Cibola Burn

Why it’s on the list: The fourth Expanse novel: with a thousand new systems open, settlers reach a habitable world ahead of the company holding the legal charter for it, and the book is the resulting fight over jurisdiction on a frontier where nobody has standing to adjudicate anything. The land-rights-and-no-operator volume of the series.

Where I heard about it

• The a16z infrastructure team — on the a16z Infra Reading List, in Sci-fi — Very good books, A tier, under The Expanse series (fourth of the nine volumes listed). It follows directly from Abaddon’s Gate.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• James S.A. Corey — the author.
• Abaddon’s Gate — volume three, which opens the gate this book goes through.
• Nemesis Games — volume five.
• Governance — the dispute is a governance problem: two legitimate claims and no arbiter.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.
• a16z — the firm whose infra team curates the list.