Avasarala's swearing in the books wouldn't be out of place in Deadwood. But the biggest loss to her character in the translation to television has to be her cleaned up vocabulary. That torture scene, for example, makes a little more sense. 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.
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The TV series therefore gives him a new backstory as the product of antigovernment radicals in Montana. The James Holden of the books is a little too idealistic to work on the screen without plenty of time to explain himself. 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.Īlterations to the characters themselves feel more jarring, but again there's common sense at work.
We also learn about Naomi Nagata's past with the radical OPA faction much earlier than in the books. 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 meet the UN's Chrisjen Avasarala much earlier than expected, torturing an OPA terrorist in episode one. The occasional plot element from the later books shows up in the first few episodes along with completely new turns. There is-I think-the same overarching plot, but we may take a radical different route to get there. A love scene doubles as an explanation for the difference between a ship under power and not. A transit map quickly orients us to the geography of Ceres Station. Advertisementįurther Reading The Expanse is the best new science fiction series in years 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. The show has also been doing a clever job showing-rather than telling-us about the world(s) of The Expanse. That works less well on TV than the page where there's room to dig into the mundane aspects of spaceflight. The books depict a realistic 23rd century, where journey times across the solar system require weeks or months to complete. 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.īut some of the changes to The Expanse make an awful lot of sense. Plot changes can feel disconcerting, like a newly chipped tooth. Actors get cast for roles you always imagined as someone else.
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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. 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. 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. 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 current king of the space opera genre is James SA Corey.
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