• Babylon's Ashes

  • Book Six of the Expanse
  • By: James S. A. Corey
  • Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
  • Length: 19 hrs and 58 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (1,089 ratings)

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Babylon's Ashes  By  cover art

Babylon's Ashes

By: James S. A. Corey
Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
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Publisher's summary

A revolution brewing for generations has begun in fire. It will end in blood.

The Free Navy - a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships - has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets.

The colony ships heading for the 1,000 new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them. James Holden and his crew know the strengths and weaknesses of this new force better than anyone.

Outnumbered and outgunned, the embattled remnants of the old political powers call on the Rocinante for a desperate mission to reach Medina Station at the heart of the gate network. But the new alliances are as flawed as the old, and the struggle for power has only just begun.

As the chaos grows, an alien mystery deepens. Pirate fleets, mutiny and betrayal may be the least of the Rocinante's problems. And in the uncanny spaces past the ring gates, the choices of a few damaged and desperate people may determine the fate of more than just humanity.

©2016 James S. A. Corey (P)2016 Little Brown Book Group

What listeners say about Babylon's Ashes

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  • Overall
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

This time around the story just stalls

What disappointed you about Babylon's Ashes?

There are plot holes and the way characters behave is really weird. Nobody appears to be really angry/hurt/traumatised about the attack on earth. That just doesn't make sense. The story went nowhere this time. It feels like the authors are stalling.

What was most disappointing about James S. A. Corey’s story?

I was missing all the ingredients that make The Expanse a great series for me, like a good Holden story (he feels left out this time), great action writing (too sparse) and alien stuff/new worlds/new technologies/mysterie development.

The space battles where OK, Bobby was OK, the Prax and Vandercaust bits where good, but it fails to save the book for me.

What didn’t you like about Jefferson Mays’s performance?

He has a nice and consistent voice to listen to, but he's not my favourite. Some of the Belter slang is weird to listen to, it's supposed to sound foreign but the way Jefferson May pronounces them is weird. I didn't recognise the German or Dutch in it for instance. It must have been really hard to do, reading a boring story with characters speaking a self-invented language half of the time.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Babylon's Ashes?

We got even more Marko this time (the blandest villain character ever), a meek Avasarala (!) and boring details about the struggles of Micio Pa. I would have cut a lot, if not most of it.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

A new height of dragging the story

A few genuinely great space opera pearls drowned in mountains of padding. I've seen my share of this tactic but the Expanse authors mastered it to an absolute perfection.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Anti-climactic end

Amazing characters, but the ending wasn't that good. It was too abrupt and ambiguous I think.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Touching

These books are incredibly well written. It makes you part of the crew of the roci in a way few writers are able to.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Awesome! Just awesome!

James S. A. Corey is back and better than ever. The authors are changing their narrative style a little by telling the story from every relevant angle making this a complex but very exciting story! Everything we love about the expanse and a little more.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

The expanse is the best series!.

I highly recommend It from start to finish. I can't wait to listen to the next one.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

A great book. Well, series really.

Well written, engaging, great story, great character definition. I feel sorry for people that don’t read SiFi as they will miss this classic story of war, love and politics.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

First book of the series that was a bit less good

So far I've loved this series, and all books including this one have been good, there's been very few moments when I felt like I something in the story makes no sense or that "why would they do that? it makes no sense" there are some things like the way the belter creole works that seems an unrealistic way for it to evolve, as someone interested in linguistics this is something I just have to accept though. However in this book the main problem with the story is how hard it is to keep track of where they are going and why. It is also hard to tell how much time passes in parts of the story, because of this, it often is hard to follow I got bored and uninterested which I never got in the previous books. Also the characters' behaviour are many times not realistic, like Marco's crew, and how characters who act in impossible and unreasonable manner are tolerated even in extremely serious and grave situations.
So this is the first book in the series where I will give it a lower score. The previous ones in the series got highest scores from me.
Babylon's Ashes only get this:
Overall: ★★★★☆
Performance: ★★★★★
Story: ★★★☆☆
Performance still gets top score as Jefferson Mays manages to be lively and exciting, and any range of emotions from any character, he does convincingly, without ever sounding silly or over-the-top.
Also this is the first series where I have been listening to most of it in higher than 1x speed, usually 1.10x or 1.15x speed. Any speeds between 0.90 and 1.20 sound good, and - I would say - completely natural. Which has not been the case with most audiobook productions I've listened to. Even 1.25 sounds fine most of the time, but at some points it sounds a little unnatural.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Felt like a filler episode

You know how there’s sometimes episodes that only progress characters and not the main story? This is what this book is. I like the development of the characters, but it mostly lacks the galactic mystery aspects of the other books. In previous books the Holden chapters almost always lead to a development around the protomolecule, while other character chapters typically lead to development of subplots such as the Medina mutiny-counter-mutiny. In this book, even Holden chapters focus on what feels like subplots, which leaves the book feeling directionless. You could probably skip this book if you only want the alien plot lines, but I liked the character development. If you do skip it:

— Warning, spoilers ahead —
Here’s the main plot points in order of importance: The ring gates make ships go missing if too many go through at once, there’s a monster hiding between spaces of atoms or something killing ships that go missing, the Earth has been bombarded with meteors by terrorists and is soon uninhabitable, Clarissa/Melba is now a part of the crew, Naomi got kidnapped and then tried to save her son but chose to killed him by making his ship go missing in the gates, Fred Johnson is dead, Mars has been abandoned in favor of ring worlds, a Martian faction is building human-alien hybrid warships in secret, Michio Pa is in charge of setting up a network of shipping to move people off the dying Earth to ring worlds. That’s all that happened essentially, there was an escape from dying Earth and stuff which was pretty cool and some other parts I really liked, but yeh. Felt a little filler compared to the rest of the series!

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Invisible pieces falling together leaving a mark

Possibly my least favorite book in the series, but this is expanse so it's still onw of the greatest books, things don't happen because they are the main characters but because they are the people they are doing their best in these situations

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