With the last six episode season of The Expanse coming out soon, I find myself left with wanting more. Knowing nothing of TE outside of what I’ve seen on the streaming episodes, I’m not sure where to begin.
I’m not sure what books the streaming version was based on. Should I read those?
Any thoughts are appreciated.
Yes I read them four or five years ago. I thought they were good but not great.
The TV adaptation does actually follow the books quite closely starting at the beginning of the first book and following the story all the way through. And from what I can remember it pretty much sticks to what happens in the books fairly rigidly until the end of the most recent series in which there is a rather dramatic change to the fate of one of the major characters. And so from now on it is likely to be a bit different.
Worth a read though if you like sci-fi. I enjoyed the books enough to stick with them all the way to the end - though it says something that I cannot actually remember what happens! The TV series usually gives me a nudge and I recall stuff moments before they appear on screen (which I think might be the worst of both worlds).
Yes - I’m a big fan. I recommend them - not too long and well written scifi, IMO.
I think it was Leviathan Wakes? Something I read about 10 years ago. Never read any sequels or seen the TV series. My thoughts are, read it, and either it will leave you wanting more, or… not.
Just finished the second book this morning and I actually like the TV show better. The books are somewhat lacking in dramatic tension.
I’ve read them all. The recent ones are still enjoyable but not as compelling as the ones being dramatized for TV. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything but the last one or two books take place 20 years after the events in the early books/TV show, and it makes sense that they probably won’t be adapted for TV any time soon.
In my experience, whether you like a book or its media adaptation better is usually strongly influenced by which one you experienced first.
They’re definitely worth reading, although the body count is incredible (it is a space opera, after all). The last one comes out in 2 weeks, so your timing would be good. They’ve got a LOT of loose ends to tie up.
I read the first one. I thought it was pretty good for what it was (not too challenging space adventure/political thriller), but not to my taste enough to make me want to read the rest of them. It read like something that was created with the expectation of being adapted to film, and so far I have preferred the TV show to the book (although, again, not so much that I’ve watched all of it).
If you like the TV show enough to watch all of it, you’ll probably like the books too.
I’ve read all the main books and most of the side-novellas, and enjoyed them sell enough, but (like the Witcher) the show follows the books closely enough that you can skip the books, imo.
The books are, as usual, more. You find out a lot more about what the characters are thinking and feeling, and a lot more of the “why” about nearly everything.
That said, the showrunners have done an absolutely fantastic job of casting, especially for the main 4 in the Rocinante crew. And oddly enough, the one I’d have imagined would be the hardest to cast, is the one they got the most right- Wes Chatham pretty much channels Amos in some kind of black magic kind of way. If anything, he’s too good looking to be Amos, but that’s pretty minor, relative to his ability to actually inhabit the character.
So if you like the show, you’ll like the books. The showrunners have stuck closer to the books than is typical, with one exception due to a certain actor’s extracurricular activities. The storylines are broadly the same, the look of things is actually better done than I’d have expected, and in general, even outside of the main 4, the casting and acting is very good for a TV show.
I suspect they’re going to end the series after the end of Babylon’s Ashes, and not pick up decades later with Persepolis Rising. But there are 3 books remaining after that, and the first two are pretty good, if different.
I have read the books and really enjoy them. The TV series not so much.
What I enjoyed about the books was the crew’s cohesiveness after the tragedy of their ship (where they’ve worked for years together) being blown out of the sky while they were exploring a ship in distress in a shuttle. The TV show through that all out and went full TV trope with manufactured inter crew conflict just for drama.
I love the show and love the books.
I have to see the adaptation before I read the book — it’s a thing with me — so with The Expanse, after watching each season through, I’ve bought the related book.
They are thick as hell, and yet they read very quickly. I love the writing, and often read something out loud to whoever is in the room with me because I love the way it sounds. (Or because it’s funny, or a great character bit, or was a great moment in the show and I enjoy it in the book as well, e.g., Amos’s speech to Peaches about tribes.)
So yes, read the books. I hope you like them.
I read the first two (sparked by the recommendation of a Doper, actually), and got about a third of the way through the third book before the story became too bogged down for my taste, as I felt there were too many new characters introduced and too many little details to keep track of. So I put that book down, and am focusing on another book series at the moment. I quite enjoyed the first two books though, some nice world-building in them.
For the TV series, I’ve only gotten through two-thirds of the second season before other shows took away my attention. So far I find it … decent enough, but I thought a couple of the characters were miscast. For example, the books’ description of James Holden as someone more akin to an alpha male, had me envisioning someone like Chris Pratt’s character in Jurassic World, rather than the baby-faced actor we currently have.
Also, Naomi was described in the books as having a mix of African, Asian, and South American genetics, but I don’t see any traces of Asian in her actress’s looks. With Amos, the actor selected didn’t exactly match the physical description of the character, but I felt he nailed the demeanor and attitude down to a T.
I’ll resume the books and the show somewhere down the line, but it’s gonna be a while.
I love the books (and need to read them again as I am now with Peter Hamilton’s “Dreaming Void” trilogy, which is also excellent…and needs a movie or a show too!) and the show about equally well. As someone upthread noted, the books are more. A lot more, actually. Someone else mentioned feeling bogged down in minutia, but for me, anything that needed remembered always seemed to be mentioned more than once so eventually I would understand what many of the made-up sci-fi words were for pretty much everything in the series.
Great books!
We need a Peter Hamilton thread! Nose game, you need to start it now FoieGrasIsEvil/>
Aw man! Speaking of space opera and lots of made up sci-fi sounding fake words…lol. I love that guy’s books.
That’s one thing I kind of like - just about when we start getting nostalgic for the TV show, the actors will have aged enough to pull off a season or two to do the last three books.
Hey, a guy can dream!
Yeah, that was one of the major turn-offs for the show for me as well. By about the end of the second book, the main 4 characters were TIGHT. And yet the show is introducing conflicts and staring matches between them for some reason. I think part of it is probably that in-book, the authors say that it took X many weeks or months or whatever for them to go from say… Mars to Titan, and so forth, and then they do some critical stuff somewhere in there. So it’s not unusual or jarring to then see them as a tight-knit crew, and even more or less friends with each other. But the TV show doesn’t really do as much of that- they don’t do a lot of “Two months later…” showing the Roci pulling up to Tycho Station type stuff; time seems to be less defined, and as a result, I think that in the show, it must have seemed unnatural to have the crew be tightly bonded so fast in terms of in-show time. So they must feel like they have to explicitly show them rubbing off the rough edges, or else it would be weird.
That, and the other turnoff for me is that I really like Alex as a character, and Cas Anvar’s portrayal of him, and his dismissal kind of turned me off to watching it. Not because I didn’t think he shouldn’t have been dismissed (he absolutely should have been), but because I couldn’t really imagine the stories without Alex.
Yeah, that is certainly the worst part about the show vs the books. WTF was he thinking?
At least the character got a good ending, even if the actor didn’t deserve it.
But the show has been good enough so far that I’m willing to trust them to get the replacement right. There have been enough character changes from the books (like introducing Bobbie early) that they made work that they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.