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Let’s Talk About “The Expanse”
About seven months ago, a kid I work with told me about a science fiction TV show he thought I’d enjoy. It was a little something called “The Expanse.” It had a great premise. The only problem was that it was on the Syfy channel.
If you’re not familiar with Syfy, until they rebranded themselves a few years ago, they were the Sci-Fi Channel, a cable station nominally devoted to science fiction television. The only problem is that … their programming was terrible. If you need an example of their garbage programming, they’re the folks behind Sharknado. The fact that they changed their name to “Syfy” should tell you everything you need to know. But I was assured, by my coworker, that this one series was the shining gem of the network and that it was worth watching. And, boy howdy, was he right.
The series is set a few centuries in the future. There’s a united Earth, under the UN. There’s a colonized Mars, attempting to terraform, and there’s The Belt, the people who live and work in the asteroid belt. They are the Third World of the solar system. They have their own culture, their own language, their own society, and they are perpetually under the boot of the Inner Planets. The series centers on two main characters, James Holden, who begins the series as XO of an ice freighter, and Miller, a hard-boiled detective who lives on one of the inhabited asteroids in The Belt.
“The Expanse” television series is a masterpiece. It’s superbly done. The production details are exquisite. It is everything I want from a science fiction television show. My wife and I quickly burned through the first season, which was available on Amazon Prime. That was in February or so. I didn’t want to pay for the second season, which we calculated (correctly) would come onto Prime when the third season premiered on television, so we held off.
But wanting more, more, more, I began reading the books, of which there are currently seven, with another coming in December and a final book in 2019.
The overwhelming majority of science fiction I’ve read was written in the 20th century. The great masters of the genre all did their work in the 20th century, mostly before I was born. I think the last science fiction book I read from this century was The Martian. It was refreshing having a work with modern trappings: computers, coding, cell phones (called “hand terminals”), and something resembling the Internet (and Internet culture) all play a role in the story.
For me, Leviathan Wakes was not only a masterpiece but a breath of fresh air. It is everything I want a science fiction work to be. The world-building is rich and robust. The characters move me. And the authors (James S.A. Corey is a nom de plume for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) understand how science fiction works because they’re keen observers of history and human nature.
Allow me to explain. Great science fiction works thusly: Technology and circumstances change; social patterns, customs, and habits form around those changes; but human nature stays the same. People do what they always do. So to understand and create great science fiction, one must understand human nature.
The authors do this masterfully. They will tell you this is not “hard sci-fi” because there is no math. True, but they do fully account for gravity, which is the real dividing line. (It also means that the space combat is realistic.) There seems to be no aspect of the technology of living and working and fighting for centuries in space that they have not thought of. And not only is the technology there, but the culture of The Belt is built around those conditions. For example, Belters are always fastidious, especially about changing air filters. (Because, if you slack off, everyone dies.) It’s a hard life living in space, and it’s bred a culture of hard people.
I finished the seventh of these monster tomes (they are 500+ pages) on Monday night. It is all I’ve read for the last seven months. There’s a reason for that: these books are superb. (When Season 2 of the television series came onto Prime, I stopped 10 minutes into the first episode, because I was blurring characters and plot lines.)
I cannot recommend them enough.
Addendum: The certified geniuses at Syfy wouldn’t know a good thing if they saw it, so they canceled the series after the third season. Or maybe they realized the series was too good to be on their terrible network. (The truth is that it was expensive to produce and they only made money on the first-run viewing, not on streaming.) It was promptly picked up by Amazon, which knows a masterpiece when it sees it.
Published in Entertainment
Been hanging out on Ceres again, have you? Up where the Coriolis is bad?
Wow. I’ll definitely check it out.
Well, that video clip got my attention. Thanks.
That’s the one thing I don’t like about the show, is their pronunciation of “Ceres,” which doesn’t match anything anyone at any time has ever said. It is not a homophone of “series”.
Good to hear because a few friends at church are into it, and I watched the first episode recently but haven’t got back to it yet. I was told that my not being sure what all happened in that first episode is okay.
I’ve gotta see Firefly at some point. There’s been so much talk of it on this site.
So, I watched the first episode. It is very good. U.N. grandma is already a terrifying character. And Miller is a solid addition to the American detective tradition.
Huh. How is it pronounced? Dictionary.com and wiki both agree with the show.
It really ain’t that great…
Go Hwong Tong. It’s quite shiny.
It’s good, but a lot of what makes people love it is the potential they saw in it. Having something that could have been great getting cancelled after a short run leaves everyone free to project on it how great it could have been and then treat it as if it really was that great. And the potential for great was definitely there.
Check it out. You might love it. I certainly did, but it’s not for everyone.
It’s represented here in at least one name (mine) and two avatars.
SER-ees
The only way you come close to “series” is to pretend you’re speaking Latin, while somehow forgetting that Romans would have used a hard “C” sound at the beginning.
I have friends in astrophysics, and they’ve never heard anyone pronounce it the way the show does.
I have to agree. It was saved by the fact that there are only 13 episodes and thus no time for it to hit its own “Omega Glory” or “Violations” degrees of bad scripting. The pilot and “Jaynestown” are terrific.
I should give it another shot, as it has been years since I watched it, and I didn’t watch all of the episodes. I suspect that Firefly is great in the same way as Kurt Cobain, God rest his soul.
There are two different speakers from NASA in this video who rhyme Ceres with series.
Astronomer Scott Manley says series.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is really interesting because the host asks him a question about “ser-ess” and NDGT corrects him to “seer-eez”.
I’m open to being persuaded though, if you think these are unreliable or tainted sources.
Some more general thoughts on the matter…
Scientists often don’t get to control how the general public talks about their technical domain. An example in my own field: people use the expression “traveling at Mach” or “going Mach speed” (both nonsensical) to mean “very fast”. People even talk about the speed of objects traveling through the vacuum of space in terms of a Mach number — all nonsense.
They also say ur-A-nus instead of UR-an-us. And carbon dioxide is simply called “carbon”.
All frustrating for the experts, but beyond hope.
Those they people! And they call wasps, hornets and yellowjackets all “bees.” Not cool.