Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection

If you read all 9, no reason to stop before this one! I assumed this would be a combination of fan service and fun ideas the authors never got to, and that's about correct. And it is fun to see some gaps in some characters' arcs, especially Amos and Fred Johnson. A few of them fell a little flat, but three were great and almost all of them had at least a good idea/premise. “Drive” had a great sense of dark humor, “Auberon” was an excellently twisty look at corruption and duty, and “Sins of Our Fathers” gave a very satisfactory dismount for the biggest loose thread in the whole series. Exploring different genres is fun, too. You've got dark comedy, war memoir, teen drama, street gangs and poverty, horror, crime/politics, post-apocalyptic, and immigrant stories. I'm sure it was fun for them to write, and it mostly makes for good reading.

The last one in particular, “The Sins of Our Fathers,” closed strongly on two points. One, it holds a wise discussion of the strange relationship between “doing the right thing for someone else,” and “finding out if my good thing helped them.” Of course we all want to see the fruits of the seeds we plant, but planting the seeds is always more important than seeing the harvest. When you do good things in this world, you don't always get to see how they pan out, and that shouldn't stop you from doing them. In the book, Naomi made huge sacrifices to give Filip a chance to escape his father, and she never found out if it worked or not. But that's less important than making the investment in the first place. As the author's postlude quotes from an earlier book, “You don't get to know [if your good deeds paid off]. They did or they didn't. You didn't put them out so that someone would send you a message about how important and influential you are. You tried to [do some good in the world]. Even if it didn't work, it was a good thing to try. And maybe it did. Maybe you saved someone, and if you did, that's more important than making sure you know about it.” I love this sentiment, and there's something deeply Christian and self-less about this worldview. It reminds me of the Biblical notion of “Cast your bread upon the waters;” giving of yourself to the world, even if the current takes it out of your sight before you see someone pick it up. You're trusting that somewhere around the bend, it will get picked up and nourish someone (Ecclesiastes 11).

Lastly, the book closes with a terrific riff on an earlier book's anecdote. A young girl is on a ship to found a small colony on a new world, and her school teachers have warned all the kids to be kind to each other, because they'll be living together for the rest of their lives. This logic applies to small towns today, where high school grudges can stretch well into the adult years. But, more importantly, it applies to the planet earth and the entire human species, because we're all connected. The distances between us are an illusion, and we're all stuck with each other on this little pale blue dot. So, I agree with Nami: “We're spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle to each other.”