The Expanse

The Expanse is a series of nine science fiction novels and a collection of nine novellas in the space opera tradition, set amid a politically tumultuous future in which humanity has colonized the solar system. It tells a story set across four decades and beyond the solar system about the political consequences of conspiracy which starts out as a missing persons case which will change the course of human history, and quickly gets into spoiler territory, and I think its worth avoiding spoilers. It was adapted into a TV series of the same name, which you’ve probably heard of if you’ve landed at my website.

I had originally heard about the series via publicity for the TV show, and while I had heard a lot of great things about it, I was a new parent at the time and making time for entertainment was hard. My first visual exposure to the series was unfortunately a promo clip of the first scene of the second season of the TV show: a military training exercise for marines of the Martian Congressional Republic, and my dislike of military fiction turned me off to the series for a while. When I was wrapping up my Discworld re-readthrough, I sought out recommendations for another large sprawling series, and repeated recommendations for The Expanse convinced me to give it a try, and I’m glad I did.

Recent edition book covers feature a prominent quote:

Interplanetary adventure the way it ought to be written – George R.R. Martin

which caught my eye as a former fan of GRRM’s (still, famously) incomplete series A Song of Ice and Fire and it turns out that author James S.A. Corey is the pen-name of two co-authors, of whom Ty Franck had served as GRRM’s personal assistant in organizing and world building; apparently Franck had developed the world of The Expanse as a role-playing game, which the other co-author Daniel Abraham found compelling enough both in research and world building that he asked to write a novel set in it, and they developed this into their co-authorship.

The series contains much of what I found compelling about A Song of Ice and Fire: Multiple perspectives from a diverse cast of unreliable narrators across a variety of locales; mysterious, poorly-understood, dangerous powers which are a looming existential threat in front of which less existential political violence and retribution for which plays out; detailed world building full of unrest; characters with goals that align but whose allegiances don’t; a narrative style that delights in the details of anything and everything.

The series also lacks many things I found problematic about A Song of Ice and Fire: character deaths feel like they actually mean something, as opposed to feeling cheap in the name of defying tropes. Content Warning; the series includes body horror, genocide, war, xenophobia, child abuse and death, false accusations of pedophilia, torture, sexual violence, and suicide ideation and attempts; but none of these felt gratuitous or superfluous; rather, the consequences of people – however evil or sympathetic – trying to further their – however horrible or sympathetic – political goals by doing what they think the right way to go about that. The series illustrates how often violence backfires, however well-intentioned. The stories are firmly anti-authoritarian and concern themselves deeply with the ethical choices involved by its various characters.

“There’s a right thing to do,” Holden said.

“You don’t have a right thing, friend,” Miller said. “You’ve got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.”

— Leviathan Wakes

“Your empire’s hands look a lot cleaner when you get to dictate where history begins and what parts of it don’t count.”

— Persepolis Rising

“That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s too late.”

— Tiamat’s Wrath

I found these books extremely captivating reading to the point where it became difficult to keep “just one more chapter” from interfering with other responsibilities – including sleep, and this may be the most grateful I’ve been to my partner for turning me on to audiobooks, because it’s much easier to listen to four hours in a day (at 1.25 speed) while driving, working out, cooking, or doing other chores, than it is to read the equivalent 110 pages. At 195 hours or 5,500 pages in total, that adds up.

The initial setting of the novels is very compelling, and remains so through a series of dynamic changes . Humanity has started colonizing the solar system; Mars gained its independence after designing a radically more efficient engine – giving them a tremendous advantage, and the governments of Earth unified under the UN. There is a massive amount of tension between the UN and Mars, but they both exert a tyrannical control over those who live further out in the asteroid belt or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, with those locales producing rare minerals needed by the inner planets and the inner planets controlling the “complex organics” and pharmaceuticals necessary for survival in outer space.

“Belters”, as those born outward of Mars are known, have elongated bodies with different proportions, thanks to growing up in either no or little gravity; they speak a creole language and have developed a system of body language using primarily hands, suitable for communication in environmental suits. Having no recognized political power from Earth and Mars, they’ve created their own fractured government and militant groups called the Outer Planets Alliance, labeled a terrorist organization by Earth and Mars. Because people are people, many “inners” latch on to these differences to justify the wanton cruelty their governments impose on the belters.

The first book starts out with two point of view characters: James Holden, the second-in-command of a ice hauling ship who will soon become captain of his own ship and remain a point of view character through the series, and Joseph Miller, a detective on Ceres tasked with finding and bringing home the daughter of someone with a controlling interest in the security corporation he works for. Their paths converge and they make a discovery which has consequences explored through the rest of the series. I’m avoiding talking about it, because I think its worth avoiding spoilers as the process of figuring it out was a wonderful experience.

The point of view characters shift from novel to novel, though James Holden is a point-of-view character in all nine novels. The perspectives include high-ranking politicians, a bevy of scientists, a former pirate captain and smuggler, security, and military personnel from many factions, a pastor, a welder, various rebels, adolescent children of antagonists, and more. I enjoyed all of these perspectives, even if I detested the characters from which they came.

While this isn’t necessarily “hard” sci-fi, one thing I loved about these books is how they deal with both the vastness of space, how that relates to time, and explores the consequences of both the speed of light and the limitations of g-forces on the human body as limiting factors.

When the orbits were right, the journey from Luna to Mars could take as little as twelve days. The trek from Saturn to Ceres, a few months. And because they were out there with their primate brains, evolved on the plains of prehistoric Africa, everyone had a sense of how far it was. Saturn to Ceres was a few months. Luna to Mars was a few days. Distance was time, and so they didn’t get overwhelmed by it. — Abbadon’s Gate

The narrative style relishes in small details, from the nuances of gravity (well, as from a planet; spin, as from a body’s rotation; thrust from a ship’s acceleration), the specialties of the point-of-view character, and astute observations:

Posthuman. It was a word that came up in the media every five or six years, and it meant different things every time. Neural regrowth hormone? Posthuman. Sex robots with inbuilt pseudo intelligence? Posthuman. Self-optimizing network routing? Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of.

— Leviathan Wakes

“We’re like children,” Anna said, pushing herself to her feet and lecturing down at him. “Who burn their hands on a hot stove and then think the solution is to blow up all the stoves.”

— Abbadon’s Gate

It was astounding, Bobbie thought, how quickly humanity could go from What unimaginable intelligence fashioned these soul-wrenching wonders? to Well, since they’re not here, can I have their stuff?

— Cibola Burn

What a weird fate for a photon to be spat out of a nuclear fireball, speed through the vast emptiness between stars, and land on a Martian Marine’s retina while she decided whether she still feared death, or if she was ready.

— Tiamat’s Wrath

The nine novellas are collected into Memory’s Legion, and are all wonderful additions to the series, providing either backstory on the universe or characters, additional insight to the goings-on, or a follow-up to a sympathetic character the story left behind. Using the chronological placement guide table in the link, I interleaved my reading of the mainline books with the stories and enjoyed the experience.

The audiobooks as narrated by Jefferson Mays are mostly great, with two gripes:

• Mays pronounces “gimbal” with a soft g through the seventh book, and finally changes it to the correct hard g in the final two books.

• The production quality falls off in the last two books, with many highly noticeable patched-over edits. I know as well as anyone that getting a good recording tone is hard, but it’s one of the things that separates the quality productions from the amateur-seeming ones.

The TV show is also great, and if you’re the sort would rather watch eight hours of TV before diving into a 550-page or 20-hour book, it’s worth watching the first season to see if its to your taste. The first season includes a point-of-view character not in the first book, and only covers about two-thirds of the first book’s story. Changes were made otherwise to accommodate the needs of casting, but I feel like they were all well-justified.

If you’ve watched the TV show, but haven’t read the books, here’s my case for doing so. There are spoilers for the TV show, books 1-6, and the first six novellas in Memory’s Legion.