Caliban's War is a science novel written in 2012 by the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the collective pen name James S. A. Corey. It is the second entry in a popular series known as The Expanse, a sequel to Leviathan Wakes. The narrative focuses on a conflict raging throughout much of the near-Earth Solar System, including Mars and Venus.
The story commences a year and a half after the events which conclude the previous novel. This is a big book, clocking in at just over 600 pages. That is a lot of stories to tell, and it is reasonable to assume that a huge chunk of the first 50 or those pages would be devoted to catching readers up on what happened in the earlier novel. That is not the case, however, as readers are thrown immediately into the narrative. By the second paragraph, a character is mentioned as having left Ganymede with no context. Readers are left to determine on their own whether Ganymede refers to one of the moons of Jupiter or whether it is the name of a ship or space station.
This is an important point; perhaps more so than it seems. Caliban's War, like most other books within a series telling a serial story, is written with the built-in expectation that readers picking it up will have already read the first book. This is the dual-edged sword of any serial, but especially of fantasy and science fiction series. All books after the introductory volume will have a solid preconstructed readership. That is great news for the authors, but less so for readers. Books have long lives beyond that initial purchase. A reader randomly coming across a used copy of Caliban's War is going to be at a severe disadvantage if they are not aware it is the second book in a series.
The big question lurking beneath any book that is part of a series is whether—or how much—it can be enjoyed on its own by a reader unfamiliar with other entries in the series. The answer varies considerably within each series and with each book. The Ganymede reference occurs in the prefatory section before Chapter One. It's a fairly long section and it will not be until the sixth paragraph of that first official chapter that the narrator explains:
"The inner planets had all been one big, happy, slightly dysfunctional family. Then Eros, and now the two superpowers were dividing up the solar system between them, and the one moon neither side was willing to give up was Ganymede, the breadbasket of the Jovian system."
While lacking details and nuance, this short passage fairly well sums up the foundational premise of the series. But that is where the simplicity ends. Just the mere attempt to quickly summarize the events of the story is difficult. The storyline involves supersoldiers, a proto molecule run amok on Venus, complex political interactions on Earth involving the United Nations, and an interstellar peace negotiation, and everything that begins with the kidnapping of a four-year-old girl.
If that very skeletal outline of events that occur in Caliban's War sounds confusing, then reading all six-hundred pages without knowing what happened in the prequel is likely to be even more so. This is the downside of a literary series. One certainly can read this novel on its own and becomes immersed in the dense storytelling and probably come away with a certain high level of satisfaction. The undeniable truth, however, is that maximum entertainment levels cannot be reached without already being familiar with everything that came before. For that matter, one cannot reach the absolute maximum appreciation of the novel without knowing that the title alludes to a character in Shakespeare's play, The Tempest. The absence of familiarity with that Caliban will make the title of this novel meaningless. Spoiler: there is no character named Caliban in the novel.
