A hundred and fifty years before, when the parochial disagreements between Earth and Mars had been on the verge of war, the Belt had been a far horizon of tremendous mineral wealth beyond viable economic reach, and the outer planets had been beyond even the most unrealistic corporate dream. Then Solomon Epstein had built his little modified fusion drive, popped it on the back of his three-man yacht, and turned it on. With a good scope, you could still see his ship going at a marginal percentage of the speed of light, heading out into the big empty. The best, longest funeral in the history of mankind. Fortunately, he’d left the plans on his home computer. The Epstein Drive hadn’t given humanity the stars, but it had delivered the planets.The ExpanseThe Expanse is the name of a series of science fiction novels by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, using the pen name
James S. A. Corey. They're pretty darn great and the motley crew of misfits and outcasts in the novels definitely gave me very strong
Firefly vibes. Daniel Abraham occasionally collaborates with George R. R. Martin, and Ty Franck also happens to be GRRM's assistant.
The book series currently consists of four novels:
Leviathan Wakes,
Caliban's War,
Abaddon's Gate, and
Cibola Burn. A fifth novel is in the works, with the working title
Nemesis Games.
SyFy has ordered a 10-episode season of the first novel. The show will simply be called
The Expanse, and it's currently in production, to premiere in 2015. Don't cock this up, SyFy!
The series is produced by Alcon Entertainment and will air on Syfy. The first season will be 10 episodes and is based on a script by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, who are the show's writers and executive producers.
Sean Daniel and Jason Brown of the Sean Daniel Company developed the original pitch with Fergus and Ostby. The project has been described by industry insiders as “Game of Thrones in space.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27JmggM5GGQLeviathan Wakes
Humanity has colonized the solar system – Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond – but the stars are still out of our reach.
Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, the
Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for – and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.
Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to the
Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.
Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations – and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.
Beloved of Broken Things- James "Jim" Holden (Steven Strait): an Earther and former UN Navy soldier in his early thirties, the only child in a family co-op with five fathers and three mothers. Currently the XO of the Canterbury, shuttling glaciers from Saturn's rings to the colonies along with dozens of similar ships. Doesn't quite know when to shut up, which is why he's no longer in the navy.
- Josephus "Joe" Miller (Thomas Jane): a Belter born on Ceres Station, which he has only left four times in his life. A detective hired by the Mao family to find their estranged daughter, Julie Mao, last known to live on Ceres Station.
- Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper): a born Belter, standing almost two meters tall (well, in the novels at least). Chief engineer of the Canterbury.
- Alex Kamal (Cas Anvar): helmsman on the Canterbury. Of Indian heritage, but born and raised on Mars.
- Amos Burton (Wes Chatham): engineer on the Canterbury. A calm and amiable Earther, but also capable of sudden violence without qualms when the situation requires it. Doesn't like to talk about his background.
- Juliette Andromeda "Julie" Mao (Florence Faivre): the oldest child of Jules-Pierre Mao, magnate of Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile. While attending college, she joined the student activist group Far Horizons Foundation. Not long after, she eloped from her family on Luna and joined the associated organization Outer Planets Alliance (OPA). While on an OPA mission on board the Scopuli she discovers a secret that will change everything...
- Gunnery Sergeant Roberta "Bobbie" W. Draper: a Martian Marine of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force. Stands a little over two meters tall and a muscular onehundred kilos at one g. Also won't show up until the second season but hey I'm hopeful.
- Frederick "Fred" Lucius Johnson: a former Colonel of the United Nations Marine Corps, one of the most decorated officers in the UN military, and the de facto leader of the OPA. Also known as "The Butcher of Anderson Station".
- Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo): the United Nations Assistant Undersecretary of the Executive Administration.
Gods of Risk- The United Nations: abbreviated UN, the governmental body of Earth. It was founded in 1945 after World War II as an international organization facilitating cooperation in, among other areas, international law. The UN is seated on Earth, but also has a presence on Luna, in the New Hague facilities in Lovell City. It controls the United Nations Navy and the United Nations Marine Corps.
- Martian Congressional Republic: the governing body which rules over the four billion inhabitants of Mars. Their flag has a single star and thirty stripes. The Republic is often times in direct competition to Earth and its governing body, the United Nations. Although Mars has a significantly smaller population than Earth, the ruggedness of the people, as a result of the harsher environment and sparser resources, makes Mars a worthy counterweight to Earth's power. The Martian Congressional Republic Navy, although smaller, is considered to be more advanced.
- Outer Planets Alliance: an organization that started its life as a labor union or advocacy group, fighting for the interests of inhabitants of the Belt, often in direct conflict with the inner planets' Earth-Mars Coalition Navy. The OPA is described as either a social movement, according to people sympathizing with Belters, or a terrorist network, according to the inner planets.
- Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile: ("Mao-Kwik" or "Maokwik") a company owned in part by Jules-Pierre Mao, assumed to be the result of a merger between his company and Kwikowski Mutual Interest Group. It is one of the fifty largest corporations in the Belt.
- Protogen: "First. Fastest. Furthest." One of the most powerful corporations on Earth. After Mars discovered silicate anomalies during a routine survey on Phoebe, they approached Protogen as a cosponsor of a research facility.
Dandelion Sky- Earth: humanity's cradle. A population of thirty billion. Governed by the United Nations. Due to the bountiful resources provided from the Belt, any citizen may choose to not work for a living and get a basic support income from the UN.
- Mars: The terraforming of Mars is considered to be humanity's greatest project. Has a population of four billion, governed by the Martian Congressional Republic.
- The Belt: the asteroid belt spread between Mars and Jupiter. It was quickly colonized after the creation of the Epstein drive. Natural-born Belters are taller and thinner than planet-born humans. Official censuses by Earth claim a population of 50 million; Outer Planets Alliance claim more than 100 million.
- Ceres Station: the largest asteroid (designated 1 Ceres) known and the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system, and the first asteroid discovered by humanity. Half a generation after humanity arrived there, Tycho Manufacturing managed to spin up the asteroid, which gave it a gravity of 0.3 g. The station has tens of thousands of kilometers of tunnels.
...and the horse he rode in onFlew into the light of Deneb
Sailed across the Milky Way
On my ship, the "Rocinante"
Wheeling through the galaxies
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Edit: 3 bucks? Bought. Will find out first hand. Gonna read Ancillary Justice first though.
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I don't really know what this series is about, but any "just like <country's most popular TV show> with one difference!" tagline is always one that smells like BS.
Not least because I don't think SyFy is in the habit of doing fairly explicit brothel scenes.
Ascension and Defiance have racy scenes like that in their series. It's not GoT shit, premium cable has its benefits.
* They're both series of books initially published in the English language
* They can be located in the Fantasy/SF section of the bookstore
I'm curious how they're going to go about translating the novels into a TV series. There are a lot of things that would be expensive and/or difficult to bring to film. A fair portion of the first three novels take place in low-to-zero gravity, for example, with predominately claustrophobic settings. And anything involving belters seems iffy at best. They're meant to be obviously physically distinct from baseline humanity (elongated bodies with disproportionate heads), with body language that isn't intuitively obvious and won't have accompanying text for translation. The specifics there aren't terribly important to the plot, but the xenophobia, prejudice, and misunderstandings on both sides of the belter/earther divide are fairly critical to the over-arching political and social themes.
As for sexiness, there's very little. No explicit sex scenes that I can recall. Hopefully they'll save enough of the effects budget to handle the extensive CG work that's going to be required for the climax of the first novel. And hopefully they get someone capable of making it look horrific instead of ridiculous.
They've pretty much said they're ignoring the physical differences, what with the lack of actors born in the asteroid belt. They've done a really good job at not whitewashing the characters for the show though, there's plenty of ethnic diversity matching the characters in the novels.
It'll be interesting to see how they handle Belter body language - it developed from the need to communicate while wearing bulky space suits. Lots of hand signals, since a shrug with your shoulders can send you flying in zero g.
The IMDB page lists characters from the second book showing up in the first 10 episodes. The first season might cover more than just the first book, or otherwise set things up for the stuff from the second book.
Julie Mao (seriously, big damn spoilers here):
Also, a fifth novel, working title Nemesis Games, release date set for June.
The books each have a mainline Holden arc and then a couple of main character arcs constrained to that book. It's a bit jarring in the second book, then expected in the later ones. I can see for an ongoing TV series wanting to introduce the primary characters in season 2 plot arcs before episode 1 of season 2.
About Julie:
That gets toned down in season 2. It's become a great show.
Well one thing that causes some of the game of thrones references is the writer of the expanse is a long time friend of George R R martin and has helped on the game of thrones books I believe as an editor/proof reader.
Yeah, Daniel Abraham has collaborated with GRRM. Ty Franck is GRRM's assistant.
edit:
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/geeks-guide-ty-franck/
edit2: link's a bit spoilery.
Yeah, but the books themselves are in no fashion similar. Lots of authors know or have a history with one another. I mean, Martin himself wrote/co-wrote/edited/worked on the Wild Cards books but I wouldn't call those "Game of Thrones with superpowers". It's a blatant attempt to get viewers by name-dropping a really popular franchise. If you go into The Expanse expecting a grim, gritty, character drama with a massive cast and a focus on shades-of-gray morality and political maneuvering you're gonna have a bad time. The various books in the series have different tones, but Leviathan Wakes is a moderately-hard sci-fi action/adventure mystery thriller. The main characters are basically a Space Detective and the Space A Team. The themes are, outside the action elements, about xenophobia and the dangers of capitalist greed. There are clear-cut good guys and bad guys, and when the good guys do bad things they feel bad about it and redeem themselves.
From good reads it's only the first three I read. It was pretty standard space opera with wildly inappropriate titles. Is there more to it in the later books?
Even if not I imagine I'll watch. I feel a very painful need for a sci fi series in my heart right now
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Yeah, they've been good at that part. One weird exception is Ade Tukunbo who is Nigerian that turned into blonde and white Ade Nygaard played by a Canadian actress but that's a really really minor role that won't get more than ten minutes of episode one.
I can't remember anyone in any of the books actually being white. I thought everyone in the Expanse future was kind of baseline mocha or darker. Jim Holden, for example, I could have sworn was meant to be brownish. But at least some of the cast aren't white, so there's that.
Someone made a collage of actor mugshots.
edit: not exactly the best comparisons though, pretty much everyone but Fred Johnson's actor look like they have a really light skintone in those pics.
Well, one important similarity is the rotating chapter POV. Like A Song of Ice and Fire, each chapter is told from one character's POV (title of the chapters are the characters' names). Some other books do this, but it's a pretty obvious homage to Martin in this instance.
Plot-wise and tone-wise, I would agree that saying it's Game of Thrones in space (or, A Song of Ice and Fire in Space) is mostly trying to bring in fans of that series.
Great series, though. A pleasant surprise when I started reading Leviathan Wakes (yeah, a hipster-like comment about how I read the series when it first came out).
@rockrnger Well, I'm up to like chapter 5 in the first book, and there's zero Game of Thrones-style politics. You've got a hefty amount of racism, and there's a terrorist army that people are afraid of, but the main characters are a Freighter XO and a Detective/Mercenary, so no one who is involved in government or anything. Politics is obviously a thing, but it seems to all be a backdrop/maybe a motivator for the bad guys.
Which is good, because Avasarala is my favorite character and I would watch an Avasarala show. ("These cunts are distracting from my grandma time" sold me on her instantly).
So they actually do space stuff?
Count me in.
If they don't have that line in the show I will be disappoint!
But will HBO drop the money for "space stuff?"
I doubt HBO would attempt it if they didn't think it would look good. In terms of dropping money, they are the best network to be on.
As for the series, I've read the first two books, and this should be fun. The weakest link is:
Book spoilers about characters and opening setting:
There's a ton of Firefly in the books' DNA. All of the action takes place in the Earth's solar system. The basic setup is that there's brewing tension between the independent colonies of the asteroid belt and the allied forces of Earth and Mars. Backwater colonies are space stations, vacuum-sealed settlements and asteroid bases instead of space Deadwood. The captain has a warship, not a civilian freighter. Earth is overpopulated and powerful. Mars is an industrial base with an elite military. They are basically in a NATO-style alliance while the outer colonies are diverse and independent.
The first season, if it follows the book, will be split pretty evenly between a hard-boiled detective tracking a missing girl through the space stations of the asteroid belt and the captain from above. The pace of the action, both in space and on the ground, tends to be more military than Wild West when focusing on the captain and dark noir/horror when with the detective. Overall, the immediate tone is light but the overall plot goes to very dark places.
That's a pretty darn good description of the setting.
Edit: Also, why are people talking about HBO? Isn't it on Syfy? Which, I mean, they did BSG, so they're obviously willing to do the space stuff.