There will be spoilers ahead—you have been warned!

SyFy

SyFy

SyFy

SyFy

SyFy

The current king of the space opera genre is James SA Corey. Corey—a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck—first appeared in 2011 with the critically acclaimed novel Leviathan Wakes, the first installment in an increasingly epic series called The Expanse, about war and solar system colonization. The books have recently been translated into a TV show on Syfy, and my colleague Annalee Newitz is spot on when she says it's the best thing in years. But having just reread the books, seeing the story come to life on the screen has given me a little "canon shock." Even so, working through this reaction has helped me think more about how the writers on the TV series have tweaked the story to work better in a visual medium.

TV and movie adaptations run a certain risk with fans of a well-loved book—few Dune aficionados have much love for the Lynch movie or the SyFy show, for example. Actors get cast for roles you always imagined as someone else. Plot changes can feel disconcerting, like a newly chipped tooth. Does an author's involvement in the process help defend against canon shock? I'd argue it can—the various radio, book, and TV versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fall on this side, for instance.

But some of the changes to The Expanse make an awful lot of sense. The books depict a realistic 23rd century, where journey times across the solar system require weeks or months to complete. That works less well on TV than the page where there's room to dig into the mundane aspects of spaceflight. The show has also been doing a clever job showing—rather than telling—us about the world(s) of The Expanse.

As a TV show, it needs to establish the world and its characters much faster than the space of a novel permits. The accents and patois of the Belters does much to set them apart from those born in the gravity wells of Earth or Mars. A transit map quickly orients us to the geography of Ceres Station. A love scene doubles as an explanation for the difference between a ship under power and not.

There is—I think—the same overarching plot, but we may take a radical different route to get there. The occasional plot element from the later books shows up in the first few episodes along with completely new turns. We meet the UN's Chrisjen Avasarala much earlier than expected, torturing an OPA terrorist in episode one. She accuses him of carrying contraband stealth technology—and is this the same stealth technology that an OPA faction uses to camouflage a horrific attack on Earth described in Nemesis Games (book five)?

We also learn about Naomi Nagata's past with the radical OPA faction much earlier than in the books. Without the luxury of a long haul to get to know the Rocinante's crew, the show gives us their backstories during Martian Navy interrogations on the Donnager.

Alterations to the characters themselves feel more jarring, but again there's common sense at work. The James Holden of the books is a little too idealistic to work on the screen without plenty of time to explain himself. The TV series therefore gives him a new backstory as the product of antigovernment radicals in Montana.

Similarly, Avasarala's motivation is subtly reworked. She mourns the loss of her son; in print he died in a skiing accident, but in the show we're told he was a UN marine killed in a skirmish with Mars. Changing the circumstances of her son's death makes her actions more relatable to the viewer. That torture scene, for example, makes a little more sense. But the biggest loss to her character in the translation to television has to be her cleaned up vocabulary. Avasarala's swearing in the books wouldn't be out of place in Deadwood. Clearly it's too extreme for SyFy, which is a shame since her foul-mouthed tirades have often reduced me to tears of laughter, and those are welcome moments of comic relief in an often dark solar system.

The action on Ceres is also a lot more intense than in the novels. Detective Miller almost gets airlocked, and his partner Havelock—rather than some random Earther—gets staked to a wall. I expected Ceres to resemble the fall of Saigon when Miller packs up and heads off to Eros. But this geopolitical shift, which we see in the novels, may be held for a future date instead. And what about the Earther spy (with bionic eye implants?) on the Rocinante—where did he come from? He's not in the books, either.

Some of these changes have left fans shouting at the screen (or taking to Twitter). Abraham and Franck, who are working on the show as consultants, have been engaging directly with these fanrage reactions:

You know, we add new twists and storylines just for you book readers. Give you a reason to tune in. #TheExpanse — James S.A. Corey (@JamesSACorey) January 20, 2016

Not everyone is able to get over canon shock easily though. Series producer Ben Moon describes one fan who ragequit because Detective Miller's hat changed—in the book it's a porkpie hat, but actor Thomas Jane wears a different style. That fan is just taking it way too far, though. If you like Belter fiction—and really, who doesn't—you won't find it done better on screen than The Expanse.

Listing image by SyFy