Cibola Burn

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Science Fiction / General / Expanse	4-week checkout	Due 05-03-2024
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Science Fiction / General / Expanse	4-week checkout	Due 05-07-2024

"The gates have opened the way to thousands of habitable planets, and the land rush has begun. Settlers stream out from humanity's home planets in a vast, poorly controlled flood, landing on a new world. Among them, the Rocinante, haunted by the vast, posthuman network of the protomolecule as they investigate what destroyed the great intergalactic society that built the gates and the protomolecule. But Holden and his crew must also contend with the growing tensions between the settlers and the company which owns the official claim to the planet. Both sides will stop at nothing to defend what's theirs, but soon a terrible disease strikes and only Holden - with help from the ghostly Detective Miller - can find the cure"-- Provided by publisher.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Fiction Profile
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Excellent Characters submitted by jodihannah on June 20, 2016, 12:04pm I love these characters. I love the main characters, yes, but the side characters just keep getting better and better, too. Elvi, the main, non-main character is a super intelligent scientist who has no idea. You love her as she fights machine monsters and tries to understand the role of sex in a mammal; even though she seems to understand sex in alien death-slugs, it seems she has a hard time understanding that she might need some, too.

Then there's the plot: Miller becomes intelligible, bad guys fighting other bad guys, but really they're both good guys, the new alien bad guy sits like a big empty spot in the middle of the planet - and then the entire planet blows up...

My only complaint was the Murtry character. It was too simplistic, too evil. I mean, I understand there are evil people, but he was too evil somehow. And kinda not believable. Like, I understand why people followed Hitler; he had a way of saying empowering things to a population that felt they had been brutally treated. I just don't get that from Murtry. I have absolutely no reason to believe that people would actually do what he said if he was really that big of a bad guy.

Anyway, that character wasn't bad enough to knock down my rating of the book, so I guess that means something. Still one of the best series out there right now.

Okay submitted by ishhewitt on July 15, 2016, 10:47am This is the book I didn't care for in the series. Too bound in the politics on one new planet.

A solid addition to the series submitted by jlaurenbogen on July 4, 2023, 11:41am Cibola Burn takes a turn from the installments that came before it - but in a good way! This book uses the (assumed) investment that we as the readers have put into this universe and takes a beat to create more depth in the main characters.

In this 4th book in the series the crew of the Rocinante who have, at this point, been teaching us about the universe they inhabit by flying from place to place are ultimately placed in a pressure cooker environment on one planet to show us more about their internal lives and interpersonal relationships. The story itself is written more from the perspectives of new characters - the people they meet during their futile quest to defuse tensions in a world they barely understand - which allows the writers to show us, not tell us, how the main cast is adjusting to the radical political changes happening in their universe.

I understand some of the complaints mentioned by other reviewers, but I still rate this 5 stars given how this book bridges the plots points in the books before and after it and gets us invested in old and new characters alike. I think an interlude like this in a 9-part series allows us to see how large political and existential changes can affect a small community and makes the other books, with grand melodrama played out over multiple planets, feel different.

Exploration of space and humanity submitted by bahr on July 28, 2023, 6:52am This book has a different flavor than the others - it’s true that there is more political arguing but I felt that it was realistic and necessary to explore this. The tensions set up in the previous books go off like a powder keg. Read to see just who gets burned!