Wednesday I gave an overview of The Expanse series of books/TV series, focusing on the factions and characters. If you haven't read that, it might help to do that first so you're not like, "Who's James Holden?" Cuz I'm not gonna explain this shit again.
One problem for me in comparing books and the TV show is that I read the first book like 3 1/2 years ago so it's not really fresh in my mind. But I can say that I think the TV show has the gist of the book. There are probably minor details that differ, but overall it's a good representation.
It starts off with Julie Mao on an abandoned ship. We don't really know how she got there or why, but we know everyone else is dead.
The book alternates two POVs: James Holden and Detective Miller. The later books use a lot more POVs but looking up the first book it only uses two through the main part of the book plus Julie's for the Prologue and Fred Johnson's for the epilogue.
Holden is on the ice hauler Canterbury and gets a promotion to XO when the previous one starts going mental. It's not really a promotion that he wants, but there's not much he can do about it. The ship picks up a distress call from the ship Julie Mao was on. The captain doesn't want to waste time investigating, so he tells the crew to ignore it. Holden seems OK with this, but when he's alone on the bridge, he logs the call so that the ship has to divert to investigate.
The captain then sends Holden out on a shuttle to board the ship. He takes along the core group of Naomi Nagata, Alex Kamal, and Amos Burton and some redshirt. They go aboard the ship and there's no sign of Julie--or really anyone else.
As they're investigating, the Canterbury comes under attack from a stealth warship. The ship is hit with nuclear missiles and destroyed, as is the derelict ship. Holden and the others barely manage to escape the destruction of both ships in their shuttle. The problem for Holden and company is the shuttle they were on doesn't have the engines, air, water, or other facilities for a long journey. The radio is also damaged, so Holden and Naomi go outside to fix that.
They manage to send a call for help that draws unwelcome attention: a Martian warship. Holden figures the Martian Navy is going to quietly disappear them so he broadcasts a message to the whole system saying the stealth ship belonged to Mars. He and the crew are taken on the ship and interrogated when the stealth ship shows up to attack it, proving it wasn't actually a Martian ship.
Holden and his crew manage to get to a hangar and aboard a gunship. A wounded Martian soldier is able to give them control of it before he dies. Holden and company escape the Martian ship's destruction. But now what?
Meanwhile, Detective Miller is working on Ceres Station when he's given the job of locating Julie Mao. But like in a lot of detective stories, when he starts getting too close to things he's not supposed to know--like what Julie was doing on that ship at the beginning--he's taken off the case. But he's able to find a key piece of evidence in a computer drive stored in a mechanical hamster or something. (That might be one of those details that differs in the book slightly--I don't really know.)
Holden and his crew name their "salvaged" gunship the Rocinante after Don Quixote's horse and then receive an invitation from Fred Johnson to come to Tycho Station. Not seeing any alternative except to let Mars or Earth arrest them, they decide to go there.
And it just happens that Miller is going there too! Miller meets Holden and they all wind up going to Eros Station. In a seedy motel on the station they find Julie Mao--what's left of her. She's been infected with an alien thing called the "protomolecule." Holden and Miller look around the station and find more infected people and are dosed with hard radiation when some bodies they're examining are vaporized.
They manage to get back to the Roci and treated for radiation poisoning--something they'll have to be treated for the rest of their lives. They head back to Tycho Station while Eros is actually starting to move! It's flying like it's a ship or something instead of a big chunk of rock. Its course puts it on track for Earth, so Earth launches a bunch of missiles--except the big space rock can of course avoid those.
Holden and company realize they have to reboard Eros and try to plant some explosives. But things don't go as they plan and Miller winds up stranded on the station with Julie Mao, who's bonded with the protomolecule. He convinces her to steer away from Earth--to Venus. So what's left of Eros crashes there.
Holden and his crew are no longer actively being sought by Martian or UN officials. And they still have their "salvaged" ship to do whatever they want. And Fred Johnson managed to capture all those nuclear missiles Earth fired that missed Eros. Sweet.
That's pretty much the TV version. The weird thing to me is the story takes not only first 10 episodes of season 1 but also about 6 episodes of season 2. You have to wonder why they didn't just do the first book in the first season because it makes it a little odd when the story has to suddenly shift gears to the next installment.
***
Book 2 starts with a little girl named Mei Ming being pulled out of her nursery school or kindergarten on Ganymede by a Dr. Strickland. Except we soon learn her father Prax, a botanist on the station, knew nothing about this and so it amounts to a kidnapping.
Meanwhile, Gunnery Sergeant Roberta "Bobbie" Draper of the Martian Marine Corps is on patrol with her squad on the surface of Ganymede. She suddenly sees a group of UN Marines running towards them and at first thinks it's an attack. But then she sees a creature not wearing a suit of any kind following them. The creature (which I usually think of as sort of like the xenomorph from the Alien movies though in the TV show it's more human looking, which would probably make sense) kills the UN Marines and then Bobbie's squad too. It nearly kills her before it suddenly stops.
The attack on the surface has the UN and Martian ships overhead firing at each other, destroying big mirrors that help keep Ganymede operating. Much of the colony is destroyed and many people are injured. Prax is frantically searching the station for Mei, but he can't find her. He visits her classroom, where the teacher says she went off with Strickland, but there's no sign of Strickland anywhere.
Out in space, Holden and the crew of the Rocinante are intercepting pirates at the behest of the OPA, but Holden doesn't really enjoy playing mercenary. He and Fred Johnson have an argument and Holden quits. Instead they go to take relief supplies to Ganymede.
Meanwhile, Bobbie wakes up on a ship to find no one has seen the "monster" except for her. Nor does anyone seem interested in finding it either. In the book she's able to retrieve gun camera footage from her armor, but still no one is really interested in it. The Martians don't want to risk destroying the fragile peace they have with Earth.
Prax is still looking for his daughter weeks later when the station is going to Hell. There's a "cascade" happening where the plants that help to create and purify the air are dying off because of a lack of nutrients. Between that and a lack of food, things are going to get real desperate, real quick.
Holden and company show up and they meet Prax, who tells them his story. Holden and Amos go with Prax to a computer hacker who they coerce into giving them an idea of where Strickland might be--in the old lower levels of the moon. Holden, Amos, and some mercenaries go down there to fight with some other mercenaries, where they find the body of a little boy in Mei's class and signs that someone has been experimenting with the "protomolecule" from the first book, which freaks Holden out to the point he basically wants to leave and destroy the whole moon.
Meanwhile, Bobbie and a Martian contingent meet with Chrisjen Avisarala and a UN contingent. Bobbie blurts out her story about the monster but again no one seems to believe her--except Avisarala. The Martians are pissed at her for talking about the monster and are going to send her home, but instead she defects to the UN and starts to work for Avisarala.
On Ganymede, things are going bad and Holden, Prax, and the others barely make it out alive. After they take off, they find out a protomolecule monster is in the cargo hold! They manage to kill it by luring it outside the ship with some radiation and then burn it up with the engines. But it left a little surprise for them--a bomb! It damages the ship but doesn't destroy it.
Then, with Holden's encouragement, Prax tells his story over a system-wide communication and it turns into like a GoFundMe as people send him money, encouragement, and tips. At least until someone gets to his ex-wife to start accusing him of abusing her and Mei; then he starts getting death threats.
Meanwhile, Bobbie has a hard time adjusting to life on Earth with Avisarala. She discovers that Avisarala's aide is spying on his boss and gets him fired. But eventually some other higher ups get Avisarala and Bobbie banished to a yacht owned by Jules-Pierre Mao that's supposed to take them to Ganymede. Really it's just to keep them out of the way.
Bobbie breaks them out to Julie Mao's old racing ship the Razorback. They link up with Holden and compare notes. Then they all head to Io, but they're followed by ships from Earth and Mars. They convince the Martians to help them against the Earth ships and then land on Io. But the bad guys fire off a bunch of missiles loaded with protomolecule monsters. One of them hits a Martian ship and Holden goes aboard to try to stop it. Meanwhile Bobbie leads the attack on Io and kills a monster while Prax finds his daughter is unharmed.
It turns out Jules Pierre Mao was weaponizing the protomolecule by binding it to kids who had an immune system deficiency. Mao is arrested and put in prison. Prax and his daughter go back to Ganymede to help it rebuild. Holden and company go back to being an independent ship for hire. And at least in the books Bobbie goes back to Mars as a civilian. The missiles with protomolecule soldiers on them are blown up before they can do any damage.
Everything seems good--until something rises from Venus. It flies out past Uranus--insert joke--and opens a mysterious Ring. But what is it? You'll have to find out.
That's pretty much the book description. The TV version covers half of season 2 and half of season 3 for pretty much 1 season total but again it's weird to have it stretched over two seasons. The TV version gets most of the gist. I didn't think the attack with Bobbie at the beginning was all that well done and I'm not sure why they had Prax be taken off Ganymede instead of staying on the station. Avisarala and Bobbie's journey from Earth is more streamlined, which is probably better.
What the TV season probably does better than the book is it involves Jules Pierre Mao more. He develops a soft spot for Mei, probably because his daughter Julie died in the first season. But that doesn't mean he isn't willing to sacrifice her and the other kids.
***
The third book takes place like 6 months or more later. "The Ring" is out there in deep space and some ships from Earth and Mars have gone out there to study it, but no one really knows what it is. Then a would-be daredevil slingshots his little ship around Saturn, into the Ring--and doesn't come back out.
That gets even more people interested in what's going on with The Ring. Holden and Rocinante are not interested in going, despite that Holden has been seeing a "ghost" of Detective Miller telling him that he needs to go there. Instead, Holden is looking to take a shady-seeming job to the other side of the system, but that falls apart when Martian officials demand the immediate return of the Rocinante. The only way to get out of it is to take an important journalist named Monica Stewart to the Ring so she can do stories on it. Reluctantly, Holden agrees.
Meanwhile, the UN is sending an expedition to the Ring with scientists, artists, philosophers, and clergy aboard. One of the clergy is a Russian woman named Anna. She left her fairly small congregation in the Belt to be part of the expedition--and left her wife and daughter behind. She makes friends with a rich woman named Tilly who basically coerced her way on board.
On another ship, Clarissa Mao is working as a technician by the name of Melba. She's embarked on an elaborate plan to destroy James Holden, the first pieces being to get Holden to go to the Ring. Now she's taken the technician job so she can plant a bomb aboard the ship. She almost gets away with it when a supervisor starts nosing around, so she has to kill him and stuff his body in a case or something. Then she takes a transfer to the ship Anna is on, where she's nearly recognized by Tilly, who rubbed elbows with Clarissa's family.
With Earth and Mars sending ships, Fred Johnson of the OPA dispatches the Behemoth, a former "generation ship" or "colony ship," that was supposed to carry a bunch of Mormons to another star system over like 100 years, but now it's fitted out with a shitload of weapons that will either blow up other ships or blow up the Behemoth with how hot-wired it all is. Carlos "Bull" Baca was supposed to be the XO of the ship but when people complain about a guy originally from Earth being the XO, he's demoted to security chief. And promptly throws a drug smuggler out an airlock.
When all the ships get to the Ring--including the Rocinante--Clarissa finally puts her plan into motion. She blows up the ship she was on and then a confederate on the Roci tampers with the communications so it starts playing a bogus message from Holden saying he's claiming the Ring for the OPA. The crew tries to stop the message, but they can't. On the Behemoth, Bull convinces the captain they need to fire on the Roci first to convince everyone they aren't working together. They finally do but the Roci escapes by flying into the Ring.
Ships from Mars and Earth follow, along with the Behemoth. What they find is a bubble of null space inhabited by a spherical alien station. It soon becomes known as "the slow zone" because there's a "speed limit" ships have to follow or they're dragged towards the alien station.
In part at the Miller ghost's behest, Holden takes a really long spacewalk over to the station to try to shut the slow zone down, but he's interrupted by some Martian Marines, who take him to one of the Martian ships.
But when someone opens fire, the station defenses lower the "speed limit" even further, which causes massive damage on all the ships and without being able to go much faster than the average baseball fastball, none of the ships have any gravity. Eventually Bull offers up the idea to bring everyone over to the Behemoth because it can spin "the drum" or a thing on the outside of the ship that when spun creates minimal gravity on the ship. It's not as good as Earth gravity but it's better than nothing. The captain, a guy named Ashford, doesn't want to do it so his XO leads a mutiny and throws him in the bring. Then to get the Martians to agree, they supercharge their communications laser to make a crude weapon.
Things are recovering until Ashford breaks out and launches a counter-mutiny. He wants to use the laser weapon to destroy the Ring and thus keeping anyone else from ever getting stuck there again. Then there's a counter-counter-mutiny with the XO, Bull, Holden, and his crew all trying to take engineering and the bridge. While the attack is underway, Anna uses Monica Stewart's equipment to give an inspirational speech to try to encourage people to stop the madness. In the end Clarissa helps to stop Ashford, joining forces with Holden. Miller's ghost is able to shut off the alien defenses to raise the speed limit so the ships can all escape. And it also opens wormholes to 1300 other systems! So humanity is no longer stuck in the Solar System. Which can be bad or good. As a reward, Anna convinces Tilly to buy the Roci from the Martian government and then sign it over to Holden to end their legal troubles. The Behemoth stays in The Ring, becoming "Medina Station," sort of like Deep Space Nine as the transit point to the wormholes.
Like the TV series, I kind of left a lot of stuff out. Maybe because they knew they were being cancelled on Syfy, they compressed the third book into only 6 episodes. So it was more of a mini-series. They basically lop off the first quarter of the book, pretty much starting with everyone at the Ring. They also sort of combine some characters and have different characters in other roles. For instance they have Naomi on the Behemoth as the engineer since they never introduced the OPA mechanic Sam Rosenberg from the previous books. Which is too bad because Sam is a cute redhead but then she's also shot by Ashford in the book, so maybe it was better to just not exist. The character of Bull is largely played by Fred Johnson's assistant Drummer, who's also the ship XO--unlike in the book. It turns out not to be all that bad. Ashford is played by veteran actor David Staitharn (a Syfy series alum from Alphas) and is less crazy and evil than the book version. He sort of picks up the rest of Bull's character that Drummer didn't inhabit.
I liked the third book, but turns out there was a lot of bloat that could be cut.
***
Now that the Ring is open to 1300 systems, there's a rush to find out what's there and to exploit it. But a group of refugees from Ganymede beat everyone to a planet they call Ilus. They set up a village and start mining Lithium, a rare material in the Solar System but plentiful on the planet.
Naturally the governments want a piece of the pie. The UN gives the charter for Ilus--which they call New Terra--to a company called RCE. When the settlers hear about this, some decide to give them a warm welcome by blowing up the landing platform. The plan was to blow it up before anyone got close but as they're rigging it, a shuttle is on its way down. One of the guys named Basia wants to stop the explosion, but the others veto him--with force.
A scientist named Elvi Okoye is on the shuttle when the platform explodes. She manages to survive, as do some others, including the thuggish head of security, Murtry. Elvi and some of the others are tended to by Basia's wife, the colony's doctor.
With things getting heated between the settlers and RCE personnel, Avisarala sends Holden and the Rocinante to go and negotiate a settlement. And Miller's ghost uses the opportunity to start experimenting with the alien technology on the planet. As he calls it, he's just a monkey flipping switches to see what works.
While Naomi and Alex stay with the Roci in orbit, Holden and Amos stay down with the colony. But things go from bad to worse when Murtry kills a colonist. To calm things down, Holden "arrests" Basia and has him sent up to the Roci, where he basically is a member of the crew. Then it gets worse when something on the far side of the planet explodes, sending a shockwave and tsunami across the planet. Holden leads everyone to an alien structure, figuring something that has lasted millions of years is probably pretty sturdy.
They survive the shockwave and tsunami, but the colony is pretty well destroyed. And there are new problems. For one thing, everyone is going blind thanks to some alien bacteria or whatever. And death slugs! They're slugs that excrete something to move around that paralyzes humans completely, killing them almost instantly.
Within days everyone is blind--except Holden. He's then working around-the-clock to help everyone survive. In space the situation is also deteriorating as some alien device has turned off the fusion reactors of the ships so they have to use their back-up batteries, which will eventually run out. The ship the settlers took is in worse shape than the RCE ship or the Roci because it's older and was lower, to the point its orbit will decay until the ship burns up in a few days. Basia's daughter is on the ship, but there's little he can do to help.
Eventually Elvi realizes that Holden is immune because of drugs he takes to prevent cancer after the radiation he was exposed to on Eros Station--see Book 1. They're able then to cure everyone. Miller's ghost shows up then to tell Holden he needs to take some old alien transport deep into the planet. Murtry follows him and Elvi and Amos follow him.
Meanwhile, in space, Basia's daughter and Naomi figure out how the Roci can tow the older ship to a higher orbit to buy it more time. It's a very tricky maneuver that's nearly sabotaged by some people on the RCE ship, until the head of security on that ship helps to stop them.
Using an old robot, Miller's ghost is able to get Holden to something in the planet that's supposed to turn off all the alien shit. But Murtry interrupts them and so it winds up being Elvi who helps to turn the stuff off. Murtry is incapacitated, though Holden refuses to kill him. With the alien stuff off, the settlers and RCE people agree to work together to rebuild while some like Elvi are more than happy to go back to Earth. All the fusion drives start working in orbit so they can go home. Hooray!
The fourth season premiered on Amazon last fall and while it was 10 episodes it still cut out a lot from the book. It dropped the character of Havelock, the security guy on the RCE ship, entirely, which is ironic since Havelock was in Season 1 as Miller's young partner on Ceres. Maybe they couldn't get the same actor back. They also gave most of Basia's role to his wife and changed his name to Jacob or something. Again it's ironic as someone named Basia appeared in Season 2 or 3 on Ganymede, but maybe they couldn't get that guy back either. They did get Burn Gorman as Murtry, though I don't really see him as the murdering thug type; I mean some of his most visible roles were as one of the scientists in Pacific Rim and Ben Mendelsohn's henchman in The Dark Knight Rises. They should have got some big wrestler-type for the role. I'm just saying.
One thing I didn't like was they waited until halfway through the season to flash back to the sabotage of the landing platform. That was supposed to be a dramatic scene, but moving it to the middle instead of at the beginning took a lot of the drama out of it.
Really almost all the stuff in space was cut from the book except for having to save the colonist's ship from burning up. Meanwhile they added stuff from the novellas about Bobbie Draper joining a group of arms dealers on Mars and Avisarala running for Secretary General of Earth. Meanwhile, Drummer and Ashford attempt to apprehend a Belter terrorist named Marcos Innaros. This all isn't really important to the 4th book but it sets up books 5 and 6, which presumably would be seasons 5 and 6 of the TV series, when the shit really hits the fan. That's definitely something to look forward to as there's basically a civil war in the Solar System. Woo, war!
Overall the series sticks closer to the books than Game of Thrones probably did, but they obviously had to cut stuff out. Not a lot of it turned out to be all that important. Some of the creative decisions I didn't really agree with, especially because the books are written pretty cinematically to start with, so some of the changes seemed needless, like the placement of the landing platform sabotage or Mei's kidnapping. Others I could understand because of time and financial constraints.
I would say I like the books better, though they're more expensive and take more time than watching the series on Amazon Prime. I'm just saying. If you got the time and money--or they have the books at your library--then go for it and expand your universe.
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