In my opinion it's better to know that not strictly hard sci-fi.

Let me explain, since I think this is an aspect of writing that's not widely appreciated. The beginning of a book essentially sets up "promises" for what the rest of the book is going to be like. In the case of Leviathan Wakes, I think it's entirely reasonable to see the book as making a promise that it's hard sci-fi, given that it's trying so hard to be. All of the little details, like you say, are made very obvious in the beginning.

And then, you get a good ways into the book, and suddenly you realize that it's not really hard sci-fi after all. It can be a serious let-down since the book was leading you on to believe it was fully hard sci-fi.

Now I'm not actually a huge fan of hard sci-fi per se, but this did irritate me that I didn't bother to pick up any of the sequels. Maybe I'll get back to it some day, since I do think some of the almost-hard details are nice, and now that I know to set the right expectations.

This was me with the TV series. Most of the first and second season are hard sci-if in the strictest sense. Just what the protomolecule is remained a mystery, but but it was a tiny alien enigma within a realistic near-term hard sci-fi universe that was and still is unlike anything else on TV.

Then the big reveal happened (in season 3, I think?) and it’s like the bottom dropped out. I legit stopped watching at that point, although I’m considering giving it another chance now. Had I known upfront I think I would have been more forgiving, but instead I felt deceived.

All that said, the Epstein drive is nearly as magic as the usual hyperspace trope. Even in the beginning The Expanse isn’t as hard sci-fi as it purports to be.

Leviathan Wakes would not be nearly as good if the exact nature of what comes later was broadcast early on, though the prologue does make it quite clear that the central mystery is going to lead somewhere outside of established science fact. That’s the promise it makes: that there’s something strange going on, and that by the end of the book you’re going to know more about it, and about what happened to the point-of-view character.

IMO, straying out of the lane of the subgenre that someone going in with no foreknowledge happened to sort a story into without reading the whole thing first is pretty low on the big list of literary sins. On the contrary, I think a genre switch-up executed well is a delightful thing, mostly because complications and reversals are critical elements of most good plots and genre is completely arbitrary and artificial. All other things being equal, a story that tiptoes around genre conventions is never going to be more interesting than one that goes where it wants.

There are so many things the author got right throughout the Expanse books - physics, politics, character progression, character impact. He just added a pinch of sci fi to make things interesting and different, but in a good way.

It starts as a bit of duex ex machina yes, but its never inconsistent. Any new progression seems logical from the old, so its easy to follow and doesn’t break the world view you develop for the series.

Also one of the best things the book got right for me is the scale of character’s actions. You don’t have mega heroes. The good guys just try to survive in the big universe and do good, but it doesn’t always work out the way they want as the world is big and you have unintended consequences. It felt very real.

It does have mega villains though, which were a bit _too_ powerful in my opinion, but not without historical precedent I’m afraid.