Why I love the Expanse
Background
The year is 2018. I'd quit one job to get a few months off before starting out at a new job. While working on a project, I took time out to binge on a few series - Altered Carbon, The Breaker, and finally The Expanse. It had a couple of seasons up on Netflix, and I decided to try it out. I can't remember what about the cover art got my attention but I was captivated from the start. It had one of the most attention grabbing scenes that I've seen start any show; Two people having sex in zero gravity.
I kept watching past that point and it turned into one of the most interesting series that I've seen. The first season started out with a missing person's mystery coupled with the show exploring a lot of class inequality, and it kept improving from there. By the time that I got to the second season, I was completely hooked. I knew the show was based off a book series and I'd had people that I followed on Twitter talk about it. But it took me a while to get into the books. Netflix had refused to renew it passed the second season and I think I was sad for a while. But Amazon eventually picked it up. Back then, I was no longer following the long standing art of pirating shows. I also couldn't watch the show on Amazon Prime because they weren't in Nigeria at that time.
And so, I decided to start buying the books. It remains one of the best decisions that I've ever taken. I started reading it around late 2019/early 2020. And the first book was beyond captivating. I loved it so much that I got the second book about a month later. I remember that my job had given out gift vouchers as a Christmas gift to employees, and I sold mine so I could continue buying the books. For a while, I stuck to buying a book a month and taking a couple of weeks to read each one.
And by May or so, during COVID, I'd finished book 5. But it ended on one of the best cliffhangers that I've come across, that I broke my rule and then bought book 6, and then book 7, and then book 8. And within a short period of time, I'd finished all of them. It did involve a lot of days where I didn't eat until 11pm or 12am, because I was caught up in the books. And I needed a month to recover from all the starvation but it was worth it.
I did have to wait a couple of years for the final book in the series to come out, and I got it around the weekend that it did. I loved it a lot too.
What I love
I've tried a lot to get people to read this series lol. I even bought all nine books for one of my close friends in 2023 thinking she'd like it. While it's a sci-fi series, sci-fi just serves as a backdrop for the writers to explore a lot of social issues.
The first book was part missing person's mystery and focused on a detective looking for a billionaire's daughter, and part a dive into class inequality. The book sets up the world perfectly. It's set in a future where humans have mastered inter-planetary travel and have populations on Earth, in Mars, some of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, and in The Belt
You'd think that in a future where space travel is possible and there's Universal Basic Income for people who want it, that xenophobia would not exist. But psych, xenophobia is alive and well in this world. And it forms a large basis for the rest of the series going forward.
Book two takes things a step further and focuses on the extreme end of capitalism. It also introduces us to the political system of the universe that the books are set in, and to one of my favourite characters in fiction, Avasarala. It's also the book in the series that starts exploring different kinds of relationships in-depth and also has one of my favourite pieces of dialogue
"If life transcends death, then I will seek for you there. If not, then there too."
Book three is more philosophical and poses the question, if you've grown up with belief systems that were pretty much set in stone, what would you do when something shows up that usurps everything that you've been taught? Do you abandon your beliefs or do they evolve alongside it?
Book four is one of my favourite books. Which is weird because I've seen other people say that they don't like it because a lot doesn't happen in it. But to me, a lot did. There's a lot of exploration in the book and it's the book that I probably think about the most. This is one of the more sci-fi heavy entries in the series, alongsides books eight and nine. But it's focuses on an aspect of sci-fi that I enjoy. I found myself enjoying rain on a new planet being depicted and the aftermath that followed it(poisonous rainbow colored slugs that turned your vision green).
Book five is where things kick up a notch and the tone for the rest of the series shifts. It's also the only book that deviates from the narrative structure that the remaining eight books follow. The other books have a setup or build up half and a more explosive half. Book five starts out explosively and maintains the pace all through. The class inequality that I mentioned earlier comes to a head here and it follows into book six. It explores a traumatic family unit and how one character navigates their way around it with the aim of getting out of it.
Book six continues from where book five ends, but it also explores conflict from the point of view of the aggressors who feel like they've been wronged for decades. And it looks at all the avenues in which the conflict could be resolved. One of the reasons that I'm also fond of this book is that it focuses on a polyamorous unit, and how they navigate communication, how they support each other, give constructive feedback and show love towards one another.
Books seven and eight focus on authoritanism and how people rebel against such regimes. They are some of the most emotional books in the series. Book eight leans more into the sci-fi aspect of the series and explores some of the concepts we started getting introduced to from book one. It also features one of the best set pieces in all fiction that I've ever consumed, centering one of my favourite characters in all of fiction, Naomi "The Genius" Nagata
Book nine brings the series full circle and has one of the best endings to a series that I've read. It centers another favourite character of mine, Elvi Okoye, as she tries to find the cause of unexplained deaths that have been happening for about five books at this point. The book shows how the core group of characters we'd focused on from book one have grown and how their ideologies have evolved up until this point, how trauma also affects what their current viewpoints are. I didn't see the ending coming, and it took me a while to accept it but I understood that it was the best conclusion to the series
One of the other things I like about the series are the space battles. It's different from what I grew up with in Star Wars and Star Trek, where entire battles take place with ships in close proximity to each other. The Expanse takes the vastness of the universe into accounts and ships rarely see each other. You would have scenarios where missiles are chasing after you for 24 hours, and you have that much time to prepare countermeasures. Even what's considered close quarters combat(CQB) in the series still has ships spaced pretty far apart.
Conclusion
I love how the books explored human connections and different kinds of relationships - straight, queer, polyamorous, and found families. It explores sci-fi in a way that doesn't get overwhelming. The characters are written so well that you are drawn to them from the time the series starts and you stick with them until their arcs end. You understand their fears, their motivations, what they love, what they stand for. I think about some of the characters from time to time. Usually Naomi or Michio Pai. It's one of my best rated series of all time. I was finally able to get someone to binge the series in 2024 and I was happy that she loved it. Maybe I'd convert more people in the future 🥲🥲.