Next week, The Expanse gets a little more expansive: Persepolis Rising, the seventh book of James S.A. Corey’s superior space opera saga (which has garnered a Hugo nomination, landed on The New York Times bestseller list, and spawned a successful television series), is poised to propel Captain James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante into an adventure that will take the series to its endgame. The author (or, authors: Corey is a pseudonym for the duo of Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham) have promised that this installment launches a trilogy that will wrap up the whole shebang at nine books.

But enough of that—if you’re reading this, you’re already sold on the series. Better to make the case for why you need to head to Barnes & Noble on Tuesday (or click that preorder button now): because we’ve got a special exclusive edition of Persepolis Rising with a 16-page Q&A with the author(s) you’ll find nowhere else.

Check out a brief excerpt below to get an idea of what you can look forward to next week—and make sure to preorder now if you also want that exclusive edition to be signed by the authors.

Was the whole series planned from the time you finished writing Leviathan Wakes, or was it more something you found your way through as you went? Sort of book by book?



We’ve known the whole arc of the story since about halfway through Caliban’s War. We were at the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno with our publisher, Tim Holman, and we had some questions about whether we should start bending the story to an ending after the three novels we had under contract were done or if he was hoping to have more after that. The mid­point of Caliban’s War was about when we would have had to start making the structural changes between those two versions of the story. He said he’d be open to more, and that really gave us permission to sketch it out as something larger.

We built a couple versions of the story—one with twelve books and one with nine—but in the end, the nine-book version seemed like the right shape. When we get done, you’ll probably be able to see where those other three books would have gone, but the deeper we get into it, the clearer it is that, while they might have been fun to include, the overall project’s better off the way it is now. The pared-down only-million-and-half-word version.

God, that’s a thought.

So the story you’re telling has an ending? You already have that in mind?

Absolutely. We’ve known the last scene and the last line for almost half a decade now. There are a few other people who know, and some speculation online that’s seen the direction we’re headed.

Does that make you want to change it? I mean, if people have already guessed?

Nope. If anything, it means we’re doing it right. The idea of a story as always being about surprise is something that we’ve bumped up against more than once. The truth is that surprise is easy. Just have something weird and random happen, and hey, no one saw that coming. What’s harder is earned surprise. Those moments when something happens that takes your breath away a little, but looking back, it couldn’t have gone any other way. We don’t want to telegraph everything that’s going to happen, but we do want to earn the things we do.

Preorder the Barnes & Noble signed exclusive edition of Persepolis Rising, available December 5.