#The expanse books series order tv#

At the beginning, the TV show stayed close to the source material, but of course a television show cannot encapsulate everything that is in a series of monumental novels, so major events and plot lines were softened and/or dropped in the media offering, and eventually major divergencies took place due to real world and real time limitations (including one very disappointing development involving the actor portraying a major character). The sixth and final season of the TV series and the final novel, Leviathan Falls, appeared within two weeks of each other. The series, which started at the beginning of the books, premiered after the release of the fifth novel, Nemesis Games, and from the first episode it was clear that the visual series would be just as amazing as the book series, albeit in a necessarily truncated way. There is also the television series known as The Expanse, which debuted first on the SyFy network and then was moved to Amazon Prime Video when production values demanded more than SyFy could contribute. (I have one friend who insists that the novella The Churn is the best offering of the entire series.) These are not hangers-on works, they are works of art in the framework of the entire experience. They are not necessary reading, but enhance an already well realized experience to an incredible degree. But they have spawned more than merely nine superbly crafted books.Īlong with the massive novels, there are nine (soon to be ten) novellas that take one aspect of a movement, or a landscape, or a character, and crystalizes that aspect into something sharp and beautiful. Each one, a treasure, and the sum of them all together are, in my opinion, simply the best science fiction series in the history of literature. The nine books in The Expanse are magnificent. The sheer diversity of the people whose lives unfold on these pages, and the way each of these divergent characters adds to our understanding – both systemically and universally – to the worlds that may be in our future, is simply remarkable.Īnd yet, the series has given so much more than “just” that.

There is also a myriad of other characters – some that appear in only one novel or even one chapter, some that spam multiple novels, or reappear after a long hiatus – that populate the books and expand the story to an incredible degree. The complex and sometimes fractious development of the relationships between these four characters amidst the increasingly complex and very fractious development of the storyline is the center of this incredible nine-book series, and both the character and story development defy description and sufficient accolades in the journey we are taken on over the years.

The main characters of the series – affable underachiever James Holden from Montana, bristly engineer Belter Naomi Nagata, former Martian Naval pilot Alex Kamal, and Amos Burton, the menacing yet fiercely loyal mechanic from the underbelly of Baltimore – were crewing a shuttle investigating a derelict ship when their freighter, the Canterbury, was inexplicably destroyed. The Expanse series follows the 4-person crew of the Rocinante, a group thrown together when their ice hauling freighter is blown to bits as an early casualty of a power grab involving an alien substance – the protomolecule – that ends up igniting a firestorm of consequences borne from not only the unknown, but also the unbalanced political structure that exists between privileged and hubristic Earth, the rising military power of Mars, and the fermenting underculture of the exploited working class Belters. Still, like all good relationships, it was not a solitary endeavor, but branched out into many different possibilities, many different paths to follow after the initial steps were taken. Now, ten years later, the ninth and final book of the series – aptly named Leviathan Falls – has dropped, and the relationship has spun down to a graceful yet yearning end.

The expanse books series order