Released in 2017, Persepolis Rising is the seventh of nine novels in The Expanse series.
Persepolis Rising contains examples of:
- Big Damn Heroes: Subverted after Holden allows himself to be captured in order to ensure his mission succeeds. The underground has every intention of rescuing him, but he ends up getting transferred off station and out of reach before they can initiate their effort.
- Boarding Party: Bobbie leads one with Amos and a bunch of underground fighters to scuttle the Laconian destroyer the Gathering Storm after Alex uses the Rocinante to lure it away from the station (and the possibility of it being reinforced during the attack.)
- Cacophony Cover Up: Double, during the resistance's plan to steal the Laconians' decryption keys. The keys will be useless if the Laconians realize they have them - so the resistance plans to blow up a sizeable chunk of the station to cover up the theft. After realizing that the guards have alarms that would tip them off anyway, Holden starts setting off every alarm he can find so that the real alarm gets lost in the noise.
- Curbstomp Battle: One Laconian ship vs the entire combined military forces of Sol System. It's not even a contest. The Laconians mop the floor with the Sol forces in minutes.
- Day of the Jackboot: Laconia announces via communication that they are ready to rejoin the wider scope of human civilization after three decades of self-imposed exile... only for their two "diplomatic" ships to refuse protocol on arriving and invade and occupy Medina Station almost effortlessly within hours of their gate transit. The occupation is (relatively) benign but they demand submission, tolerate no interference, and reserve the final say on any matter.
- Downer Ending: At the end of the book, the Laconians have subjugated humanity, Clarissa is dead, and Holden is Duarte's prisoner.
- Eldritch Starship: Downplayed. Laconian technology is derived from an abandoned set of shipyards in orbit over Laconia. The ships look alien, with the Magnetar-class battleships being described as "a self-repairing flying vertebra", but inside, they're laid out very similar to Martian military ships.
- The Empire: Laconia, a defecting offshoot of the Martian military, reestablishing contact with the rest of humanity after a thirty-year self-imposed exile... with Protomolecule technology and an intention to establish a permanent centralized government.
- Fate Worse than Death: Being used as a protomolecule cultivation substrate in the Pen.
- Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Inverted and exploited; when Amos isn't right, he deliberately picks a fight with the one person he thinks he will lose to (Bobbie) in order to get a hold of himself.Amos: If I want to beat someone up, I have an entire station of people out there to pick from. But if I want to get beaten up? It's pretty much down to just you.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- Clarissa Mao dies using one last burst of her Bio-Augmentation in a body already wracked frail from its long-term side effects.
- James Holden, as he often does, goes off on a suicide mission. He survives, but is taken captive by Laconia and shipped off-station and back to Laconia itself before he can be rescued.
- Human Resources: Laconia punishes slips in discipline among its own population by sentencing them to be used as substrate for breeding more Protomolecule cultures.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: After the Heart of the Tempest destroys the Tori Byron and the railgun emplacement with two shots, Holden and Bobbie realize that they're completely outmatched and encourage everyone aboard Medina Station to surrender.
- Later, Camina Drummer surrenders to Admiral Trejo after she realizes that the Heart of the Tempest is more than a match for the Transport Union's fleet.
- Lost Technology: The Martian breakaway fleet settled in Laconia because of the presence of apparent ancient shipyards established there by the Protomolecule civilization. Using the Protomolecule sample stolen for them by Inarios' forces, they were able to reactivate the shipyards and use them to construct new starships using ancient Protomolecule tech that is centuries more advanced than anything humanity previously had access to.
- Make an Example of Them: In his final appearance, Governor Singh orders Major Overstreet to massacre most of the Medina Station population, to send a message to the rest of the galaxy. Overstreet promptly makes an example of him, executing him and making knowledge of his plan public.
- Meaningful Echo: Clarissa often thinks of a poem she wrote in prison where she says she knows she is not a monster because a monster would not be afraid. As she is dying, she tells Naomi "I am a monster" to signify that she is not afraid to die. Sadly, Naomi doesn't know the context and assumes she died hating herself.
- Meaningful Name:
- "Laconia" is the name of a region in classical Greece that was centered on Sparta and part of the Spartan domain of influence. It's also the name of the system in which a very militant culture premised on discipline and martial superiority arise to enforce its will over its neighbors across human space.
- Invoked by Drummer, who plans to intercept the Heart of the Tempest and dubs the intercept point "Point Leuctra". Leuctra was an ancient Greek village where the Spartans lost a decisive battle, which destroyed their hold over the other Greek city-states. It doesn't work.
- New Era Speech: Several Laconian characters give these, most notably Admiral Trejo.
- Nuke 'em: At Point Leuctra, the Transport Union fleet tries to nuke the Heart of the Tempest. It doesn't work.
- Race Against the Clock: The heroes and their allies must get out of Medina before the Eye of the Typhoon arrives.
- Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: The Freehold Colony. Three-hundred firearms enthusiasts who aren't big on unelected, supergovernmental bodies like the Transport Union, and don't feel obligated to follow their rules. They don't get a very charitable treatment until the end, when it turns out they're exactly the sort of people willing to hide the Rocinante from the Laconians.Alex: Oh, they're not so bad, so long as you avoid conversations about the nature of sovereignty.
- Self-Healing Phlebotinum: The Protomolecule-assembled materials used in Laconian ship hulls, in addition to being highly resilient, shows an apparent ability to seal itself rapidly after undergoing any kind of rend or puncture. Anti-ship railgun shots pass right through it with minimum apparent damage and even Amos' attempts to cut through it with a torch are frustrated because it closes itself barely slower than the rate he can trim it away.
- Shout-Out:
- Saba captains a ship named the Malaclypse, and at some point he refers to not liking to be "under the authority of the authorities". This will certainly be familiar to any reader of the Principia Discordia.
- The Laconian marines wear bright blue power armor with an eagle symbol across the chest.
- 10-Minute Retirement: Holden and Naomi decide to retire and sell the Roci to Bobbie. Before they can even finish the paperwork, Laconia finally decides to invade.
- Time Skip: Thirty years have passed since Babylon's Ashes.
- Underestimating Badassery: Payne Houston seems like an obnoxious blowhard, but he manages to escape his cell, disable the Rocinante, and even holds his own against Bobbie, briefly.
- Wave-Motion Gun: The Magnetar-class capital ships fielded by Laconia are aptly named, as their primary armament is a magnetic field beam of a strength similar to that of the magnetic field of a magnetar neutron star, which is to say strong enough to distort the shape of the electron clouds of atoms, causing anything hit by it to instantly come apart at the molecular level. Needless to say, this is decisive in fleet engagements.
- Wham Line:Major Overstreet: Yes, sir. Only, I have other orders. Sir.
- Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: A running theme in the novels, but never as strongly as here, where several of the 'good guys' are members of the Voltaire Collective, a motley gang of terrorists and psychos who didn't join Inaros' crew because he wasn't hardline enough.
