FINAL BOY

This is sci-fi and there’s a nine book series – with I think a couple of short story collections too. James S A Corey is actually two people, who were assistants to George RR Martin of Game of Thrones fame. So the first thing to say is that yes, the series is finished. They completed it rather than leaving readers in limbo for years and years. You don’t really spot any joins in the writing, style or language or anything.

What’s the set-up? Well, basically a few hundred years from now, humanity has gone out into space and started colonising our solar system – there’s definitely a sense that that was made necessary by Earth becoming a more and more challenging place to live. Humans went out to Venus, unsuccessfully, and to Mars, fairly successfully. They also have little pockets of colonies in the asteroid belt and some of the moons farther out. There’s quite a lot of tension between Earth (who have a bit of a superiority complex), Mars (who feel like they have worked hard for what they’ve built and don’t need Earth bossing them around) and the asteroids and moons (who call themselves the Outer Planet Alliance, and feel like they’re just doing all of the grunt work and providing the other two planets with resources but don’t get any respect or a seat at the table on discussions)

We have two leads – James Holden, who works on an ice-hauling freighter called the Canterbury – they move ice from one part of the solar system to the places that need it – water is scarce and valuable and so it is worth people doing that. Holden is idealistic and young and quite a romantic. The second is Miller, a cop on the asteroid Ceres, who is jaded and cynical and moving through his world trying not to let anything get to him.

Holden really finds himself thrown into a series of situations in which tensions between Earth and Mars seem to be escalating – its a very 80s Russia and America vibe whether neither actually wants to go to war with the other, but there are plenty of people on either side who are wargaming out that there MIGHT be an apposite time to do that whilst it still feels winnable. Holden gets squeezed right in the middle of that.

Miller is assigned a side-job by his boss. Some rich businessman’s daughter has left home on Earth and come out to the outer planets to play revolutionary and thumb her nose at her father. Find her and bring her home.

That’s the basic starting point, but what the first book is really exploring is the discovery of something out in space which comes beyond our solar system and is much much older than life in our solar system. Humanity can’t yet understand or process it, but there are people who have very firm ideas about what it could be used for.

As one of our leads muses in a later book this [something] prompts in humanity a similar reaction to monkeys and a microwave oven. One might find that if you push a button a light goes on, another finds that it gets hot inside and thinks it is a weapon, another that the door opens so it is a storage device.

There’s lots of tension in the book about whether this can be used for power, or for good, or whether nobody should have it at all. Both of the leads grow and change during the course of the story and they also affect one another. Both of them are flawed and make bad choices from time to time and those bad choices always feel like they flow from who they really are and what they would really do.

One of the things that I really like in the Expanse series is that although we’re sci-fi, nothing is just clean and streamlined and perfect. Nobody puts coordinates into a computer and then instantly travels by jumping to hyperspace – space travel is slow and has weight. Gravity and the forces of acceleration and decceleration really make a difference to the way people move, the way that their bodies appear, their outlook on the world and people from other worlds. Resources are scarce and precious – if you’re on a spaceship having fuel and air and water are the difference between life and death. It rakes a long time to travel, and if you’re wanting to know what is happening in a space battle above one of jupiter’s moons, then there’s a real lag in time for the signals to reach Earth – they’re not reacting in real-time, but to events that happened ten or fifteen minutes ago, and the same is true of any conversations two people on different locations are having with one another.

There’s loads of action, loads of politics and lots of characters who have their own agendas and form shifting relationships. It is very Game of Thrones in space – that’s not intended to be a bad criticism at all. It has that same weight and crunchiness and the same feeling that there are stakes here – just because you love a character doesn’t mean that they’re going to have plot armour that gets them out of any situation.

Whilst there’s big interplanetary stuff going on with huge implications, we spend most of our time with a very tight cast and a very close viewpoint of what they’re doing and what they are seeing, so it all feels really personal and like it matters to us. The pacing is strong and it doesn’t ever bog you down in the science elements – there’s enough there to give it some impact and context, but you don’t need to be into hard sci-fi to follow what’s happening.

There’s also a TV show, on Amazon Prime. I’ve been reading the book and then watching the season that tells that story. I’d say that the TV show gets the casting spot on (I know that there are some people who don’t like that TV Alex doesn’t physically resemble book Alex, but i really like TV Alex and that’s who I think of when I read the books), and the effects and look of it are so immersive. The TV show does bring the politics and politicians more to the fore at an earlier stage, and also tends to bring in the newer characters at an earlier stage so that we’ve already got to know them a little before the plot points about them start to happen, so I really like that. Obviously with a book that gets into people’s heads and lets you see their perspective, we do get to know the characters better in the book, but i think its a really good complement to the books.