Which "Expanse" Novel is it Again? Quiz

Answer: "Nemesis Games" (book 5)

The inner planets were constantly making life for Belters hard. Marco Inaros rallied Belters to him, and struck at the inner planets, including dropping three asteroids on Earth. Half of Earth's 30 billion people were killed. All Marco did was unite the solar system against him, and risked more starvation because the only place to reliably grow food en mass had just been hit by three cataclysms. For all the pain he caused, he was still a puppet of Winston Duarte, who used Marco's war to distract from his own defection.

Answer: "The Butcher of Anderson Station" (book 1.5)

"The Butcher of Anderson Station" was a prequel to "Leviathan Wakes". The title was a name used for Fred Johnson after he killed a large number of Belters on a rebelling station. It was an accident because of a risk Johnson took, but he had also not been told that the inhabitants had already surrendered. Earth had wanted him to make an example of the station.

He quit Earth's military and was recruited by Anderson Dawes (who was named after the company who owned the station) as an advocate for Belters.

Answer: "Leviathan Wakes" (book 1)

The main characters of the series started as workers on a water hauler, the Canterbury. It was destroyed by stealth ships in the opening chapters to trigger a war, so the survivors tried to figure out who had killed their friends and why.

The premise of "Leviathan Wakes" was that water haulers moved chunks of ice from Saturn's rings to Ceres Station, the largest population centre in the asteroid belt. In 2014, three years after the novel's publication, it was discovered that Ceres was loaded with ice, so no ice haulers would have been needed.

Answer: "Abaddon's Gate" (book 3)

Earth and Mars were just coming off of a war with each other, and the Belt was starting to flex its own muscles. It was a very tense time in the solar system when the ring gate opened, and every faction sent warships. Anna was a pastor with the religious leaders delegation, trying to figure out what the ring meant for humans spiritually. Bull was an Earther working on a Belter battleship, trying to keep everyone, both inside and out, from hurting each other.

Answer: "Persepolis Rising" (book 7)

After thirty years of isolation, Laconia rejoined the rest of humanity with ships and weapons more advanced than anything else ever produced. A single battleship was enough to subjugate humanity's home, the Sol system.

Answer: "Leviathan Falls" (book 9)

The beings that created the protomolecule and gates were long dead when humans found their artifacts, but their killers were still out there. The gate builders were a hive mind species with weapons to fight back, but their fragile bodies left them vulnerable. Humans, by contrast, had robust bodies. Winston Duarte wanted to combine the human hardiness with the gate builder mind network to defeat their killers once and for all.

He managed to briefly, but was stopped by the heroes of the story.

Answer: "Caliban's War" (book 2)

War profiteers wanted to sell new weapons to either Earth or Mars, and subtly pushed for the conflict. Chrisjen Avasarala of Earth hired Bobbie Draper of Mars to help stop the war from happening.

Answer: "Cibola Burn" (book 4)

Basia was a Belter from Ganymede. He became a refugee when the Earth-Mars conflict went hot, and lost a son to the protomolecule experiments. They couldn't stay on Ganymede, and the inner planets offered no help. His family, and everyone else on the ship Barbapiccola, decided to make a run for one of the new worlds beyond the gates to start a new colony, not dependent on any of the existing governments.

The existing governments followed to voice their disagreement.

Answer: "Babylon's Ashes" (book 6)

Each novel in "The Expanse" had a slightly different genre. The first was a mystery. The second a political thriller. The fourth was a western. "Babylon's Ashes" was a war novel, with viewpoints from all over the conflict. There were nineteen different viewpoint characters, more than any other novel in the series.

Answer: "Tiamat's Wrath" (book 8)

In the previous novel, a single Laconian ship took on the combined fleets of the Sol system and won. In this novel, using stolen Laconian technology, Bobbie Draper showed the Sol system (and the rest of humanity), that Laconia could still be hurt. She personally destroyed the ship that had defeated the Sol system.

Laconia started the novel with three Magnetar battleships. Bobbie destroyed one. A collapsing neutron star destroyed another, and then all of Laconia's shipyards were destroyed to stop them from making more. Despite its terrifyingly quick conquest, Laconia's rule barely lasted a few months before fraying.