The End of The Expanse

The book series, that is.

Box set of Expanse books from Amazon, not including the concluding volume.

The news all sucks, but barring some new disaster, we’ll be heading out for Christmas with my parents and sister tomorrow, so let’s talk about something happier, like escapist genre fiction. Specifically, the last novel of The Expanse dropped recently, and I finished it over the weekend; the TV show is also in its final lap, with a shortened sixth season running on Amazon Prime right now, but I’m way behind on my watching, so will confine myself to talking about the books here.

The novel series consists of nine books, starting with Leviathan Wakes in 2011, written by “James S. A. Corey,” a pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. These are set in a future Solar System where humans have developed fusion energy and reasonably efficient propulsion systems that have allowed us to colonize Mars, the asteroid belt, and the moons of Jupiter. The Earth is one big state under the UN, Mars is an independent and militaristic state, and the settlements in the Belt and Jovian moons are a collection of city-states and company towns, with a number of squabbling factions attempting to unite them into a force that could stand against Earth and Mars.

The action of the series kicks off when mysterious forces release a “protomolecule” of alien origin, which can infect living things and repurpose them to unknown ends. Some of the power players in the system have decided to see what, exactly, the protomolecule can do, and are using Belters as their guinea pigs; they’re resisted by the obligatory bunch of scrappy underdogs, chiefly the former crew of an ice hauler who find themselves in control of a state-of-the-art gunship, and a disgraced cop from Ceres who becomes obsessed with a missing girl who turns out to be central to something much bigger.

These are old-school space opera with lots of space battles and action setpieces and alien artifacts on a grand scale. The characters are well drawn, starting with Jim Holden and Joe Miller (the captain of the salvaged gunship he renames the Rocinante and the detective from Ceres, respectively) who get alternating POV chapters in the first book. The cast expands out from there to include all manner of folks from scruffy Belters to the most powerful rulers in human history. If you haven’t read the books, I highly recommend them, particularly the first six; if you don’t like spoilers, go read them now (or watch the TV show, which is different but also excellent), because I can’t talk about the series as a whole without giving stuff away. (I will say that it more or less sticks the landing, which is crucial information to have heading into a nine-book series partially written by someone associated with George R. R. Martin…)

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Structurally, the series breaks down into three loose trilogies, each covering conflicts at a different scale. The first (Leviathan Wakes plus Caliban's War (2012) and Abaddon's Gate (2013)) deal with the initial release of the protomolecule through its takeover of Venus and the assembly and opening of a set of “ring gates” that allow instant transport to distant worlds. The second, (Cibola Burn (2014), Nemesis Games (2015), and Babylon's Ashes (2016)) covers the effect of the ring gate on humanity, both through the increasingly deadly politics within the Solar System and in the attempts to explore and exploit the ring gates, whose makers seem to have been killed off eons ago by some vast unknown force leaving mostly-habitable worlds and scattered bits of high technology. The final trilogy (Persepolis Rising (2017), Tiamat's Wrath (2019), and now Leviathan Falls (2021)) jumps almost 30 years into the future, and brings a new phase of human empire into direct conflict with the alien forces that destroyed the makers of the protomolecule.

It should be noted that none of these are full of rainbows and sunshine— the first trilogy involves thousands of people being fed to an alien plague triggering a major interplanetary war, the fifth book opens with a terrorist attack that nearly wipes out Eart. That said, the first two rough trilogies are a lot of fun— there’s dark stuff, but it’s counterbalanced by space-opera derring-do. The Good Guys win more fights than they lose, and do it in cinematic fashion.

The third trilogy, on the other hand, takes a much darker turn, starting with the thirty-year jump and the rise of the fascistic Laconian Empire. There’s a lot more grim guerilla action and grinding life-under-authoritarian-rule sequences that can be a bit of a slog. I don’t know to what degree the plotting of these reflected real-world politics, but the first book dropped toward the end of the first year of the Trump administration, so it was really difficult to keep politics from affecting the reading. That took a lot of the fun out of the series— it became much less of an escapist diversion from all the yelling on Twitter than it had been previously.

The final book is particularly bleak at points, with most of the characters spending much of the book believing that the utter extinction of humanity is imminent. That does remain somewhat at arm’s length, though, in that I never really felt that beloved POV characters were about to meet a meaningless death. It does eventually reach a satisfying end, though, one that brings redemption and/or closure to all the major characters.

Even the darkest points of the final trilogy are engagingly and entertainingly written, so I can recommend the series as a whole with very little hesitation. That recommendation is maybe not as enthusiastic as it would’ve been before the final trilogy, though I’ll also note that you could perfectly well stop after the second trilogy. The ending of book six is a more satisfying conclusion than a lot of series reach, and the mysteries that are left hanging aren’t that much of a distraction from the fun bits.

I don’t know what’s next for “James Corey.” Abraham has successful series under his own name— I greatly enjoyed the Dagger and Coin fantasy series that came out in parallel with the Expanse books. I’m not sure if there will be more solo stuff from him, if Franck will start his own series, or if they’ll continue to work together on something new. Whatever it is, though, I’m sure it will be worth checking out, because this series was terrific.

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So, there’s some fun genre fiction content for you. I’ll likely have more of that in coming weeks— the Wheel of Time tv show’s season one finale drops tomorrow night (though I don’t know when we’ll have time to watch it) and there’s also The Expanse on Prime to watch. If you’d like those in your inbox (or know somebody else who might), here are some buttons:

And if you just want to talk about the books, the comments will be open (and a free-fire zone for spoilers).