The Vital Abyss
An Expanse novella
James S. A. Corey
Orbit
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: As a boy on an overpopulated Earth, Paolo Cortazar could only watch helplessly as his mother withered and died of an incurable disease. The experience drove him to push past the limits of the masses subsisting on basic income in search of answers medicine had yet to discover. Somewhere along the way, he stopped being that boy and became the man currently imprisoned deep in space, a man who sacrificed more than he ever intended, but who stands on the forefront of humanity's greatest discovery... a man who will stop at nothing to continue his work.
Part of the Expanse series, these events occur chronologically between Book 3, Abaddon's Gate, and Book 4, Cibola Burn. (Note: some would place it between Book 5, Nemesis Games, and Book 6, Babylon's Ashes.)
REVIEW: Shuffling of characters in the TV series adaptation of The Expanse introduced me to Cortazar before I got around to reading this novella, so I had some inkling of what he had gone through. Still, this standalone tale functions as a glimpse into one of the many lives forever altered by the discovery of the alien protomolecule at the heart of the series, not to mention the lengths some went to in order to understand and exploit it. Not as action-oriented as other tales in the series, it's more of a psychological study of how far a boy's grief and desperation take him and how one wrong turn tragically invalidates much of what drove him, the core of his own humanity - a sacrifice he is too dazzled to truly appreciate even when the full cost becomes clear. It made for an enjoyable read, filling in background information and teasing developments to come.
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