So The author is actually two fellows, Daniel Abraham, and Ty Frank.

I am terribly sorry that I missed yesterday. I am in a local theatre production of Mamma Mia!, we had practice from 9-1 on Saturday and then we did another 1-6 practice on Sunday. After a busy weekend, I kept forgetting to get to the computer. When I finally did, I was sidetracked by the fact that Garageband has some pretty cool things that I did not know it could do (creating music by placing the notes at the right pitch and length in a timeline.) Anyway, I missed my window yesterday because of me messing around on the computer. I also missed the window because my wife and I had to finish up the season 3 finale of the Expanse.

The Expanse book series is quite long now. I’ve read 3 of the books, and those three books happen to coincide with the progression of the show on TV – the first 3 books are covered in the 3 seasons currently viewable. Yay for Amazon for picking up the show for some more seasons! They definitely have enough source material to work with for some more seasons.

So the expanse is a Space Adventure/crime drama/political thriller/horror/space western… (the space western part comes up in book 4 I understand.)

Like most things that have a book and a movie/TV show, the book is definitely more descriptive, and you understand a great deal more of what is going on, but the TV show is quite good. It’s great to get so many adaptations of good books on TV. New original content is good, but when a TV or movie is done well, it gives more life to the books that already exist.

But back to the Expanse: I don’t mind the shoot em up elements of space battles and rival factions. I do love the fact that the ships fly backwards most of the time. I of course love the exploration of the grittiness of life in space, and the problems on earth in the future – there is still rampant poverty, war mongering and profiteering, issues with climate and nature, and of course human interaction issues. But the books (and the show) do quite an interesting job of making the relation issues not race related, but location oriented – the Earth, Mars, and the Belt (Belters are those that live and work in the outer planets, mostly for the benefit of the Earth) have issues with each other. They have been living in different environments for so long now, that they have gone through a fair bit of evolutionary development. The three factions are almost (and that’s the key – almost) different forms of humans. This of course plays into the main political arc of the the story, that Earthers, Martians and Belters just can’t get along. There’s war, there’s restoration, there’s betrayal, there’s love, and there is an entirely alien species called the protomolecule thrown in there for good measure. Anyway there is too much going on in these books to really do it justice with my rambling words. The story is grandiose, the plots take you all over the place, the characters are enjoyable (the TV show portrays them pretty well). And there are plenty of shots of the inside of Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto.

Book 1: Leviathan Wakes

Book 2: Caliban’s War

Book 3: Abaddon’s Gate

Book 4: Cibola Burn

Book 5: Nemesis Games

Book 6: Babylon’s Ashes

Book 7: Persepolis Rising

Book 8: Tiamat’s Wrath

Book 9: ??

Book names taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)