The Expanse

A while back, I read the first three books of The Expanse series, which I enjoyed and is a good temporary stopping point. Several months ago, I discovered that my local library was ordering the DVD box set of the full six-season TV series. I’d heard good things about it. I decided to first read Books 4-6 before starting on the TV series. Then my spouse and I slowly watched our way through the visual version of The Expanse.

 

Overall, I would give two thumbs up to the TV series. They did a good job adapting the books to the visual medium. This is always a challenge. I felt there was a bit of a rough start to Season 1. My wife, who had not read the books, was confused in the first several episodes. Even though I knew the story, I still found the presentation confusing. I understand the strategy of plopping the viewer dab smack in the middle of the action without much explanation (some scifi revels in this), but in this case I thought it was less than effective. Thankfully, things started to cohere as the season progressed and I feel that a certain consistency emerged over time.

 

[SPOILERS from here on…]

 

The TV series blends in background information and characters from future books by introducing them earlier in the season. Avasarala who only shows up in Book 2 begins to be featured in Season 1, and I think they did this effectively. Havelock also showed up in Season 1, but was inexplicably absent in Season 4. I can see why they cut out chunks of that story to concentrate on what was happening in Ilus. You have to make choices of what to keep and what to cut. Overall, the TV series has fewer characters from the book, as expected. Some are composite characters. For me, the most interesting choice was to introduce Drummer early and progressively make her a single main character by taking on the roles of other key characters. This was very well done, and the show-writers did an excellent job in using their freedom to create a compelling character.

 

An engaging scifi book is often more about probing the social science aspects rather than getting into details of the ‘hard’ science. This, I think, is a very effective approach. You need to provide enough to make the world feel realistic, but be vague enough so that your reader doesn’t suffer from disillusionment because you introduced something more ridiculous than fantastic. You can be vague in a book and leave imagination up to the reader but this is not so easy in the visual medium where you now have to decide how you will represent the technology. The Expanse TV series is a mixed bag. Some of the visuals are absolutely spot-on and I felt immersed in their world. Others were more meh and broke the spell of illusion. But overall, I like their representations of the Belt space stations, and the PDC countermeasures against torpedoes made for exciting visuals. Seeing the Nauvoo first get towed out was awesome.

 

I didn’t recognize any of the actors in the series. That was a good thing. Most of them did not look like what I might have imagined when reading the books, so while I experienced some cognitive dissonance in the early goings, eventually I felt that the main-billed actors inhabited their characters and I think they made excellent choices overall. No one was a dud. Drummer was superbly portrayed and one of the most engaging presences on-screen, which I find interesting given that she was a composite of multiple characters in the books. I suspect that going forward when I read Book 7, I will start to picture the TV series actors instead of what I had imagined previously in my mind’s eye. Not sure if this is a good or bad thing.

 

Finally, as a chemist who studies the origin of life, the protomolecule is of particular interest to me. I was less impressed by the visuals involving the protomolecule. And now that I think about it, the name is highly misleading. There’s no way a single molecule (even one that is large and multifunctional) can do what it purports to do – feed on organic matter and activate it into something life-like that straddles the boundary between machine and organism. It has to be a protomolecule system. But adding the word system would sound clumsy. Mixture? Composite? I can’t think of a better word, but the use of the singular-sounding protomolecule entrenches a wrong conception of how chemistry works. And the protomolecule’s action is all about chemistry.

 

Maybe after finishing Books 7-9, I will revisit what I think the protomolecular system needs to consist of. I study protometabolism. Maybe that’s what they should have called it: the protometabolism – but that would likely have been confusing. But that’s for another time. Watching the series also made me think of the “curse of knowledge” that inflicts all teachers. We have to constantly try our best to put ourselves in the shoes of our students to anticipate what will be confusing to them. If you haven’t read the books, parts of The Expanse TV series will be a bit of a muddle. My spouse would still say she found it engaging, and she was able to follow most of it with no problems. I did clarify some of the parts she found muddled, but overall that was minimal except for the early going in the first season. I am happy to recommend The Expanse TV series if you’re looking for engaging characters and an interesting multifaceted story.