s Governor Singh, and therefore worthy of some sympathy.

In the tried and tested tradition of the Expanse series, Auberon gives us much food for thought and sheds some interesting light on the latter part of the overall story, while we wait for the conclusion of this sweeping space opera saga that for me represents one of the best in the genre. ( )