Without
the natural resources of Earth or the military might of Mars, the
people who live on the asteroids belt have always been treated like
second class citizens. It is not particularly surprising then that when
the ring opens up thousands of new worlds and one of them appears to be
earth like - that is with air, water and other things humans need - a
group of Belters decide to make it their new home. The Belter group
names the new planet Ilus and sets up a settlement. Unfortunately for
them, like colonial powers of the past the global powers that be don't
especially care whether someone else got their first. They see land they
want and assume they have to right to take it. The earth based UN
government decides to assert its "rights" by issuing a contract to Royal
Charter Energy (RCE) that gives the corporation the "rights" to New
Terra (otherwise known as Ilus) and all its resources. The fact that
people are already living on Ilus/New Terra matters not at all to RCE or
the UN. But it matters to Ilus’ new settlers and to show it matters,
the settlers set off an explosion as an RCE ship tries to land on the
new planet, thereby beginning the first war in the new frontier. The
UN's Chrisjen Avasarala and the OPA's Fred Johnson send James Holden and
the crew of Rocinante to keep the peace until the global powers can come up with a more permanent solution. Cibola Burn started off a bit slow. The first half of the book is basically argument and fight after argument and fight between various the settlers and RCE, with Holden in the middle trying and failing to make peace or at least stop the killing going on.
As Holden fails to bring any measure of peace the planet starts mobilizing its own defenses against its human intruders. This is where things began to get interesting. There are death slugs, water organisms that make people go blind, and something that makes space ships stop working and fall out of the sky. But even natural disasters (to the extent anything on alien planet is natural, I suppose it has its own version of what's natural) aren't enough to stop people from bickering and so the fights and arguments continue on the ground and in space where each faction has a ship floating on stand by (along with the Rocinante). The series started with a mystery in space – what happened to Julie Mao and what the protomolecule was. Now everyone knows about the protomolecule and story is how people are reacting to it.
New point-of-view characters are introduced in Cibola Burn. There is someone from each of the relevant factions. Basia is a settler whose son was one of the kids who were kidnapped in the previous books. Holden and crew were able to rescue some of the children but they didn’t make it in time to save Basia’s son. Havelock who first made an appearance in Leviathan Wakes as Miller’s partner shows up here as one of the less sociopathic members of RCE’s security team. Elvi is one of the RCE scientists. Her sections were funny but mostly I enjoyed Holden and the investigator/ Miller. I really hope there is more of the investigator/Miller in books to come (despite Holden’s attempt to prevent that).
