I forgot to tell you all that while I was still recovering from my amputation, I read the final piece of fiction in the Expanse series. Everything that follows (including the link I'm about to post) contains spoilers. If you are interested in reading the series, skip tonight's GF.
Remember when I wrote this? I only knew there was one novella left to tell for The Expanse, and I speculated that it would tell us the ending of Filip's story. Surprise! I was right. I kinda hoped that it would reunite him with his mother so she would know that she didn't actually kill him when she killed his father. That was a bit optimistic for me and the series, anyway.
When the ring space was sealed off from humanity, Filip was working in a different solar system and got stranded there, living under his mother's last name instead of his father's. Being the son of a crazed fascist (maybe an oxymoron there) is a pretty fucked up thing to live through, especially when you realize that your father is a lunatic. He works at surviving with his team on this distant planet so far from the Belt that the Enterprise would probably take a long time getting him back even at warp nine.
So now he's helping build a new civilization because everyone has (rightfully) decided that they will never go home again. This is home now. And everything seems to be going as well as it could given the circumstances until a strong charismatic man starts taking power little by little until it's starting to look like a lot. Filip, being his father's son, is very familiar with what is about to happen if he doesn't step in and handle it. And he handles it in a big fuckin' way.
He becomes the colony's first murderer.
Had he still been in the frame of mind he'd been in when murdering thousands in the name of the Free Navy, he probably would have stepped in to fill the sudden power vacuum. He doesn't. The others don't know quite what to do with him. Should they kill him? Did they have the resources to imprison him for life? One way or the other, he doesn't care. He knows what he did and what he deserves, and he's willing to take his punishment. But he really, really had to kill that guy. That guy definitely had it coming.
They choose to exile him, and the end of The Expanse shows us Naomi Nagata's son heading out on his own in a strange new world with only the fact that he has easy access to water to comfort him. Well, that and the fact that gravity here is almost like home, so his Belter body won't go into convulsions and kill him.
Wow. There's only one thing I can say to that.
O Discordia!
No comments:
Post a Comment