Cibola Burn

Cibola Burn is a science fiction novel by James S. A. Corey, the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, published in 2014. It is the fourth book in The Expanse series.

The novel moves the series onto a new world, Ilus, reached through the alien gates, where a group of Belters have already set up a mining settlement and a corporation has sent its own team to claim the same planet under the charter it holds. The crew of the Rocinante is sent to keep the two groups from killing each other, which is not a task the ship or its captain are suited to, and the arrival of the protomolecule's makers' machinery complicates it further. Abraham and Franck wrote the book with a western in mind, so there is a frontier town, a claim, a sheriff and a landscape that is trying to kill everyone on it, and the older political argument between Earth, Mars and the Belt is carried into the new setting.

The Expanse runs to nine novels, and this is the one in which the consequences of the gates first become the subject of the series rather than its background.