Cibola Burn Review

Cibola Burn is that fourth installment to The Expanse Series by James S.A. Corey and happens to be on of my favorite books in the series. This book sends us into the gates into new worlds with weird new life forms and new challenges. Let’s dig into Cibola Burn to see if this installment holds it’s weight to the rest of the series.

The Plot

With the events from Abaddon’s Gate, The crew of the Rocinante are tasked with dealing with a settlement dispute in one of the new colonies that passed through a ring gate to a different star system.

The issue, is that Royal Charter Energy was given permission to mine lithium from the world. This causes the immigrants who arrived on the planet first to fight back to protect their claim for the world. The two groups clash. a mediator needs to come in and cool the tensions between the groups. Who better but the hero of many recent events James Holden.

Holden has become somewhat of a celebrity, taking interviews, and attempting to ease tensions in the best way he can by showing the rest of the universe what peoples lives are like outside of Earth and Mars.

Holden and Amos travel down from space to the planet Iilus or as the other faction calls it, New Terra.

While there, some of the new characters work with and against Holden and crew as they make new strange discoveries and fight to survive in this strange new world with limited resources and unforeseen tragedies.

New Characters

The First new character point of view we get is Basia "Baz" Merton. He and his family are friends of Prax on Ganymede. They fled Ganymede some time after the attacks that occurred on the moon in Caliban’s War. When landing on what they call this new world “Iilus” they establish the town of First Landing. He joins the resistance when the Royal Charter Energy arrives to start stripping the planet of it’s lithium.

Doctor Elvi Okoye is a biologist, She is along with the Royal Charter Energy to study what everyone else in the universe is calling “New Terra” She ends up getting attached to Holden and works with him closely as they uncover several mysteries of the brand new world and has a pivotal role in helping both factions along with Holden.

Then we have Dimitri Havelock. He is a security contractor for Royal Charter Energy. If his name is familiar, you would not be wrong. Dimitri was the partner of late Detective Miller from Leviathan Wakes. Dimitri is following orders from the Chief Security Office Adolphus Murtry.

Murtry, leaves Dimitri to secure their ships in space while he takes himself along with most of the security contractors down to the planet and instates marshal law. His actions increase the tensions between the two factions on this new world.

Conclusion

This book contains everything that Expanse readers have come to love about the series. There are real issues, this time more alien than ever before. On top of that, the consequences appear larger than ever before. The characters have very limited help as the understanding of the ring gate systems are still new to so many people.

We get the political back and forth, along with the action packed and tension between different groups. This time however, it’s not just OPA vs Mars, verses the UN. Now it’s citizens of Illus vs. the contracting company RCE.

This was a great step into future books as of course people are looking for new habitable worlds to establish their own ideals and societies. With this happening now, we can shift focus later in the series back to what is causing all these things to occur and almost appear to start to come to life.

Cibola Burn like I said in the introduction is one of my favorite books in Expanse series. What it tries to accomplish it does really well. This book was hard to put down and I think it was one of the fastest read I did for this series cause I just could not put it down. I recommend this to everyone. This is close to peak Expanse.

If you want to check the reading order out of the Expanse you can find our article here.

If you want to pick this book up you can get the paperback copy on Amazon here. If Paperback is not your thing you can get the Kindle version here.

The next up is book 5 in the Expanse series “Nemesis Games” very excited to share my thoughts on this one with you! Stay tuned.

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