Here at Ars we unapologetically love science fiction. Books, movies, comics—all of it. In fact, it needn't even be very good to earn our affection—who among us doesn't have a soft spot for Robot Jox or Dark Star? Of late, there has been a wave of fiction that has taken a closer look at what life would be like once humanity starts to colonize the Solar System and beyond: Neal Stephenson's Seveneves and Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora for example, as well as the miniseries Ascension. But none of those has given us something that's quite as well fleshed out as James SA Corey's The Expanse.
While it feels lazy to compare the series to Game of Thrones, it's understandable how that has happened. This sprawling, Solar System-wide series originally started life as the idea for an MMORPG somewhere around the turn of the century, before morphing into a series of novels (and novellas), and finally, a TV series on Syfy. Adapting a book to the screen can often be a fraught experience for the fan that is invested in the story. Unusually, however, Corey—or the two humans behind that nom de plume, Dan Abraham and Ty Franck—are deeply embedded in the show's writers' room.
As a result, the translation from one medium to another has felt extremely faithful in tone, even if some of the plot isn't happening in quite the same order as happened in print. Stallone's Judge Dredd this isn't!
Season 2 of The Expanse is where things have really started to get interesting. A shadowy conspiracy led by one of the system's richest men has been revealed. A bunch of scientists—who have had their capacity for empathy surgically removed—have used the space station Eros and its 100,000 inhabitants as guinea pigs for an alien artifact that's as old as the Sun. And as we saw last week, that alien artifact, also known as the protomolecule, seems to be able to ignore what we understand as the laws of physics.
Still, as the sneak peek that Syfy shared with us shows, The Expanse is about more than technobabble and space walks. It's about people and the bonds they form:
Holden, Naomi, Alex, and Amos are becoming more than just the crew of the Rocinante, and despite their differences with Miller, they're coming to see him as part of the family, too. And like real life, none of them is perfect or even close to it. Holden is idealistic, preachy, and often out of his depth. Miller has fallen in love with someone he has never even met, the missing person he was tasked to find. Alex holds himself to impossibly high standards, then mopes about when he fails to meet them. Under that charming babyface, Amos has even less capacity for empathy than our evil scientists. And Naomi is expected to be the glue that holds the crew together.
The dynamic between the crew is reminiscent at this time of the late, great Firefly, although obviously there is a universe's difference in tone between Whedon's cowboys-in-space and The Expanse. But something both series are good at is how they humanize their characters. And it's that, rather than the accuracy of the science or the beauty of the special effects, that keeps us coming back week in, week out.
The next installment of The Expanse runs tonight on Syfy, and you can catch our next podcast devoted to the show this coming Friday.
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