Auberon (James S. A. Corey)

Auberon
An Expanse novella
James S. A. Corey
Orbit
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: When Laconia conquered the Sol system and humanity's fledgling colonies beyond the ring gates, it absorbed not only the wealth of innumerable new worlds but the burdens as well. The sort of people who fled beyond the gates were generally not the sort to take kindly to greater authority, and they have had a couple decades of self-reliance to breed independence and create their own cultures. For all that Laconia's warfleet brought humanity's greatest navies to their knees with almost no effort, the battle to win over the hearts and minds of the people they now rule will be much more difficult.
Auberon was supposed to be a jewel in the new empire's crown: the only world where evolutionary happenstance allows for open-air farming of Earth crops, without the potentially deadly interactions caused by the native biomes on every other inhabited planet. Here could lie the secrets to cracking one of the last barriers to indefinite human expansion, perhaps even the means to make native plants and animals across all the worlds into viable food sources. But when the new Laconian governor, Biryar Rittenaur, comes to enforce imperial rules and discipline, he finds a populace entrenched in its own corruption, and a mysterious metal-armed old man who could prove to be his greatest enemy or greatest ally in this strange new land he must call home.

REVIEW: Taking place between the seventh novel (Persepolis Rising) and the eighth (Tiamat's Wrath), Auberon gives the reader a glimpse of the cultural and logistical challenges of imperial rule over vast differences... challenges that have, throughout history, proven more implacable than any military might. The reader saw hints of these issues in the novel arc, but this novella moves things away from the core conflict to show how those on the colony worlds deal with the swift and surprising conquest of most of humanity by Duarte's Laconian forces, how local ways and power structures find ways of persisting in the face of invaders. Biryar starts out full of his own importance and sense of righteousness, convinced that Laconian cultural superiority will win on the ground as effortlessly as its battle cruisers won in space. Needless to say, things do not go nearly as well as he anticipated. The one-armed local, who has previous ties to the Expanse universe, is an implacable force of his own, though the new governor proves a challenging puzzle even to a successful criminal like him. If Auberon doesn't stand on its own quite as well as a few of Corey's other novellas, it still adds an interesting facet to the greater story.

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