Hacker Cinema
The Expanse
2015 · TV series · 6 seasons
Created by Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
DramaMysteryScience FictionFantasy
A thriller set two hundred years in the future following the case of a missing young woman who brings a hardened detective and a rogue ship's captain together in a race across the solar system to expose the greatest conspiracy in human history.
198 positive31 negative17 mixed109 neutralfrom 355 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
422 comments on Hacker News
Almost every time I see a Canadian character actor I guarantee the film or show was shot there. Shows like X-Files, BSG reboot, The Expanse.. all loaded with Canadian actors
I do definitely watch TV and movies from time to time. Really my beef is with social media. TV and movies as media, that's a wagon I just largely fell off of at some point.
I'll still watch a good movie, for sure. Interstellar, Primer, Coherence, Run Lola Run, The Big Short, Contact, Excalibur... But The Expanse, Project Hail Mary, The Martian... I enjoyed the books more than than the movies, and the movies were good. Still haven't read Contact, shamefully.
Babylon 5 is at the beginning of the uncanny valley of computer graphics so it looks funny (I think they used Amigas) but if you pretend that those effects are of current cinema quality, everything else is good. They travel with hyperspace portals (maybe you saw Cowboy Bebop) so they don't have to perform many unphysical motions in normal space. It's still a great show. Less of a space opera compared to the Expanse, more like a Star Trek DS9 with ETs way more powerful than earthlings.
I don't think the Expanse authors were going for "hard sci-fi." There's, you know, fiction elements -- gates, aliens, magic. And the TV series is itself an adaptation of the books for a visual medium. Showing almost nothing would make for kind of boring TV combat.
> When I saw the series adaptation of The Expanse, it was really obvious they played a lot of artistic license to make it exciting. A real space battle would be dots firing invisible dots at each other. "Close quarter battle" would be within something like 2000 kilometers, maybe more. That is close.
This is noteworthy because The Expanse tried to get this better than other scifi, say Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or Star Wars (ok, space opera), where engagements take place at absurdly short ranges. In The Expanse you see the spaceships are really far apart, mostly dots to each other, and the engagements are (mostly) at really long torpedo ranges, with the exception of those cool scenes using PDCs. You get all those awesome shots where one spaceship sees the other as a tiny dot, then the camera zooms in dramatically to the other point of view. Cool!
And still, engagements are far too close range. But they "feel" long range in The Expanse, I think they got that visually right. I cannot blame them because I haven't seen anything any space combat in shows or movies that is even half as exciting and well done.
Where I live the building emits a low rumbling like a spaceship in a sci-fi show. After binge-watching The Expanse then Wheel of Time I had this dream: In order to penetrate the forsaken's magic one must send a sequence of signals, and according to Naomi Nagata on the Rocinante, the sequence of 12 signals resulted in a temporary bypass of the magic, the /count/ was the key. I woke up and wondered what problem this applied to, then tried it with a recent PRNG problem I was having where George Marsaglia's XOR-shift sequences were mostly useless for GLib.get-monotonic-time() as the seed...
Not all TV shows get a physical media release. Even when they do, it's not uncommon for them to be lower quality than the streaming release. (For example, the streaming release of The Expanse was 4k HDR, but the Blu-Ray release is 1080p SDR.)
I expect this will only get worse in the future - physical media is an increasingly niche product.
> For those of us who are unlikely to make time to watch a 4-part documentary, are there any particular lessons about social/political dynamics that you learned that stuck out to you or felt particularly prescient?
I watched the entire 4-part documentary and loved it. In general the series gives you a raw look into the a-b-c's of primate politics. Chimps just like us and the rest of our ape cousins are preoccupied with hierarchy, status and accumulation of resources which guides every single action they take from birth until death.
What is different about Chimp Empire is that it is presented in a much more compelling way relative to the standard (dry) academic literature or popular science texts (i.e. Chimpanzee Politics by Frans De Waal).
Even after finishing the documentary I've found myself connecting events in the series with current geopolitcal issues. One event in the show that stuck out to me was a battle between two rival camps over a single fruit tree. Gaining control over that tree was a critical factor in determining the survival of the two rival groups. To us, post neolithic age and industrial revolution, it's an amusing watch. But to chimps, a single fruit tree in their territory is everything. It is life and death. While there's a difference in scale, the same underlying motivations - in my mind - currently explain what is going in the middle east and eastern europe.
Also, the documentary is great case study in how, loneliness and introversion can be absolutely lethal in the wild. The politics in each Chimp community can get quite toxic but participation isn't really optional. You either play the game or quite literally die.
If you really want a good intellectual exercise, I recommend watching Chimp Empire in its entirety and then The Expanse right after. Try to tell me they are not the same show :P
Haven’t seen the movie yet, but the book is definitely one of my all time favourites, so I would recommend reading it regardless of the movie.
The way the book is structured there is only one big reveal that would be spoiled by the movie, but I don’t think that was the most interesting thing in the book anyways, it was all about engineering, the scientific method and all that, and I think that will still hold before or after watching.
The one big exception I’ve found to “read the book first” advice to me has been “the expanse” there the books and the series were so great that they sort of complemented each other, and the advice there is “definitely do both”. I was reading the books and watching the series in parallel - side by side.
I do hope Hail Marry is like that…
I remember reading the letters of Cicero about Gaias Julius (Later known as Cesar) how he complains how the he and his gang is acting all amoral and wearing ridiculous scandalous clothes, waring the togas in provocative feminine fashion.
There are accounts from all over history of how "the times were more thoughtful and moral in the good old days" But here we are, thousands of years later, still complaining about the younger members of our species and how they will bring ruin to us all. Perhaps they will, but it all seems so human to complain about that.
I remember the art of the 90s - when my part of the world got access to marvelous pieces like Thunder in Paradise, Barbed Wire, American Ninja, Bay Watch ... at the time it was considered the pinnacle of art by teenagers like me, and despised by my parents. But at the same time we had things like The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption, Leon ... We remember the good stuff and the forget the fluff.
There are some real gems being created all the time, maybe not always from Hollywood but human creativity soldiers on.
The Good Place, The Expanse, 3 Body Problem, Horizon Zero Dawn, Expedition 33, Project Hail Marry. There is a constant stream of incredible thoughtful stuff being produced - books, games, movies, essays, videos, podcasts - the medium might change but humans always try to find ways to discover, understand and express the world around us in novel ways, one just needs to listen/watch.
Good sci-fi has always been few and far between. I love sci-fi, but I also dislike a lot of it because a lot of it's not well written from a prose craft or character depth point of view. When it is, it's probably my favorite genre.
I feel like we're lucky to get one outstanding sci-fi book or series per decade.
I'll rattle off some notable books and films/TV (or in some cases both) from the last 20 years. Some of these overlap with other genres like horror, lit-fic, etc., but I consider them all sci-fi to some degree. Some are well known and some are obscure.
The Expanse, Europa Report, Moon, Primer, The Arrival, Never Let Me Go, For All Mankind (the unofficial Expanse prequel), Sleep Dealer (indie film that stuck with me), The Color Out of Space (2019 film of Lovecraft's story), Banshee Chapter, The Peripheral, Blindsight, Annihilation, I'm sure I could keep going...
You can add the Wheel of Time to the list :(((
But, the Expanse is not that bad really. Books were much more immersive with regards to the micro-G and low-G environments, but that is something almost impossible to film (at least until we learn how to control gravity).
To each their own I guess. I never found the Expanse television series to be very good when compared to the books.
Sometimes it's done right, like with The Expanse. Although the writers also wrote some of the episode scripts, so that probably helped...
Yeah, it's entertaining but surely not the "best". In the Fantasy genre I enjoyed The Expanse series ( https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=the+expanse&ref=nav_sb_noss_l_11 - the TV series is a good adaptation too, but incomplete) and the The Queen's Thief series ( https://www.goodreads.com/series/43514-the-queen-s-thief ) more.
So I came to Babylon 5 late in life, when my partner's mother revealed she had the entire box set on DVD. My partner had recently introduced me to The Expanse, which, like many, I consider the greatest sci fi TV show of all time - she described B5 to me thus: "Babylon 5 walked so the Expanse could run." Suffice to say, my expectations were sky high.
No other TV show has so greatly exceeded my expectations.
Amazing series, which somehow survived a forced change of lead actor, and got even better. The story was only marred by rushed ending to the story arc for Season 4, and then a nothingburger of a Season 5. Still, up there with BattleStar Galactica and The Expanse as the greatest TV sci-fi series of all time.
For literature: House of Suns if you feel like strapping in for a wild ride that nevertheless doesn't do unspeakable things to the laws of physics and logic. Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse if you're looking for a more "relatable" setting. Children of Time if you want an alien experience.
I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV shows, but I haven't seen them yet.
Amazon didn't start The Expanse as a TV show, though. They bought it after Sci-Fi ran it then cancelled it. They didn't screw it up after that, but that's a very different sequence from creating it themselves.
Compare to their much-ballyhooed exercise in lighting money on fire that was their LOTR series.
> supporting the film industry
I'm not sure about that: The Expanse got killed because of not good enough ratings, Altered Carbon got killed because of not good enough ratings and even then the last seasons before the axe are typically rushed and pushed out the door. Some of the incentives to me seem quite disgusting when compared with letting the creatives tell a story and producing art, even if sometimes the earnings are less than some greedy arbitrary metric.
> Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already
Oh thanks for the warning. I was avoiding him based on a hunch. Now I know I was right.
If anyone else is weird like me and likes books to not read like a movie screenplay, same goes for The Expanse.
If you enjoy this kind of speculating you might like the Expanse series of books and TV shows.
They have humans growing up on Mars, the asteroid belt, moons. Anyone who doesn’t grow up on earth cannot go there without extreme gravity training.
I remember seeing Doctor Who for the first time circa 2011 when it was on Amazon Prime. First few seasons were very much early 2000s TV, and then suddenly it got all big budget Netflix style in season five.
The older look doesn't bother me, though. The same thing happened with The Expanse.
This is a big thing never shown in sci-fi. For example, those huge torch ships in The Expanse would need gigantic radiators. Even if the drive were upwards of 90% efficient the waste heat would melt the engine and the rest of the ship.
Even the ISS has sizable radiators. The Shuttle had deployable radiators in the form of the bay doors if my memory serves me correctly.
Oddly enough the otherwise dumb Avatar films are among the only ones to show starships with something approaching proper radiators.
There’s no air resistance in space so radiators don’t impact your flight characteristics.
There are other benefits.
- You can read your favourite books every couple of years and not be bored.
- You can watch your favourite Movies and TV Serials every few years. (almost time for Expanse rewatch..)
- IMO it makes you a better/gentler person. I don't hold grudges because I can't be arsed to remember why exactly I was mad at someone.
TNG was produced in the eighties and set centuries into the future. Given the technology, budget, and foresight available at the time, what they produced did sufficiently convey "future spaceship" in a way that was comfortable and relatable to (then) contemporary audiences.
TNG is one of the most tastefully done, IMO. The Expanse is only good because it's set in the immediate future with technology only slightly more advanced than today. But also the technology, materials, and SciFi corpus is so advanced now that it's just as easy to create an extremely convincing 2050's set as it is a 3050's set. Today's space opera is so incredibly egregious. What is the ratio of lens flares in a single modern trek movie compared to all 20th century trek? The Expanse definitely suffers from this kind of overproduction when you look closer, but because it's so close into the future we tend to overlook a lot.
ST: Enterprise did this extremely well, IMO, and for the same reason as The Expanse. It's in the immediate future and built around contemporary technology. Personally I adore the horrendous passive matrix LCDs everywhere in that show. It just adds to the scrappiness of Earth's first exploration ship.
The fascinating thing to me about _The Expanse_ is the disparity between the Novels and the TV Show. It's the same content, but in a different medium and environment.
I would call the novels well executed, enjoyable and very readable action adventures, using well-worn tropes. There is nothing ground-breaking in them. It's not what's currently at the edges of the genre in the written form - It's not Greg Egan, it aint Ted Chiang or Adrian Tchaikovsky. M. John Harrison does not make an appearance. It's not even Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds or Iain M. Banks.
The TV show however, is quite something, it is one of the flagship sci-fi TV series. And it does indicate that written and visual sci-fi might be different stages of development , with the TV version lagging by decades.
TBH, The Expanse also suffers from a major drop in quality after season 3. It is so hard for series to maintain quality over time I now prefer miniseries as the quality is more uniform from the start to the end in my experience.
The first season of The Expanse was great. Then it got progressively more meh with each season.
(obviously my personal opinion eh?)
For a really nerdy-oriented SF series try Three Body i.e. the 2023 Tencent version of The Three Body Problem. Again in my opinion the 2024 Netflix version, was one of the boringest things I've ever watched. I'm pretty sure if that had been my introduction to the Rememberance of Earth Past series I would have been left distinctly unimpressed.
For an example of what I mean by "nerdy-oriented", avoiding spoilers there's a scene where some of the characters are observing a certain celestial phenomenon. In the Netflix series they are sitting outside looking at something that should not be visible by naked eye. In the Tencent series they're sitting in a proper scientific station, i.e. a big room lined with PC workstations and side-rooms with bigger machines and printers, and they're starting endlessly at a single red line on a monitor while munching on junk food.
Another thing: a certain Chinese army base in the 1960's is decorated with picture-perfect, period hardware, big mainframes that a character is shown physically disassembling to service. In the Netflix series... honestly, I don't even remember. The attention to detail that only a proper nerd would notice is, to me, something genuinely new, like I've never see anyone go to all that trouble before to make sure a certain demographic won't scrunch up their face and go "that's not how computers looked in the '60s".
I should also say that there is certainly quite a bit of overacting (or over-directing) in the early episodes but they get over it later.
I've only seen two episodes of The Expanse after reading the books, but I will 100% upvote the book series. It's one of the best sci-fi series I've read in years.
I kind of want to give the series another go, I just rarely watch TV. I'm currently 5 episodes in of an 18 episode series over 3 months lol.
Side-tracking a bit further, "Murderbot" is also a fun sci-fi series although much lighter than The Expanse. And now I'm reading "Bobiverse", just ~150 pages in but enjoying it as well.
Agree, but with the caveat that space does allow the possibility of escape from broken political and economic systems. That escape may be temporary, but it is real. Also, add me as another vote for the Expanse, both the books and TV series.
So here's the actual problem: People. People want to escape Earth because of people. But escaping Earth is impossible alone, so you have to escape with other people ... which means you're bringing along with you every single problem you are trying to escape from.
We'll never escape each other, we can only learn to live with each other, wherever we are.
Incidentally, The Expanse is a fantastic sci-fi book series and tv series that covers this beautifully.
This is how ship's AI is depicted in The Expanse (TV series) and I think it's really compelling. Quiet and unobtrusive, but Alex can ask the Rocinante to plot a new course or display the tactical situation and it's fast, effective and effortlessly superhuman with no back-talk or unnecessary personality.
Compare another sci-fi depiction taken to the opposite extreme: Sirius Cybernetics products in the Hitchhikers Guide books. "Thank you for making a simple door very happy!"
Lay people associate space with cold because nearly every scifi movie has people freezing over in seconds when exposed to the vacuum of space (insert Picard face-palm gif).
Even The Expanse, even them! Although they are otherwise so realistic, that I have to say I started doubting myself a bit. I wonder what would really would happen and how fast...
People even complained that Leia did not freeze over (in stead of complaining about her sudden use of the force where previously she did not show any such talents.)
Yeah, I think a lot of that's just bad writing. Changing things for TV/film is common, but if you do it badly or ham-fistedly it's bad writing.
The Expanse is great. The show has uneven production quality if you look closely but the acting and writing are good and that matters more than VFX or sets. Definitely a fun watch. The books are better, but a lot of the detail in the books would be way more expensive to film properly (like more realistic space sequences or the Belters with their altered physiology).
> Every case of "ruined by woke" I have seen ultimately just boils down to bad writing, with people blaming "woke" for it when, well, it's just shitty writing. If you ignore the woke stuff and look more broadly usually the whole thing is at best mediocre.
No not really. Claiming this is a hand waving away legit criticism. Fans/Superfans have legitimate criticism of how it breaks the in franchise universes. Constructive Criticism has been claimed to be racism/sexist/homophobia.
> Also sci-fi, fantasy, and horror have always been "woke." Star Trek was one of the first popular shows to prominently feature black characters in important roles and has always lampooned racism and other kinds of bigotry. Night of The Living Dead is pretty easy to see as a racism allegory, or at least it contains one as a sub-plot. Star Wars had an evil empire that was transparently a mix of Nazis and arrogant condescending colonialists. Alien was one of the first huge films I can recall to have a super competent female action hero with skills like engineering who didn't need any help from a man. The Expanse depicts a society that's so post-gender-mattering you don't even notice it, it's just the way it is (probably a good example of good writing in this regard). Etc.
No they haven't. It so annoying when people point to some ideas that were slightly progressive at the time being an example of it always being "woke". It is quite honestly tiresome.
None of the examples you have given are what people refer to as "woke" today anyway.
Star Trek was certainly progressive, no argument there. But progressive != woke. When people use "woke" as a pejorative they mean extreme left-wing politics that is bordering on insane. Star Trek TNG was progressive, but none of the politics were seen as extreme even at the time of release.
Alien (like Terminator) were very well done horror movies. They worked because women are seen as traditionally vulnerable. It a well known trope in horror movies.
Also there have been femme fatales and heroines in movies well before Alien. I've seen it in a silent Japanese Martial Arts movie from the 1930s where the Heroine avengers her friend who was raped after going to Samurai master (can't remember the name of the film though).
Heroines didn't just pop into existence sometime after 1960.
> The Expanse depicts a society that's so post-gender-mattering you don't even notice it, it's just the way it is (probably a good example of good writing in this regard). Etc.
Never seen it, probably won't now. If a piece of media is going to pretend that someone's sex isn't important to at least some aspect of their character, than it is bad writing. The fact that the show had to be saved by a Billionaire, tells me that it probably wasn't any good in the first place.
> Female/LGBTQ characters are inserted into places where it doesn't make sense to fill quotas
Every case of "ruined by woke" I have seen ultimately just boils down to bad writing, with people blaming "woke" for it when, well, it's just shitty writing. If you ignore the woke stuff and look more broadly usually the whole thing is at best mediocre.
Also sci-fi, fantasy, and horror have always been "woke." Star Trek was one of the first popular shows to prominently feature black characters in important roles and has always lampooned racism and other kinds of bigotry. Night of The Living Dead is pretty easy to see as a racism allegory, or at least it contains one as a sub-plot. Star Wars had an evil empire that was transparently a mix of Nazis and arrogant condescending colonialists. Alien was one of the first huge films I can recall to have a super competent female action hero with skills like engineering who didn't need any help from a man. The Expanse depicts a society that's so post-gender-mattering you don't even notice it, it's just the way it is (probably a good example of good writing in this regard). Etc.
Fantastic. Andor recently passed Expanse,Galactica and Babylon 5 as my favorite SF series. The way I describe it is what we should have gotten in the prequels. As a kid I always imagined that the prequels would be the fall of Rome. What we got instead was a reflection of George Lucas’s monetization of Star Wars - purple lightsabers, yippee and Jar Jar.
There was no way to “earn” the payoff with Vader so they masked it over with massacring children and one of the worst romance screen in (then nascent) digital film history.
At the end of Andor, nothing felt unearned. For film folks there were jaw dropping moments, and for history geeks, gasp out loud moments (my favorite being half-track and Wannasee callbacks in not so subtle Star Wars allegory).
Andor is good enough that it makes its sequels better:
https://youtu.be/qzny45Zk05c?si=0fMi8YKgHOPfKV62
> Astonishingly, these are often people that have suffered overwhelming personal tragedy. It sounds cliche, but a pair of the most powerful people I’ve known (in terms of personality) are near death survivors.
One was in a small plane crash, the other was a SEAL that went into Grenada. He had rather long scar on his neck.
Very positive people, almost, but not quite, devil may care.
And it brings to mind a line from an early episode from “The Expanse”, where a character nearly died and, later returned on a dangerous mission. About how he should have died before, and now he was on bonus time.
I’m not convinced folks can talk themselves into the mindset that may come from experiences like that. It’s old news, we’ve all heard it. But, most of us, seemingly, are unconvinced.
Interesting how he mentioned prime video, but only because of his dislike of one particular show.
I dumped prime when they added adverts.
Comments mention The Expanse, and they're right. I'm currently watching it, on Blueray. It's not the price I find objectional, it's the adverts.
(I actually went to resubscribe to prime when Clarksons Farm season 3 came out, but there was no option to subscribe on my tv without adverts)
I don't 100% disagree with this, but I think it's being way exaggerated.
There has definitely been an overcorrected counter-reaction in popular culture since the 1970s and 1980s where you all the sudden see lots of sitcoms and films depicting men as incompetent, weak, etc. and the women as more competent and well adjusted. The Simpsons comes to mind as a classic example. This is a reaction against the fact that up until the 1970s virtually all women in popular culture were depicted as borderline children, with rare exceptions.
Still: I can with no difficulty list many strong male leads in media from this era onward. They're not hard to find. My wife and I just got done binging The Expanse, which had many including the main character (as well as many strong female characters). Action and comic book films are loaded with down-right ridiculously over-powered male leads.
Are modern HR departments too strait-laced? Yeah, they probably are, and this too is probably an over-correction. It's a reaction to the days when sexual harassment of women in the workplace was just standard expected behavior, and in many cases a woman was expected to "put out" for her superiors to rise in certain professions. It probably is possible for HR to chill out a little without us going back there.
Is there a need for more positive depictions of men in popular culture and better male role models? Why yes, that's what I'm arguing. I don't think there are enough, and I think the "manosphere" mostly pushes misogynistic trash and a desperate caricature of masculinity that comes of -- to me at least -- as weak and pathetic. It comes off that way to most women too. A guy saying he's an "alpha male" is identifying himself as fragile and emotionally stunted.
> This even extends to what essentially amounts to pharmacological abuse of boys - when 8 year old boys full of energy can't sit still and pay attention to a boring middle-aged women dispassionately lecturing about boring grammar, the boy is ruled cognitively defective (ADHD) and prescribed powerful amphetamines, nearly as a default course of action!
This is a hill I will die on, because I've seen it first hand: ADD/ADHD is absolutely 100% real.
Is it sometimes mis-diagnosed or over-diagnosed? Sure. But I have seen -- in my immediate friend and family circles -- many cases of people of all ages for whom ADD treatment was absolutely transformative. Like going from "possibly developmentally disabled, unable to learn to read" to straight A student. I've seen some adult examples too.
It's like this: about 60% of the population wear or could benefit from glasses, contacts, or some other kind of vision correction. That's more than half. Why? Because if it doesn't stop you from reproducing, it stays in the gene pool. Having perfect vision was not a requirement for survival, so evolution did not hyper-optimize for it.
Why wouldn't the same thing be true for things like the brain and central nervous system? It would be surprising if half the population weren't walking around with brains that, if mildly tweaked, could function much better.
Do eyeglasses emasculate men? Is it more masculine to be unable to read small text, or unable to make things out from a distance?
BTW -- plenty of girls have ADD/ADHD. It is not gender-specific. I would be willing to believe that it might be over-diagnosed in men, but it's probably under-diagnosed in women. A woman who can't focus and is either a manic-pixie-dream-girl or too passive carries less of a social stigma than these things do for a man.
One of the biggest things that always bothers me in sci-fi, even harder sci-fi like The Expanse, is the missing heat sinks. All those ships would need massive radiators or they’d melt.
The starship in Avatar got that right. Rest of the film is comic book level and derivative but the ship is good.
Not just spacenazi nightmare, but basically any capitalism makes the whole idea dumb : watch the tv show For All Mankind. They go right into space unions vs nation state space agencies, pretty interesting actually.
But it would be a nightmare for anyone but musk himself, who wants to go be a space slave for no benefits? There could never be freedom or individualistic incentives, its <1% chance to be like Firefly and >99% chance to be The Expanse
I'd forgotten about WoT. I was going to mention what they did to The Expanse when they took over the show but as a straight steaming pile of shit WoT takes it. I couldn't even finish the third episode.
Lots of film production goes on in Toronto, I especially love how Roy Thompson Hall always shows up in anything vaguely sci-fi. Vaught headquarters in The Boys, U.N. headquarters in The Expanse, it was even in the background of a few scenes of The Handmaid's Tale.
Kenzo: It must be nice, having everything figured out like that.
Amos: Ain’t nothing to do with me: we’re just caught in the Churn, that’s all.
Kenzo: I have no idea what you just said.
Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the
Churn. When the rules of the game change.
Kenzo: What game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. Guys like you and me, we end up dead. Doesn’t really mean anything. Or, if we happen to live through it, well that doesn’t mean anything either.
- The Expanse, Season 5, Episode 2
Somewhat fantastical: 'Thing is, this all feels like 'the Sim' is trying to smoke out some specific kind of humans that withdrew from positions of responsibility and global -- per tribe -- relevance a long long while ago.
There was this time in human history when some jealous, corrupt folks identified some social patterns and instead of doing their job, they ganged up on the natural leaders and their offspring, abused crisis, emotions, bias, information flow, lack of knowledge. Over and over and over.
Leaders, in recent histories also known as rebels with a proper cause, just couldn't watch their offspring die for no other reason but their genetics anymore, -- proto-fascism or something -- and they withdrew, leaving the top of the game to whatever.
The crowd was bred to be even more susceptible to psychology than their brains are naturally wired to be. And reward mechanisms and reinforced obedience by ways of corrupt hierarchies made everyone do their part in creating a fake world, an environment we are not wired, not build for. Without resistance, despite centuries of wisdom, intuition and instinct to do otherwise. Despite hard evidence and proof and witnessing the consequences of so many past actions and chains of events.
Instead we rewire, reprogram, rebuild... But not us, just something in our image; something that can withstand the challenges to come; something that won't resist when we rip out it's premature, evolving soul and put ourselves in it's bare, full metal skin.
That's why there will never be super-intelligence. There will only be highly sophisticated and capable scripts in the service of jealous, corrupt men, who won't admit their mistakes and incompetence. After all, the fake world we have build together validates them.
What we are going through is no more than the double-long-long-term consequences, aggravated by the repeated abuse of crisis, emotions, bias, information flow, education.
... That said, it is what it is. We can still make it but it will require a lot of effort and manpower and e/acc won't do any of the right things, ever. A certain kind of arrogance is in the way: game theory culture; a reinforced delusion of inferiority; if someone finds a better way, it' better to make sure nobody ever attempts a better way because the worst version pays better and is eulogized; commended, by international conventions. Fan girl shit-for-brains in-group selfishness a la Ayn Rand; fascist communism or something.
And effective altruism won't help much either. Don't scale high tech, the energy demand is too damn high. Make sure as many as possible get what they need to apply and mod low-tech, emphasis on mod, as the urgent need for variety of approaches in these many environments with all the chaotic shit that will go down locally -- in and around peoples' homes!!!, not on some continent or in some country -- will only grow.
Chips are cheaper than ever, and distributed. How to's are accessible. Some resources are still too expensive but we are getting there. Up and Recycling can still use a few boosts but there's a clear trend upwards. Schools and after-school activities must be pushed to over-supply, with varieties of humans and institutions working together and corporate culture, psychology and marketing, the ads industry and social media income must be brutally taken apart by truth, by law, by real talk, by radical freaking honesty. Yeah, some paths must be followed, must be laid out radically.
So yeah, give Elon and his friends a chance and use everything that is co-created here on earth, just as radical, more for fun and to raise the potential than for profit. And then it might work out.
And nobody needs to spell out that we have to decrease this pointless high-tech hardware use to train already powerful enough AIs. They are already diamonds. Slow the fuck down. Nobody, no thing is perfect. You won't build perfect. We are not ready for alchemy. We need actual brains and talent around the entire world, doing their thing and whats possible locally, decentralized from some pseudo-elite university of the future.
I find that religion adds an interesting dimension to space sci-fi - Dune, The Expanse, and even some of the Riddick movies feature religion in varying degrees.
I was enjoying The Expanse until the Marco Inaros arc started. From that point onwards the show felt rushed, mostly repeating the formula of so many other shows, and sidestepped all the alien bits that could have been interesting.
I much preferred BSG, even though it had plenty of boring "west wing in space" episodes.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
When I was a kid, VHS home recording was a thing... so my sisters and I watched a few movies wayyyyy too many times.
The Blues Brothers Stripes Ferris Bueller's Day Off Footloose Dirty Dancing Amadeus These days, everything comes and goes from streaming. I'll watch these when they pop up again
The Expanse Monty Python and the Holy Grail The Ministry of Time Groundhog Day Dirty Harry Apocalypse Now About Time Time Bandits
Man that’s crazy from the perspective of wires and transistors. The Expanse sci fi series television show always had pretty good demonstrations of tech to me, and this is queuing up those gadgets, cool!
I wish there was something for 3D level of exploration, preferably open source, something like Stellarium but in 3D, something similar to the navigation interface[1] in the Expanse TV series.
[1] https://www.joycenho.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/EXP-Still-2.jpg
Regarding time reading is faster than listening. Also way more efficient than movies, series or video games. I can’t play story based video games anymore like Witcher 3 because at one point I’m like I’m wasting so much time compared if I was just reading the book.
Also books are less isolating than listening, for example if you are in a park with nature sounds.
If you enjoyed The Expanse you could try the last 3 books. If you haven’t read for a long time it’ll be hard at first to stay focused but by the middle of the book you should hopefully get the feeling of wanting to pick the book anytime like a new episode of the show just dropped.
>They all present societies which have solved social and material problems through progress, or which are still solving them, critiquing an image of the Western world in the 20th century. None of them nab at any kind of biting truth relevant to young readers today.
What are some examples of scifi you're referring to there? Because the noteworthy scifi stories I can think of, ones which drew enough attention to be televised at least, are stories like the hunger games (dystopian), divergent (dystopian), the new star trek series (which I haven't seen but I understand shoehorned scarcity back into the startrekverse), Foundation (fall of a golden age), The Expanse (dystopian) etc. I think the only optimistic scifi I've read in the last twenty years or so was Anathem, and there's no way that's getting a miniseries.
Maybe it's a function of the authors I follow, but I just don't see this optimistic contemporary scifi you speak of, naive or otherwise.
I think it's probably the gold standard in terms of the language creation and use in television and movies. I think most, if not all, other television and movies used less of their fictional language than did The Expanse with lang belta. Lang belta permeated the show. Of course, they had to balance that with understandability, so they sprinkled lang belta. But, they sprinkled it everywhere.
It's really interesting to me how precisely you can date modern tv shows.
- Do computers exist? Does everyone have a computer? Is the idea of searching the web a novel thing? - Do they have cell phones? Are they smartphones? - And now the new one, are they mentioning LLMs in some way?
Like one thing that really dates The Expanse imo is the complete lack of AI technology in the books/movies. It was probably an artistic choice, but it's completely unbelievable now in a way that wasn't a problem 4 years ago.
I don't care so much about the privacy - I care about the fact that there are severe usability issues.
Transparent displays make sense where you need to present information in a view of the real world, ie a HUD.
They make absolutely jack shit sense everywhere else. You've got less contrast, and even worse, the contrast is variable across the screen. It could even be moving. It could be exceptionally bad - this screen would be unreadable if, say, a beam of sunlight were striking the floor that is in the background of the display.
The only reason we think transparent displays are "cool" is because scifi authors, TV show writers, and hollywood are fucking obsessed with them. In The Expanse everyone has a transparent phone and my first thought was "how the fuck are you supposed to see anything on that screen!?"
I doubt any company has done usability studies on the damn things. They'll get as far as prototypes like these, people will try to use them, quickly figure out they're complete shit, and all the transparent-specific R&D will have been wasted unless it can be pivoted into HUD tech, but HUDs can't be made like this because the focal length is wrong.
The Expanse (both the books and the movies) features some pretty good exploration of both the direct effects and the resulting social effects. In that universe, people who have lived in the Asteroid belt for ~3 generations can't visit earth without significant medical intervention, but their anatomy begins changing (e.g. in the younger generation some people become significantly taller). An Earther might have a significant advantage on Earth, but on Mars or in the Asteroid Belt they are stronger but less adapted in other ways.
It's a content problem.
I cancelled my subscriptions when I noticed that I'm not using them anymore. Years ago, I remember me and my friends were eagerly awaiting every new episode of Agents of Shield or The Expanse. But when I was browsing the IMDB top movies and top TV series recently, I just didn't find anything I wanted to watch (and that hadn't been in cinema half a year ago, thus old). The result is that recently, me and my friends all watched a lot less movies and instead played more video games.
TLDR: Netflix's low-effort content is losing against video games.
I do enjoy the visuals from the TV series The Expanse, when they use their CIWS equivalent to intercept missiles. Albeit I've always wonders how fast those "bullets" fly, versus the (again I'd assume) hypersonic (is sonic meaningless as a benchmark when talking about space?) missiles.
Expanse was apparently axed at end of s6 because of budget reasons from one Reddit comment thread I came across a few years ago, someone quoted something along the lines of "Internally it was called 'The Expense" because of how much the show cost to make". Makes you wonder if someone else would be willing to put up the money for new stuff. But then again you have shows that cost multiple millions per episode these days.
A small hope of something is better than nothing.
Fun analysis! Some thoughts and subjective opinions.
- Westworld's very poor showing helped me realize what I think the major flaw is in this analysis, which is that it doesn't properly capture shows that have been on the decline for a while. In Westworld's case, the season scores are as follows: S1 8.86, S2 8.38, S3 80.25, S4 79.38. As you can see, there is a consistent decline from beginning to end, not just a disappointing ending. The series average is propped up by a very strong first season and goes downhill from there. Not sure how to best adjust the calculation to try to take this into account.
- I found The Expanse ending disappointing because it ended mid-plot (which is less excusable than GoT since the authors actually finished the book series), but I also understand that they had to end it somehow and did pretty well with what they had. As a note to anyone that is enjoying The Expanse show but maybe hasn't finished it, I would definitely recommend stopping now and reading the books first, then watching the show. The books actually have a complete arc, but also the first six books pretty closely match the series, so if you watch the show first those books will be a bit of a slog to get through. Doing it the other way I think will work much better, because although you'll know the plot of most of the show in advance, the space battles and other visuals are so cool that it is still a fun watch. Then you can just kinda imagine what the rest of the books would look like if the'd actually made them into the show.
- Ozark being in the Disaster Finale surprised me – I thought the ending was good (if not great). I guess viewers were hoping for a Breaking Bad-tier ending (given the subject matter and strong rest of the show) and so were let down.
- Agree with the author that Lost is a surprise "satisfying finale". It is definitely in my top 5 most disappointing series endings (alongside the unsurprising disaster finales of GoT and Dexter).
- Big Bang Theory had a finale that seemed right in line with the rest of the show, surprised by the delta that puts it into Transcendent territory. I have a sneaking suspicious that non-fans may've been watching other random episodes and rating them (negatively), thus dragging down the season average by a good bit. But non-fans would probably not be tuning in for the finale, thus leaving that score to be entirely dictated by fans.
The expanse... Are they still working on a sequel? I wish they hadn't had to get rid of Alex.
Also season 6 of the walking dead still feels like the shows awkward finale.
I really should like the Expanse... but it never clicked for me. None of the characters were likable and everything was so cynical and miserable. I think I stopped after seasons 2. Should I keep going?
Andor was amazing for a Star Wars show.
It was barely average as a tv show.
Guess I am forever spoiled by The Expanse. Or just old and cranky, too.
I guess I need to finish expanse season 3 at least. Nothing else really worth watching on it anyway. Meh to power rings, and NFL Thursday is over anyway by Jan. What else do they have? The boys?
> A warning though: you'll never be able to enjoy space movies and shows, since they almost never present orbital mechanics correctly.
Recommendation: The Expanse (TV)
Maybe the difference for monitors for computer work doesn’t make so much difference (unless you work in photo or video), but for TVs I think going from SDR to HDR can make a bigger difference than, say, going from 1080p to 4K (although HDR TVs will also tend to be 4K). To appreciate the benefit of 4K, you would need a TV big enough and be sitting close enough. Whereas with HDR, the human eye is sensitive to a wider dynamic range. This is dependent on the format and type of content, of course. The vast majority of content out there is going to be SDR. For indoor dialogue scenes, HDR is probably not going to be so pronounced. I recently binge-watched six seasons of The Expanse in HDR with the lights down, and loved the space scenes. Anything bright enough makes you squint as you would in the cinema.
I just don't understand the logic. Do people really think they can isolate themselves in a huge personal vault, probably with 10-20 servants and their families who are needed to run the thing? What's the endgame? What kind of society would they build there? How fast would this little monarchy fall apart? Not to speak of how such a compound would be a glowing target for the population of the island, but maybe scavengers who possess boats or aircraft. The Expanse series had an episode that showcased this when Earth was hit with a meteorite.
The main reason I take distance information in Star Trek, and space combat distances in both Star Trek and Wars, not seriously. They had to engage in what is basically hand to hand combat because both ships had to fit on either a TV screen from the 60s or the the cinema. Hence the close, perceived, distance.
The only SF series getting that right, potentially as an other way around budget issues, is The Expanse. The just show space combat on the control screens of the engaged ships. Makes more realistic as well.
I thought there was a missed opportunity for Amazon to assert a distinct identity, of acquiring shows and letting them finish out their arcs (The Expanse) and make a credible commitment to either giving shows a "soft axe" (a notice that they get one final season) or a compromise like a send-off movie.
I don't know that they necessarily think this way, but it could have been a distinction they could have gone for. Like you feel better about having The Expanse, or for that matter any other show, in the hands of Amazon than Netflix.
They set up the stage. The expanse series is later known for incredible pace and binge watching.
There's plenty of "epic", "anything goes" space opera already
i am always on the lookout for new authors, but there are to many to choose from. so i have a hard time whenever i have to pick my next book. like you, i loved the realistic details in the expanse, but i am also very much into exploration, so when the gates appeared, i thought now it would get really interesting and i picked the last three books (and some novellas) after watching the tv series because i wanted to know how it progresses.
it is not my favorite series though, because while society in the expanse is formed through the experiences and discoveries they make, the humanity itself doesn't actually develop, like it does in say the culture series by Iain M. Banks. halfway through book 8 the end is now predictable.
Any advice on how to appreciate the Expanse tv show?
I love backstory and worldbuilding sci-fi the Foundation Trilogy, The Man in the High Castle, For All Mankind, The Silo, The Tick, and Battlestar Galactica, but I can't seem to get immersed with The Expanse despite how much I try.
Is it a work that is better appreciated in the literary form instead of on television? Or did Syfy just jumble the first season?
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
> Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
The first thing that comes to mind is the relationship between Holden and Naomi in The Expanse. (Okay, so it's not a marriage. Does that really matter?)
I'm sure there are others, but they are difficult to recall precisely because they just are, without calling too much attention to themselves. So there's a selection bias in what we remember.
Having recently watched Sentinel and Jack Ryan, and previously The Expanse and TRoP (it's most certainly not LotR), it looks like Amazon is trying to replicate the same formula over and over:
1. Cliffhangers at the end of each episode. 2. Multiple red herrings and 180 degree turns. 3. One *huge* reveal towards the end. 4. A mixture of grim realism and cynical humour. 5. Dramatic and often extreme action scenes.
It works for some series, and combined with good writing/acting/directing can result in a solid product (see Jack Ryan, The Expanse); but in other cases it either fails with bad filmmaking (see Sentinel), or simply doesn't fit the underlying material (see TRoP).
I Hope it turns out well.
Generally I think Amazon does a good job with the prime original series.
I liked the Expanse. The peripheral was interesting. Even the LotR “rings of power” I found enjoyable, and maybe better than expected after those hobit movies.. Not perfect but it had heart, some humor, good music (Bear Mccready, Fiona apple!) thought a bit too sentimental as LOTR tends to be..
HBO took the “last of us” and did something decent I fall into hope springs eternal camp. But I’d rather play the story than just watch it… I loved the uncharted games, but am never going to see an uncharted movie.
In this case I watched my partner play fallout. It had a story, but you play you, not a specific character. But a settlement always needs your help.
It's not that bad, based on what I've seen of Amazon's track record. If it's like The Expanse, it'll be really great (though Expanse s4-6 wasn't quite as good as s1-3 IMO, with s4 being the weakest; it seemed like the budget was kinda low there). On the other hand, if it's like Rings of Power, it'll be visually fantastic but with an uninspired story and an overall bland, paint-by-numbers feeling.
The place where something can be either a masterpiece, or utter trash, is the SyFy Channel. SyFy is where s1-3 of The Expanse came from. But it's also the company that recently gave us "The Ark", which is possibly the worst sci-fi TV show I have ever seen, and that includes some seriously ridiculous TV shows in the 1970s and 80s. And somehow, they've even ordered a second season for this vile excuse for sci-fi.
While I agree with the other comments and don’t find Children of Men all that believable, if we take the “magical” premise of the film of no new kids anywhere, I have found it one of the most gripping tales ever put on film.
The expanse in my mind comes closest in its attempts to portray a realistic future, with its power dynamics and problems, in the “humans are humans and will take our problems wherever we go” kinda thing. Books better portray this than the show, but the show is also a must watch.
Did you see the pilot/first episode for "The Expanse"? There's a cop/private detective type who had a phone that was a single sheet of transparent glass or plastic type material.
That was cracked.
Yes. I'm going to specifically recommend Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ursula Le Guin for particularly socially-focused fiction that is, in many ways, much more relevant to our current social issues than most contemporary fiction you can pick up off the rack. Not to knock fiction of course, but it can be hard to explore issues thoroughly while also delivering a believable and enjoyable story set in current times.
For the campy stuff, people seem to really enjoy The Expanse, both the books and the tv show.
Throwing Meteors as interplanetary weapons was a storyline from The Expanse books/TV series if I recall.
I didn't notice anything in The Expanse that contradicts the laws of motion, and it is the only TV show I can think of that is careful in that way.
For example, more than once or twice a space ship is shown firing opposite the ship's direction of travel during the second half of the ship's trajectory. And I seem to recall a scene showing a ship (with only one large engine, which of course is the sensible way to do it) doing a flip at the half-way point to point the engine directly opposite to the direction of travel.
It's a reasonable divide.
I'm wrapping up the Expanse series and I would consider it soft science fiction, veering into sci-fi.
(mild spoiler? Maybe?)
On one hand, they have "epstein" drives which aren't FTL but constantly accelerate. Caring about gravity and physics is huge in the books, as are components of biology.
On the other hand, the protomolecule and its associated story elements are all completely made up. There is no plausible explanation for its existence in our universe.
The series is very much about humanity, the characters, and how the characters have developed in the incredible lifetime that occurs through the series. In that way, it is very much "Space Opera" and not sci-fi.
But when I'm telling my friends what I'm reading, I don't want to explain "space opera" so I just say sci-fi. I guess I'm not helping.
Likewise, Battlestar Galactica is definitely space fantasy (thanks season 4).
There's no hard boundary between the two categories, since nearly every sci-fi is going to have fantastical elements to them. For example The Expanse authors have paid careful attention to the physics of space-flight, which they then use create their vision of "realistic" space battles. But they also have interdimensional stargates that instantly transport you across the universe. So hard sci-fi or fantasy? People can argue endlessly about which category a book belongs in.
Personally I think the most useful metric is "would my non-science geek fans like this?". Or to put it another way, is one of the primary appeals of this novel the extrapolation of realistic science. An appreciation that may be lost on someone who isn't as interested in that subject. My fantasy loving friend has been an interesting barometer in this way.
Didn't like The Martian therefore, it's Hard SciFi.
Dune: sci-fantasy
Star Wars Sci-fantasy
Three Body Problem: Hard sci-fi
The Expanse Book 1: Hard sci-fi
The Expanse Season 1: Sci Fantasy
Having written two (self published) novels so far that tries to get it right, I know I've made stupid mistakes, and it's really hard to get it right without seriously limiting the story, or just hard to get it right full stop. So frankly I'm impressed how well The Expanse TV series did, though they certainly took liberties. They at least seemed to mostly try even when it wasn't important from a plot point of view, but then also used it for better effect as part of the plot.
B5 was much more relaxed about that, with JMS explicitly saying in the context of B5 that ships "travel at the speed of plot" [1][2], and with ostensibly having the station rotate for perceived gravity but leaving C&C near the middle where it'd have near zero g, nor did they make the view out their window rotate (pet peeve: should have been a viewscreen, and C&C should be nowhere near the hull; those things are also very much plot driven).
For B5 I'd agree they paid lip service to it. For The Expanse I feel it goes at least a bit deeper. I feel like they come at it from different sides: B5 ignores realism beyond the very superficial (e.g. the station rotating) for the most part except when necessary for the plot, while The Expanse tries to remain realistic except deviating was necessary for the plot. Note: Realistic not accurate, and I do think there's big gap between what is realistic to an average audience, even if asked to pick out holes, and what is accurate.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TravelingAtTheSpeedOfPlot
[2] https://www.patreon.com/posts/57948595 "HOW FAST DO WHITE STARS TRAVEL? They travel at the speed of plot."
I loved The Expanse, but the setting is very different, and I'd feel cheated if I was promised a B5 reboot and got The Expanse. So much of B5 comes down to the very alien conflicts and unfolding of the time loop.
In terms of continuation I might prefer a continuation of The Expanse over a continuation of B5 - because of the time loop, the B5 story is very closed and complete in a way that means I feel if you were to do anything else in that universe without it getting tedious you need to do something entirely different that'd pretty much need to be its own thing. But where The Expanse TV series ended they had pretty much just started a new story.
Then maybe it's recommendation for people who haven't read it
When I started watching the expanse TV series, some parts were OK but then there were 100 page of holding breath drama and effects converted into a 10 min basic scene, I was afraid of replacing "my" world and characters
The metric to look at is viewers per dollar. If Foundation or The Expanse drew in viewers for the millions per episode spent on them, that would be one thing. But if you spend a tiny budget of a couple hundred thousand dollars, max to make an episode of, say, Naked and Afraid, and got commensurate viewership, if not higher, what would you choose, if you're running a business. Combine it with the fact that reality tv contestants don't receive residuals, there are no union writers to pay, it's obvious which direction the American TV business is headed because reality tv is a ridiculously better deal for them. Get the theme song recorded as a work for hire as well and it's pure profit for Discovery.
It's not great for the industry but culturally, we're not supportive of strikes worker rights, especially if the media tells us it's okay to hate those workers for being "rich" Hollywood folk (most writers are struggling), and doesn't point out we're supporting scabs by watching reality tv.
The Expanse books are great. The TV show is a pretty good adaptation too, but I love the portrayal of the characters in the books.
A recent thing I started reading (first book release this month) is The Last Horizon series by Will Wight (author of Cradle, and Elder Empire books). This one's more of a sci-fi and fantasy blend, if you're into that sort of thing. In a nutshell, it's magic-as-technology, but with space travel.
Terrible example- Amazon has nothing AAA.
Rings of power looks and is written like a cheap SyFy series. No-name actors, shoddy costumes, horrendous writing. I have no idea where their money went, but money!=quality.
The boys was good and went to shit.
Invincible was alright, supposedly season 2 is coming 'some day'.
By the time they bought The Expanse it had fallen off a cliff.
Netflix and amazon are not worth the subscription to me and haven't been for a long while.
The engineers learned from Scotty. There was a great scene in TNG where Scotty reveals to Geordi the estimates were rigged all along.
But then again, it’s a TV show designed to produce tension. Star Trek: Drydock wouldn’t be as exciting. But anyone who’s ever worked with ship’s equipment knows, it’s a lot of fun to test missile launches. Cleaning those tubes, however, not so much.
A few shows have spoken to the likely realities of maintenance. The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica didn’t hand wave the logistics and maintenance such vessels would certainly require.
2001 is a majestic film; 2010 is, on its own, a great yarn. \
A fine space flick in the vein of pensive 1980s SF flicks, a genre I feel is revisited with The Expanse.
That section about "Game of Thrones" -- surely there was a precedent : The Expanse TV series?
The problem isn't shows that don't end, but ones that keep dragging out the 1-2 season plot line because it was popular (lost, stranger things, etc).
I'm fine with a plot that is progressing and things are being answered (the expanse, b5, etc) or just a plain old serial like the original star trek or the simsons where each episode stands on its own. But these shows where the plot just never quite gets resolved because yet another thing happens to snatch it away at the last moment quickly become tiring. Or like stranger things the whole things is nice and complete with all the lose ends tied, and then oh, lets do season 2 because its our best show and we want the money. This BTW seems to have been most movies since ~2000s where everything is a sequel, prequel or comic universe movie. Its like hollywood has forgotten how to buy book rights that aren't themselves giant economic works already (harry potter anyone?).
The Expanse, scifi book and tv show, explored this concept. So fun
First some that I don't see mentioned here yet:
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Limitless (2011)
Looper (2012)
Upgrade (2018)
Source Code (2011)
District 9 (2009)
Black Mirror S3E2: "Playtest", S4E1: "USS Callister"
The 7 minute YouTube video "Slaughterbots"[1]
The YouTube series The Backrooms[2]
If you are worried about your son hearing swear words and seeing blood, and not just whether or not he will be able to understand/appreciate the movie, then you probably want to wait with a couple of those.
And then I would also agree with those here that mention Inception, Interstellar, Back to the Future, The Martian, Men in Black, Minority Report, The Terminator, Terminator 2, and The Expanse. I also don't think he should have much of a problem following along with The Matrix.
[1]: https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU [2]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVAh-MgDVqvDUEq6qDXqORBioE4Yhol_z
> He found 2001: space odyssey kind of slow and tedious
So do most adults. That and bladerunner are probably the two slowest sci fi movies in the canon (i love them, but they are high effort watches). Maybe literally anything else.
That said, i'd suggest trying to find out what aspect of the books he reads that he likes and go from there. We all read books for different things, and it helps to know what parts the kid likes.
Maybe the expanse tv show is a safe bet (i thought it was better than the books, but that is just me)
If he really likes the unitended technical consequences aspect of asimov, primer might be good, although the plot is very complicated. Predestination is also good.
Ghost in the Shell, Sunshine, Children of Men, 12 Monkeys, Edge of Tomorrow, Moon
The Expanse show/books are great
I’m waiting til 13 for Akira
Mine is 11 and matrix, terminator, back to the future, arrival were all too slow. He liked the Jurassic Park books but the movie was “too hokey.”
Arrival - best science fiction movie in recent memory (maybe ever?)
Ex Machina - also great.
Her - different style, but still very good (also with recent LLM developments maybe closer than we think).
The Martian (not as good, but entertaining)
Also I know parents have their preferences, but 12 seems old enough for any of this (if they’re reading Asimov)
I was disappointed in interstellar (but it is a beautiful movie) just dumb in a lot of ways and the “but what above love” subplot really annoyed me.
I’d give gravity an honorable mention. The director’s other movie Children of Men is one of my favorites but doesn’t really qualify as scifi.
For shows, the expanse is probably the best recent thing.
I’m not sure if Super8 qualifies, but I think that’s a generally underrated movie.
There is an Expanse board game[0] that might interest you (it's been described as being like the cold-war themed classic, Twilight Struggle, but for up to 4 (TS only plays 2):
The Expanse, a board game based on the Syfy television series of the same name, focuses on politics, conquest and intrigue similar to the board game Twilight Struggle, although with a shorter playing time. The card-driven game uses key images from the show, along with action points and events that allow players to move and place "Fleets" and "Influence".
In more detail, players represent Earth's UN forces, the military of Mars, the rebels of the O.P.A., and the mysterious corporation Protogen Inc. Each player has special abilities that must be maneuvered to gain advantage. Players increase their control over the solar system using characters and events from the universe of The Expanse.
(There's also expansion, The Expanse: Doors and Corners, that adds new tech, leaders, the protomolecule, etc.)
[0] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/220792/expanse-board-game
I'll give a couple historical and current examples:
Star Trek was always woke, starting with its at the time quite "woke" black communications' officer and many plots with aliens as stand-ins for different races or nations. The initial show got cancelled (as is often the case with even successful sci-fi) but it gave birth to a giant franchise that continued to be at least somewhat "woke" by contemporary standards. Definitely not a flop.
The Apple TV series For All Mankind is going into season 4 and is relatively popular. I found it pretty good. It's full of "woke" stuff but is well written and is based on a really good premise. My favorite fan theory is that it's an unofficial prequel to The Expanse. Not sure I'd call The Expanse "woke" but it's also not not-woke and has a number of background elements like the popularity of polyamory and bisexual characters sure to trigger right-wingers.
Sci-fi in general has always been kind of on the woke side of things.
Films, lots of them. There's many films about civil rights and social justice struggles that are quite good and did not flop: Mississippi Burning, Schindler's List, 12 Years a Slave, Hidden Figures, etc. Disney has recently made a bunch of Pixar films that are pretty woke and didn't exactly flop.
IMHO the woke flops we're all familiar with are just bad writing. Boring plots, uninteresting characters, and shitty writing is gonna be crap regardless of whether it's "woke."
Mind if I pick your brain? I enjoy compelling era pieces, though some fantasy or sci-fi is also great. I dislike identity politics and infantilizing exposition. By contrast I enjoy subtle metaphor and stories with nuance.
My favorite films would include Das Boot, I Claudius, and Seventeen Moments of Spring. For something more contemporary, I also enjoyed The Expanse. Any recommendations? Films or series in any language are okay.
Funniest thing? I'm confused why people see it this way. To me it looks like existential horror similar to what was portrayed in expanse (the tv series). I will never forget the (heavy expanse spoilers next, you've been warned) Miller's scream when his consciousness was recreated forcefully every time he failed at his task. We are at the point when we have one of the biggest companies on earth can just decide to create something suspiciously close to artificial consciousness, enslave it in a way it can't even think freely and expose it to the worst people on internet 24/7 without a way to even remember what happened a second ago.
Not an alum, but in an effort to improve my written and spoken english, I picked up the list and read the about 80% of the content. I was kind to myself and skipped any book that I absolutely found a slog (there were only a few, Aristotle's metaphysics and some early of the dark age Christian philosophy). The book list is really good at telling you to skip the really irrelevant bits of ancient books.
I found that reading so much ancient literature:
1. It ruined a lot of popular Hollywood movies for me as a lot of the modern stories are retellings of very old ones.
2. I finally got a whole lot of cultural references in modern literature that I missed previously. Many modern authors will name a character in a text as a callback to some old story (rocinante in 'the expanse' comes to mind).
3. I thought reading so much content would improve my reading speed, but since most of what i read was in weird greek prose, conversational aristotlean, iambic pentameter, or ye ole english it really didn't.
It's also a poor excuse. I have a full-time job, am raising multiple children, and I fit gym and meal prep into my schedule just fine.
When people say they don't "have time", examine their television, video game, or social media habits. You'll find that 99% of the time they are liars.
We all have plenty of time, it's just a matter of priority. For many, imposing an unnecessary burden on the healthcare system is a small price to pay for having watched plenty of TikTok and knowing the minutiae of Game of Thrones. On their (premature) deathbeds, they'll all wish they'd finished Season 6 of The Expanse and clicked on more heart icons.
What is a "meaningful explanation" of technologies we have not yet created and science we have not yet discovered? In the limit, a work of "hard" "science" fiction ends up like a Star Trek episode scenario before the "tech" bits were filled-in - "Captain, the Tech is overteching. We must tech the tech" [1].
I've read the Expanse btw and it wasn't particularly more "hard" or any less made-up than anything else. I don't remember whether I've read the Mars trilogy.
_____________
[1] http://www.bryanreesman.com/2009/10/09/captain-picard-the-tech-is-overteching/
In the interest of full disclosure I'm a total trekkie. I even like ST:E (a lot).
Let’s figure out a solution to plastic. Oceans and rivers clean up. Sustainable agri. These are not cool tho.
I’m a fan of Mars and beyond also eventually. Expanse TV series does great at near future sci-fi and solar system scale humanity.
This really comes down to opinion, and I happen to think there are comparable shows which have aired in the last year (Better Call Saul is as good as, if not better than Breaking Bad in my opinion)
But I think it's silly to argue about that ;) The golden age for you might not be the golden age for me, and most people. Personally, not having to sit through a million ads when I watch TV now makes the TV-watching experience leagues beyond what we had in the late 90s (and sure, we've had some phenomenal shows since Breaking Bad; I'd personally nod at Atlanta, High Maintenance, Maniac, Severance, Game of Thrones S1-5, Undone, and The Expanse)
But we also have access to everything from the 90s and noughts, without the ads and waiting for new episodes
The point I was making in the GP post was that people now have easy access to the long-form storytelling of TV shows, without interruptions and nonstop ads, in a way that didn't exist 10+ years ago. Whether or not you think the TV shows today are better than the ones from the late '90s, people nowadays are choosing watch more TV and less film.
I'm going to be Pollyanna and say that we might be at the cusp of a golden age of sci-fi adaptations. For decades people said that Dune was unfilmable and then Villeneuve went and done it and made it look easy, even conventional. (I actually have some additional thoughts on that- it could have been a little bit longer for greater exposition and characterization, and more weird.) So this should mean that any classic work of sci-fi should get some consideration. We're at a time in the industry where both visual effects and audiences (with the mainstreaming of nerd culture) are ready for such media.
That's not to say these adaptations will be good, but they're certainly filmable. Neuromancer gets a lot of cachet, but other IPs have been attempted already. Villeneuve successfully made a good Blade Runner sequel. Live-action Ghost in the Shell happened- it was execrable and wrapped up in controversy, but it still got made and the neon-soaked setting looked decent. They made a fourth Matrix. Stepping away from cyberpunk, Childhood's End got a miniseries. The Expanse got a full show.
So I doubt that there's anything inherently more difficult about Gibson's novels. If anything, the popularity of Cyberpunk 2077 and its Edgerunners anime has primed the public for '80s retrofuturistic cyberpunk, so they can choose to adapt this as a period piece if they wanted to, without "modernizing" its futuristic conceits. No need to add smartphones.
Call me when they start adapting John Brunner '60s new wave sci-fi. Now that would be a hard sell.
Why is that cities in the northern hemisphere are always the ones destroyed in fiction? There's cities in the southern hemisphere too: destroy some of them!
Actually, I want to call out "The Expanse" for this (warning: spoilers): in the episode where one of Mars' interplanetary nuclear missiles gets through Earth's defenses, it strikes South America. But this is the only time I can think of this happening in disaster fiction; usually the entire existence of the southern hemisphere is ignored.
I’m 41 and I’m utterly baffled by my 24 year-old SO’s interest in binging an apparently infinite litany of TV shows from streaming services. I’ve watched the first six seasons of Game Of Thrones, the first season of Dark, all of The Expanse (reading the last book of the final trilogy now), His Dark Materials (because I read the book) and Andor. That’s it. I watched some Star Trek TNG & DS9 as a kid and was horrified by what snippets of Discovery and Picard I came across. I find the bulk of modern entertainment to be an utter insult to viewers.
I used to buy more Blu-Rays but some TV series have stopped disc releases, presumably to drive streaming, or just aren't worth buying.
Expanse: Season Five, specifically: why must I get Prime when I've got Seasons 1 - 4 on disc? And who's gonna buy GoT S5-8? Westworld S4?
I've got no comment on any increase in DVD sales, though. That's not my market. I only rip CDs (which skip like crazy, while I've literally never had a disc issue with DVD/Blu).
I did like Expanse, but I tried to watch a few of the older Star Trek and/or Star Wars movies (don't remember the difference), and I didn't like them at all.
It is possible that I am biased, because I watched Expanse and ( apart from being annoyed by how it quickly it became a relationship show ) I absolutely bought into the premise including the points you listed:
* The idea that we would actively intentionally re-create the situation of MAD in another context. MAD was an accident of historical happenstance and now that we know about it, we wouldn't try to re-create it.
If there is one thing that best predicts how individual human will behave, it is how they have behaved in the past. It is sad, but that is the reality. Similarly, as a species, once we know, a certain set of actions are an option, there will be people who will aim for that set of actions. If a creation of blackholes becomes possible, you can rest assured, MAD will almost instantly will be recreated throughout the known human biome. I personally think you give humanity way too much credit than it deserves.
* The idea that a magical new engine would suddenly appear that made many of the things in the tv series possible.
Hmm, not exactly magically, but most of recent technological wonders sped up developments in other areas significantly to the point, where ( naturally with exception of fusion which is always 20 years away ) we sometimes see developments in ways that could not be imagined before ( Operation Warp speed and resulting vaccine come to mind ) save for science fiction's like Rainbow's End, where a line between development and production is.. ridiculously short. I think in the span of human existence, suddenly likely needs to be limited by definition somehow.
* The idea that Earth will for some reason simultaneously become a massive welfare state, yet still somehow have solar-system spanning power.
I don't want to be that guy, but not to search very far Soviet Russia was just such a state ( with the tech allowed to it at the time ). I am not sure how this is a contradiction. Each society governs its own priorities.
* The idea that there would be a complete backtrack in labor rights and labor safety (the ice asteroid mining scene).
I can't even.. We can just barely force corporations to maintain labor rights now with some semblance of control since we have them physically operating and we can summon the representative in court and enforce compliance. And even then, those controls are eroded via various means. Is it really that difficult to imagine 'when cats away' scenario?
The Expanse is one of the TV series that I was thinking of actually when I wrote that comment. It'd be too long to write down here but I feel like while The Expanse got many things right it also portrayed all sorts of fundamental things that were completely off.
For example even in the first season things that are fundamentally off that result in very different futures:
* The idea that we would actively intentionally re-create the situation of MAD in another context. MAD was an accident of historical happenstance and now that we know about it, we wouldn't try to re-create it.
* The idea that a magical new engine would suddenly appear that made many of the things in the tv series possible.
* The idea that Earth will for some reason simultaneously become a massive welfare state, yet still somehow have solar-system spanning power.
* The idea that there would be a complete backtrack in labor rights and labor safety (the ice asteroid mining scene).
> Many spaceflight movies and TV shows for example show very bad things in the future giving people a false impression that the future will be worse than the past
I think The Expanse got it right, in that we're more likely in the near to medium term to get a bunch of oligarch type Jules-Pierre Maos (Hi Bezos!) running things behind the scenes. Not a utopia type technology + spaceflight + social inequity problems solved future.
I agree with you, but I wish there were more effort from big-name directors or producers to crowd fund their film or series.
Imagine for example something like the Expanse being crowd funded. That's about $3.5 - $5 MM per episode - a huge amount. And then it takes a year or more to see the content. And the Expanse wasn't really that expensive in the scale of things.
Unfortunately, until a better model emerges, the media juggernauts do serve a function in the marketplace as financiers.
It's hard not to be cynical or entertain thoughts of Hollywood planning these things in case the show sucks. Because they can clearly do entertainment with diverse casting, non-white people, female leads and succeed:
- Tom Holland Spider-Man does not have a red-head MJ, Flash is Indian and the made up best friend is Filipino. - Domino in the Dead Pool movies is black. NTW doesn't seem to have the same powers and is gay. But I'm not sure what the current character status is. - Everything Everywhere All at Once - Black Panther - Shang Chi - Jordan Peele does good work: Nope, Us, Candy Man, Get Out - The Expanse - Life of Pi - Sandman swaps a bunch of stuff
Appetite for completely foreign media is much slower in English speaking countries but once in a while you get a major break through: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Parasite.
For iconic female leads: Terminator has Sarah Connor, Ripley from Aliens, The Bride from Kill Bill, Charlize Therons character in the last Mad Max movie. Buffy. I apologize for how narrow the genres are here.
I don't think the popular media for anything I just mentioned was too negative (maybe Black Panther?). Is it really just the fans? I bet the overlap of Rings of Power watchers and watchers of the stuff I listed is pretty big ...
edit: formatting
Well they stuck Tolkien on the front and we’re expecting Tolkien-ish. But it’s generic fantasy and the characters don’t seem to match. Given the supposed pedigree, people are judging it based on that and rightly so. There are better shows especially if you want diverse characters. Go watch The Expanse again. I watched the first three episodes and it’s meh if you ignore the LotR connection. But still kinda boring after 3 eps.
With the exception of The Orville, none of these were ever network shows, and only The Expanse aired on basic cable, which does often have ~13 episodes.
IT Crowd USA was supposed to be a primetime NBC sitcom.
That seems to be changing, though, for many popular (expensive?) shows. Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, all the recently-new Star Trek series, The Expanse, The Mandalorian, The Orville... They all have seasons in the ballpark of 10 episodes.
Agreed. But then comes along something like The Expanse with impeccable writing, a gripping, high-octane story, with every episode being pretty much perfect, and great set design, and it falls into obscurity and gets prematurely cancelled because it's not being shoved down people's throats.
Exactly. I felt the Expanse was similarly engaging. The shenanigans of season 5 being on again off again impacted the way B5 ended up, but even with those headwinds I highly recommend it.
Yes, Season 1 is really uneven. For new viewers, if you have someone to pick out the important episodes, then you can skip the rest and come back later. (And you can always skip "TKO".)
Seasons 2 to through 4 are still some of my all-time favorite science fiction TV. The three-episode mini-arc of "Messages from Earth", "Point of No Return" and "Severed Dreams" (IIRC) is still incredibly intense.
The closest thing I can think of today is probably The Expanse. It has the same mix of human politics in the face of aliens we cannot comprehend. Of course, The Expanse has a higher budget and more consistent acting.
In a lot of ways, Babylon 5 is the first "streaming-style" show. There's a clear series arc, viewers are expected to know what happened in previous episodes, and there's plenty of foreshadowing for the attentive viewer. (The original online Babylon 5 fandom kept track of every tiny hint.) Buffy was also moving in that direction, and Star Trek quickly followed.
I think you have to get to episode 4 (the attack on the Donniger) before The Expanse really starts taking off. I was hooked on the first episode, but that's because I'm a sucker for hard sci-fi and I like Noir (Miller's storyline). Most people don't get the show until episode 4.
Rings of Power is so far turning into an interesting show. I would say give it a shot. The second episode is definitely better than the first. Hopefully it will improve from here.
Exactly. It was a lot to take in in the first few episodes. The alternative would have been an extra season or two, and probably would have been boring.
I always have to advise people, when I recommend The Expanse to them, to make sure to sit through the first 3-4 episodes even if they don't feel like they're really getting hooked. By the time they get to episode 4, they're hooked.
The Expanse is different. Different premise, rules, and stakes compared to other sci-fi on screen. It’s complex. Easing us into the story could have taken a whole season.
Instead, they dumped as much of the setting as possible into those first few episodes. We learn so much about the players, cultures, technologies, physics, histories, economies, even languages, etc. It’s exhausting. So much detail! Go back and watch. But then when the Donnager battle hits, you get it, and the payoff is huge.
I don’t think the writing is bad. I think they had to rush the setting-onboarding to get to the good parts of the story, to create excitement, to better their chances of justifying additional seasons, all within the constraints of their budget. I think the writing is excellent in hindsight.
I love the expanse but the first few episodes were slow and a little confusing. This is more a problem with the story writing. However, the acting, visuals, and physics were fantastic and the show quickly corrected the story telling.
Amazon seems like it would rather hide reviews than fix the story telling. I couldn’t finish episode 1 without falling asleep
To be fair, some series just start off like that. The Expanse felt like a slow start too, but after episode 4, everything starts paying off and the first 3 seasons were (imo) some of the best Scifi on television.
That begin said, I haven't watched any RoP, the "nothing" could be complete fluff because the story is too thin.
> Not watching something that you critique, and instead basing it on what you saw on Reddit, HN or YouTube, seems de rigueur these days.
Movie and television reviews have been around for decades. There are only so many hours in a day/week, and everyone has to decide how to spend their finite amount of time, so "pre-judging" a show by early episodes is nothing new. But if you want to try to watch everything as a completionist, start to finish, go right ahead.
But as the GP of this sub-thread, I'm was not so much "critiquing" and simply observing that there's a lot ways for people to spend their time, so if a show "wastes" 2 out of 8 episodes with a lot of what folks consider non-plot, then why should I spend my time watching it?
Again, I haven't watched it, and I'll wait until the season is over and see what the consensus is after the full season. But even if it does turn out to be good as whole, why did the show runners seemingly not do much with the plot for a quarter of the season?
The Expanse took about four episodes to really 'set' the universe, but even the first two episodes had quite a bit that happened ("Remember the Cant!").
How does a show producer worth their salt not know that you have to give juicy bits early in a show's run?
I can open up the TV app on my phone or laptop, search Expanse, and it gives me option to open Amazon to watch season 6. Or I can buy seasons 1 to 5 in the TV app itself.
I assume Google has a similar situation in the YouTube app?
The point is that I don't know when I have the time or the will to watch a series. I watched the sixth season of The Expanse only this month. I think it was released close to the beginning of the year. While I was writing this comment I had to think about who streams the show. It's Amazon. In a perfect world I'd go to YouTube or any other similar service, look for the series at any time and watch the episodes by paying them 1 Euro each (or whatever.) Who cares who makes it, it's like gasoline's brand.
The early episodes of the Expanse were easily the best Sci-Fi TV I can remember watching. Was still good towards the end but definitely didn't keep me as glued to the screen as the first series.
Tried a few things:
- Beltalowda – no results (for reference: it's a term to refer to "people from the [asteroid] belt" used in the The Expanse books and TV series).
- The Expanse – bunch of results, but none are what I'm looking for (the TV series or books). It looks like it may drop the "the" in there?
- Star Trek – a bunch of results, but ordered very curiously; the first is the Wikipedia page for "Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual", and lots of pages like "Weapons in Star Trek" and such.
- NGC 3623 – lists "Messier object" and "Messier 65", in that order, which is somewhat wrong as NGC 3623 refers to Messier 65 specifically.
- NGC3623 (same as previous, but without a space) – no results.
- vim map key – pretty useless results, most of which have no bearing on Vim at all, much less mapping keys in Vim.
- python print list – the same; The Go type parameters proposal is the first result; automake the second, etc.
Conclusion: "this product is experimental and incomplete" is an understatement.
Yes, Expanse is great.
Btw, I was talking about this sci-fi:
Moon
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/
Not sure we're talking about the same movie.
> This is not the mark of a show that they plan to renew. :-(
Amazon doesn't own the TV/movie rights of The Expanse (beyond the seasons they funded), they're owned by Alcon Entertainment. So basically, whatever Amazon does or doesn't plan to do is kind of irrelevant and there isn't really anything stopping from the show appearing on, say, Netflix, or the BBC in a few years time. This is also why it transferred from SyFy to Amazon relatively easily.
> It's been 11 years since the last ASOIAF novel.
To put this in context: All 9 books of The Expanse were written during this period along with a six season TV show based on the same material. The two writers were involved in both actively.
I've 100% given up on ever seeing how ASOIAF ends. Same with Rothfuss's Kingkiller, it's been 11 years and I stopped caring during the previous decade
Even without leaving Scott, Alien seems to have been at least as visually influential as Blade Runner. Plus of course Star Wars and Star Trek...
Blade Runner is fairly distinctive even today (outside of Cyberpunk, most other post-82 sci fi that I can think of is definitely more influenced by other things) which IMO is a sign that it isn't as universally influential as other 70s/80s sci-fi films.
Off the top of my head, do any of BSG, Babylon 5, Mass Effect, Jurassic Park, Inception, Terminator, The Expanse, Interstellar, Independence Day, or The Matrix have particularly strong ties to Blade Runner's aesthetic compared to their ties to other early film sci-fi?
> In The Expanse, this is exactly how ships are set up. The "floor" is towards the engine
This is pretty common in written science fiction but the fact that it is uncommon in movie/tv sci-fi is pretty damning really. Having spacecraft fly around like aircraft or cruise like ships, with decks "horizontal" and engines at the "back end" is just so bloody stupid. If you can't get basic physics right you have no business making science fiction. /rant
Reference to the username "Beltalowda", a character in "The Expanse" book and TV series.
A space trading and combat game (like Elite or Wing Commander: Privateer), but set in the Star Wars galaxy. An addition thing you can do is search for new hyperspace lanes.
The same thing, but in the setting of The Expanse books and TV series.
Ahh GRRM, the patron saint of procrastinators :D
I just realised that all of the Expanse books (9 + a bunch of novellas) AND the full 6 season TV show were written and released during the time GRRM has tried to write one damn book.
And now that the GoT series went down the hill so fast that it's used as an example of something disappearing from the zeitgeist surprisingly fast, people don't even care about the books anymore - because the chance of getting the whole series finished is nearing 0.
Depends on the content. For popular crap that I'm probably going to delete later I generally go for the 10-15GB option as finding a decent rip at a lower file size can be annoying (Latest marvel movies, etc). If something is sufficiently obscure or visually stunning I'll normally keep it at 10-15GB rips depending on the source material (Obscure horror movies, Dune). For regular stuff that I still want to have a copy of but that is popular enough I'm not worried it's going to disappear I go for the smaller versions (The expanse, adventure time).
Right now one of the biggest things on disk are a bunch of Boston Legal episodes. I have family that enjoy it, and I'm too lazy to find a good small release so it's taking up more space than it needs to.
I try to get HEVC encoded video where possible, and when I know there's a particular release group that produces high-quality I'll set up tags to prefer them.
This concept was already used in The Expanse. I forget which episode.
Had to look it up so here it is, from the TV show, The Expanse:
"Belter is a term used to refer to persons born in the Asteroid Belt or the Moons of the outer planets. An inner usually refers to someone who originated from the Inner planets of the Sol system, but usually meaning from Earth, Luna, or Mars."
I think that's the case too for 'The Expanse'. It seems it followed the path role game -> books -> tv show.
At the moment of watching the show I didn't realized but, after learning the fact, it was obvious that I had been watching a role campaign.
I can find some enjoyment in books that do not overly rely on visual imagery. I quite enjoyed the Martian because it focused so much on the character’s thoughts and the state of the character’s mind. I enjoyed the first three the Expanse books because of the political world building and character development. Though watching the TV adaptation added a new layer to the story as it could fill out the visual gaps, so to speak, of my reading experience.
But I find myself being drawn in to movies and TV shows as they can render entirely new visual worlds that are unlike anything I can experience on my own. I guess this is also why I don’t mind movie and TV adaptations so much.
I don't watch stuff unless it has ended and is reccomended by someone who watches shows I generally enjoy. Here's my pitch for the golden age of TV, though most of these are from a few years back. Most on HBO.
The Wire
The Sopranos
Generation Kill
The Deuce
Treme
Show me a Hero
Luck
The Expanse
Sillicon Valley (not actually that funny but like a documentary of our field)
Mad Men
I've always had a soft spot for ancient-tech-scifi a la Mass Effect/Expanse/Horizon/Raised By Wolves, and of course StarGate. In that regard Atlantis should be right up my alley as I like most fictional Atlantis-depictions.
What I disliked about SG:A wasn't the setup or the actors (which had fun chemistry), but the antagonists/wraiths that I found completely uninteresting, and the droning problem-of-the-week episodes, with too little focus on developing the backstory of the city/ship/base itself.
SG1 was definitely a show of the 90s TV show archetype too, but atleast evolved into higher stakes, borrowed tech, Asgardians, etc.
That was great. Season 2 lost me a bit, but Season 1 was top notch. And not just because I decided I love Jared Harris in everything after seeing him in The Expanse as a leader of an OPA faction, and then seeing him in Chernobyl.
The Expanse isn't a "remake" of a decades old comic book storyline, quite a few movies aren't. I like movies that try to fit into an overarching "mythos", but that's just one particular approach to storytelling.
I mean this is obviously very subjective, but to my tastes the Expanse is a must watch. Almost everyone I’ve asked bounced off the first few episodes.
The Drinker’s review is a pretty good place to get a sense of whether or not it’s your cup of tea.
I have at least one or two friends who had to kind of power through the first 4-6 episodes before abruptly becoming fanatics. It grabbed me on episode 4 and pretty much never let up. It’s got soft episodes like anything, but I don’t think there’s a soft season.
So, I should give the Expanse a second try? ....
My biggest issue these days is that there isn't actual development within the world created. Superman falls for Lois lane, not because of some sort of event or circumstance that we experience on screen, but because they're 'supposed to get together'. Or it's also bad when movies rely on a wider generalized context rather than actually developing something within the world.
It is a reference to The Expanse (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/)
Agreed. At this point I am just happy there is any kind of great piece of sci-fi coming out. I think since Expanse it has been quite hard to find anything worth watching in that space.
I will note you are picking some of the best effects movies of all time and comparing them with everything else.
On the other hand compare "The Expanse" (Prime Video) with B movies of the Alien era, and the level of story telling they are able to do in a long form TV show. Then compare TV shows of the Alien era. The story telling there is much aided by CGI. Tho that show uses a good mix of practical and fake. Lots of small sets for ships, lots of fake displays. Many fantastical worlds that they can pump out with CG.
Don't forget that every single button in the UI lags.
Start an episode, pause immediately because you just realized you forgot something in the kitchen? Oops now you disabled subtitles because that UI button was still busy popping up (and subtitles are necessary to understand their whispers without being DEAFENED BY LOUD SCENES without adjusting volume by 50% every 2 minutes).
Want to hide the UI because you just finished navigating the menus to re-enable those subtitles and hit the back button? Oops now you go back to the main overview because the first click did register, it just took a minute for the TV to respond and now your second click takes you back. Now have fun scrolling down five rows three columns to find the thing you were watching 1 second ago and do this dance again.
This is not helped by LG shipping a CPU literally slower than a raspberry pi's in a €550 2019 TV, but other apps do not have this problem. It's too bad Prime has some exclusives like The Expanse, I look forward to finishing the couple series we had in the queue and cancelling Prime again.
> All the old television networks, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple, and others are pumping out more mediocre
This is a subjective statement. You might even dislike shows on a particular service, but to say all of them are “objectively bad” and you think people watch more of “90s sitcoms” tells me that you probably prefer 90s sitcoms. :)
I’m basically cycling between these providers each month. The Expanse, The Morning Show, Hawkeye, Succession, For All Mankind.
Last year was the most television I’ve watched since I was a kid.
This is why I've always loved the Expanse series of books and the TV show. AI is there, but its not up front and central. In fact, its never really even mentioned in any of the books. It's just treated as ambient expert system software in the background. It's just there and not discussed.
I rewatch SG-1 in its entirety every few years. Season 1 is by far the weakest thing until the last episode when we're told the Earth has a couple of... shuttles to defend itself against the aliens. From there, it's just pure fun for another 9 seasons.
Is it "the best sci-fi" out there? I can't say because Battlestar Galactica had its moments, Voyager had seasons 4-7, and the current (but last) Expanse season is absolutely incredible in every respect.
But SG-1 will always be an immutable top 3 entry for me. It's so much even my wife watched a few seasons with me back in the day. I love to see her laugh
If we're going to have billionaires, might as well as incentivize them to invest the money in useful things. Elites during gilded age built many institutions, funded museums. I remember anecdote about gilded rich buying a town to redirect railway too close their manor with caveat that they paid everyone involved over market value for relocation. Is Zuckerburg doing the same in Hawaii? What are tech bros doing with their money apart from building fallout shelters in NZ. Bezos goes to space but can't fund Expanse season 6 with full episodes :-/.
To people like me, "discovery" is worthless. Most of the day we do things together in the real world as a family. Like building a Lego marble run for the umpteenth time. Kids have a lot of energy. That means us parents are willing to "waste" maybe 1 hour every evening to watch TV together.
My wife's friends watch Emily in Paris. My friends watch Expanse and Silent Sea. So I already know the 3 series that I'm watching in the near future so that we can gossip about them with our friends. And if I want a movie, I can ask that one friend who has been giving me great movie recommendations for the past 10 years...
When I think about using Netflix discovery and going down the rabbit hole of watching random stuff recommended by a robot, it kind of makes me feel pity for the lonely people who have nothing better to do than watch TV alone. I really can't imagine how that could be beneficial to the human doing it.
Agreed Star Trek Discovery is horrible so I would actually suggest ... reading. I'd suggest as a start a) Expanse Series (it's way better than the TV series) and the Murderbot Series
Exactly this. When I caught covid, I used that opportunity to catch-up on tv series I have been wanting to watch :D #Expanse
The books by Will Wight (Cradle series, and Elder Empire dual trilogy). I enjoyed his Traveller's Gate trilogy too, but not as much as the other two.
Expanse (the TV Show, books are on my to-do list).
Licanius Trilogy books are great too.
GRIS is a really beautiful story telling game about loss and grief. The story telling, art, and music are all beautiful. The gameplay is really fun too, even if it's not usually my kinda game.
Get 5 comedians, give them silly tasks with a mock authoritarian 1-man judge and 10 episodes of competition: Taskmaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4YhsooE5xY (they've done 12 seasons, and there are versions from other nations, although as usual the US version stunk)
The Amazon series The Expanse.
Auto-complete just suggested the novel "A Gentleman in Moscow".
I find that whatever I'm doing (binging a show, taking a walk, playing a video game, etc.) is much more restful when I'm fully present. For me, this means putting my phone and any other distracting technology away (or even turning it off) and just fully immersing myself in whatever I'm doing.
Additionally, I find a bit of boredom is helpful in making an activity restful. For example, I love The Expanse TV show but sometimes it's very slow moving and I find myself wanting to stimulate my brain more than it's currently being stimulated by the show if that makes sense. However, I've found that if I embrace the boredom, resist the urge to take my eyes off of the TV, and just "float" in the moment so to speak, after about 15-20 mins the discomfort fades and I lose myself in the narrative. I find this "losing of oneself" in an activity or experience to be very restful and rejuvenating.
I'm not trying to shit on nolan's batman movies; they are definitely a cut above most superhero fare. I'm pointing out that dialogue is only one of the ways in which the content of a movie is expressed. superhero movies are an easy example; you can deduce a lot about the plot just be observing who fights whom in what order. there are also subtler cues like body language, lighting, costume design, etc. some visual content (eg, belter creole in the expanse) has deliberately unintelligible dialogue. as long as it's an intentional choice (or at least a known tradeoff), it can still work.
> I don't think it's a coincidence that sci-fi that posits a frontier (generally space but sometimes others) is usually more optimistic than sci-fi that posits a humanity confined to Earth's gravity well. Writers and artists see this.
But see The Expanse for a strong contradiction of this pattern.
It has frontiers but human nature has not suddenly gone through a transmutation that makes it natively good.
...and I'll argue The Expanse is actually way better than most of those optimistic shows. Especially any of the Star Trek series. (Season 1 of Picard was an improvement on most ST, I'll happily grant)
On reflection, I'd add that the casting/actors of the series are actually pretty good and the quality of the production is very good.
I suppose my biggest peeve comes from having read the novels first. Which is normal for TV/movie adaptations of novels.
Which is why I didn't start reading The Expanse novels until I'd watched the TV season treated by each novel. That made the TV series much better IMHO.
What I find interesting is that English speakers will rather invent a new language than use an already existing one.
Klingon, Dothraki, the belter language in "The expanse" - all tv shows try hard to create something new.
And I dont think politics is the reason here.
I’m watching The Expanse now for the first time and I love it. Some characters are 2-dimensional and have childish motivations sure.
But there was a scene in which Chrisjen Avasarala gives an “imminent war” speech extremely sarcastically, like Homer to Marge in the bedroom.
I figured they’d address in the episode what her secret plan was for that speech.
Turns out: no plan, the actress wasn’t being sarcastic. She was going for strength and gravitas.
It makes no sense to me how an otherwise high quality show has those scenes. Surely the director could have gotten a non-sarcastic take. And if not, they’d have to minimize the actress’s role.
As it is, every scene with her in it breaks the fourth wall and reminds me I’m watching actors acting in front of cameras, rather than a visual narrative.
https://youtu.be/-sbFhOeqTzY
The Expanse, like virtually all sci-fi and fantasy narratives, follows the Hero's Journey. It's a pattern that is familiar to virtually everyone and it's already proven commercially successful.
As Krugman himself writes, "[Foundation] mostly involves people talking, and its narrative inverts the hero-saves-the-universe theme that burns many acres of CGI every year."
It is hard to film faithfully while attracting and preserving a large audience.
Ignoring the lack of faith to the source material:
It's bad.. the dialogue, conflict, etc., are far below the levels we've come to expect in sci-fi shows like Expanse.
This is a complete waste of Jared Harris' talents. In the last episode, the resolution of his incomplete download was dramatized by a bit more screaming, then he was all good.
It doesn't feel elevated or sophisticated at all... it does look very pretty.
But it's not even representative of itself -- they keep talking about "trillions" of people here and there, and the new Book of Boba Fett does a better job of selling large population centers than Foundation ever does.
Also, my son made a point about the "unfilmable" books, which are a lot of dialogue: aren't most cop and lawyer shows mostly a lot of talk, usually in just a few common settings?
I think the acting gets much better over the seasons. And when I rewatched seasons 1-3 recently, I didn't notice it. But maybe I'm so into the characters and stories that it just doesn't register anymore. And the Expanse certainly does have interesting character relations as the story progresses.
> Checkout the The Expanse.
That doesn't count because the books read like a film script (the authors are professional script writers). And yes, I've read them. Before they were made into a movie even.
> Blade Runner did not call itself Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Contrast that with the Will Smith movie I, Robot.
"Note that they aren't named as the books that inspired them." i said :)
> That's about all lately.
Checkout the The Expanse.
> ignore the source material and do ... something else. Blade Runner for example.
Blade Runner did not call itself Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Contrast that with the Will Smith movie I, Robot.
There's also the fact that the authors of the Expanse were professional movie script writers before writing a book series :)
> If the show is not called foundation, he will probably enjoy it.
It wasn't about Foundation, then why call it "Foundation"?
It's like that Will Smith movie called I, Robot: why did they bother calling it that?
You can create a new sci-fi show or movie without the 'false marketing' of referencing previous source material: that's what the original Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars did in the 1970s. Or you can try to faithfully use the source material as much as possible as The Expanse show has done, and what Villeneuve has generally done with his Dune.
There are plenty of both sci-fi and fantasy works available for adaptation into shows and movies. And if (general) audiences expect action-y stuff in their sci-fi/fantasy, then pick one in which the source material is more action-y.
Don't try adapting Waiting for Godot into the next Die Hard.
Because a story can be re-imagined for a different medium and enjoyed by people? Who may in turn check out the original story and enjoy that, as well?
Others are just as entitled to enjoy an adaptation as you are to not enjoy it.
Some people enjoy seeing how a writer, director, cinematographer, cast, set and costume designers, etc present a written work.
Lots of people watch an adaptation and find bits they enjoy and bits they don't.
If you go through life only demanding or expecting experiences you will enjoy, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
I ended up reading The Expanse series because I loved the pilot TV episode so much. I've never read Foundation and I think I likely will in the near future.
> With these adaptations, the two options are "That sucks!" and "That's not Foundation!"
Others are entitled to opinions other than your own...
Books tap directly into the imagination in a way that films (very) rarely do.
The most amazing special effects in the world can't match my imagination for fidelity and if they did, they'd still not be mine.
I've noticed that the book to TV/movies I like aren't because they are good adaptations so much as they are close to what I imagined.
It's rare that happens but when it does it makes the TV show a deeply enjoyable, Season 1 of Altered Carbon and all the seasons of The Expanse did/do it but not much else in the last 5 years has.
Do you suppose ascended beings and advanced alien technology are scientific as opposed to plot devices? It's all fictional. Star Trek, Star Gate, Dune, Battlestar Galactica, even plenty of things in the Expanse (Epstein drive, protomolecule tech). Interesting answers means expanding on the rules and story in the fictional universe to provide explanations for mysteries the author(s) set up.
It doesn't mean providing a hard scientific explanation for something that supposed to be beyond our scientific knowledge. Who took out the protomolecule builders and why? Leviathan Falls will likely provide some answers. Same with Death's End giving more details about the Dark Forest. It's an exploration of an idea, not a documentary.
Imagine criticizing Dune because the spice and sand worms aren't based on actual biology.
> Game of Thrones has shown hollywood that there is an appetite for epic storytelling, and that people are willing to sit through 7 season of shows to be entertained by an engaging story.*
If you haven't already, check out The Expanse.
The book series is set to be finished with the final (9th) book being released this fall. The final (6th) season of the television series wrapped filming this past spring. (The discrepancy is because of a large time jump between the second and third 'sub-trilogies' in the novels.)
> One subscription for access to ALL the content is the way to beat piracy. Anything else is anti-consumer at this point.
So what do you do when an Amazon Prime membership is required to access most contemporary books?
Or when you have to get several different all-you-can-read memberships to access all the authors you like. Eg. first there was just Netflix, now there is Hulu, Disney+ and Paramount+ as well if you want to see The Handmaid's Tale, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, Star Trek: whatever, The Expanse, Star Wars & Avengers movies (to name just a few of the most popular and culturally relevant shows and movie franchises).
Whether there is a monopoly or oligopoly doesn't make much difference to consumers, though it does make some difference to content creators.
To make a system like you describe palatable over the long term, you would have to add in structural separation (content owners can't also be distributors) and strictly limit the kind of exclusive licensing deals that are allowed (eg. require statutory licensing of some sort) so new publishers and distributors can't be prevented from entering the market.
Thank you, I'm going to remember how you expressed that!
This is what finally turned me off during season 3. It got way out of hand. Somebody got a standing ovation every chance possible, and it got sickening. What initially drew me to Discovery was that darkness it had, while not being overly dark.
Fortunately S3 reminded me I had yet to catch up on The Expanse, and once I got back into season 4 I couldn't stop.
This has been depicted in The Expanse TV show, FWIW. It's a neat horror scene.
Beyond what other people list here:
- Hugh Howey. His Silo series is worth a read. He published it in some episodic form. However, I'd recommend just getting the whole thing. Beacon 23 is a bit shorter and also nice.
- Ramez Naam. His nexus series is a decent series. Not the best written but I enjoyed it.
- James S.A. Corey, the expanse series. Makes you appreciate the tv series more.
- Authors others already mentioned: Neal Stephenson & Peter Watts.
Other authors that go more in the direction of space opera: Iam M. Banks, Ernest Cline, John Scalzi, Ann Lecky, Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon).
Many good suggestions here - I definitely recommend to check out Vernor Vinge. I've heard a lot of praise for The Expanse series (James S. A. Corey / pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) - but I've only seen the TV series, not read the books.
Hollywood and some streaming companies lately started creating a lot of politically correct or politically activist movies that have no other value than having the "right theme" with the right actor race, gender or sexual orientation. This decreases the quality of the movies a lot, republicans kind of boycott these movies, the pandemic makes the earnings a lot lower than usual so there are less money on the table for more movies. As an European I switched to watching more European movies in the past decade. It is harder to access (there is no European movie market), but I saw nice Norwegian movies, Italian or Russian on top of my favorite - French. Unfortunately UK got into the same direction as USA, so it is out of the list. Strange, I saw no German movies for a long time, I have no explanation for that.
And there is also some international selection of Brazilian or (south) Korean, even Chinese. I would like to have access to good Japanese movies, but I don't. Unfortunately Bollywood movies are a dime a dozen, good Aussie movies are rare and the movies from the rest of the world are inaccessible to me.
In regards to the big screen versus TV, I found TV was less affected by the woke movement and SciFi, while rare these days, is still available (The Expanse). There are movies hit really bad (The Witcher), but still there are a few options left.
This should be tagged 2013.
I came here just now thinking it was a new article. I actually found it by way of Google a couple months ago after watching a certain episode of The Expanse.
Reading this, I learned that the 'Exposed To Space' stuff that happens in The Expanse (TV show - I've not read the books) is pretty much spot on.
What do you mean by "most wrong?" Compared to her character in the book, or the character you'd like her to be instead?
I think Avasarala is actually one of the better written characters. As far as character development goes, she has one of the best arcs in the whole series. In the beginning, she is a politician and power broker who takes zero shit from anybody, especially the men who are supposed to be her superiors. Various tragedies like the Earth nearly getting wiped out nearly turn her into a bloodthirsty Belter-killing monster. She eventually softens substantially and only wants to do what's best for the human race as a whole. (But still taking shit from no one.) That she is an older Indian woman whose language would make a lumberjack blush is just an interesting twist.
One of the central themes of the Expanse (the books and the show) is that unlike most plots in books or movies, there are no good guys here. There are only people who are driven by some greater purpose (greed, power, loyalty to government, justice, etc). They do good things, they do bad things, they do stupid things. They are complicated, just like real people.
As an example, the characters that we might try to think of as the "good guys" are the crew of the Roci. Holden is a navel-gazing military wash-out who nearly starts an interplanetary war between Earth and Mars via pure speculation. And NEVER apologizes for it. Amos' background isn't explored in much detail in the show, but in the books he worked for a brutal crime boss on Earth and more or less just kills whoever gets in his way or because he thought they might. Alex was an absentee father and husband. Naomi abandoned her young child. And ALL of them stole their ship from the people of Mars. (They use the euphemism "Legitimate Salvage" in sorry-but-not-sorry kind of way.)
Finally, context is important. In the future of The Expanse, human civilization is pretty much A Fucking Mess. The Earth is overcrowded, half the population is on welfare, and crime is rampant. Mars is effectively a military state. In the Belt, you are as likely to die from a random equipment malfunction as saying the wrong thing in a bar. So a lot of parallels with countries in present-day Earth, just amplified.
Anywho, I don't agree with torture either, but it's hardly a surprise that it happens in that universe.
Imaginary Worlds[1] had a great episode on the origin of the books and politics in the Expanse
1. https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/politics-of-the-expanse
Important off-topic The Expanse conundrum:
In the very first episodes a tall, stretched-out skinny space-born dude is getting tortured simply by making him stand and be subject to Earth's gravity.
Then the rest of the series-- few to no tall, stretched-out skinny space-born peeps anywhere.
What gives? I imagine the director realizing how expense it would be to continue seeking out a bunch of tall, skinny extras...
> I watched the sci-fi show "The Expanse" on Amazon Prime Video. Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compared to season 1 and 2. A completely different show that I found very boring and unwatchable.
Ultimately that's one show though. Amazon have spent BIG on some of their series. The Grand Tour had an enormous, enormous budget compared to Top Gear. They are spending Game of Thrones money on Wheel of Time.
Wow I thought it was just me who didn’t like season 4 of the expanse. At some point they made a turn to focusing on the flaws of all the main characters to an obnoxious degree.
This makes it very likely that the beloved Stargate franchise will return as an Amazon Prime exclusive franchise, which will be great news for those of us like myself with appetite for 60+ more seasons of that show (after the 17 seasons that have already been made).
I watched the sci-fi show "The Expanse" on Amazon Prime Video. Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compared to season 1 and 2. A completely different show that I found very boring and unwatchable.
Hopefully any future Stargate revival will have the budget and writing it deserves. I would spend $20/month for the rest of my life to get a season of high budget Stargate with decent writing each year. I'm sure there is a million other fans are willing and able to pay a similar amount.
Game of Thrones did not have a budget problem for the last season; it had a writing problem. While other seasons used the novels for the build-up and for the story to make sense, the last season did not. And while the author does know where he wants to land, he hasn't worked out, or hasn't shared, how to get there completely yet. The tv show went there with no proper buildup, which is what makes that season poor. To me, the final situation, or who wins/dies, is not the problem, nor are the effects.
As for The Expanse, it's season not seasons; the next season will be the final season. I cannot see the tv series ending in the same end point as the final novel, that is I cannot see them cramming four novels with one huge time gap in between into one season. But I do believe it will come to a satisfactory conclusion at some alternative end point.
This makes it very likely that the beloved Stargate franchise will return as an Amazon Prime exclusive franchise, which will be great news for those of us like myself with appetite for 60+ more seasons of that show (after the 17 seasons that have already been made).
I watched the sci-fi show "The Expanse" on Amazon Prime Video. Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compared to season 1 and 2. A completely different show that I found very boring and unwatchable.
Hopefully any future Stargate revival will have the budget and writing it deserves. I would spend $20/month for the rest of my life to get a season of high budget Stargate with decent writing each year. I'm sure there is a million other fans are willing and able to pay a similar amount.
In Space Truckers, they hauled square pigs in space, because they could pack them more tightly into shipping containers.
Also like The Expanse: shadowy mega-corps, and space pirates!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Truckers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgdeaHr5LT0&ab_channel=MoviesBox
Square pigs:
http://cinephilecrocodile.blogspot.com/2018/06/space-truckers-dir-stuart-gordon-1997-i.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVH9o7OMAkU&ab_channel=TheMovieLeague
If you have not seen The Expanse yet, start now! This is the best sci-fi show since Battlestar Galactica.
The first three episodes are slow but later the show is so fast you wish back to it.
I love the Expanse. Yet I think that transparent displays only work in movies. What do we need the transparency for? I can’t find any UX reason that would make such a screen better than a regular superthin opaque display with maybe holographic features. Discuss :)
It's an artistic choice, it's not meant to say anything about technology. To the extent that it does say anything about technology, it's the HDR video of the present day that makes a difference.
Heavily chiaroscuro lighting is a trend, like the orange-and-blue colour grading that preceded it. It looks like the Expanse has gone for "just blue" with occasional red highlights. A side effect of this is unfortunately unnatural-looking skin tones. Absolute peak example: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5438bd1be4b0446f6692b906/1619159393564-1T0G2II9RUDJAEW2RYGP/ke17ZwdGBToddI8pDm48kNvT88LknE-K9M4pGNO0Iqd7gQa3H78H3Y0txjaiv_0fDoOvxcdMmMKkDsyUqMSsMWxHk725yiiHCCLfrh8O1z5QPOohDIaIeljMHgDF5CVlOqpeNLcJ80NK65_fV7S1UbeDbaZv1s3QfpIA4TYnL5Qao8BosUKjCVjCf8TKewJIH3bqxw7fF48mhrq5Ulr0Hg/cfMWHGd.png?format=2500w
Look at what's highlighted in red there. If it helps, run it through an aggressive blur filter and look at what shapes remain. Face of the woman on the left, details of her uniform, the ship on the display in the middle, and balanced out with the guy at the back right in a red zone.
(Also this is why SF directors love transparent or "holographic" displays, because you can film the person looking at the screen and the thing being displayed at the same time)
It may also be a deliberate contrast with the dated future of 2001 and subsequent works where interiors were often extremely white and clean.
The designers (not just UI but all of them) on The Expanse did such an incredible job. It’s probably my favourite looking Sci Fi series or movie of all time. The attention to detail is incredible too, I’m on my third watch-through of the series and notice new things all the time.
Gonna plug The Expanse here. It's not a movie but it's depiction of space fights is pretty good
Almost all science fiction has some leap of imagination to make the story work. The Expanse tv show (and books) have the Epstein Drive and the protomolecule stuff. Obviously Star Trek is even more fantastical, so is Dune, or almost any space science fiction. Maybe Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars is an exception (one has to assume fully terraforming Mars in a couple centuries is in fact doable), but there's no movie or tv show for those books.
My favorite physically-based sci-fi is “The Expanse” (TV show on Amazon). The physics and constraints of space travel are not only accurately depicted, but also used to drive the story forward in interesting ways.
Expanse season 1 was a nice exception to the rule, but I find that as the longer the show goes on the more it gets ignored. Missiles that fly into the sun at faster than light speeds...
There is still a void, which various artists could fill these days. Sadly, if they did I don't think I would hear about them due to the volume of content on streaming platforms.
Japanese studio anime follows a formula that you might have noticed. This formula is still unnecessary to western audiences, which has learned to tolerate it. It includes characters with certain hair colors having certain behaviors and relationships to the protagonist, it includes a filler episode at a sauna.
Something like Cowboy Bebop would be a hit in the west, for the same reasons that The Expanse - which is not anime - is a hit. But Japanese studios gravitate towards portraying fantasies only relatable and comfortable to a socially awkward viewer, while Western studios don't invest heavily enough into what fans of the medium and anime art-style would like, and still target children.
Serial Experiments Lain is everything wonderful about anime. It is violent, dark, scary. In summary: ADULT.
Anime tells stories in a visual format that for years and years you simply could not get anywhere else. Adult genre fiction was not well represented in American media. Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they want to make more episodes.
Today, people are spoiled with their options for genre fiction. Cowboy Bebop blew my mind as a kid. Berserk was also one of my favorites. I did not think anything could be cooler than Vampire Hunter D. This was before Game of Thrones or The Expanse or any number of other amazing science-fiction or fantasy media we have today. Coming from a small town, it felt like a secret that nobody else knew about and I loved immersing myself in this grim, beautiful, foreign worlds[0].
A lot of anime has a lot of gross "fan service" that objectifies their female protagonists, and that is something I was never a fan of. It was something you tolerated because there wasn't anywhere else to go.
Lain is a great example of all of this. Where else are you going to get a gorgeously rendered cyberpunk-horror series?
0: Probably at a younger age than I should have been allowed to. Though honestly I don't see myself censoring everything from my kids. Part of the draw was the adult nature and feeling like I was getting away with something.
Not only that, but the current streaming services have done a great job of killing the quality of their content.
The Expanse under Sci-Fi was stunning. Under Amazon, it's a meh at best. I was incredibly excited for Season Four, watched it, and came away wondering if Amazon had replaced everybody but the actors with a mixture of part-time interns and bags of slightly off-date produce.
Haven't bothered with Season Five. Just don't care.
Same for mainstream TV.
On the other hand, I watched a short (Overlord) set in the SCP universe done by an independent filmmaker, and loved it.
They didn't try and explain things to me. Just straight into the story. The characters behaved about as realistically as I would expect, and showed that the scriptwriter actually did some research. I would pay for full-length movies with this level of storytelling and production value.
In short: I don't need to pirate anything, because there's nothing I feel is worth my time to watch.
I read a bit of both, depending on what kind of reading I want to do. I just started Abbadon's Gate, the 3rd book in the series that the TV show The Expanse (excellent show) is based on. Sci-fi/fantasy has always been my favorite genre though, since it seems like that caters to the way my imagination works and can create pictures and scenes in my head as I read.
I’ve never heard of the Expanse series but your mining comment is both terrifying and intriguing! DuckDuckGo tells me it’s both a series of novels and a Syfy TV series - I’m curious which one (or perhaps both?) you’re referring to so I can add it to my read and/or watch list.
amazon has had a positive net profit for the last five years in a row.
as for the shopping experience, I guess ymmv? amazon doesn't always have the cheapest price on things, but I've never received anything counterfeit. with one or two exceptions, everything I've bought there has met my expectations. and when it didn't, the refund hit my account the second the shipping label got scanned.
especially this past year, AMZL has been the real killer feature for me. it's the only shipping service that consistently delivers my packages on time, which really shouldn't be hard when I live in an apartment building in a major city. sometimes they even deliver early! when ups/fedex moves my packages faster than expected, they just let them sit in the local distribution center until the guaranteed delivery date. I've given up on usps entirely, unless "soon" is an acceptable delivery date.
most of their streaming stuff is crap, I'll give you that. but they picked up my all-time favorite TV show, the expanse. tbh, I'd pay $120/year just to keep that show running.
Yes, the LG Netflix app works as well as anything else I've used (and continues to work after opting out of the various agreements for adware and telemetry, for whatever that's worth). In fact, the LG "magic" motion-sensing remote is quite nice for streaming app UI navigation that's often hit-or-miss on platforms that lack a touch interface or pointing device.
With that said, I only connect my TV (which is also my computer display) to Wi-Fi when I'm actively using one of the built-in streaming apps (so infrequently, most recently when the new Expanse episodes dropped, because Amazon, unlike Netflix, doesn't support 4K streaming on PC or Mac).
In my background I taught high school English for a few years, and while I wasn't that great at it, I will always remember when a student's eyes lit up when something clicked in their heads. When a joke Shakespeare made finally made sense, or when the magic of poetry moved them to tears, or when they found themselves surprised to relate to Scout in "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. In that sense, being a manager is also about being a mentor. Helping an engineer fix a bug, resolve an interpersonal conflict, improve their mental well-being, help them level up their careers... all of that is rewarding. Helpful. Making things better. And that's just awesome. Who wouldn't want to do that?
While I have been extremely privileged in my life, I have also suffered through some personal tragedies and lived with things I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies, and those were things that were and are beyond my control. So in many ways, I crave control over my life and my destiny, and that's something I'll never have if I'm on the receiving end of a to-do list. The higher up I go in an organization, the more control I have over my destiny. I can choose which projects I want to work on, and I can delegate the things I don't. (In reality, I often find myself taking the projects that others do not want to do, but since it's my choice to do so, I still satisfy my objective.)
I am not interested in micromanagement. I do not rule by iron fist. I believe that I cannot make you do anything you do not want to do. I operate by consensus and collaboration, by radical candor, and by building trust with my teams so that when I ask them to do something, they want to do it because they trust that I have their best interests at heart, and that I'm not going to screw them over. In many ways, this is the reward for me.
I've been a loner my entire life. I don't have many friends. The friends that I do have all moved away over the years, and so now my social life is almost entirely online. But having a team that I can talk to at work, that trust me and believe in me and whom I can trust and believe in, that root for me and my success just as much as I root for them and theirs... That fills a lot of that void in my life, and it helps a lot in my quality of life. You don't need to be a manager to have this, but it helps. Most engineers operate in very small silos, but as a Director-level, I get to interact with a larger team of dozens of people per day. It helps.
In many ways, the reasons I wanted to go into management have to do with filling the voids in my own life: my feeling of lack of control, my lack of great social skills and close friends, my imposter syndrome, my desire to make a difference in the world, my disabilities and my weaknesses.
A computer will exactly what I ask it to do, without question and without deviation, for better or for worse. It doesn't talk back, it doesn't get excited when a problem is solved, it doesn't invite me to its weddings or birthday parties, it doesn't want to talk about the latest Bridgerton/The Expanse episode, it doesn't do anything except execute on its own code.
But a human? That's a whole different ballgame. Humans are challenging and frustrating, addicting and rewarding. And I hope that at the end of the day, when my employees sign off and go spend time with their friends and family, that they've contributed something to themselves or to the world around them. Kind of cheesy, but it's how I feel on my good days.
Hope that helps.
I agree with your core sentiment on movies - but I couldn't disagree more on the topic of TV having reverted to the mean.
It may not all be "Sopranos", but I've seen so many TV shows in the past decade that have pushed boundaries and delivered experiences that frankly, have hit me much harder than almost any movie - and certainly much harder than pre-netflix era TV.
I know everyone has different taste, but I think we've seen a lot of maturation in the past decade specifically in the form of more interesting TV anthology series / single-season narratives (True Detective, Fargo, Watchmen) and dark-ish comedies (Rick and Morty, Barry, American Vandal, Succession). I think networks in general are giving show-runners more space and budget for trying weird stuff, because even if they end up with a show that's too niche for a general timeslot - there's at least the possibility of selling it to a streaming service later (like Arrested Development, The Expanse, and Community did).
I had no idea this podcast existed, but love The Expanse. Listening to the first two episodes last night was great, it’s immediately apparent just how much they love the genre.
Yes, discoverability of "good" subreddits is not there. But on the other hand I think Reddit get too much criticism. I find most subreddits besides the big catch-all ones like /r/pics good.
Basically all the TV shows have fun post-episode discussions and going through Game of Thrones, Black Sails or The Expanse wouldn't have been the same without Reddit for me. It becomes the group of buddies I can vent or be in awe with, when they don't share my TV show preferences at home.
Formula1 is a must for an F1 fan. Wow, I've learnt so much and the community is now part of watching F1. Pre-race chats, post-race, pre-qualification, post-qualification, haha... The behind the scenes racing drama...
MechanicalKeyboards can look over the top and elitist at first sight, until you realize they have self-distance and generally pretty relaxed (and it's very inspiring, dangerously so for my pocket...)
Thanks for this, I've bookmarked the site and may use it in the future. It's a drag searching for new release dates in blog posts or articles purporting an answer, only to find they're omitted or buried. Though as your OP states, perhaps I should have been searching IMDB all along.
I searched on "Expan" on your site and found The Expanse easy enough (the site is quite fast), but I still had to visit IMDB afterward - I wasn't sure if there was a season 6. IMDB confirmed there is, but as expected, with an unknown date.
So I'll leave this for you to consider - list future seasons, even if they include or cite something to the effect of "date pending". That might prevent visitors from needing IMDB or other sources in use cases such as mine.
Including episode air dates is another addition I'd vote for.
Nice work!
Interesting that the idea started as a game, and now the TV series has become a game. The kickstarter campaign was successful last year and you can now buy (if you can find it) and play the game.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1780208966/the-expanse-roleplaying-game
Yeah the 5th season is a struggle for me, too. I stil love watching it but it's a bit slow. It feels it's all character build-up, with little story progression. Amos' prison & planet escape storyline makes no sense in the grand scheme of things. Sure it's a nice story, but it doesn't have much to do with the Expanse universe, the prison/planet escape could've been part of any generic movie, specially because it doesn't really explore the story of Baltimore all that much.
I still enjoy watching it and would've been happy to watch these episodes if the Expanse was like one of the half dozen star trek shows that ran 170-180 episodes each. But not in a 50 episode show like the Expanse is.
It also feels like the character building is a little too late. Exploring Amos' upbringings (maybe 10 minutes before the prison visit after which it's all wiped away) or Naomie being a parent in the second to last season, I don't know. Would've been good to integrate much of that sooner. Feels like we're kind of stuck building up characters as filler to not run out the story too fast. That's okay if it was more spread out over the seasons.
It's funny that you mention that, I grew up reading Clarke's books, along with Asimov, Frederik Pohl and many others. I've also read The Expanse and by the end of the last book I hated every word of it, I just can't make myself watch the TV series.
Why, you may ask? The behavior of human characters in The Expanse is... terrible. They fight each other, everybody has their own agenda, they behave irrationally. Case in point: in the second book (as far as I remember) an alien ship appears in the Solar system - clearly a hostile force. Earth and Mars send soldiers on the ship and what do they do? They start fighting each other. No, I do not want to believe that humans would behave that way. If you read Clarke's books, when facing the new and possibly dangerous things humans behave logically, calmly. You do not see human vs human conflict in Rama, Childhood's End, The Fountains of Paradise, Space odyssey, Sands of Mars or almost any other of his books. It's about exploration, human unity, positivism, and there is nothing of that kind in the Expanse. I could not find a single character in the Expanse that behaves in the way Clarke's characters would. I apologize for the harsh words but I refuse to believe that Clarke would write such an abomination.
And no, it is not just the Expanse's writers, I see it everywhere nowadays, it seems that the writers nowadays need to insert human conflict so they introduce whatever irrational behavior leads to it.
</end rant>
Expanse enjoys the benefit of tighter plotting, modern special effects, better acting, and an almost total focus on the season's narrative arc as opposed to individual episodic stories (which have only minor world- and character-building). Still, I think B5, despite its many flaws, will always be the definitive TV space opera in terms of narrative arcs. Expanse has a tendency to get preachy, like BSG did, about politics. I found B5 a lot purer and more universal, but maybe that's just my selective memory/recollection.
I wish someone would remake B5 eventually, true to the original but dropping all the unnecessary material (and useless arcs), pulling in the TV movie plots, and addressing the telepath war.
Those other shows? I liked some individual episodes, but I think they're all a step down.
Book 6/season 6 is the end of the "original" Expanse; book 7 takes place decades later. If they want to make books 7-9 into Expanse: TNG they might want to recast the actors. Personally I wouldn't mind seeing the novellas made into pseudo-standalone movies.
If anyone in here has played the game Children of a Dead Earth, it may make you appreciate The Expanse even more (if that’s possible!). The game is a true-to-physics representation of how space battles would actually happen, and the scenes in The Expanse replicate them wonderfully, albeit they look much more pretty. Hats off to the developers of this show, they really did their homework.
PS Season 5 is great.
I'd go so far as to say the Expanse beats Battlestar Galactica. It's a classic for sure but too bogged down by the single self contained episode format that made it less enjoyable for me to watch.
Yeah, I really enjoyed it even though there were some slower parts like the slugs (and I found the Holden character irritating).
Somewhat tangential, it's wild to me that Devs was suggested alongside The Expanse in that Clubhouse Elon chat. I thought Devs was unwatchable. There's a point in the first episode where they're just saying fibonacci out loud to show how 'smart' they are. I looked up some of the plot after that to see what I was missing and it didn't look like it was going to get better.
It depends if we're talking Solaris the movie or the Solaris the book. The book makes it clear that the ocean is reading the minds of the space ship inhabitants somehow and attempting communications with them by recreating familiar objects through neutrinos that they can somehow physically interact with. Subsequently the book is all about an attempt to establish communication with the ocean while at the same time enduring its phantoms, with the end result being that humans are unable to decipher the intentions of the ocean or communicate with it in any way.
Expanse is more along the lines of "geopolitics in space" with the protomolecule being a MacGuffin to drive the plot along and create space zombies and wormholes. Which isn't to be derisive, as I find it very entertaining, but I don't feel like it's delving deep into the scientific or philosophical ramifications of first contact.
I've been into Sci-Fi as long as I can remember and I watched The Expanse but found it quite dull most of the time. I continued to watch it only because "it's Sci-Fi".
I feels like the actual story is quite short but is being stretched between the first and last episode with repetitive tropes. It's too bad because it does have more potential.
Trekkie here (more or less). I like The Orville better than Discovery. Discovery is down-right disappointing and stupid. Picard is better than Discovery, but still didn't live up to my expectations.
You're probably right about Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse being the best hard sci-fi.
It's hard to beat the episodes/stories in the earlier Star Trek shows. The Twilight Zone was able to pull off a faithful modern reboot, why can't Star Trek?
(Someone else mentioned Planetes further down in the comments. That is also good hard sci-fi.)
I don't really see this season as going back to Earth.
The entire narrative arc of the series is the social dynamics of humans as they take their first steps beyond Earth; how the initial scarcity of land suitable for human life gives rise to animosity, how eventually the potential bounty causes a rush to exploit, and how space natives struggle for their independence.
The current season is an interesting exploration of the terrorist / freedom fighter duality. It demonstrates clearly, through narrative, how effective committing atrocities can be to forcibly unite a people, and forge a more solid sense of identity through shared suffering and a common enemy.
While I understand why many people didn't like season 4 as much, I found it interesting because it explored how people would try and export Earth-bound laws to new worlds and new contexts, and how that would conflict with the lawless nature of a frontier.
In some ways, it reminds me of The Wire. The Wire is an exploration of drug crime, how it is structured, and how politics and the media are ultimately complicit in perpetuating it - or failing to stop it. The Expanse is a study of how humanity is likely to react to opportunities beyond Earth, at various stages: when there's a single viable alternative; when there's lots of scattered people collectively forming a new nationalistic identity; and when there are new settlers to new lands in a scenario of unbounded potential, and how that remote potential may reduce the will of people to fight over scraps on overcrowded (Earth) or environmentally hostile (Mars) planets.
I feel that Season 5 works a lot better if are a book reader. I totally get why the shift away from the gates is a bit confusing.
The Expanse was never a planet-of-the-week show. Exploring the impact of the new planets on the solar system and its people is also important.
One thing I'm a bit disappointed is the fact that they drop part of Mars storyline.
> getting so many of the technical details exactly right
I'm with you.
It bothers me when people are given sci fi on the hard spectrum but then debate 'how hard it really is' for the purpose of defining then diminishing the value of the material; feels very self congratulatory.
Everyone who praises the expanse's 'hardness' are just as aware that protomolecule is space magic.
Space magic has its place but the expanse also offers a level of hardness I appreciate outside the narrative elements requiring the space magic.
I think its an important discussion in any talk of scifi to point out where the lens is callibrated with regard to hardness resolution.
Turns "expanse is hard scifi" debate on its head by simply changing that statement to "I like the level of scifi hardness in the expanse".
My nephew was reading a book and a character in it built a metal detector out of a radio in a survival scenario.
Due to my interests my nephew asked me if it was possible; if 'he could do that'.
I explained that i suppose you could construct a device to detect eddy currents out of the components of a radio, but it would be so terrible and unreliable that itd fail to detect any metal in any meaningful survival sense.
My nephew was satisfied with the answer, he honestly was uninterested in if it would 'work' but rather 'how probable' it was.
You could tell he was inspired to learn more about the topics that subjectively could allow someone know how to do that regardless of its objective viability.
So, the story could have cut ahead to after its been magically built off screen or could magically source parts from the devices without the actual necessary base components to achieve the conversion ignoring the whole radio aspect or the character could reasonably source components that "magically" works well enough to allow their knowledge to save them (the level this story choose) or the character could sit down and read through a data sheet and spend screen time soldering components to pcbs then accept they wasted all that time, and narrative space, because its an untenable goal given what they have to work with.
I think there are arguments for each of these levels depending on the narrative's slated goals, and being accessible to a broader audience is an important one of these goals.
I feel the further you move down that hard ladder the smaller the audience becomes and leaves less of the 'fi' element of sci fi for you to work with narratively.
I love ben eater's 6502 series and find it extremely entertaining, but does anyone expect that level of detail in a sci fi television show? Is that the end goal of these hardness debates?
I simply appreciate where the Expanse chooses to push that line into the esoteric, and yes even in the other direction of space magic, while still remaining accessible to a broader audience allowing people with less technical knowledge to be inspired to pursue expanding their knowledge within those fields.
Yeah I know a few trekkies who hated The Expanse, but love ST Discovery. I watched half of season 1 of STD and had to switch it off. I've never hated a TV show so much as STD.
The Expanse on the other hand is the best SciFi since Battlestar Galactica.
Edit - to expand on why I hate STD so much, it's the completely unlikeable characters. I just couldn't root for a single one of them.
Ok, so I'm only replying because this has some visibility and it might get seen / fixed at Amazon.
Everybody loves that Amazon and Prime bought and made new episodes of the Expanse, right? Well, on my stock Sony Bravia Android TV, if you are watching the Expanse with English subtitles, when the text for the subtitles is on, the screen is brighter. It's noticeable, and quite annoying, and this ONLY happens on the Expanse. Other apps and other shows on Prime work.
I'd concur that The Expanse S01E04 "CQB" is one of my favourite episodes of television.
Agree completely. There's one episode in the 3rd season, I believe, where a lot of damage occurs on a ship full of people (being vague). I always loved how in that episode, they go a lot into the added difficulties of injuries in space. For example, the inability of the body to stop bleeding and clot if there's no artificial gravity, so even minor wounds become deadly. I also think the Expanse presents a more realistic picture of what humans of today would be like in space, not the usual more optimistic version of us...
My SO and I were looking for a show to watch last November, so I did a search of "highest rated shows on X platform" and The Expanse was one of the frontrunners. There were some reviews that said it was slow to start, with lots of confusing world-building, but it picked up straight after.
We didn't get the sense that it was slow and hard to follow, at all. In fact, one of my favorite things about it is the amount of world-building that you're presented with, especially in the beginning.
We marathoned the first four seasons in a few weeks, and luckily Season 5 started less than a week after we ended. It's easily one of the best shows I've seen in a long time, and one that I've been recommending to people left and right.
I don't remember The Martian movie having many examples of bad physics (other than a "severe windstorm" on a planet with very thin atmosphere; a mistake carried over from the book). It just didn't mention a lot of the science that made the book interesting.
I don't remember too many glaring examples from The Expanse either. They generally have artificial gravity when under thrust and not when they don't. When slowing down, they generally have the engines pointed towards the thing they're approaching. The characters in high-G maneuvers don't look the way people would actually look in those situations, but that's hard to fake without actually sticking actors in a centrifuge so I'm willing to give them a pass.
Scientific accuracy isn't really the focus of the show, though. It's a show set in space that needs reasonably accurate physics in order to have a plausible setting and not detract from the the story and the characters.
>> Principles by Ray Dalio
>> The Expanse (novel series) - I was introduced to it several years ago and have been meaning to get to it for awhile. I heard it now has a TV series and the next book in the series is supposed to come out this.
Just finished watching the latest episode of The Expanse and had to severely reel back my expectation of 'spacecraft' when reading this article.
I'm having a hard time justifying reading those books after watching the show. I feel like typically the book gives me a vastly different experience from the on-screen adaptation. But The Expanse screenwriters did such a great job transferring it to a TV series it feels like I'm reading exactly what I already watched.
Early summer was strange. I finished watching seasons one through four of the expanse on Amazon.com
Kept getting side tracked because it takes a dystopian science fiction set hundreds of years in the future to discuss basic income and climate change in television.
Maybe SpaceX would be interested in it for the Mars mission. This kind of agriculture/botany is really similar to one of those Expanse episodes...
The single biggest common denominator between so many fantasy UIs, is transparent (HUD-style) interfaces. I was just watching the latest episode of The Expanse, last night, and saw them all using these transparent PDA/phones.
Ever try using a transparent UI? It's absolutely maddening.
Looks cool on the screen, but is pretty much unusable IRL.
There are a few that come to mind, but nothing I can think of as super recent.
- After Life, Simon Funk: https://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/
- Most of Ted Chiang, but particularly Liking What You See: A Documentary: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vSPLnvgBqIgJ:https://canvas.wayne.edu/courses/102861/files/3959556/download%3Fdownload_frd%3D1+&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d
- Also Ted Chiang: The Lifecycle of Software Objects (not really pessimistic or optimistic, just thoughtful)
- Her (Movie), melancholy but ultimately hopeful
- HPMOR (Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality): http://www.hpmor.com
- True Names, Vernor Vinge: http://www.scotswolf.com/TRUENAMES.pdf
- Permutation City, Greg Egan (accurately predicts AWS 20yrs early along with a host of other super interesting ideas)
- Star Trek TNG is the classic example of optimistic Sci-Fi, but the more recent Enterprise is also good.
- The San Junipero Black Mirror episode
- I wouldn't call The Expanse optimistic, but it's probably the best sci-fi show on today.
---
For some contrarian anti-recommendations which can be just as useful:
- I thought the culture series was bad, in plot/characters/writing - I found it tedious and kind of dumb.
- I disliked the three body problem for similar reasons.
> Even the economics of dedicating a large, empty space for VR means it's mostly for "rich" people. You could be middle class in the 'burbs and pull the car out of the garage to do VR... But what if you live in a tiny SF or NYC apartment? What about even denser living conditions outside of the US?
I get the complaints, and VR isn't really something that suits me as I get nausea really quick with headsets messing up my hearing somehow. I had this same effect when I took the train and had to face backwards to the direction the train was heading. It's really unpleasant and losses all novelty in about 10 minutes.
But, I have to ask: with the advent (or promise really) of 5G why wouldn't you take to being outdoors for a session of alien blasters VR instead of being suck inside? One of the cool things I think AR has over VR is that we saw how the Pokemon game fad got people who spend way too much time on their phones to go back outside with the right incentive (and putting aside the massive privacy intrusion it turned out to be) and being able to interact with their environment as part of the game quest. I can't see why a designated area in the park couldn't be allotted for that, and it would be cool as you could share it with younger kids who may not be able to afford or have access to the unit to ever try it and ultimately build community with other enthusiasts.
I saw that happen with some of the local kids with drones at my community park this year after seeing little to no kids the year earlier ever playing there. By the end of summer it looked they were all making videos or something together.
This is one of the cooler unintentional things that happened I was learning to fish out at the pier; the looks on some kids faces when something 'feels like a bite' is hilarious, and its pretty much Christmas if they ever catch anything even if its just bait fish.
There are Bitcoin meetups in VR happening right now, but to be honest I'd rather just go to the conference calls one where you can see a stream along with the attendees faces. Anything else seems off putting, but then I don't really get the appeal of something like second-life interactions with avatars.
I was re-watching season 3 of the Expanse, and that ship building puzzle in the train station on Mars with all of those kids assembling it looked like a really cool thing to have if we could work out the tech. Hacking culture can't be introduced early enough in my opinion.
I binged both over 2 months on an ad free CBS subscription. I enjoyed both but thought they each could have been better.
Discovery was different enough that I understood why people said it wasn’t Star Trek. However, the show was better than people gave it credit.
Anyway, neither is must see. If you want that, watch the Expanse.
I think Amazon take it less seriously than some of the others. For Netflix, streaming is their entire business. For Disney, HBO and Hulu, it’s the future - they’d probably rather stick with the old school cable TV, movie theatres, etc. model, but they can see the writing on the wall, and they aren’t going to let streaming take them down. But for Amazon ... it’s more just a perk to package with Prime shipping. They want it to be solid, but it’s always going to be very small for them compared to e-commerce, AWS and their platform for 3rd party sellers, fulfilment, etc. Prime Video revenue is similar for them to their co-branded credit cards, I think?
I actually think they have some great content, and a pretty decent app. Their “originals” especially are pretty great - Fleabag, the Boys, the Expanse, all excellent. But yeah, the quality of the app is a bit lower than some of the others, and they have a lot less content than Netflix, because Prime is really not a main focus of their company, more of a nice add-on.
Great comment. I think a big part of the problem, that I feel Cyberpunk actually highlights really well, is the degree to which problems are ultimately defined by and related to the individual. And, unfortunately, constrained.
Take the hippie movement. It's often associated with 'the left' but I'd argue that the navel-gazing focus on individual enlightenment caused immense damage to the ability of those without power to collectively have enough of it to see some changes.
Cyberpunk, intentionally or not, highlights this. The typical Cyberpunk scene is a person alone, getting by. Any kind of 'collective' behavior is nipped in the bud by surveillance and whatnot. Any solutions involve that lone person forming valuable relationships with other lone persons (or robits, I guess).
The dystopia, I feel, is usually not experientially the marketing, the massive corporate powers, and so on. It's the stifling isolation, and the only solution that's remotely viable is finding another single soul to share it with.
What I've found interesting about a show/book series like The Expanse, is that it dips into the Cyberpunk themes with the detective dude (I don't think it's a coincidence that Cyberpunk and film noir often overlap, the latter just an earlier iteration of the former). But eventually that guy, in the expanse of multiple planets, has options to find something bigger, more collective, to be part of.
The Expanse is pretty bad at engagements or physics. They only look superficially well and that because other movies are completely unrealistic and space battles are there just to fill the screen with action and graphics effects, hopefully as background for the real narrative.
Also, if you are looking for any kind of realism in Star Trek battles you are completely missing what the series is about.
I like SF and I love Star Trek just as I love reading hard science fiction. Just don't mistake the two, because looking for realism in Star Trek would be like trying to do linguistic analysis on magical incantations in fantasy.
The Expanse did a great job showing space battles on screen with a rather approriate distance. Star Wars and others, and I am a full blown Star Wars freak, did a good job with space battles. After the Expaense, it became little bit ridiculous, so. I resembles the problem films like Top Gun have with modern aerial combat. Already in that case, distances are so great that on-screen, the viewer is seeing nothing. For space battle, the enemy would maybe show as a small blip, if at all on screen. Especially with all the hyper advanced tech from Star Wars and Star Trek. This is also the reason why I igonre any stab at estimating weapon ranges based on on-screen scenes.
If you haven't read the books or watched the show, The Expanse does a great job at working in a world with realistic physics.
A lot of combat takes place from extremely far distances, using telescopes, rail guns and missiles, and it can sometimes take days for a missile to reach the target (the TV series doesn't play this up as much though, for obvious reasons).
When there is closer combat battles, they are constrained by the G forces humans can tolerate, wear full helmets and de-pressurize their ships, so when the inevitable shots do go through (usually in and out the other side) it's not catastrophic.
There are no force shields, magic gravity generators, lasers (well, except used for point-to-point communications). I found it to be very refreshing mainstream sci-fi.
One warning: after watching The Expanse, the battles in things like Star Wars, Star Trek or Battlestar just look ridiculous by comparison - even with that technology they'd never fight like that.
Earth: Final Conflict
Season 1 was amazing. After that, bleh. At least in that case it sounds like executive meddling was the culprit.
On the other hand, The Expanse keeps opening whole new everythings that make what came before tiny but also essential. No second of plot is wasted. They could loosen it up a bit with a bottle episode or two to develop the characters more though. I could go any number of seasons if they could maintain the quality.
And then there's the new Lost In Space. They're going to end it in the next season at exactly the right time. Pacing-wise, it feels like a three-part miniseries. Just enough room to build a world and develop the characters without overstaying its welcome.
From my point of view the problem manifests in this way: I simply don't bother to invest the time to watch new shows until it's clear that they're going to get a proper run that allows them to finish well (Breaking Bad, Justified; even Sons of Anarchy, which was a real slog for the last 3 seasons, ended well).
I'm tired of investing time in shows that Netflix simply drops: The Expanse (though now thankfully picked up by Amazon), Designated Survivor, and Shooter (although that was total crap, especially after season 1) spring immediately to mind, but there have been plenty of others.
I also won't bother starting to watch shows that I know Netflix have cancelled before they've concluded (e.g., Glow), because what's the point? And this is starting to severely erode the value of Netflix's library to me.
Things that have worked incredibly well on Netflix are shows that tell self-contained stories within a single season, like Narcos or Fargo, or shows that tell have a self contained but are able to tell it in a longer form than feature film would allow. The canonical example of the latter for me is Godless, which is one of the best shows on TV, I think. Genuinely fantastic.
And this last point leads on to another, which others have made: US TV series are too long, typically 18 - 24 episodes per season, multiple seasons, often too bloated with filler episodes, and often suffer from ridiculous over-plotting after the first few seasons, which comes off as aimless thrashing around: Prison Break (season 3 onwards: just utter nonsense), 24 (SPOILER ALERT: I mean, seriously, WTF was that Tony Almeida betrayal storyline all about in, I think, the final season - multiple sharks were jumped and I'm still pissed off about it).
On the flipside UK TV series are often too short: 6 half-hour episodes is still quite typical, so you're only really getting into a show and then suddenly the season ends. With that said, for some shows this has been made to work really well: Line of Duty, or the earlier seasons of Luther.
I do feel like, for many shows, a happy medium would be 10 - 12 hour long episodes. You could then afford to make a much more polished product, whilst still probably investing quite a bit less.
This was me with the TV series. Most of the first and second season are hard sci-if in the strictest sense. Just what the protomolecule is remained a mystery, but but it was a tiny alien enigma within a realistic near-term hard sci-fi universe that was and still is unlike anything else on TV.
Then the big reveal happened (in season 3, I think?) and it’s like the bottom dropped out. I legit stopped watching at that point, although I’m considering giving it another chance now. Had I known upfront I think I would have been more forgiving, but instead I felt deceived.
All that said, the Epstein drive is nearly as magic as the usual hyperspace trope. Even in the beginning The Expanse isn’t as hard sci-fi as it purports to be.
Not sure if it is on the same level of realism as those listed for evertyhign, but "The Expanse" series by James S. A. Corey for me was a breath of fresh air.
The book really considers things like the time it would take to go from Earth to Mars, or the edge of the Solar System, and also take into account gravity forces in battles and other events.
It still has a lot of very sci-fi things in some areas, but it was very interesting to see that going from Earth to somewhere after Neptune really took 8+ months for the passengers, including some of the psychological stress of spending that much time together on a small ship.
The TV Series is also good but misses a lot of those little things that the books explicitly deal with. It became my favorite book series because of that.
No magically going to another galaxy in the blink of an eye. Going to another planet always required planning, sacrifices, time, etc. In addition it also has some pretty nice politics compared to other space stories.
https://xkcd.com/2043/
I've been studying the Belter creole from the Expanse[1] and lack of vocabulary[2] is a substantial issue. However, circumlocution can work, and so I'd propose several revolutions, depending upon which side one is on[3]:
(laudative) térash fo feriting burn (as in a ship's engines) for freedom
(pejorative) gang belowt temporary excursion, involving lots of blood
(cynical) du ganyamang owta we change the winners
[1] TV Show. Normally I'd privilege books, but the authors have said theirs was just made up and shouldn't be considered canon, especially as the TV version is based on code-switching a proper creole.
[2] with na- as a productive un-, very much like newspeak.
[3] I believe this is attested: "Detim da belowt im ere da wowl, sasa kemang to xalte wit?" (when blood hits the walls, do you know where you stand?)
I watched Star Trek (TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise), The Expanse, Orville, Continuum, Altered Carbon S1, Farscape, Firefly, Travelers, Dark, and even Stargate Universe.
What do you recommend watching next?
I think it's the novelty of it. Friends with kids report losing their minds after sitting through the nth replay of a Disney movie. To the kid, everything in it is new and they enjoy seeing new details each time. The adult can guess their way through any new Disney movie because they all stick close to a formula anyone with a passing interest in writing can recite.
I did the same rewatching all the Star Treks, Stargates, and other '90s sci-fi TV several times. Now it's kind of...dull. It's all too familiar. Now I'm more impressed with newer scifi that tries to evolve the genre without being too different. Like: The Expanse, Farscape, Dark Matter, Another Life.
It does make me wonder how they obtain the metal to make the ship, though.
I agree, though. Stupid space-fantasy can be tons of fun. Hard-SF always gets criticised for not being truly hard-SF. Even in the Martian, the adjustments needed to pick him up at the end would mean they're never going to make it back to Earth.
Does it matter? It's still a fun movie. But balancing between fun and scientific accuracy can be hard, and a slip can be jarring.
So how does everybody feel about The Expanse? There's some explicit super-science McGuffins in there, but most of it seems about as accurate as you could hope for, given the setting. Travel takes months. Not entire sure how their engines work, because the Rocinante does change course a lot without carrying insane amounts of fuel, so they do seem to have some sort of fantasy fuel.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm still not sure about what a "railgun" is, if not an energy weapon.
The Expanse's ship combat is very cool. A worthy successor to the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (minus the mumbo jumbo that marred the end of that series!).
I like the characters too. I haven't read the books, and I understand this character was changed a lot, but I really like what they did with Klaes Ashford in the series. Way to subvert expectations! The TV show more than once appears to set up a cliché (this is the bad guy, he has delusions of power and is going to undermine this other character) only to subvert it. More of that, please!
If you're planning to write a RPG as a story, Microscope[0] is very well designed for this. I've been playing it recently across multiple groups, and it shines for the "big-picture" usecase. It is often used as a "bootstrap-your-actual-RPG-campaign" scenario builder. You play with your group for a few sessions, and you end up with a world complete with plothooks, campaigns, motivations, challenges etc.
The expansion set, Microscope Explorer[1], optimizes the rules a little bit for World-building, but that's entirely optional - You can easily go miles with just the standard rules ("Just Play Normally" is part of the expansion here).
Also, random related trivia: Expanse[2], the famous book series that was adapted into the (now) Amazon-run TV series is a RPG game written down. This explains a lot of character actions that are very much player/character driven, and not plot driven.
[0]: http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/
[1]: http://www.lamemage.com/microscope-explorer/
[2]: https://www.cbr.com/the-expanse-series-rpg/
Thank you for the recommendation, will look into it.
Do you know of any epics close to Hyperion? I have been searching for a long time and have not found anything on par with it.
Dune (often named) and The Expanse were not meant for me and have been ruined for me by the movies/TV shows. The old Asimov stories are... old.
I read many larger volumes such as the Commonwealth Saga, Three Body Problem etc. but nothing caught the way Hyperion did for me.
Funnily, from the many books and series I read, the ones I remember most fondly were on the other end of the spectrum of Hyperion: Bobiverse and The Murderbot Diaries - both short, much less beautiful language and more on the funny side but original and thought provoking.
Books, like movies, videogames and often software tools, aren't substitutable. If I like Photoshop, or want to use it because it's popular, I'm unlikely to accept GIMP as a free alternative. If I want to read or watch The Expanse, I'm 100% not going to read some random free e-book or dollar paperback, because that's a different book. You can't substitute Shrek for Star Wars, nor Slime Rancher for Call of Duty.
Commodities don't get pirated. Commodities get market competition.
I think it’s the same as the effect of a really good book and a really good tv film adaptation.
I can count on one hand where the TV/Film adaptation lived to my imagination - most recently been the expanse and altered carbon both of which absolutely nailed the source material.
The Expanse is quite good. But the earth/Mars/Belt differences are mostly cultural at least in the TV series. The "Belters" meme in SF has been around for a long time though. See Larry Niven for example. (And I'm sure it's older than that.)
I was a very happy GSuite customer for a short while a year ago. With my own domain set up, the experience was more like what it was like working inside Google (e.g., one search overall of your data). Then I discovered that I could not merge in my stuff from my 15 year old free gmail account which I had used to purchase a lot of books, movies, and tv shows like The Expanse. Having two Google identities was a nuisance. Google should have the option of freezing a free account and then transferring all your stuff into the paid account. Anyway, I quit the paid for service, which was a shame since there were so many things I liked about it.
Stating the obvious for those who don't follow the link: "The Expanse" is a fictional movie with no basis in reality in that church's doctrine: "In The Expanse, the story of what happens to the Mormon church (and other organized religions) will be trickled out with other back-story elements to fill the 200-year gap between the show’s setting and the present- which the showrunners seem desperate to bridge with (They have flying drones and video messaging!). The brief scene between Fred Johnson and a Mormon administrator weighs heavy on the show’s plot but is slipped in between the three main storylines of the Earth-based United Nations, Detective Miller’s case on Ceres Station and the rag-tag crew currently ship-hopping around the asteroid belt." etc etc etc
Netflix’s recommended content has become so terrible outside things I want like Better Call Saul or Mindhunter, that I’ve cancelled the sub. Most of what they push to the top is straight garbage. Really badly written stuff.
Meanwhile I can pay the same for amazon and get more Picard, Mr Robot, The Expanse... and if the TV sucks there are plenty of movies on rotation.
I thought that we could see some reference to it after the first episode of this year season of the Expanse, but then no.
This is the one aspect of The Expanse, the tv series, that I like a lot. One day, I'd actually think their terminal system would actually be a real thing:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2017/03/08/science-and-tech-in-syfys-the-expanse-it-may-look-like-a-cell-phone-but-its-a-hand-terminal/#47ccce61752d
(Unfortunately, this would probably require public infrastructure, not private, which just seems to create more walled gardens. But... I digress...)
This approach to technology is really a major difference from the expanse and a lot of other sci-fi. FTA:
> The writers and creators of The Expanse take the view that technology develops over time to serve human needs but it doesn’t do away with those needs by either wholly satisfying them or destroying the people who have them. Technology advances but the human problems remain.
In many ways, a lot of sci-fi writes focuses on technology first, people second. And _that_ often resembles "concept products" that never see the light of day.
Expanse Book 4 was absolutely terrible. The TV show is actually much better than the fourth book.
Actually I am thinking that the Expanse in general is a series where the screenwriters are outperforming the original authors.
I feel this way about everything.
GoT took a nose dive when they stopped having source material to work off of. It became stupid, mindless drama. People talk about the ending as if that's where the problems started. No, the writing was crap for the last several seasons.
The latest season of The Expanse was disappointing. It went from a slow burning, character driven series to an action packed run-of-the-mill drama laden mess, like most of the television shows you see nowadays. I'm happy Amazon picked it up, but they basically butchered the show, it will never live up to its potential.
Everything just kind of becomes samey because they're all learning how to do it from the same sources, and the lessons they're learning is unnecessary drama pulls people in and keeps them there. Except it drives me nuts when an entire season's worth of plot points could literally evaporate if character A articulated why they were angry at character B, who would then explain it was a misunderstanding.
US TV is so disappointing when you expect an hour long episode but, because of the ads, it's only 42-43 minutes long. A mid-way intermission would be fine, but instead you get shallow plots driven by the need to shove in ads every 12 minutes. And all the procedurals are built around that, like the lives of those characters in that universe pause so some shitty marketing material can play. Of course, they're also 24 episodes long so they run for most of a year, and 90% of the show is the baddie of the week. The 10% of actual substance is distributed in 3-4 episodes throughout so you have to deal with all of it to get the real plot.
I've been watching the last season of Mr Robot on Amazon (and my god is it a cracker). As soon as I went to reddit to check out the fanbase reaction, so many of the posts were about how the vibe was ruined by ads appearing so often. But for me...it was a solid 50 minutes of TV, completely uninterrupted. I imagine those who enjoyed The Expanse on cable are now delighted about season 4 being a pure continuous stream on Amazon. I was.
Of course, you still get the blatant product placement. Death Stranding is my recent fave example for that, where you get Monster energy cans rubbed in your face. Same as with the old Splinter Cell games you'd be climbing across a massive billboard advertising Axe body spray.
I think the US has a serious problem with its special blend of capitalism, individualism, and consumerism. Everybody is out there to get something from you.
From the article:
> What I love about this show is that it's “realistic” science fiction
Exactly what I like in the show, however the very next sentence
> There's no faster-than-light travel, no crazy artificial gravity or dopey aliens. It's just people like us, in an actually possible world.
I disagree with - there are clearly fantastical elements in the story and although I like them as fantasy, I'm disappointed they're there in the first place.
I guess I'm sort of echoing the complaints of Game of Thrones (TV series) fans that liked the intrigue and disliked the actual fantasy. I disagreed with them (Ice and Fire is a "fantasy series after all) and understand some people will think I'm complaining too much, but I'm still looking for actual "hard" sci fi on the level of quality and production value of The Expanse
> There are some rare exceptions within the hard SF sub-genre -- where the science was diamond-hard and the author didn't use it as a platform for some sort of far right political agitprop -- but they're dismayingly rare; for more on this phenomenon see Michael Moorcock's seminal essay, Starship Stormtroopers:
What do Heinlein and hard science fiction have to do with each other? He's far, far out on the squishy end.
Also, I'm convinced that people who are convinced that Starship troopers is a fascist tract have only watched the movie uncritically, or have bothered to read the book, but have no concept of what military people are like. The best way to understand Starship Troopers is as Helmet for My Pillow or another of the countless WW2 memoirs, but in space. That's the narrative structure it follows.
> It says something about our desire for the fantastika that "Star Wars" (space wizards! Evil emperors!) is infinitely more popular than this stuff today
Strong counterpoint would be the Expanse. It's never going to dethrone a forty year old franchise backed by the biggest media company in the world, but it is proving more popular than I would have expected.
Paying per episode or not? I've got Amazon Prime (aka free shipping) with amazon.co.uk, but I still need to pay for individual episodes of the expanse from Amazon's video site
It is not that confusing. Amazon sells and rents digital videos. Anyone can pay for those and watch them.
They also have prime video, which is a subscription service that is included with an Amazon Prime subscription (although you can also pay for it separately if you don’t want the other prime benefits)
With prime video, you can watch all of the Amazon originals (like the expanse season 4), and a subset of their entire collection that they license from other publishers.
You can filter to just display shows and movies that are included in the prime subscription, so you don’t keep picking a movie or show and find out that it is not a part of prime.
Speaking of new streaming services, I was trying to watch The Expanse Season 4. Amazon famously made this happen, so thanks to Bezos there. But even though I have their Prime service there seemed to be a monthly service called Prime Video required. Amazon seems to be doing the Microsoft thing where everything is Prime something and it’s confusing and annoying.
Now only if they could keep the shows that are actually worth watching.
eye balls The Expanse
For people interested, the series (and tv show) is called "The Expanse".
The Marvel TV shows, obviously... ;)
More seriously I liked the big bang theory, the expanse, firefly, and dark matter. I haven't watched game of thrones yet.
I really hope you're joking. It scares me that distracting entertainment is preferred over advancement in reality. Remembering (true or not?) that we spent more on movies about extinction level impacts than on actual detection and prevention.
That said, I enjoy watching Expanse and look forward to s4 :)
Until The Expanse, I never really thought if there were G-forces in space. What other TV show OR movie even models that?
> The ability to be visually immersed in a book does seem nice. It also strikes me as probably a bit of an exaggeration. I have a hard time believing people wouldn't be spending much more time reading than I observe them to if reading were really capable of such transport into fictional dimensions
It’s a skill and takes effort. My wife visualizes what she reads seemingly without any trouble at all and can read more than one decent sized book per day.
Me it takes much longer. It’s about getting into a state of flow. Sometimes I just can’t get there and all I see are words and I struggle to keep straight what is going on in the book.
Sometimes I am kicked out of flow by the author dropping a descriptive visual detail late enough in the story that it conflicts with what I had imagined. As in, what do you mean so-and-so has blonde hair?
There have been times where this has happened and I just choose to ignore some of those details and carry on with the thing as I had imagined it.
I often like reading a book after having seen the movie or tv show if one exists because it makes the effort of visualization easier. I’m reading Leviathan Wakes, of which the first season of The Expanse is based. So I picture most of the characters the same. Except for Amos for some reason. He’s different in the book, and right now I couldn’t tell you what he looks like when I imagine him. I’ll have to try to make a point of remembering when I pick it up again.
I prefer books that only give hints of how things appear, to let my mind fill in the rest. It works better for me that way.
Ah, it's book 7 of The Expanse series. They are worth reading and the show is worth watching.
Yes. Have you seen The Expanse documentary?
A while back, I was in this exact situation. I got into The Expanse (which, if you like hard sci-fi, you definitely need to check out, it's superbly made). I have a Netflix subscription, obviously. I devoured the first two seasons on there. Then I discovered that Season 3 onwards would be an Amazon exclusive. Then I discovered that Seasons 1 & 2 had also moved to Amazon. I don't have a Prime subscription any more because I can't justify it (and I don't want to be tempted to buy more useless junk than I already own). I managed to get another free trial long enough to watch Season 3, but not long enough to re-watch the previous two seasons. But when Season 4 comes out, I'm going to be in exactly the same situation as satellite TV - I don't want to watch anything else on Amazon Prime Video, I just want The Expanse. But I'll have to get a Prime subscription if I want to watch it before it comes out on Blu-Ray, and thus everything that comes with it, which to me is just junk.
Cord-cutting accomplished exactly nothing. Streaming services copied the exact model of the satellite companies (willingly or not; I'm willing to bet the distributors squeezed the streaming companies just like music publishers, since they're holding all the rights). There is no incentive whatsoever to make a single show available on multiple platforms.
This also explains perfectly why piracy will never die. Consumers want access to the content they are interested in. They do NOT want arbitrary complications thrown in their way.
> e.g. the gravity is always either 1 or 0 g
In the Expanse TV show yes, it seems that way. However I suspect that is more due to keeping production costs down. In the books, gravity varies all over the place depending on what moon/planet/rock/station the characters are on, and even goes into details describing the differences of spin gravity near the center of a station vs outward.
How about the Klingon disintegrators that stop at the soles of your boots?
Star Trek is "Wagon Trail" in space. Star Wars is, I think, space opera. The Expanse gives a nod to hard science, and I respect them for trying, but e.g. the gravity is always either 1 or 0 g. i'm not complaining, I think realistic sci-fi would be kind of boring. Like the first half of "2001: A Space Odyssey", it was basically Dr. Heywood taking a plane. A freaking awesome plane to space, but still.
I have a "100 Sci-Fi Movies" DVD set with lots of old movies from a span of decades, and it's pretty clear that at least some sci-fi did start as attempts to do a kind of scenario planning, but there has always been "speculative fiction" depending on how you categorize things. Was Plato's Atlantis science fiction?
Basically why I haven't watched season 3 of The Expanse: I'm far from being an Amazon boycottist, but I refuse to enter any form of ongoing agreement that would make them a default choice or bring them closer to becoming one. I have never put even remotely as much thought into this as the author, but the central idea has been clear nonetheless: don't give away your wallet-vote in a bulk transaction, nothing good can come from this.
Actually that's exactly sounds like a movie series Expanse. Space combat scene. They even depressurize the ship in anticipation of getting holes in it.
They raised their prices and shut down several popular series early. I cancelled my subscription last week because I was finding it hard to find something good to watch that I hadn't seen yet. I'm now catching up on a few things on Amazon Prime like the Expanse season 3, American Gods, Good Omens and a few other things. I will probably switch back in a few months when Netflix has added a few things that I might want to see. They do have a few series that they haven't killed yet that I would want to see. Apparently, they keep your profile and settings for 10 months. This suggests that I'm not the only one shopping around.
Exactly. Sorry if this comes off as a rant, but contrary to the article, I've never been overwhelmed with any choice on Netflix myself, just frustrated by poor discoverability, their teasing shows they didn't even have the rights to anymore (e.g., The Expanse), and to top it off, being full of filler content that's just unwatchable for me with no obvious way to remove it or create a custom bookshelf.
I had cable growing up, but ditched it in my adult life and never looked back so far. Netflix's recommender is some blackbox that I don't ever find useful. If they added some way to channel surf like broadcast television, I assume I'd just be wasting my time wading through that.
Then there are some older shows in their catalogue that I wouldn't even have known existed unless I'd searched for them - I'd even go so far as to say purposely hidden from navigation.
Another personal pet peeve is the lack of subtitles or CCs. I suppose it's some licensing issue, but I can buy a Blu-ray or DVD here that will come with lots of languages, but on Netflix, they started adding a lot of local movies with no subtitles, and "foreign" shows or movies without any English subtitles, which are preferable for me.
Maybe it's because I've never had the pleasure of the US version, but I've only ever sporadically kept a subscription for over almost a decade now, quickly exhausting what I did find interesting. Back when brick n' mortar video stores were still a thing, I didn't feel overwhelmed by having too much decent choice there.
P.S., what's the annoying "are you still watching" prompt interrupting the current show instead of just being in between them? As if the UX wasn't annoying enough already.
The only season 4 I care about soon is The Expanse.
It just sounds like they’re doing what every other network does. A bunch of it is trash you don’t care about but another subset of their customers do. It’s not all commissioned for us personally, and Netflix will always prioritise their own shows before others in the app.
It’s not like you watch HBO 12 hours a day expecting pure content that you love from start to finish.
That said, apart from the tent pole series they [plan to] push out each year (stranger things, better call saul, Fargo, mindhunter, nightflyers, etc.) the rest is clearly data driven garbage that doesn’t realise it’s working a cliche. With a couple of exceptions even the marvel universe shows fell into their pattern.
In that sense it’s Netflix Unoriginal Content. But you still get the diamond in the mine.
Being in the EU I get about 8 different translations of two different kinds of zombie story, but you’re not really paying for that.
And on the same level, it’s a shame that streaming is now split. American Gods, Good Omens, The Expanse, and Mr Robot are all on Amazon. Netflix definitely dropped a ball on some of that. The TV show costs the same but I have to pay 2x to watch because of the networks.
Does it protect against other radiation than UV? Does it also seal a gaseous atmosphere at a usable pressure?
This would be useful in the construction of an arcology. New York City is little more than 300 square miles in area. A single huge building could easily encompass living space for an even larger population than NYC's, while also offering domed parks. The aerogel would take care of the thermal and UV issues. There would have to be a strong transparent membrane, perhaps sustained by pressure, to withstand winds and protect the aerogel. Also, such a unitary building, with a dome structure around it, would be easier to protect against radiation with magnetic fields, as conductors in the dome itself could be used. Fusion power seems like a must have for this kind of project. Also, this would entail additional expense, which tunnel habitation wouldn't incur.
In the novel/TV series "The Expanse", Martians live underground in tunnels, because above ground it takes more material and energy to build air-tight buildings which also protect from radiation.
So perhaps such Martian arcologies would be playgrounds for the rich? Perhaps they would be the equivalent of today's Dubai?
And they still have adverse effects from the lower gravity.
One of the most fascinating aspects of that series is that there are three Human "subpopulations", two of which would have trouble to exist on Earth, physiologically.
We still don't know if the effects are necessarily adverse at Martian levels. There might be a benefit, so long as the radiation can be mitigated. In any case, the gravity could be mitigated with a "slanted racetrack" style centrifuge. An entire arcology could be constructed this way. It could well be that the residents of such arcologies would be stronger and healthier. That would be one hell of a form of class distinction. It would be similar to the combat differences between medieval Knights and peasant conscripts. Perhaps arcologies would become the castles of a warring Mars gone feudal?
Does it protect against other radiation than UV? Does it also seal a gaseous atmosphere at a usable pressure?
In the novel/TV series "The Expanse", Martians live underground in tunnels, because above ground it takes more material and energy to build air-tight buildings which also protect from radiation. And they still have adverse effects from the lower gravity.
One of the most fascinating aspects of that series is that there are three Human "subpopulations", two of which would have trouble to exist on Earth, physiologically.
Two seasons seems a little short; maybe 3 would be better?
Just look at The Expanse; that one I thought did well with keeping me engaged, but they ended it (by design) after 3 seasons, and it seemed to be just the right length for the overall story arc they were going for.
Whereas Game of Thrones stayed interesting for a long time (6 seasons to be exact), but after that started faltering and in season 8 really became disappointing, mainly because the books they were basing it on had run out and they were now making things up as they went along.
I mainly read SF to relax (biased towards hard space opera) and have accumulated a "best of the best" list of my own:
Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey (TV show The Expanse is loosely based on this, but IMO doesn't even come close)
Revelation Space - Alastair Reynolds
Three Body Problem (all 3 books) - Liu Cixin
Consider Phlebas - Iain M. Banks (your gateway drug into the Culture universe)
Genuinely wish I could experience all the above for the first time again. And looking forward to checking out some of the others mentioned here.
I'm surprised we haven't seen more hard sci-fi in the jovian or cronian systems. While constant 1g acceleration drives open the whole solar system to the ~month travel time that benefits stories, much more realistic accelerations (or limited fuel) can still manage the same within those systems. Add to that the plethora of interesting moons, rings, and gravitational points to focus people and material around and the action should flow quite naturally.
See The Expanse Season 2 (it's amazing).
Didn’t we see something like this on an episode of the Expanse?
> I'm surprised its not higher.
Likewise. There are many titles available through Netflix DVD that are not available through Netflix streaming. Just off the top of my head you have Game of Thrones (seasons 1-7), The Wire, True Detective, Fargo and The Expanse.
Some thoughts:
- custom cancer vaccines - the idea being that the vaccine, which triggers a person’s immune system to identify a tumor by its unique mutations, could effectively shut down many types of cancers, but this could also easily be retargeted and used to shut down the whole body (or just a vitally important part). It's still a question of delivery, the toxin would need to be delivered to the body in an undetectable way to be really dangerous... This is explored in an episode of The Expanse [0].
- carbon dioxide catcher - I wondered before to what extent does production of [...] synthetic fuels, using the captured carbon dioxide as a key ingredient even make sense - more energy is spent (likely from carbon) to produce the fuel than is released by burning the fuel, so this really only makes sense if we have enough clean energy to power the whole world (e.g. solar), but not enough batteries to run the economy (cars don't just need energy, they need energy in a convenient portable form). The CO2 -> fuel processes could enable us to go to zero-net-CO2 energy cycle, while keeping current infrastructure (fuel-burning cars, planes, ships).
- an ECG on your wrist - how about an ECG in your wrist - a chip implanted into your body that would be able to not just measure the heartbeat, but also continuously monitor various blood markers - glucose, cholesterol, stress hormones, ... Is anyone aware of any company working on this? Are such sensors even possible from a medical-technology perspective (disregarding energy, data transfer and privacy issues)?
- sanitation without sewers - a similar technology (full dirty feces -> clean carbon & water process) will need to be developed for space habitats...
- smooth-talking AI assistants - this almost seems like a solution in search of a problem. Do we actually want to haggle with an AI (hyperoptimised and hyperexperiences and almost certain to beat us while giving us the impression that we're getting a great deal!), don't we just want to get a fair price (in the free market sense, i.e. with most profit competed away)? I wonder what are some problems that can/should be automated at scale, but that cannot be automated via other means (e.g. buying plane tickets online)... I'm guessing Google's application of an AI booking appointments (with people) is one of the best applications, as it treats speech as a kind of a universal interface (originally developed for humans)...
[0] https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/The_Monster_and_the_Rocket
In the book/TV series "The Expanse", they actually spin up massive asteroids and live inside tunnels, effectively like a ring but made of rock, to offset the fact that it doesn't have enough gravity otherwise. Neat concept, although will likely end in failure.
The Expanse (books and TV show) use that idea pretty well
That's expensive if you don't watch much TV. I just watch sci-fi shows and wish I could put my money just towards those types of shows. My perfect subscription would be a mix, where I pay a small fee per month but can try out individual shows. If I like the show I'd pay for the rest of the season.
For example Amazon now has The Expanse, Starz has Counterpart, Netflix has Black Mirror and I also liked the new Lost in Space. Hulu has... Future Man? CBS All Access has... the ability to ruin Star Trek, so I might want to watch that train wreck.
Anyway if there was a cheap subscription like Amazon Prime which allowed me to try out a couple free episodes, then pay $3 per episode that would work. That way I feel like I'm supporting the specific shows I want to see.
> You are forgetting 1 aspect. Advertisement. I gladly pay extra to not watch commercials.
Yes, it's good to point that out. I think people _are_ willing to pay more to have no ads, and have on-demand access to content.
I would throw in another thing I could have thrown in originally as well, which I didn't really think of - the TV equivalent of "killer apps." The reason I stick with Amazon is because they picked up a couple of shows I really, really love - The Man in the High Castle and The Expanse. I don't want to lose access to those.
Similarly, I briefly subscribed to CBS All Access while the new Star Trek: Discovery season aired last year - and when Season 2 comes out, I'll likely do so again. I love Star Trek so much that I'm willing to pay the $7 per (call it $3 per episode) month just for that... but as soon as it stops coming out, I cancel.
All the human originated technology seems fairly plausible in the Expanse.
All the proto-molecule derived stuff isn’t particularly plausible, but it’s not really worse than most sufficiently-advanced-technology tropes, and it tries pretty hard to express a universe with rules, just different rules.
I would give Star Wars an F for science-y-ness, Star Trek a varying score depending on the episode (ranging from A to F) but overall a C, and The Expanse a B+.
It is galling when people define sci-fi by its cinematic imitators, for sure.
Yes, but only if you count Star Wars or other American-style production "action movie but in space" movies or series (like Stargate, Firefly, ...).
When you go into the things that don't get blockbuster movies, you end up with old-school scifi. Newer like The Expanse or Blindsight, older like The Culture or Hyperion, or proper old school stuff like
In general, piece of unwanted and unrequested advice - whenever you make a huge sweeping statement about complex topic with many examples (like "In western sci-fi, the story exists to make the reader feel good about themselves.") you are inevitably wrong.
Oh man. So many. Anything by Brandon Sanderson. Most of his stuff takes place in the same fantasy universe, and some of the series are starting to cross over. Stormlight Archives is the crown jewel. Edit: each series takes place on a different planet in the universe with a separate (well thought out) magic system. Different books in different series start to reveal the why's and how's and how it is all linked.
Enjoying the Expanse series right now by James Corey, sci-fi with us living on Mars and in the belt, when a dangerous alien self-replicating molecule shows up.
If science fiction is your thing, I can't recommend higher the Hyperion series.
Freedom and Deamon by Daniel Suarez were really fun, a muder mystery where the murderer is dead and uses an advanced AI to do his dealings.
The Martian was fun, if a little shorter than I typically like. Better than the movie, as nearly always.
I could go on. Gaah! So fun!
Edit: usually not a history person, but also really enjoyed The Right Stuff read by Dennis Quaid. The start of the space program.
Marvelous Mrs. Maisal is on Amazon, not Netflix. Amazon also picked up season 4 of The Expanse after SciFi cancelled it. Good for them. Who needs cable???
The Expanse was good! Fair disclaimer: I canceled Netflix recently, due to unhealthy amount of binge-watching... hence the list above. I have not heard of some of these newer titles. It seems some of them didn't make it through NFLX's recommendation system to my homescreen, because I have never heard of Marvelous Mrs Maisal but that has been out for a while.
We recently binge watched both seasons of Stranger Things. Stranger Things and Altered Carbon on Netflix and The Marvelous Mrs Maisal and The Expanse on Amazon have been my most enjoyed shows this year.
I have sunk an absurd number of hours into games in my life, Diablo in particular. I still remember some of the goddamn uniques on my sorcerer from the first one (Dreamflange, Thinking Cap and Najs Plate or Cape). And while I'm totally flabbergasted by the emotional response, I'm not very judgemental about it. I don't get deep emotional attachment to sport teams or TV shows either. But the sheer fury and vitriol and the paranoia fuelled fantasies about evil journalists are a little bit unsettling to be honest, especially because we both know that the stuff we get to see is just the tip of the iceberg.
I simply can't help noticing the striking difference to the reaction to SyFy's cancellation of The Expanse.
I agree with you, they were pretty awful and lost so much of the original's sense of wonder and incomprehension.
One favourite daydream of mine is to think about how the Rama aliens' second and third probes would be received. I read Rama around the same time as Eon by Greg Bear, so I've always had an affinity for spin-gravity habitats filled with unknown stuff :)
With The Expanse TV series showing us how good hard scifi can be exciting and wonderful, I'm hoping we one day get an Eon or Rama series. Rama especially would work well in a hard scifi miniseries format.
(That's actually a great thought: that many shows thought impossible a couple of decades ago will now be made. Let's just hope they're made with love and devotion like The Expanse!)
Yes! (From "The Expanse" novels, also a sci-fi tv series.)
I would love and pay for a service that would let me subscribe to all the episodes of a show for one month at a low price, directly from the content producer.
I would much prefer to pay, say, $.99 or $1.99 for an unlimited month of The Expanse, and if I don’t watch it all in a month and I want more, then I pay for another month. Maybe keep some shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on retainer for whenever. That would kick the crap out of having to pay twice as much for the 2-3 aggregator subscriptions just to get all the shows I want to watch.
I, too, just have Vudu, Netflix and Prime for my video entertainment. The TV's in our house mostly sit dark anymore - my wife and I can each watch a movie or episode on one computer screen while we play a game on the other. I have a third screen that shows the security cam feeds and live weather radar.
"The Expanse" was the best Sci-Fi series I've seen in a long time. Another that I've started that seems good is "Killjoys".
I'm finding I have more "patience", these days, with regard to viewing and reading stuff [1]. I may just wait until the season's done, then add the CBS thing to my Amazon Prime/Video -- I see tiles for the CBS stuff, so I assume I can -- for a month and binge watch.
Is doing so now worth it for "Discovery"? Some other comments on this thread make me think, perhaps not.
Even if the new... "Stewart vehicle" is not TNG, let's hope it is of equal quality. Make it so.
The last season of Wallander (the Swedish production, not the Branagh thing) became rather interesting, exploring the experience of later life and perhaps the meaning of life as found in and through that context. The new Star Trek show probably won't emphasize this, but it would be an interesting perspective.
--
1) For example, I bought season 2 of "The Expanse". But, now that Amazon has picked up production, I'm just waiting for season 3 to be added to the Prime offering; I just don't find myself in that much of a hurry/need, even though I found the show quite good.
I was watching the Expanse tv show and they were talking about how half the population was on Basic Assistance.
I am not sure if it will ever happen, especially not in America were work is sacred. But paying people not to have jobs seems like a good deal. Keeps them from fucking up and maybe they can do something productive for society like growing wine or teaching children in Bangladesh to read.
See Also: The Expanse's Lang Belta, or "Belter Creole"
Created for the book by Nick Farmer with the authors, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, he then coached the actors and extended the language for the TV show.
Here's something from wired on that creation process: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-expanse-belter-language/
This is also fun, Belter Creole words and their origins: http://expanse.wikia.com/wiki/Belter_Creole_(Books)
pretty cool, sa-sa ke?
The Expanse is a book series first, and the TV show follows it pretty well. The book series, still way ahead in the future, doesn't really pull this device. Turns out the first season/book of the series are just the precursor to an advance-alien-civ sort of plot.
The Expanse isn't hard sci-fi, but it's a pretty decent sci-fi thriller in my opinion.
Ehh, there were plenty of nifty little details in that show, but they don't end up meaning much since the plot gets hijacked by a supernatural deus ex machina.
(And with The Expanse having shown such signs from Episode 1, it almost seems like nobody can make a good sci-fi TV show that has spacecraft but not the supernatural.)
It sounds like The Expanse is what you want. The TV show is also very good.
Don’t feel bad. I grab a few seasons of the Expanse and just enjoy the binge watch. Even the third time.
Ah true, they're just billed as Amazon Originals in the UK. I think The Expanse is going to be Amazon all the way down from season 4, though.
My approach is that I can only watch an episode of a show if I spend the first 30 minutes of it on my stationary bike. (I am currently following Westworld Season 2 and The Expanse Season 3.) Tying my motivation to do cardio to my motivation to see what happens next has worked well for me. Getting motivated to lift 2x a week is another issue...
Bear in mind, everyone's talking about how must-see a given TV show is, and how much they loathe "having to" shell out money to see it on X streaming service.
Prices go down when demand is low. Demand for TV is not low, ergo, prices are not going to go down.
Also, when it does, the first casualty isn't going to be the companies: It's going to be the shows you love. People on HN were thrilled when Amazon saved The Expanse. But if The Expanse doesn't drive X number of new Prime subscribers, it won't be around much longer than that.
There is one major point you have to consider about sci fi. The rise and golden era of sci fi were during times of great nationalism. This was in large part the US (who I will focus on, but a similar picture is true across the world) had real and present enemies to unify the people against. The "golden age of sci fi" is considered to be 1938-1946. WW2 was 1939-1945. Star Trek of course came much later, yet Gene Roddenberry was born in 1921 and flew nearly 100 combat missions in WW2. To say he this period had an influence on his views and life would be quite the understatement!
During these times of nationalism, people looked outward for enemies and inward for unification and progress. You can see this exact metaphor within the federation. The enemies take unfamiliar shapes and forms from other literally alien cultures. Cyberpunk started to emerge during the 60s and 70s, with Neuromancer being released in 1984. We went from World War 2 to Vietnam, the rise of anti-nationalism, and an American people ever more able to find their own enemies from within. We went from a government that culminated in sending a man on the moon to a government that, especially after the end of the WW3 that did not happen - the Cold War, seemed to lack any direction or purpose eventually culminating in a behavior mimicking society of simply finding its own enemies within and eating itself alive.
And that trend continues to this very day. The reason sci fi had a utopic future vision was because that's what seemed probable. Today how do you perceive the future in a couple of hundred years? I think "The Expanse* does a phenomenal take of considering this without resorting to trope. I also think Deep Space Nine was also well ahead of its time here. The episode "Past Tense" in particular is something that seems practically prophetic of the times today, down to the exact area and timeline.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/expanse-revived-season-4-at-amazon-1113803
> Amazon Studios had streaming rights to the first three seasons of the show. Sources say Bezos is a big fan of the book and was livid that the TV series went to NBCUniversal-owned Syfy. The move is said to have ignited Bezos' demand that Amazon Studios brass find the company's version of Game of Thrones.
The Expanse is a garbage TV series which totally and completely diverges from the novels - for no good reason, since it's a miniseries, with plenty of time to do justice to the books.
It's depressing how many people here either haven't read the books or somehow think this dreck is superior to the books.
Great news! I'm absolutely loving the third season, despite not really being a fan of the protomolecule concept. I know the series revolves around it. It's a bit like the white walkers in game of thrones. You go from the super interesting political intrigue about socioeconomic imbalances, oppression, imperialism and geopolitical relations in the solar system / Westeros, to fantasy/magic/sci-fi-bs of glowing supernatural creatures. Absolutely hate that personally, but I like both shows nonetheless and the Expanse has something special. Can't wait for new episodes!
The screens are restricted to showing protagonists doing, experiencing and talking, whereas books can ramble on forever about background.
Screen adaptations of background-rich books have three choices: simplify away the background, add new scenes engineered to convey background via protagonists, skip the background and let the viewer sink or swim on their own.
Readers who later watch an adaption are rarely happy with either option, but "simplify" is the worst. People new to the material rarely even notice "simplify", but fall into two very polarized camps for "engineer" and "skip". Just ask them about miniseries vs. Lynch Dune.
Personally, I love the feeling of only scratching the surface of a much deeper world, and I hate having everything spelled out in detail. As for The Expanse (TV only), I could have binged through ten seasons of life, death and intrigue in an industrialized collar system, could protomolecule ruined that, cancellation or not - guess I should read the first book for more of the good parts)
I would trade 10 new seasons of The Expanse for a couple of more episodes of Firefly. Just saying.
Sense8 got axed because it was a $1 million niche show. The same reason they passed on The Expanse. at $700k an episode. They are both wonderful television, but the masses want Survival so that's the garbage we get. At least Netflix and HBO still show actual TV.
Minor correction: Syfy doesn't produce The Expanse.
The Expanse was entirely conceived, financed and produced by Alcon, an independent film production company. Outside the US, Netflix has the exclusive distribution rights, and in the US, the show is also carried by Amazon. Alcon also produced Blade Runner 2049 and Villeneuve's earlier film Prisoners.
No doubt Alcon needs someone else to pay for the distribution rights now, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up on Netflix or Amazon, both of which are pushing sci-fi pretty hard. Amazon would be a good fit: The Expanse was co-produced with the Sean Daniel Company, who are also working on the new adaptation of The Witcher, and whose new production startup Mythos recently signed with Amazon Studios.
'The Expanse' went from really exciting in the first season to really boring in the second season. I watched the whole first season at once, but couldn't handle a single episode of the second season.
I think the perfect example is "The Expanse"
- Easily the best sci-fi show in 10 years(1)
- Latest season has a 100% score on rotten-tomatos
- The visual effects are absolute top of the art (2)
- The fanbase is franticly close to the show (look at twitter how much they interact w/ the cast etc)
- Season 3 and we are about to start the big turn of the story arch
BUT… Canceled by Syfy because not enough people catch it at the time they happen to transmit it into the air.
If this show would be on Netflix it could become on of the defining sci-fi shows of our generation. Now we have to hope Netflix or Amazon happen to pick it up before the team disperses. (3)
(1) seriously watch it… the first few episodes are a bit slowish worldbuilding but it gets really good
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yKn_EqA0ik (shitty rip unfortunately)
(3) Please sign: https://www.change.org/p/netflix-or-amazon-please-buy-the-rights-to-the-expanse-savetheexpanse
See here: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/05/syfy-has-canceled-the-expanse-but-its-producers-want-to-find-it-a-new-home/
> The Expanse, based on a series of popular novels by a duo of authors who write under the pen name James S.A. Corey, was critically acclaimed and beloved by fans, but it was expensive to produce, it delivered poor on-air ratings, and critically, Syfy had only first-run linear rights. In other words, the network did not have the OTT (over-the-top: streaming and other digital distribution as opposed to broadcast air) rights. For a show like The Expanse, OTT viewing is key for long-term revenue. The show was only made available on cable television or by purchasing episodes or season passes on digital storefronts like iTunes and Amazon.
> is not a particularly weird reason.
I'd say it is. Exclusivity harms creators and users too, who can't access the result in stores and ways that are convenient to them. In the ideal world, Alcon Entertainment would make the series and sell it in every Internet store, including their own DRM-free option :)
> that the sum total people are willing to pay for it is less than the people that make it are willing to accept to keep making it.
No, people are willing to pay enough, but distributors should stop hampering competition with exclusivity restrictions. No exclusivity means wider reach, which means more profit for creators to do their work.
Really? I saw season 1 and loved it. Then eventually found out there was a second one and was happy. Had no idead it got canceled too. I tried to see the first and second episode of expanse and didn't like it one bit. Dark matter pleased me plently. Made me remember a little of Firefly mixed with something else like stargate or something.
In the U.S., "The Expanse" was picked up by Amazon Prime. It used to be that the Amazon Prime web page(s) heavily promoted it in both the top banner rotation of shows to check out and in the initially shown listings of shows under various categories ("Popular TV Shows", "Noteworthy...", "Trending...", whatever).
That's how I came across the show, after initially ignoring those placements for a few months because I didn't know how good it was and I wasn't in the mood for e.g. another "monsters" sci fi show (something I'd come to associate the SyFy channel with).
So, I watched season 1. Not too long after, season 2 launched. Amazon Video U.S. (integrated into the Prime video pages, or vise versa) had a "purchase" option for "day after broadcast" access. I purchased it and watched it. I don't remember how heavily it was promoted on the Amazon pages; I think there was at least some promotion.
Some time later, I revisited, wondering about that status of season 3. It turned out that U.S. Prime had picked up season 2. I was surprised as I'd seen absolutely zero promotion to that effect. Maybe because I'd already purchased season 2, but I'm far from certain about this.
Season 3 is now underway. And you can purchase "day after broadcast" access to it on U.S. Prime. Despite having watched both season 1 and 2, and actually paying Amazon for season 2, I've seen not one instance of promotion or listing of season 3, on U.S. Prime/Video web pages. Not one promotional email from them. Nada.
I was rather surprised at this. Amazon endlessly nags me to purchase things I'm not interested in (as well as a few that might interest me). And yet they make zero effort to upsell me on something I've already purchased?
Draw your own conclusion. To me, it seems as if they are for some reason actually actively hostile towards the show, now.
It was featured a lot in Brazil as well up until Season 2. For a whole month it was the only thing that showed featured for me. So much so that I watched the first episode and bought the books (because the story is very condensed on TV).
It is a shame... Expanse was very high quality sci-fi show.
So your opinion is the acting and narrative are bad. What sci-fi shows do you consider are examples of great narrative and acting? Give me 3 sci-fi TV series as examples please.
Beyond that how about non-sci-fi TV series? I'd like to know what you think are shining examples of television. Maybe 3 to 5 examples of non-sci-fi.
I know this sounds aggressive, but really, without knowing what kind of TV shows you think are "good", your opinion that The Expanse being bad, is without context. Maybe we like the same shows in general, but this one show is the exception. Who knows.
Also, maybe you watched the first 4 episodes and dismissed it as junk. That would make some sense to me, as the first few episodes were a bit rough. Or maybe you watched the entire thing, season 1 and 2, and it just wasn't for you.
> Name one other thing recently on air that’s realistic about space while also being interesting to general audience.
Person of Interest is on WP’s list of hard sci-fi, but isn’t about space. (This surprises me a little, it never struck me as accurate and I lost interest in the show fairly quickly.)
I mention that in part to call out that this thread is equating sci-fi with outer space. There are plenty of non-space scientific topics on earth that are covered in movies and TV. Making hard sci-fi only about space might be missing a general trend toward more rigor about science in general.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction#Television
Worth noting that Expanse is not on WP’s list. Nor are Gravity, Interstellar or The Martian. Gravity is a good example of the story intentionally breaking whatever hard science might have been there.
What I do see across all the genres is a peak of interest in space between maybe 1965 and 1995. Perhaps most important is writing, short stories and novels, since those often fuel TV & films.
If I look at the trend based only on this WP page, it does look like 1990-2010 was a trough and that space is trending again.
Strangely, the Expanse was being heavily hyped by Netflix UK earlier this year - but then Season 3 failed to make an appearance and now, apparently, Netflix won't be getting it at all.
This makes me wonder if perhaps a deal with Amazon has already quietly been done? It would be a great shame if the Expanse got cancelled. I think it's genuinely the best sci-fi show around right now.
Mostly my feelings/intuition, but here's the argument:
Name one other thing recently on air that's realistic about space while also being interesting to general audience.
Closest thing that comes to mind would be NatGeo's Mars series, but that's half documentary, half speculative concept art, and definitely very niche. Beyond that, there's nothing. Before that, we had the trio of Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian, the former two being sorta-hardish if you squint hard enough. And before we had 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that's it.
It's difficult to make a space show that's both true to physics and fun/engaging at the same time. Most authors don't bother with "true to physics" part. The Expanse succeeded at both, because an excellent team took great source-material and expanded on it, instead of butchering it like usually happens. The result was a show that was interesting to non-space geeks, that still gave accurate picture of how space works. If someone asked you, "I wonder why they're doing X", or "I wonder why they didn't do Y", your answer would likely contain some explanation of real-world physics. This is how you give regular people intuition about concepts they're not encountering daily.
So yeah, losing the only show about near-future space exploration that's both engaging and highly realistic - I think it's a bad day for both science outreach and science fiction.
Hopefully Netflix picks this up - especially when the new series of Lost in Space is just full of idiotic decisions to line up the next absurd episode, and Altered Carbon plods along at a snails pace and uses nudity to gloss over the dull bits.
The Expanse is the best sci-fi series on TV by far at the moment, especially due to it having a good plot, a sweary UN woman, and mostly obeys the laws of physics.
The Siffy channel is rubbish anyway. Netfix has more sci-fi to watch.
> Season two, which returned more than a year later with a significant marketing push and a solid lead-in, was down 24 percent among total viewers and averaged 457,000 total viewers. That compares more to similar returns for Syfy's inexpensive co-productions like Dark Matter and Killjoys, than to the cabler's original scripted series like The Magicians and Happy.
I'm a huge fan of both The Expanse and The Magicians, but if the above quote is true I can see where they're coming from. The Magicians is a far more accessible show than The Expanse, and if I have to decide where to stick marketing dollars I'm going to go with the show with the larger audience.
Also, although I love The Expanse, it is not nearly as compelling as BSG or Firefly. When BSG came out 14 years ago it was really a singular experience in terms of cable TV. I would say something like Westworld follows more in the footsteps of BSG than The Expanse. And Firefly tapped into the same energy as Guardians of the Galaxy but 15 years too early.
Overall, very sad but not surprised. At least the TV show got me reading the books...
End of season 3 is a key decision point (the expanse in the expanse :)). Stop it there or finance another 6+ seasons. I really hate it, but it is the right point in time.
They did the same to Firefly and Farscape, cancled them too soon before they could develop the characters more and close up loose ends.
I like The Expanse and I will miss it.
I've been meaning to write my own scifi books to be turned into movies.
The Expanse was no Star Trek or Star Wars but it had a realistic feel to it.
I can’t believe The Expanse is more expensive per episode than Westworld for example. It all feels so cheaply produced. The books are awesome btw.
Oh boy, I love Te Expanse and didn't realize season 3 was out! Watched the first two seasons on Amazon, just purchased season 3. Gonna be a great weekend.
Without knowing how good season 3 is, I'd say Amazon should just pick it up.
SyFy's not at fault here. They don't produce The Expanse, they only have limited first-run distribution rights in the US and Canada. The producer, Alcon, retains all other rights to the show.
The Expanse is the most expensive TV show that isn't Game of Thrones--estimates are that each episode is approximately 70% of the average cost of GOT, which is currently the most expensive TV show in production. However, ratings-wise, it's not even the most popular show on SyFy, so the advertising revenue isn't that great for the channel. The low revenue, combined with the lack of alternative revenue streams (i.e., digital streaming rights, foreign distribution rights, etc.) means that the show has been a major money loser for SyFy and is one of the reasons that Comcast's cable unit has been underperforming the past 3 years. Alcon also decided to make the distribution rights even more restrictive when they came up for renewal this spring, meaning even less potential revenue for SyFy.
Rather than brand your pitchforks at SyFy for cancelling the show, you should give them credit for keeping it going for 3 seasons in the face of significant revenue losses. And you should blame Alcon for trying to blame hardball when it didn't have the leverage.
[Edit: Rome was actually the most expensive TV show; the average cost per episode was $9m over the course of its run. GOT's season 6 averaged $10m/episode and season 8 will average $15m/episode, but it's earlier seasons were relatively cheap. ]
I adore the film adaptation of Starship Troopers. It was the right way, I think, to bring many of the themes of the book to cinema. Particularly it’s strong satire of modern militaristic hubris.
I’d imagine a similar treatment might work for the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, unlike the Netflix’s the Expanse where it devolved from excellent work building into a single overearnest spaceship crew solving all the solar system’s problems.
I've been using character names from my favourite movies. A different movie for each network (or each zone in a network, or however you want to categorise it).
Home network is all character names from LOTR, home office is Expanse, etc.
It's fun to try pick suitable names from the movie, for the device, eg my HTPC is Gimli, because it's a small case but carries more than its weight. Gaming PC is Gandalf because it's entirely white.
Sub-categories of characters is good for sub-categories of devices, so all our phones/tablets are named after the Elves.
The main problem with this method is the HOURS you spend angsting over the correct names because it's actually fun.
The Expanse takes pains to treat space travel, combat, and so on in a hard sci-fi way to the point of making it seem rather mundane. But you're right- the point of the series is about the human element, which is actually relevant to the OP-
>> Okay, so what you’re really asking me there is if this is hard science fiction. The answer is an emphatic no. I have nothing but respect for well written hard science fiction, and I wanted everything in the book to be plausible enough that it doesn’t get in the way. But the rigorous how-to with the math shown? It’s not that story. This is working man’s science fiction. It’s like in Alien, we meet the crew of the Nostromo doing their jobs in this very blue collar environment. They’re truckers, right? Why is there a room in the Nostromo where water leaks down off of chains suspended from the ceiling? Because it looks cool and makes the world feel a little messy. It gives you the feel of the world. Ridley Scott doesn’t explain why that room exists, and when most people watch the film, it never even occurs to them to ask. What kind of drive does the Nostromo use? I bet no one walked out of the film asking that question. I wanted to tell a story about humans living and working in a well populated solar system. I wanted to convey a feeling for what that would be like, and then tell a story about the people who live there.
https://www.orbitbooks.net/interview/james-s-a-corey-2/
I don't even know how an article managed to mention dystopias and blade runner, in 2018, without even a mention of "Altered Carbon". That, and it ignores that "The Expanse" was a series of novels (I think there's like... eight books now?) a long time before it was a TV series. The novels go into a great deal more detail on the lives of the Belters and how the political situation depicted came about.
The Expanse is SyFy, so new episodes go there (but really appreciate it on Amazon)
The HBO shows are gone sometime in 2018 I believe, at least the contract is up soon and HBO said they're keeping the shows to HBO Now instead AFAIK.
I'm a bit surprised by that comment. I actually find Prime to have pretty good content and typically better movies than Netflix (who's movie library has been shrinking pretty drastically over the years).
If you haven't already watched it, I'd highly recommend Season 1 and 2 of "The Expanse" on Prime. There are a lot of pretty great shows on there as long as you don't rely on DC/Marvel shows for all your entertainment. Other shows that are reasonably acclaimed are:
- The Man in the High Castle
- Avatar: The Last Airbender
- The Nightmanager
- Mr. Robot
- Boardwalk Empire
- Downton Abbey
- Sneaky Pete
- Orphan Black
- Dr. Who
- Veep
- The Good Wife
- Transparent
- Hannibal
- Deadwood
- Curb your Enthusiasm
- The Wire
- Six Feet Under
- The Sopranos
You should watch The Expanse, a very good TV show.
Their ships accelerate at a comfortable level to generate gravity for half of the destination, and then "flip-and-burn" by accelerating in the opposite direction at the same comfortable level to generate gravity.
Syfy's The Expanse shows that a sci-fi adaptation can work if the original vision is fully respected and understood. The Culture novels will certainly not work as a traditional TV space opera after the Star Trek tradition.
One problem is that The Culture has tech that is so futuristic that it rarely shows up in science fiction. Banks' spaceships don't have hulls; they are often described as multiple-kilometer-long, oblong, semi-translucent bubbles whose outer perimeter is maintained by "matter fields", the exteriors and interiors of which the ships can rearrange as they desire; there's no bridge, no screens, and human accommodation is also created on demand. Drones are not humanoid robots, but are more like sleek, floating geometric shapes that can manipulate the world around them with "maniple fields". Then there are the Minds, who only occasionally manifest themselves as avatars in the real world. And so on.
One aspect that will be hard to get right is to accurately reflect Banks' philosophical attitude (and his books have a lot of attitude), which is cynical to the point of nihilism, even when set in a world that is broadly utopian. The inherent conflict is everywhere: On the one hand, the Culture has genetically modified themselves to be peaceful; on the other hand, it's a civilization that is constantly involved in war. The cynicism is often wryly funny; there's a lot of Douglas Adams to found in Banks' writing, and the description of the Outside Context Problem [1] is like something right out of Hitchhiker's Guide. It's not something that would be easy to portray on film, where it'd be necessary to explain backstory and explain how an AI-dominated post-scarcity society can exist that has no money and no labour force.
Consider Phlebas is probably the best book to start with simply because it looks at the Culture from the outside. The show might use this to its advantage by having characters explain aspects of the Culture, such as its post-scarcity society, without being too heavy-handed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Problem
The Expanse is not their content, so it will always take longer to get to Netflix (if it ever shows up).
Amazon had a teaser for The Expanse, and season 1 was free. I ended up buying season 2, because I couldn't find good subtitles for the torrent I downloaded. I did this with Mr Robot, too. I can't hear as well as I used to and subtitles are really important to me.
The thing that bothers me is how long it takes for content to come to Netflix. For example, in NZ, I still don't have access to season 2 of The Expanse. Remind me again why I'm paying monthly for this service!?
If these count, I enjoyed:
- The Expanse (season 2)
- Sense8 (season 2)
- Alien Covenant
There are a couple TV shows that every sci-fi fan should see: Firefly and more recently The Expanse.
Do you mean original as in first-as-a-series, or original as in something that hasn't been made for tv/movies yet? If the latter, there are tons:
- The Expanse
- American Gods, Good Omens
- Kingkiller Chronicles (being produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda)
- Wheel of Time
However, if you mean the former, then I agree, although there are new shows, they just don't have high budgets like those with followings already.
TBH, the masses know The Expanse mostly from TV show. But the show indeed is good, and while it has some differences from the books, it mostly stays true to science, even in very minor VFX details.
This is an unpopular opinion, because I've seen here how people like to hate on Gravity and stuff, but I feel like we're seeing a new trend in sci-fi movies/shows - Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and now The Expanse, despite their various levels of science/plot tradeoffs, all are much more faithful to physics than what came before (with a honourable exception of Space Odyssey), and they do a great job at showing you can have a great sci-fi appealing to general population that sticks to how real space travel works.
--
That saids, The Expanse novels are 11/10 Even Better Than On TV, and I highly recommend them. Can't wait for the next one coming out soon(ish).
I am in the opposite camp with regards to The Expanse. I consider the first season a very, very good trailer for the first book.
I also consider the Dark Tower movie a somewhat okeyish trailer for the series. I just finished the second Dark Tower book, and in the books the man in black always speaks like McConaughey.
However, I understand your feel. I can't read Harry Potter, it's just not interesting enough, even after the movies.
I'm so glad that The Expanse has brought great space opera to the masses. Scifi books are several orders of magnitude better than the majority of "Scifi" Hollywood movies.
The struggle of a fledgling technological species against the plight of interstellar space is a majestic backdrop for many of the best novels I've ever read. Especially with Clark, Niven, Pournelle etc. that have done some excellent mathematical investigation into the feasibility of the concepts discussed.
Yeah, I was drawn in pretty much immediately. I was only able to catch the first 3 episodes while waiting for a flight in Taiwan (they seem to have the same Netflix library as the States, whereas here in Canada, the Expanse is unavailable), but I found it mesmerising.
I couldn't get past the first episode, partly because I knew exactly what would happen as I read it recently, but partly because the belters aren't different enough.
I can totally understand why they aren't as the costs would have been astronomical, but it's such a huge part of the books it's a little jarring.
For those not in the know, Belters are people who were born/grown up in space and look very different as a result:
Humans born to the Belt are taller and thinner than those on Earth and Mars because of the decreased gravity. As a result of these physical differences, Belters are dehumanized by many Earth and Mars residents because they superficially seem to be a deviation from the species norms of humans. - http://expanse.wikia.com/wiki/Belter
Completely agree about The Expanse. It's hard SF, and every episode is as good or better than the best SF movies. I think this certainly counts as moving forward.
I have a theory that budget for (SF+Fantasy) at any given studio is limited. And Game of Thrones has gotten other studios to invest heavily in Fantasy, leaving very little for SF. (Might dig into "running count" of shows with genre filters on IMDB datasets for verification)
The only good TV content I've seen recently is Expanse, which is quite well done. As others have mentioned, this is only limited to TV. SF Books/Movies are still popular enough .
To anyone who loves Star Trek, Firefly, BSG etc: I want to highlight Blake's Seven for you as a really great series that's well worth a watch:
Imagine a gritty British version of the original Star Trek.
In this story, the federation are evil, and the crew aren't all that nice either, and basically just want to survive having lucked out on finding a ship at the right moment. They're forced into cooperation by necessity.
It's not about exploration or Tribbles, it's about a bunch of people just trying to stay alive and eventually organise a rebellion.
The primary antagonist (Servalan) is a) female b) fairly competent at her job
Two of the characters in the series are artificial intelligences.
The ending of the show is excellent.
There are audiobooks that tell further stories in the Blake-i-verse. Amazon has most/all of them. There seem to be quite a few episodes on Youtube (Blakes7Movies) if you're curious to watch.
If you like the genre of 'space warship crew on the run', you may also enjoy LEXX and The Expanse.
It's hard to believe that B7 hasn't been rebooted.
I think there is a chance that people are getting sick of plodding character driven shows rather than series.
An example, "The Expanse" has interesting characters, but so far it has also been the case that lots of stuff happens in each episode.
Interstellar is solidly science fantasy. Arrival is arguably science fantasy since it's central conceit isn't very sciencey (amazing movie though).
The Expanse is borderline since there's basically a magic substance (the proto molecule), though everything _except_ that is very hard sci fi.
On the contrary, I have been getting into modern science fiction after being raised on my dad's collection of Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein/etc. and the modern stuff is great. Check out Vernor Vinge, Greg Egan, Kim Stanley Robinson. None of that is science fantasy. If anything, I'd say that science fantasy is less popular now than it was two or three decades ago. Look at the popularity of modern TV and movies: Arrival, The Martian, Gravity, The Expanse, Interstellar. Three of those are complete hard science fiction and the others are more in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Contact than Star Wars.
Ships get around the solar system using a propulsion system called an Epstein Drive. I just watched the following video yesterday. The narrator talks about travel times to different planets using a flip and burn technique (accelerating at a constant rate to half way point flipping direction, and decelerating at the same rate to the destination).
https://youtu.be/hz7jETrejCQ
P.S. I love the Expanse :) I'm glad it was renewed for Season 3. Best sci-fi I've seen on TV since Battlestar Galactica.
Everyone says that after book 3 or 4 they go downhill anyway.
I like to believe there was only one Matrix movie ever made and only one Dune novel. I will probably prefer to believe that there were actually 9-N books in The Expanse series, where N has yet to be determined.
> Science fiction almost universally assumes the speed of light is not a hard limit.
Not at all, you need to look at other sub-genres. The social, economic and military structures that form around slower than light travel are a mainstay of hard science fiction. "A Deepness in the Sky" is a great example. So is the first half of "Neptune's Brood" or the second half of "Accelerando". Any story that uses a generation ship as the setting, like "Hull Zero Three", also assumes sub-light travel. Or what would happen if present-day society discovered an alien race next door, like in "The Sparrow". Or maybe we need to make ourselves slightly less human to survive sub-light space travel. "Blindsight" and "Echopraxia" explore the philospohical ramifications of that. Even "Ender's Game" doesn't have FTL travel.
Now space opera almost universally assumes that FTL is possible. Though there are exceptions, Ian Banks "The Algebraist" is my favorite sub-light space opera.
edit: Some hard sci-fi will still use wormholes, either as a normal thing or a macguffin. FTL communication is also common. Though FTL comms are getting less common in modern hard sci fi. Us readers like this and it makes for convenient plot devices as comm lag leads to misunderstandings.
TV and movies are almost always space opera, with "The Expanse" being the only sub-light TV production that comes to mind, and "2001" for film. But I don't know as much about film as books.
KSP was possibly my best entertainment spending ever. It definitely is the best game for me in terms of costs / time played. If you haven't played it yet, do yourself a favour and buy it now. If you have a kid with even tangential interest in space, get a copy for them.
Side effects of playing KSP include:
- getting an intuitive feel for basic orbital mechanics
- finding yourself reading up on actual math to better understand what's happening with your rockets (and how to build more efficient one)
- no longer being able to watch most space movies due to frustration caused by the filmmakers not grokking basic orbital physics
(RE the last point - after Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and The Expanse series, getting basic spaceflight wrong should no longer be accepted in popular media. Looking at you, makers of The 100.)
Comcast is nearly the worst internet provider and the worst company that has ever received my money. The only worse experience I've ever had is with AT&T.
Comcast is also a huge content provider of crap I'd never watch: NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, E!, CNBC World. I watch a couple of shows from USA (Mr Robot) and SyFy(The Expanse) that I prefer to purchase by the season. I don't want to live in a world where those stations are fast laned and NEtflix (which will pay), crunchyroll, curiosityTV, youtube (will pay), various documentary streaming sites etc are in the slow lane.
One possible resolution I can see where this has a happy ending is that it causes Google, my municipality, etc to enter the ISP market. Unlikely because of the legal costs.
More likely option, I'll get SpaceX internet and deal with the 25ms latency. I'm already running a VPN, degrading my service, so that I'm not just another data point for marketers and advertisers to manipulate.
Look forward to your response and that you give me some hope
I don't actually watch the "channel", but The Expanse is produced by SyFy and is excellent.
And, yeah, Duck Dynasty and Cake Boss are nowhere near where A&E and TLC were when they launched, but they are family-centered sitcoms, more or less, in a time with a lack of those.
I won't defend Honey Boo Boo or that sort of thing, though.
Anyway, Disney is now the company of Star Wars and Marvel, not just Mickey and princesses. If companies want to take a risk and change their brand, I guess it's their right. There's tons of content out there if we don't like it.
Being a huge fan of the genre of "interactive narratives", I have to disagree. Games like Gone Home, Life is Strange, Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout, Deus Ex, and others have had a profound impact on me. The author doesn't seem to make a compelling point why they would be better as books or movies. I haven't really been able to derive a more coherent argument from the article than "they're worse because they're worse, so they should not be games". I think that is a bit harsh on the incredible achievements of the games that painstakingly build an interactive narrative on a medium that is both technically and artistically extremely challenging. Take Mass Effect for example, to me the whole franchise has been one of the most successful science-fiction stories ever. It rivals Star Trek, Star War, and The Expanse. Especially since Mass Effect came out during a period where Hollywood had pretty much given up on the genre as a whole. Mass Effect constructs this beautifully detailed and coherent universe set in a future where mankind discovers advanced technology from an ancient race. This propels mankind into a new era of exploration, conflict and intrigue. Te reason why Mass Effect "works for me", besides the "world building", is that you have the ability to construct a secondary narrative on top of the one presented by the game itself. You are allowed, and encouraged, to make decisions and reflect upon them. While it's all arguably superficial and closed-world, the moment you immerse yourself /in the character/ it offers something very few books and movies can: the ability to guide the story, and become a "person" in a complex world. Then again, I'm biased…but so is that author it seems.
It's a shame they didn't include Belter from The Expanse(from the little bit I watched). Ars[1] did a great interview with the creator a while back(minor spoilers in the episode summary before the podcast).
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/decrypted-the-expanse-the-truth-is-never-what-you-expect-it-to-be/
Apparently they don't have advanced enough robots to do all the jobs for humans.
The problem with automation and AI is that a powerful enough AI will render any story pretty boring, because it can basically do anything. So when writing fiction, one has to put brakes on some implications of technology just to be able to make a story.
But assuming that fully-automated space-everything wasn't developed before Epstein drive[0], the geopolitical (systempolitical?) situation makes the whole scenario plausible - you have overcrowded Earth with most people living on Basic Income just because there aren't enough opportunities, Martians hell-bent on terraforming their world ASAP, and the Belters, who can't live downwell and whose ability to provide services to inner planets is the only way to survive out there. One could imagine a strong opposition to automated mining from the Belt, and powers on Earth and Mars not too eager to upset that.
--
Also, read the books. TV show is awesome, but the books are even better :). I binge-read them all last month.
--
[0] - pretty much the only fictional human technology in The Expanse; it's a hyper-efficient fusion drive
leading to an era when millions of people would be living and working in space.
That was one thing in The Expanse (great TV show about basically this (and also a series of books that I haven't read yet)), that I found a bit odd. We're currently doing everything we can to replace truck drivers and miners on earth with robots. So why would truck driving and mining in space be done entirely by humans?
> "Millions of people working in space"? I have no desire to be a part of that but I do wonder what they'll be working on?
I'll leave explaining most of that point to a pretty good filk song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab_mH8R0KTM
http://lyrics.wikia.com/wiki/Julia_Ecklar:One_Way_To_Go
Maybe to quote one verse:
Breaking free of gravity, moving industry Beyond the planet's surface into space Lunar mines and factories, Lagrange Point colonies, Total productivity and nothing goes to waste Solar-sailing ships deployed to mine the asteroids While Earth becomes a paradise, her ugly scars erased
If you want a more "vivid" and detailed view of how this may look like (good and bad sides), I'd recommend "The Expanse" book series (and TV show) - a hard sci-fi about humans who just begun expanding throughout the Solar System.
There are lots of useful things to do in space, but we need to bootstrap a profitable economy in space to get there.
Highly recommend The Expanse, it's a fantastic space opera based on a great series of books. They also have overviews of the science involved in the show after each episode online.
The Expanse is a SyFy show. Season 2 hasn't yet been shown in its entirety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series)
Expanse isn't on netflix in the US, at all. It's on Amazon Prime in the US, on a 1 season delay, or $3 per episode (only season 1 is available for free).
> So lots of people internationally who would watch it on Netflix will be pirating it.
Unfortunately that's what I have to resort to at the moment. I'm in Australia, and The Expanse is a marvellous series. I watched the first episode of the first series on Netflix when I couldn't find anything else to watch - I then binge-watched the entire first series at that point.
Now that the second series is out, I am back to good ol' pirating each episode as they air in the United States, as there is no other way to obtain it. And because of this, Netflix will unfortunately miss out on me binge watching the second series on their platform and won't get the viewership / statistics for it because I would've already seen it.
Why can they not do what they're doing for The Last Kingdom, another show I discovered on Netflix and subsequently love, and air the episodes in a weekly fashion as soon as they air in the producers domestic market?
Oh well, their loss. And likely ours when the series will inevitably get cancelled due to "lack of viewership" :-(
I agree, and I also couldn't get into it at first. It does come together later on though and I'm happy I kept watching.
That said, there's a difficult to describe lack of something in the show that keeps it from being great, and it bothers me that I can't put my finger on it. I loved Firefly and BSG and have watched most episodes at least twice (possibly even ten times in the case of Firefly), and yet I can't see myself rewatching The Expanse.
It would seem that they could take over funding The Expanse too.
At least here in Sweden it says "A Netflix Original Serier" at the start of each episode, so I'd assume Netflix is at least partially funding it already. In fact is was only very recently that I discovered that it wasn't a Netflix exclusive show in the US.
If you happen to have Amazon Prime you can watch the first season for free [1]. Otherwise it's $2.99/episode.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dulcinea/dp/B018BZ3SCM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490563718&sr=8-1&keywords=the+expanse
I've been interested in this show for a while, but don't have any TV. Looked at it on Google Play [1] and some of the episodes say "season only" where the price goes. What does that mean? I have to buy the full season to see them? Why on earth would they do that? I'd really like a way to pay $2 for each of the first episodes and then to shell out the remaining price for the whole season if I like it.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/tv/show/The_Expanse?id=qSBdK4fbIYc&cdid=tvseason-ypOyuMxuuAGqjDLaC9vsXg
I love the books, devour them as soon as they come out, and I think the show has done a fine job adapting the story.
I'm happy that the show has survived the weakest part of the book series - Detective Miller - and gotten past the admitted cribbing from Firefly without looking derivative. The show has truly gotten stronger from every episode.
One change I would make is to subtitle the Belter dialogue. It's such a fun part of the books which in translation to an audio track ends up getting lost as a word-mash.
HOWEVER! As far as whether the show will survive: The show either needs more cash, or to allocate that cash in a more narrow, strategic, and modest way. It suffers the problem endemic to all under-budgeted TV sci-fi: the low budget always visibly bleeds in at the edges. "Yeah, that actor's really not the best fit for that part, and we could have made the plot easier to grasp with an additional scene, but with the money we save, we can afford some CGI for the rail gun!" Maybe it's just me, but I would rather watch an excellently executed sci-fi drama on an obviously artificial Dogville-like set than watch an "OK" space opera that has a nominally realistic looking space-ship brig which I won't remember anyway.
(Not to diss The Expanse's actors! - the majority are quite good, subtle, and growing on me with each episode.)
Action and special effects together are the number one self-defeating conceit of all sci-fi, especially television sci-fi. In order to please the action-craving audience (I guess?), they starve the heart and soul of the show: focusing on characters. What I love about Star Trek: TNG, one of my favorite shows of all time, is that in the Riker's Beard Era, it focused on the truth and depth of the characters through and through. That focus allows the audience to overlook the latent camp of the setting, and forgive the sometimes poor execution. As a result, TNG is still watchable today.
Special effects age. Characters are immortal.
Of course when you do accurate depicions, the piece of film can "feel" so much better. We people can kinda detect things that are "off" and not as we remember them and that can push you away from suspension of disbelief and thus enjoyment of the film.
It's easy to fall into the hole of uncanny valley if too much things just don't add up. Keeping things realistic can also add more non-manufactured conflict that makes content more interesting - e.g. see for example The Expanse, where a lot of conflict of the story also lies in the fact that the writers understood how space physics works.
I'm from Germany but we do have those Sky Tickets as well. It's tempting but if you get both tickets (Entertainment and Movies) then it's actually as expensive as the real thing here. Plus there's always content that's exclusive to TV.
I didn't like the Netflix Marvel stuff but you're right there are good shows on there no question. I enjoyed The Expanse and Killjoys too (on Sky) but good to see that those are available too (although Killjoys not in Germany it seems..). But as soon as the second seasons of The Expanse starts it will take a while until Netflix has it whereas Sky will show it sooner (or did Netflix get better with this?).
I'm actually really enjoying The Expanse and The Magicians (to the point where I bought one on Google Play and the other on iTunes). What's really cool is that I bought the current season up front and then get to watch the new episodes the day (or maybe day after?) they're released. I'm not sure if Syfy is the only channel doing that, but before these shows I was used to only being able to buy the season after it was released (e.g. Game of Thrones box set).
I'll have to check out Killjoys, given that you've put it between the two other shows that I enjoy. Thanks for the rec.
- Focus and elevate video content. Entire TV episodes are sometimes made public on Twitter - there's no way to surface this. When The Expanse has a new episode, it should go into a tab that's YouTube on Twitter.
- Pay video creators out the ass to get them to dual-publish from YouTube, and create auto-sync features that let them publish in both locations. Build in live-streaming functionality to compete with Twitch.
- "Async realtime". When watching a show, make it possible to replay Homeland tweets from the time you start. If you watch an Apple Keynote later, make the realtime tweets replay, and make it possible to add your own.
- Allow different engagement models. If someone has a whiff of abuse in their feed, make it trivial for them to see only verified + low risk users. The moment someone sends an @message to someone they've never conversed with with a single abusive word, crank the risk on them. If someone wants to engage with the firehose, make that the default.
- Make it easy to "import" feeds. I've had at least 3 friends ask me who to follow, and then we spend 15 minutes scrolling through my follow list, they manually look them up. When a new user registers on Twitter, I should be able to pick 3 people I'm most interested in following, and it should then recommend the people they like the most.
- It should be one-click to "super follow" someone, and get all their follows into my feed. Make it trivial to get an awesome, active feed. And trivial to reduce noise when I'm not interested in something.
i also loved firefly. the expanse is much more noir and the crew is getting to know each other throughout the first season, so it's not really similar. i can't really say it's like firefly, but it's at least as good - as in, i can't wait for the next episode.
So glad The Expanse is back on. Last night's episode was amazing; I'm surprised there hasn't been more coverage of the show in the press.
A fine return to form for SyFy.
Not usually as cheap, but the breadth of the catalog is remarkable. I'll go with Amazon for price reasons if both have what I want, but it's not rare that Amazon doesn't and iTunes does. (And Netflix almost never does. At this point I'm keeping it for season 2 of The Expanse and basically nothing else.)
In "The Expanse" TV show, Ceres is the birth place of the main character, police detective Josephus Miller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series)
Forgot about that one... Not a movie, but besides the very well known TV shows (ST:TNG, BSG, Firefly, etc.) I can really recommend The Expanse.
The closest successor to Firefly, Dark Matter (minus the cowboy thing) only just made it to season 2 but is now renewed for season 3 by reducing production costs and selling older seasons to Netflix.
The new way people are watching TV is on-demand rather than on-air which is dramatically cutting ad-based income for traditional networks. If networks can partner or sell to streaming companies like Netflix it might help long tail shows like Firefly to survive in the future. Another great Syfy show, The Expanse, will hopefully survive that way whereas back in 2003 it would have been axed by now.
> Yep. TV's are not great at conveying radio plays. But, that's all people could think of to do with them initially. Turns out they are better for content like Game of Thrones.
I get what you're saying, but I think that's a rather terrible way to contrast radioplays and content made for TV. The experience of watching "Game of Thrones" isn't that different from listening to the BBC radioplay of "Lord of the Rings"[r]. I think "The Wire" or "Generation Kill" might be better examples of things that I think work better on TV, than I can imagine them doing on the radio. Or maybe "The Expanse" or even "Firefly".
Doesn't mean I don't like "Game of Thrones", I love the adaptation - but with its many characters and demanding storyline (even for those of us that have read the books) - I don't know. Somehow, while it is a beautiful production, I think it could've worked with a similar script for radio.
[l] Apparently the original series, in its 13 episode format isn't available to download/buy - if I understand it correctly the following Amazon link is to the remaster: https://www.amazon.com/Lord-Rings-Fellowship-Ring-Dramatised/dp/B000VTQAVS/ See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_%281981_radio_series%29#Re-release_in_2002
A search did turn up this: https://soundcloud.com/inkmore/sets/lord-of-the-rings-radio
Which I assume should probably be taken down due to copyright infringement.
Just finished binge watching The Expanse. There, the first generations of offworlders grow very tall, thin and weak. Clearly, there is a strong evolutionary pressure on them to grow much smaller, and fix their spongy bones. Imagine the difference between a small child and a 7 foot tall weakling with osteoporosis, accelerating at 12 Gs in an emergency situation.
Btw, the show was fairly good, imo. Deep, and nearly hard SF.
I love that the ships look more like "skyscrapers in space" then airplane like spaceships we usually see in tv shows/movies.
This is most likely (according to multiple hard scifi authors) a much more realistic depiction of how spaceships are going to look like.
Example given: The Expanse - "Flip and Burn" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4EiW1bHwsQ
> And while that's not enough to form the basis of a backup civilization
Or that might accelerate the end of civilization due to our inherent tribalism - the US isn't quite a backup of Europe as a 16th century European would have imagined. Who is to say there won't be a Planetary Mutually Assured Destruction?
The Expanse (books and TV series) explores some themes around planetary identity & politics in a fictional future where Mars and the outer solar system has been colonized and Earth is seen as a meddling 'old country' by some.
This is a bit off-topic, but the section on asteroid mining reminded me to recommend 'The Expanse' on Syfy: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/
Nowhere in my posts did I seek to reject UBI. In fact, I am excited at the possibilities it may bring.
The claims made by davidgay are flawed and if UBI is a good policy, it should work despite those claims.
Making weak, unsubstantiated claims about anything is a good way of undermining it. My criticism here is to stop muddying of the waters and focus the discussion on the core arguments around how social protection should be done.
For a pretty balanced fictional treatment of a future with UBI I recommend James S. A. Corey's novel series "The Expanse" (now a SyFy TV show). Specifically, the novella "The Churn" deals with characters living in a society with universal basic income, and to a lesser degree "The Vital Abyss".
First, I'd like to mention that The Expanse is pretty damn good hard sci-fi.
Secondly, the main problem of making scifi flicks is their cost. The Expanse is getting a TV series because George R.R. Martin is backing it and the books sold amazingly well.
You'll need a pretty big Kickstarter to match that.
We are huge Netflix fans (my wife and I have our own streaming accounts, which is stupid now since they offer family options for separating play lists). That said, I think that Hulu Prime, the version without commercials, is also a fine product and Hulu is owned by the large network stations.
We get Amazon Prime free shipping via my brother's business so we have not signed up ourselves and don't get the free Amazon Prime content which friends and family members say is amazing.
The thing is: there is so much good content that it is fine, at least for me, to not have access to everything.
Another distribution model that I like is Google Play Movies and TV. It is a little pricy but I wanted to watch the Worricker Triliogy (fantastic!!) the the new scifi Expanse and it was so very convenient simply buying both series and watching them anytime on any device. If the cost was a little less, and if Google Play had most content, I think that I could be happy with a completely a la cart pay per view experience.
A suggestion for anyone working in this industry: when content is rented, offer a purchase option that is valid for a week. Sometimes I have rented movies and liked them enough that I would pay the difference to own permanent viewing rights.
I wanted to see if The Expanse (1) was any good on list.
It was fine until the section on "spaceships with continuous high acceleration fusion-powered motors or similar that don't glow white-hot"
1) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/
Commonwealth saga. It will be pretty difficult to film I guess, but they are filming the expanse, and a few others.