Caliban’s War is the second book in The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey, which is being adapted for television by SyFy. I could not put this book down.

I’m a little in love with Corey’s writing style, and I wish to dissect it and learn all the secrets. S. A. Corey is actually a team of two co-authors, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.

If you aren’t familiar, The Expanse is an epic space opera set a few hundred years in the future, with human colonization of the solar system stretching as far out as Pluto and Ceres. Corey builds up a gritty, believable world where life is a daily struggle, and regular people live and die on the whims of politicians, generals, and CEO’s. The level of detail does a lot of the work of pulling me in and implanting the story directly into my brain. I think my favorite weird detail so far is the idea that people have to make whiskey out of genetically modified mushrooms, and it tastes a little funky to people from Earth.

This book has me thinking a lot about structure and bringing different story lines together into a cohesive whole. Caliban’s War tracks four point of view characters, two of whom start out on Ganymede when everything goes to hell, a Martian marine and a local scientist, kicking off the plot. The third point of view, Holden, the captain of the ship featured in the first book of the series, is sent to Ganymede to investigate, while the fourth point of view, a powerful politician on Earth, is trying to keep all out war from happening in response to what happened on Ganymede.

The plot moves logically to combine the four into two, with the Martian marine being sent to Earth, and the scientist finding Holden and begging him for help. As the huge political events the politician has tried to prevent threaten to become real, the two points finally move together, leading smoothly into the climax of the book.

Looking at this story that held my brain hostage for nearly a week, I’m amazed at how clean the overall structure of the book really is. I think that’s why it works so well, there’s no extraneous junk to knock you out of the story. Everything flows logically within the rules of the world, including the fast action scenes that keep you on the edge of your seat. That simplicity, well padded with the thick details of the world, make for a really good story that shuts out the real world for a bit.

There are definitely elements of writing craft Caliban’s War that I aspire to do as well in my own writing someday.