Page to Screen: The Expanse, Part 1

First, a little prologue.  Back in October 2016 I read the first book of James SA Corey's series The Expanse.  I liked the first book and wanted to read the others, but they were like $10 a book on Kindle.  I put them on my Wishlist and figured at some point they'd be on sale, right?  Right?  A few more times the first book was on sale, but it wasn't until Amazon premiered the 4th season of the TV series that the other books went on sale.  So it was a full 3 years before I bought the others.  And by then it was the holidays so I didn't actually start reading them until 2020.  At this point I'm almost done with the 8 novels.

I made a conscious decision not to watch the TV show until I had read the books.  (Plus I didn't have Syfy to watch it before it was on Amazon Prime anyway.)  Or at least as many books as the series covered--which is up to 4 so far.  Once I got through the fifth book in late February, I finally started to binge the series on Amazon.

I'm going to take a somewhat organized approach to this.  Part 1 here is going to give you the background on the characters and factions.  Then in Part 2 on Friday I'll get into the story from the 4 seasons of the TV show vs 4 novels.  Some of the story is obviously going to bleed into this, but probably not too much.

Background:
It's the 23rd Century, but it's not like the classic Star Trek series/movies.  Mankind has left Earth in spaceships, but is still unable to break the speed of light and thus remains rooted to the Solar System.  They also don't have niceties like artificial gravity, transporters, or food replicators.

Factions:

United Nations (Earth)
So apparently the UN went from a largely impotent body here in the early 21st Century to a government of over 30 billion on Earth and Luna, ie the moon.

Something I said in a post a few years ago (and that has been said in other sci-fi novels like Player Piano, Make Room, and so on) is that a huge population and advances in technology have made for few job opportunities on Earth.  Most people live on "Basic" or a welfare-type program where they're provided food, water, and housing but not work.  Naturally then most people hang around watching the equivalent of TV or getting up to no good.  A lot of people end up waiting for decades on a waiting list for jobs or training.

Earth has a large but old fleet of ships and also at the beginning of the first novel at least owns Ceres Station in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Saturn.

Martian Congressional Republic (Mars)
Mars was for a while a colony of Earth, but it eventually broke away.  Befitting its name, Mars is largely a military colony with an advanced navy and Marines.  They've been working on terraforming the planet for centuries but still most people have to live underground.  Because of this, when Martians come to Earth they have to wear sunglasses and take special drugs to handle the higher gravity.  The wide open spaces can also be disconcerting for them.

The Belt
To provide for all these places and people, companies needed to access the raw materials from the asteroid belts between Mars & Jupiter and Jupiter & Saturn, as well as moons like Titan and Ganymede.  This became a huge industry and thus permanent settlements sprang up.

At the point of when the first novel begins, people have been living out in deep space so long that whole generations have never set foot on Earth.  This has affected their physiology, so that "Belters" are taller and skinnier with more bulbous head because they haven't ever really been exposed to real gravity.  In the books then it's easy to tell most Belters from "Inners" or people from Earth, Luna, or Mars because they have a different shape.  But mostly for financial reasons, this isn't really true in the TV show except for one case early on.  To accurately depict the Belters they would have had to have all the actors wear motion capture suits and replace them with CGI or else it would involve a lot of time-consuming and expensive makeup.  Thus on TV the Belters don't look that much different except a lot of them have more tattoos than Inners.

The Belters don't have a central government, but rather have a bunch of different factions like gangs.  The primary one is the OPA (which always makes me think of that Greek exclamation, "Opa!") that means Outer Planets Alliance or something like that.  At the start it's more of a terrorist organization.  It's kind of like the PLO in the 70s/80s if you're old enough to remember that.

The main OPA station is Tycho Station, which is a space station rather than an asteroid, moon, or planet.  There's also Ceres Station that I already mentioned and Eros Station.

Those are pretty much the important locations through the first two books.  Then everything changes with the opening of "the Ring," essentially a wormhole into a pocket of null space that opens wormholes to over 1300 other systems.  Ilus, also called New Terra, is in one such system and while the gravity and such are tolerable for humans, it has a myriad of dangers that we'll discuss later.

Characters

James Holden:  Holden has a fairly interesting conception in that 8 people donated their genetic materials.  The resulting fertilized egg was put into one woman to give birth to him.  The reason is that these 8 people have a farm in Montana and through some legal thing if they had a kid they could keep the land--or at least they hoped so.  When he's 18, Holden joins the UN Navy, but he's dishonorably discharged when he disagrees with a superior officer and punches him.

Holden then signs up with an ice hauler called the Canterbury.  He mostly sleeps with women and tries to avoid much real responsibility.  But in one of those Greek things, those who try to avoid Fate will wind up finding it anyway.  Holden inadvertently starts a war between Earth and Mars, but also helps to stop an alien threat from destroying Earth.  Then he helps to stop another alien threat.  Then he opens The Ring and later helps the settlers on Ilus to survive.  The guy who didn't really want responsibility becomes the guy who's somehow involved in every significant event.  A line in the sixth book pretty much sums him up:  I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.  He believes in humanity even when most experience should tell him not to.

In the TV show, Holden is played by Steven Strait, who's also listed as a producer, which is a good way to get a little extra money.  He doesn't necessarily look like Holden as described in the books as his hair and eyes are too dark, but otherwise he's OK.  But he often has this squinty look that sort of bugs me.  I'm just saying.

Naomi Nagata:  Naomi is a Belter who's a gifted engineer, but she has a mysterious past that isn't really detailed much in the books until the fifth one.  But a lot of it is detailed in the TV show.  Basically she met up with this guy named Marcos Inaros when she was young and he had sort of a mentally abusive hold on her, convincing her to do things she didn't want to do, like write a code that would cause a ship's fusion reactor to blow up.  This made her inadvertently responsible for killing a bunch of people on a freighter.  After that she left Marcos, but he kept her infant son Filip.

She bounced around and wound up on the Canterbury to help keep it flying.  She and Holden didn't really have anything going until after the Canterbury was destroyed.  Then they hooked up and mostly stayed together ever since.

In the show she's played by Dominique Tipper and like all the Belters on the show doesn't really look quite how the book describes.  But also the book frequently talks about her hiding behind her hair, but on the TV show her hair is too short for that.  Not that it matters all that much.

Alex Kamal:  For over 20 years Alex has been piloting ships, first with the Martian Navy and then ships like the Canterbury.  With his "Mariner Valley drawl" that's kind of like old-fashioned cowboy talk, he tries to project an air of cool and calm all the time.  But of course he's hiding some pain under the surface.  He had a wife that wanted him to settle down, but he couldn't give up flying so they got a divorce.

In the TV show Alex has an ex-wife and a son back on Mars.  It's not until the 7th book that he has a son--and second ex-wife.  Alex is played by Cas Anvar, whom you might have seen in small roles in movies like Transformers 2, Argo, and Punisher War Zone or at least heard in Halo 4, Archer, or Batman and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  In the books he's supposed to be black and not have much hair, but whatever.

Amos Burton:  Amos is the last man standing in any situation.  He grew up in Baltimore, where he ran with some tough customers.  After making his way to the stars in a not-quite-legal way, he eventually wound up as a mechanic on the Canterbury, where he sort of adopted Naomi as his conscience.

The thing about Amos is that he really has no conscience of his own.  Whether he's a sociopath, psychopath, some kind of autistic or whatever, he has no compunctions about beating or killing whoever needs beaten or killed.  It's funny in the 3rd season of the TV show where he tells a reporter, "You're trying to make me feel guilty about getting that guy killed, but I won't.  Ever."  And that's probably true.  He makes a good team with Holden, Naomi, and Alex because he'll do what they can't to remove obstacles without a thought or any mental anguish after.

In the TV show he's played by Wes Chatham, whom you might have seen in the Hunger Games movies--or not.  He has more hair than Amos does in the books and maybe his voice isn't as deep as I'd imagine Amos's, but I love how he deadpans threats to people.  I'm going to kill you--it's just a fact, like the sky is blue or water is wet.

Detective Miller:  Miller is a cop of Ceres Station who's been working that beat for a while, long enough to become world-weary.  Mostly to keep him out of the way, his boss assigns him to find Julie Mao, the daughter of rich industrialist Jules Pierre Mao.  Miller's investigation leads him to falling in love with Julie, even though they've never met.  He eventually does meet her on Eros Station, and the two of them "die" on Venus.

But Miller reappears at the end of the second book as sort of a ghost.  A ghost created by an alien intelligence as "the Investigator" to search for its lost creators.  Holden is the only one who can see the ghost Miller, which leads to some trouble at times.  Miller helps Holden open up the Ring gates, not really for altruistic reasons.  While he causes alien machines on Ilus to become active, in the end he helps Holden to stop those machines.  And in exchange, he's finally put to rest.

In the TV series Miller is played by Thomas Jane of that 2003 Punisher movie and also the TV series Hung and some other stuff.  I don't think he's necessarily old enough for Miller and his hair looks stupid most of the time, but whatever.

Fred Johnson:  A former colonel in the United Nations, Fred gained the nickname "the Butcher of Anderson Station" when his unit killed a bunch of miners on Anderson Station.  But it turned out the miners were trying to surrender, so Fred left the military.  He began to work for Belters instead of killing them and became a big wig in the OPA, though a lot of factions refuse to trust him because of his Earth ties.  When Holden and company are looking for a safe port, Fred lets them come to Tycho Station.  Later Holden and crew do some work for Fred to deal with pirates and such.  Naomi also gives him a sample of alien protomolecule as sort of a deterrent against Earth and Mars.

In the TV series he mostly shows up the first 1 1/2 seasons and then doesn't really appear much more until season 4 and then only for like an episode.  He appears slightly more in the books, though not a ton more until the 5th and 6th books.

I would have really loved it in the books if just once they had written, "Right," said Fred.  Like that 90s one hit wonder artist.  And then Fred could have said, "I'm too sexy for my..."

Chrisjen Avisarala:  For years she was the power behind the throne at the United Nations as an undersecretary.  A shrewd political player who curses worse than a sailor, she's not someone to trifle with.  Though like a superhero she has a more mild-mannered secret identity as a wife to a college professor, mother, and grandmother.

Unfortunately for her, some of her political enemies and allies are destroyed and she's eventually thrust into the limelight as the Secretary General.  That's really the worst thing for her as she had never even had to win an election before.

She doesn't really show up until the second book but she's in the TV show right from the start.  It was probably just easier that way for them.

Roberta "Bobbie" Draper:  A Gunnery Sergeant in the Martian Marines, Bobbie and her squad are attacked by an alien-human hybrid creature on the moon of Ganymede.  But no one wants to believe Bobbie even when there's gun camera footage of it, as happens in the book.  She ends up defecting from Mars to Earth to work for Avisarala to find out what's going on on Ganymede.

In the books she goes back to Mars as a civilian once the alien threat on Ganymede and Io is stopped while on the TV show she remains in the Marines to be sent to the Ring in the third season.  Then she attacks some of her fellow Marines to help Holden and company and is drummed out of the Marines.  She's not really in the third or fourth books but in the fourth season of the TV show she gets mixed up with some criminals on Mars who are smuggling military hardware to Belters.  According to Michael Offutt, this is taken from one of the novellas that I haven't read.

Julie Mao:  She's not really much in the book or TV show but she is a critical character.  The black sheep daughter of Jules Pierre Mao, she left Earth to go out to the Belt to help the downtrodden Belters.  This led her to uncover a conspiracy by a company called Protogen to use an alien substance called the "protomolecule" on people.  She's one of the first infected by it and becomes a focal point for the protomolecule.  A ship she was on sends out the distress call that lured Holden and the Canterbury crew into a trap as well.  Her racing ship the Razorback also saves Avisarala and Bobbie later on.

Clarissa Mao:  Julie's sister who's always tried to be the good one.  After Julie dies and Jules Pierre is jailed for trying to weaponize the protomolecule, Clarissa launches an elaborate scheme to take revenge.  This scheme is laid out a lot better in the third book vs the third season of the TV show.  First she gets some upgrades that when she licks the roof of her mouth allow her to have super strength, speed, and reflexes for a brief time.  But it leaves her body depleted afterwards; they did something pretty similar recently in Terminator: Dark Fate.

From there Clarissa joins a work crew on a UN ship heading to the Ring.  This she uses as a cover to plant a bomb on a ship.  To get away with it she has to kill one of her coworkers and jam him in a case.  Meanwhile she has a blind technician working with a reporter sabotage Holden's ship.  After she blows the UN ship up, she sends a fake message purporting to be from Holden to claim the Ring for the Belters.  The idea then is that the UN or Martians near the Ring will destroy Holden but of course he escapes and so she goes after him.  But in the end she realizes the error of her ways.