Released in 2015, Nemesis Games is the fifth of nine novels in The Expanse series.
Nemesis Games contains examples of:
- Apocalypse How: Planetary/Societal Collapse. The Earth is subjected to a Colony Drop that devastates much of the surface and starts an impact winter, effectively making the planet unlivable outside domed cities.
- Axe-Crazy: Konecheck, a prisoner in The Pit, who is strong enough to bend steel plating with his bare hands and is just sane enough to work with Amos and the guards to escape.
- Bathhouse Blitz: Exploited by Amos' when he takes a cheap passenger ship to Earth. A shipboard gang shakes down the passengers, and he refuses their demands on behalf of a couple of men with a young daughter. He deduces that the gang is operating on "prison rules" and will only likely beat people who fail to pay their protection money in the communal showers, since that's the only place where security cameras won't be watching. Amos is correct, and when they come for him in the showers, he's ready for them but they weren't ready for him.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. Decompression injuries, exhaustion, dehydration, and solar radiation burns take a toll on Naomi.
- Colony Drop: Marco drops a number of high-speed radar-shielded rocks on Earth, killing billions.
- The Conscience: Holden is revealed to be this for Amos, and Naomi realizes she's in trouble when an imaginary Amos becomes her inner voice of reason.
- The Coup: The radical attacks divide the OPA into two major factions: Fred Johnson's government, which holds Tycho Station, and the Belter Free Navy, which holds Medina Station and a large pirate fleet in the outer belt.
- Crazy Survivalist: Amos and Clarissa run into one after the rocks fall on Earth.
- Eldritch Abomination: At the very end, Naomi realizes that while many of the missing military ships can be accounted for among the Free Navy, none of the civilian ships can. Then, Sauveterre has a front-row seat to his own ship disappearing, and glimpses something in the confusion...
- Explosive Decompression: Averted when Naomi purposefully ejects herself out of an airlock without a spacesuit. She had been planning for it and knew how vacuum would affect her body. She even brings along a specialized emergency device Belters developed specifically for explosive decompressions: a self-injecting vial of oxygenated blood that gives you a few more seconds of consciousness in order to get to safety (or at least drifting in that general direction before passing out). She survives but the effects of prolonged exposure to the vacuum of space take a debilitating toll on her.
- Extranormal Prison: "The Pit", a subterranean supermax prison for the bio-augmented.
- Foreshadowing: Miller's Virtual Ghost constantly warning Holden over the past three books to check "doors and corners" takes on a whole new meaning when the crew realizes that something is devouring ships as they pass through the Gates.
- Friendly Enemy: Amos and Erich spend most of the book fully prepared to kill one another if either of them makes a move, but they help each other more often than not and are on decent enough terms by the end.
- Great Escape: Amos and Clarissa make one from the Pit. Subverted in that the guards assist them, as the facility has become unsafe due to the asteroid bombardment. Also, the greatest threat to the escape plan comes not from the prison staff—whose lives are also in jeopardy if they remain—but from another, dangerously psychotic prisoner.
- Let's Split Up, Gang!: Five chapters into the book Alex has headed off to Mars, Amos to Earth and Naomi to Ceres, with Holden left alone on Tycho Station. This turns out to be less than helpful when a lot of plot suddenly starts happening all at once...
- Last Stand: Defied and played for laughs. Alex thinks Bobbie is about to make one when she realizes there isn't enough room in the Razorback for both of them as well as Prime Minister Smith — but she was just thinking of tearing out one of the crash couches so she'd fit, and is a little freaked out when she realizes Alex's assumption.
- The Man Behind the Man: Discussed; once it becomes public that Marco is responsible for the attacks, Fred comments that he wouldn't have expected Marco to be capable of this kind of planning, and speculates that he probably has a puppet master somewhere. In the epilogue, we learn that he was right; everything was orchestrated by a rogue faction of the Martian Navy, led by Commander Duarte.
- Meaningful Name: Somewhat YMMV, requires
Genius Bonus. The title "Nemesis Games" can be seen as Foreshadowing (spoiler alert!). We're not talking of the Greek goddess of vengeance here, that would be too generic, but ''this''
Nemesis.- The most basic interpretation is it refers to Marco as Naomi's nemesis and his actions drive the plot.
- A Million Is a Statistic: Lightly subverted. Most of the novel is set amidst the backdrop of a cataclysmic terrorist attack. While the protagonists are clearly affected, they all have more immediate concerns, and the handwringing is kept to a minimum. Naomi is probably the most affected. And, playing with the trope, it's because of her relationship with the perpetrators of the attack, rather than the victims.
- Missing Mom: Naomi abandoned her son, Filip, as a baby in order to escape Marco's control. Though, to be fair, this was done after she realized what an extremist Marco was. When she decided to leave him, Marco kidnapped Filip and used him as a bargaining chip to keep her around, while also spreading lies to everyone that Naomi was dangerous and unstable.
- Out-of-Character Moment: Everyone, including himself, is shocked to see Holden actually keeping secrets instead of broadcasting them to the entire world.
- People's Republic of Tyranny: "Free Navy" sounds nice, but unfortunately, they're a bunch of terrorist pirates who killed billions of people using stealth-painted asteroids against Earth.
- The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: The Free Navy cares more about avenging the Belters' treatment than about creating a stable, sustainable future for the human race as evidenced by their catastrophic attack on Earth, the only body truly capable of sustaining human life over generations without assistance.
- Rocket Ride: When Alex and Bobbie realize the Chetzemoka is rigged to blow if another ship approaches, Bobbie surfs on a laser-guided missile to save Naomi.
- Shallow Cannot Comprehend True Love: At one point, Naomi confronts her ex-boyfriend —the incredibly charismatic yet horribly antisocial Marco Inaros— asking him what he thinks is the reason she chose James Holden over him. All he can mumble in response is that Jim is a handsome "Inner"note fellow; Naomi responds to that with a well-aimed "He IS what you PRETEND to be."
- Smokescreen Crime: The purpose of the Free Navy dropping asteroids on Earth is to draw everyone's attention away from them also stealing the only known protomolecule sample and seizing control of the Medina station as part of the deal with a fleet of renegade Martians who called dibs on an alien planet possessing some interesting precursor technology.
- Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: How many Martians react to the opening of new habitable worlds via the Ring network. Mars has become politically unstable as a result, which is how a good portion of the Martian Navy ends up in the hands of Marcos' faction of the OPA.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Towing a ship out of a decaying orbit by using the Rocinante's railgun as an improvised thruster was an awesome bit of MacGyvering. It also bent the ship's frame so badly that it has to be stripped down and rebuilt.
- Ungovernable Galaxy: The political structure of the system that had mostly stabilized over the course of the first four books (Earth, Mars, OPA, colony worlds) falls all to hell.
- What Happened to the Mouse?:
- By the end of the book, Marco and his crew remain at large and play no part in the final leg of the story.
- The fate of Lydia's widower Charles, whom Amos helped to avoid eviction, is left unresolved after the Free Navy's attack, but given the destruction one assumes the worst. There are only a few perfunctory lines from Erich and Amos to show that neither of them even care.
- Working the Same Case: Alex, Naomi, and Holden all end up looking into the same mysterious missing spaceships for totally different reasons. (Amos's plot doesn't intersect theirs until everything becomes a lot less mysterious, though...)
- Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Some of the radical Belters' grievances against the inner planets are legitimate, and they frame their attacks as an uprising.
