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Posted on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019 by Vanessa Armstrong
I just started watching the The Expanse and it’s really difficult to get over how dramatic Holden takes every. I feel like he could be playing pinball and have to take a moment to weigh out the morals of flipping the ball with the paddle and get into an ethical argument with whoever is. What many people don’t know is that The Expanse is based on Leviathan Wakes, the first book of James S.A. Corey’s (the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) The Expanse Series. Jan 24, 2016 Gaming & Culture — What changed when The Expanse went from book series to television Or, how I dealt with canon shock. Gitlin - Jan 24, 2016 5:15 pm UTC. The Expanse is a 9 book science fiction series from James S.A. Corey, the pen name for a collaboration between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. The books are numbered here in publication order, which is the order recommended by the authors. There is also an alternative chronological order.
Jul 30, 2020 The Expanse season 5 finished filming in February, but a premiere date for new episodes of the science-fiction series still has yet to be announced.While the show maintains its stable orbit.
Fans of the television series The Expanse likely know that the show is based on the books written by James S. A. Corey, the pen name of co-authors Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham. Each season roughly follows the story from one of the books, and Season 4 is no different; the main plot of the show taken from Cibola Burn, the fourth book in what’s expected to be a nine-volume book series (the eighth book, Tiamat’s Wrath, was published this year, and the final book is expected to come out in 2020).
Like most television adaptations, there are necessary differences between the source material and what we see on screen. The Expanse is no different in this regard, and there’s a lot pulled in and taken out from the books in season 4. “At the end of a season, [co-authors Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham] and I will start talking about the plan for the next year,” showrunner Naren Shankar told /Film. “I will often have my feelings about how we should adapt it, what changes we should make, but the three of us talk about those things.”
Read on to learn about some of the differences these three creative minds agreed upon for the show, including Shankar’s perspective on why some of them were made.
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Warning: heavy spoilers below for both Season 4 of the television series as well as the fourth Expanse book, Cibola Burn. There’s also very light spoilers for the fifth Expanse book, Nemesis Games.
Big Change #1: The Removal of Havelock’s Storyline on the Edward Israel
One of the main points of view in Cibola Burn is from Havelock, Miller’s old partner when they were both detectives on Ceres. By the fourth book, Havelock is now working security for the UN-backed corporation sent to establish a presence on New Terra (AKA Ilus). Unlike his boss Murtry, however, Havelock stays on the Edward Israel for the entirety of the book, where a bunch of “deputized” engineers get all Lord of the Flies with a grudge toward Belters. This whole storyline, including Havelock changing sides and eventually making it to the Rocinante, is completely left out of the fourth season. This omission, however, is a reasonable one—the theme of civilized people becoming less-than civilized is well covered by Murtry on Ilus, and by keeping this storyline out, the show was able to build out Bobbie, Avasarala and the OPA storylines, which are barely present, if at all, in the book.
Big Change #2: The Addition of the Storylines of Bobbie, Avasarala and Ashford, Drummer and Marco
With the exception of a few choice messages to Holden from Avasarala, the entirety of Cibola Burn takes place on Ilus. If the show followed this trend, that meant that fan-favorite characters Bobbie, Avasarala, Ashford and Drummer wouldn’t make an appearance in Season 4 at all. Fortunately, the show did include storylines for all of them, and even pulled from the source material, both from the fifth book, Nemesis Games, and also from one of the The Expanse novellas that James S. A. Corey have also published. “A lot of Bobbie’s story is from the novella Gods of Risk,” Shankar explained in an interview with /Film. “We thought it was a really interesting way to finally go to Mars. We wanted to see what that place was—we’d touched on it by going there on ships and seeing what Martian culture was like, but it was always effectively on a naval ship, so it gave us a chance to go into that world and what life is like there.”
Avasarala’s election threat isn’t touched on at all in Cibola Burn, though it gave the show a chance to not only touch on how the discovery of the ring gate affected Earth, but also to provide a deeper look into Avasarala’s relationship with her husband, and how something as intense and stressful as a global election can strain even the strongest relationship.
And then there’s the OPA. Marco Inaros, the Belter with a grand violent vision to kill a lot of Earthers, is a character that was pulled from the fifth book into the fourth season. Without getting into spoilers for Nemesis Games, seeding Marco’s character this season effectively tees up the likely major conflict for Season 5. Introducing Marco now also helped emphasize the internal struggles the OPA is facing in trying to legitimize itself to Earth and Mars.
Big Change #3: Naomi Tries to Deal With Gravity on Ilus
In the book, Naomi never even tries to acclimate to high-gravity life on Ilus; her time in Cibola Burn is spent on the Rocinante and as a prisoner on the Edward Israel when she tries to disarm their armed shuttle and gets caught. In Season 4, however, Naomi desperately wants to be able to live planet-side.
Dominique Tipper, the actor who plays Naomi, explained to /Film what motivated her character to do so: “For her, the want to be on a planet and experience what’s that like is partly her own curiosity, and partly the hope of relieving some of the Belters’ plight and their reliance on Earth. I think for her, this is a good solution, because for Naomi, you’re never going to catch her going to Earth—that’s her oppressor’s planet. Now that the ring gates are open, for her that’s an opportunity to exist there with the man she loves. And so they get the best of both worlds. You get to see her go through this really difficult journey to try to get her body to adapt to atmosphere, and it’s a real struggle for her.”
Naomi’s struggle to stay planet-side ultimately fails, which brings with it not only a poignant moment for her and Holden, but also hammers home the larger point that there will be Belters who won’t be able to settle on any of the new planets. What will become of those who have to stay in a low-gravity environment? The OPA, including Marco, are grappling with this as well, with Marco’s point of view appearing to win out at least in the immediate term with his attack on Earth at the end of the season.
Big Change #4: Have the Main Ilus Settler Point of View be Lucia Instead of Her Husband, Basia
In Cibola Burn, Basia—Lucia’s husband and fellow refugee from Ganymede—is a main point of view character. In the book, he instead of Lucia is the one who is part of the cell that blows up the landing pad that kills dozens from the UN-backed corporation. The show made Lucia the focus character on Ilus instead, in part because having Basia be the focus felt a little too similar to Prax’s role in earlier seasons.
Big Change #5: Adding Material in Season 4 to Set Up the Conflict for Season 5
There are other changes too of course, small things like not seeing more of the alien flora and fauna described in the book (I would have loved to see one of those “lizards” who throw up their entire stomach when eating something, but I understand that the CGI budget was better spent elsewhere). And if you’ve already read Nemesis Games, it’s exciting to see where things are headed for Season 5. “Think about how much we get out of showing Marco and Naomi the way we do in episodes 4 and 5 of this season,” Shankar teased. “That’s a huge advantage of the material we created for Season 4 that isn’t in the books; the material bridges Books 4 and 5.” And while we’ll likely have to wait another year to see how Season 5 plays out, fans of both the books and the show know what we get will be, to put it one way, Earth-shattering.
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There will be spoilers ahead—you have been warned!
The current king of the space opera genre is James SA Corey. 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 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. 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.
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. Actors get cast for roles you always imagined as someone else. Plot changes can feel disconcerting, like a newly chipped tooth. 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.
But some of the changes to The Expanse make an awful lot of sense. The books depict a realistic 23rd century, where journey times across the solar system require weeks or months to complete. That works less well on TV than the page where there's room to dig into the mundane aspects of spaceflight. The show has also been doing a clever job showing—rather than telling—us about the world(s) of The Expanse.
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. A transit map quickly orients us to the geography of Ceres Station. A love scene doubles as an explanation for the difference between a ship under power and not.There is—I think—the same overarching plot, but we may take a radical different route to get there. The occasional plot element from the later books shows up in the first few episodes along with completely new turns. We meet the UN's Chrisjen Avasarala much earlier than expected, torturing an OPA terrorist in episode one. 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 also learn about Naomi Nagata's past with the radical OPA faction much earlier than in the books. 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.
Alterations to the characters themselves feel more jarring, but again there's common sense at work. The James Holden of the books is a little too idealistic to work on the screen without plenty of time to explain himself. The TV series therefore gives him a new backstory as the product of antigovernment radicals in Montana.
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. That torture scene, for example, makes a little more sense. But the biggest loss to her character in the translation to television has to be her cleaned up vocabulary. Avasarala's swearing in the books wouldn't be out of place in Deadwood. Clearly it's too extreme for SyFy, which is a shame since her foul-mouthed tirades have often reduced me to tears of laughter, and those are welcome moments of comic relief in an often dark solar system.
The action on Ceres is also a lot more intense than in the novels. Detective Miller almost gets airlocked, and his partner Havelock—rather than some random Earther—gets staked to a wall. I expected Ceres to resemble the fall of Saigon when Miller packs up and heads off to Eros. But this geopolitical shift, which we see in the novels, may be held for a future date instead. And what about the Earther spy (with bionic eye implants?) on the Rocinante—where did he come from? He's not in the books, either.
Some of these changes have left fans shouting at the screen (or taking to Twitter). Abraham and Franck, who are working on the show as consultants, have been engaging directly with these fanrage reactions:
You know, we add new twists and storylines just for you book readers. Give you a reason to tune in. #TheExpanse
— James S.A. Corey (@JamesSACorey) January 20, 2016
Not everyone is able to get over canon shock easily though. Series producer Ben Moon describes one fan who ragequit because Detective Miller's hat changed—in the book it's a porkpie hat, but actor Thomas Jane wears a different style. That fan is just taking it way too far, though. If you like Belter fiction—and really, who doesn't—you won't find it done better on screen than The Expanse.
Expanse Book Series Order
Listing image by SyFy