rocinante, though
i'm SO SAD my brain is SUCH A MESS. all i do is watch tv and go to the beach. (thank god it's summer.) also i'm reading my way through the hugos because why not? (cyteen KILLED ME i had to stick my head under a pillow for like, an hour, it was awful.)
anyway, i am truly in love with the expanse, which is on syfy and has aired six episodes out of ten and already been renewed for a second season and you should talk to me about it.
i LOVE the expanse. like, love it enough to suffer through every single one of the books even though their protagonist is a white guy whose notable feature is being a White Guy. space operaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa i'm such a nerd for space opera and CREOLE and thomas jane is GREAT AT IT (tbf miller was the best part of leviathan wakes; depressed dude playing the role of film noir detective before realising he is significantly less genre savvy than he thinks he is is right up my alley).
the worldbuilding is super fun, if not challenging - earth and mars are solar system superpowers: earth is decaying and hedonistic, mars is militaristic and focused on terraforming; the proletariat (belters) live on hollowed-out asteroids, which have water and air shipped to them and are generally oppressed, and their liberation movement (the Outer Planets Alliance, or OPA) is gaining strength while being characterized as a terrorist movement by earth and mars, who obviously don't want their strangehold lifted. belter society has been shaped by the conditions of living on rocks for 200 years; everyone's tall thanks to low gravity, and sick due to lack of oxygen/nutrients, and super cognizant about environmental conditions (riots occur when water shipments are threatened, etc). belters are my faves.
also, there are mormons. the mormons are building a generation ship so they can go somewhere without population restrictions. the mormons are GREAT.
there are basically twin storylines that converge: josephus miller lives on ceres station and is a detective working for an earth company despite being born on ceres, and is tasked with finding the missing rebel daughter of a shipping magnate, who got caught up in OPA activities; meanwhile, a bunch of ice miners get their ship blown up, and try to figure out who did it while hanging out on a stolen mars warship that they name after don quixote's horse. there's a lot of ~~~~intrigue and cool technology; the show adds a third storyline, following a un secretary named chrisjen avsarala who is trying to stop the solar system descending into outright war, but also she wants to crush the hell out of the opa.
the books suffer a lot from "dudes writing space opera" syndrome, in that james holden, the central figure, gets away with pretty much every terrible decision he makes (even though it's constantly lampshaded that he's an idiot) because he Means Well and Has A Strong Moral Centre. (there's a pretty egregious love situation in the first book that honestly makes me want to weep in embarrassment every time i think about it; hopefully they'll avoid it in the show). there is literally a scene in which holden thinks about how boring it is that he is a White Guy From Earth (contra his navigator, naomi, who is a belter of hella mixed race descent) and i had to put my laptop away and sigh very heavily. oh, holden.
apparently the science is legit, which r/theexpanse really approves of. (r/theexpanse does not share my concerns re: characterization of female characters. oh, r/theexpanse.)
BUT i think they're getting better? like, plot wise leviathan wakes is 100% my fave - the characters are thinly developed except for miller, but the stakes are COMPELLING and they stick to the belt, which is the interesting bit of worldbuilding imo - but the most recent book, in which the central four characters all fuck off to go home and explore their Tragic Backstories did some things i found really interesting (NAOMI your plot is SO SEXIST but I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!!!! and i am SO COMPELLED ANYWAY), even though it did some really dumb things wrt plot, like [spoilers] dramatically expanding the scope of the universe in which people can travel, which is boring; the belt is the cool part, i can read about colonization of earthlike but hostile alien planets anywhere [/spoilers]. plus, dudes really tried for diversity. like, really tried. the worst character by a mile is holden and it only stands out because everyone else has to earn their focus in the story but holden just happens to be there, existing and getting lauded [/hateboner].
anyway, the show so far improves on the books in every possible way (with maybe the exception of depressed detective miller, who really benefits from the close up look that being in his head in the books allows; BUT tom jane and his stupid haircut are KILLER); the crew of the good ship rocinante are pretty thinly-drawn but better than their book counterparts at this point in time, and are WONDERFUL. plus, with the leeway of all the backstory that shows up in like, book five, the showrunners have managed to thread in a bunch of easter eggs and excellent backstory immediately, which gives everyone a lot more depth.
also, it's goddamn beautiful. like, holy crap is this show nice to look at. the worldbuilding is immersive - belter language sounds fucking cool, and forget about subtitles - it doesn't do much handholding at all; you get thrown in at the deep end, and i just spend a lot of time pausing my video to stare at the shape of things. ceres station feels really and truly lived in, down to like, the crack in det. miller's phone that he couldn't be fucked getting repaired, and a bird trying to figure out flying in low gravity.
character stuff, re books-> show; vaguely spoilery for both:
julie (juliette andromeda) mao, who is the missing girl at the centre of miller's life, is honestly really fucking interesting. often you get a princess in a tower sort of situation with these sorts of macguffins, but julie's complex and interesting and badass and has a lot of internal agency. miller's approach to her - he's obsessed with her, he loves her, he refuses to let his mental conception of her take responsibility for her actions and thus overwrites the real force of her until he has to - isn't glorified; it's dangerous and unhealthy and makes him worse at his job. we never get a lot of information about julie but we do get is fascinating - contradictory, impressive, intelligent, angry. i would read novels about julie mao, and i think the show really gets that about her, and likes her; it's managed to filter out a bunch of the ways miller's narration gets caught up in her, without disregarding how tangled in her he's become, or how impressive a person she is.
holden is way less annoying!!! holy hell. r/theexpanse spends a lot of time complaining about how the crew of the roci dislike each other far more initially in the show than they do in the books, but it works a lot better, imo, because holden is a fucking tool and everyone acknowledges it. (if they don't cut the stupid "i've always loved you" naomi plotline i will be FURIOUS; holden-before-the-roci in no way deserves that.) but steven strait is surprisingly good in the role (to be fair, my only familiarity with steven strait is in the classic film 'the covenant', in which he plays a boy witch who gets kissed by sebastian stan; i own it on dvd and know literally all the words) and the show does a lot in showing that holden's actually like, not incompetent at his job and ought to be respected for it, and is also tremendously willing to take advice, which is his book character's saving grace. there's a lot of repetition in the books about holden's Notable Moral Centre with little actual proof of it, but i really appreciated that the show decided to immediately show it, by having him disobey orders to respond to a distress signal. it's pretty emblematic of what you want holden to be, which is an impulsive, mostly-smart dude with a really good heart. (still doesn't REALLY explain what makes him qualified to lead the crew over, say, naomi, who the books get around being much better at everything than he is by having her just not want to do it, but whatever.)
i like this holden. i want to watch him do things. i don't get upset when i stop watching miller do things to watch holden do things, which is a problem i had in the books. holden is just a good guy, and loyal, and it's really nicely-handled. i really like watching good people do things; i like watching them be challenged and have to bend, but not break. that's something i think the books really intended to do, and i applaud the intent, but it really doesn't come across like it ought to. book holden mostly just seems like a guy who lucked into a lot of things, and the universe has equated that with him being good at shit; show holden seems like he's actually going to earn his stripes.
miller is my guy, my character of characters: he's trying so goddamn hard. he wants to be a good person and he's fucking depressed. he thinks saving julie mao is going to save him but of course it isn't (did i cry at the end of leviathan wakes? shut up, of course i did); he doesn't want to sit around being oppressed but he doesn't trust the opa, either. he protects his partner, who's from earth. he wants everything to be okay, but he's too jaded to think it ever can be, until julie mao. god, this guy. he's so fucking sad. nothing is ever going to be all right. thomas jane really loves playing him, you can see it; it's hella fun to watch, and while i do regret the loss of the claustrophobia of his narration, being able to see his world is worth it.
i'm reserving judgement on the two heads of the opa. fred johnson, who is originally from earth but defects to join the opa and be its diplomatic arm, really spends most of leviathan wakes being a plot point. his backstory is killer in both book and show (he killed a bunch of revolting miners who had just surrendered and felt so bad he renounced earth citizenship) but he doesn't really do much, just provides resources and quests. so he's my reservation.
ANDERSON DAWES, on the other hand: anderson dawes is played by jared harris, who is so fucking into it. he's the terrorist side of the opa, a man who killed his disabled sister because she was too much for his dirt-poor family to support (in the books it's unintentional, he's a kid who gets sloppy with environmental controls). he's compelling: you want to listen to him speak. he's dangerous as all hell, and the epitome of end justifies the means, and really not a guy you want to hang out with, but god, is he compelling. i love what the show's done with him.
the crew of roci have really not gotten a lot of development but i trust the show a hell of a lot more than i trusted the books at this point and i like the way they've woven in backstory.
naomi is the smartest person in the room, probably; she got passed over for xo position for jim holden, which is boring and typical because he's a white guy from earth and she's a mixed race woman from the belt. she's got some pretty fucked up belter backstory which is the thing that really got me interested in her - before that in the books she mostly just wanders around being holden's voice of reason slash love of his life, which is boring. but give me former freedom fighting (even though the weird backstory with her ex husband is really a gross way to strip her of agency; it's more of a better in concept than in execution thing) any day. the show seems liable to move up a bunch of the backstory, which is great, because naomi deserves having stuff to do. also she's beautiful, and it's really fun to watch the way that she moves differently compared to her crewmates, who are all earth/mars types; naomi, like miller, speaks with her hands. the show's given her a bunch more to do - she challenges holden a lot, she's goddamn terrified of fred johnson; when she chooses to side with holden it really feels like she's made a choice, rather than the plot having to go a certain way. i'm still sort of wary of her; i feel like things could go either way, wrt how interesting she becomes, but i'm hopeful.
amos, who is an amoral bruiser type, grew up in a brothel in baltimore and is very respectful of sex workers; he's also completely incognizant of how morality ought to work, and thus he has to let other people be his moral compass. (he does, however, sometimes figure out that people he trusts aren't necessarily doing the right thing, and is happy to have a chat with them about it.) he won't just pick anyone: his trust is a Big Fucking Deal. his relationship with naomi, who he's picked to be in charge of him, is honestly wonderful; they respect each other, and know each other, and he's absolutely devastated when she tells him she didn't disclose that holden is the one who made them go to the distress beacon (and inadvertently caused their home ship to get destroyed) because she didn't know what he'd do. i really hope that the show keeps the relationship they have, where naomi is his boss even if holden is in charge of the ship, because i really liked that about the early books and was sad to see it extend to holden, too. i think it works just as well if amos respects holden but is most loyal to naomi; it's okay to have those little hierarchies even on a ship as close-knit as the roci.
also, i really hope he makes out with a dude. the scene in 1.06 when he just calmly converses with a male prostitute was really nice - no, i'm not interested; are you well treated? good; oh, that dude has a knife on you, just fyi - and i can't really see amos burton getting hung up on gender in a sex partner. (sidebar: i was embarrassingly startled when book four, i think, had a married lesbian religious protagonist; well played, james s a corey.)
alex kamal is the pilot. he is a martian from the mariner valley with texan accent and he used to fly in the navy but he wasn't like, extraordinary at it or anything; when he got home and missed space he had to take a job hauling ice because the mars navy didn't want him back, and his wife was understandably unthrilled (okay, i love the bit in the books when he goes home asking for closure and she's like "um fuck you stop being so selfish you don't get any"). he's funny and kind of an asshole and like amos, very good at being subordinate in the ship's hierarchy without being like, weak about it; so far i'm more attached to the concept of him than his execution in both books and show, but again, i'm hopeful; he does a really good job of defusing tension, in the books, and he does get to fly the ships, which is mostly hella fun both to watch and to read. (also i truly ship him and bobbie, who is a terrifying lady space marine of samoan descent, and wonderful.)
ultimately, the expanse is a really fun space opera with great physics, fun themes of oppression and political manouevring, and potential for really interesting character development to go with the balls to the wall worldbuild. i have a lot of feelings! you should feel them with me.
anyway, i am truly in love with the expanse, which is on syfy and has aired six episodes out of ten and already been renewed for a second season and you should talk to me about it.
i LOVE the expanse. like, love it enough to suffer through every single one of the books even though their protagonist is a white guy whose notable feature is being a White Guy. space operaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa i'm such a nerd for space opera and CREOLE and thomas jane is GREAT AT IT (tbf miller was the best part of leviathan wakes; depressed dude playing the role of film noir detective before realising he is significantly less genre savvy than he thinks he is is right up my alley).
the worldbuilding is super fun, if not challenging - earth and mars are solar system superpowers: earth is decaying and hedonistic, mars is militaristic and focused on terraforming; the proletariat (belters) live on hollowed-out asteroids, which have water and air shipped to them and are generally oppressed, and their liberation movement (the Outer Planets Alliance, or OPA) is gaining strength while being characterized as a terrorist movement by earth and mars, who obviously don't want their strangehold lifted. belter society has been shaped by the conditions of living on rocks for 200 years; everyone's tall thanks to low gravity, and sick due to lack of oxygen/nutrients, and super cognizant about environmental conditions (riots occur when water shipments are threatened, etc). belters are my faves.
also, there are mormons. the mormons are building a generation ship so they can go somewhere without population restrictions. the mormons are GREAT.
there are basically twin storylines that converge: josephus miller lives on ceres station and is a detective working for an earth company despite being born on ceres, and is tasked with finding the missing rebel daughter of a shipping magnate, who got caught up in OPA activities; meanwhile, a bunch of ice miners get their ship blown up, and try to figure out who did it while hanging out on a stolen mars warship that they name after don quixote's horse. there's a lot of ~~~~intrigue and cool technology; the show adds a third storyline, following a un secretary named chrisjen avsarala who is trying to stop the solar system descending into outright war, but also she wants to crush the hell out of the opa.
the books suffer a lot from "dudes writing space opera" syndrome, in that james holden, the central figure, gets away with pretty much every terrible decision he makes (even though it's constantly lampshaded that he's an idiot) because he Means Well and Has A Strong Moral Centre. (there's a pretty egregious love situation in the first book that honestly makes me want to weep in embarrassment every time i think about it; hopefully they'll avoid it in the show). there is literally a scene in which holden thinks about how boring it is that he is a White Guy From Earth (contra his navigator, naomi, who is a belter of hella mixed race descent) and i had to put my laptop away and sigh very heavily. oh, holden.
apparently the science is legit, which r/theexpanse really approves of. (r/theexpanse does not share my concerns re: characterization of female characters. oh, r/theexpanse.)
BUT i think they're getting better? like, plot wise leviathan wakes is 100% my fave - the characters are thinly developed except for miller, but the stakes are COMPELLING and they stick to the belt, which is the interesting bit of worldbuilding imo - but the most recent book, in which the central four characters all fuck off to go home and explore their Tragic Backstories did some things i found really interesting (NAOMI your plot is SO SEXIST but I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!!!! and i am SO COMPELLED ANYWAY), even though it did some really dumb things wrt plot, like [spoilers] dramatically expanding the scope of the universe in which people can travel, which is boring; the belt is the cool part, i can read about colonization of earthlike but hostile alien planets anywhere [/spoilers]. plus, dudes really tried for diversity. like, really tried. the worst character by a mile is holden and it only stands out because everyone else has to earn their focus in the story but holden just happens to be there, existing and getting lauded [/hateboner].
anyway, the show so far improves on the books in every possible way (with maybe the exception of depressed detective miller, who really benefits from the close up look that being in his head in the books allows; BUT tom jane and his stupid haircut are KILLER); the crew of the good ship rocinante are pretty thinly-drawn but better than their book counterparts at this point in time, and are WONDERFUL. plus, with the leeway of all the backstory that shows up in like, book five, the showrunners have managed to thread in a bunch of easter eggs and excellent backstory immediately, which gives everyone a lot more depth.
also, it's goddamn beautiful. like, holy crap is this show nice to look at. the worldbuilding is immersive - belter language sounds fucking cool, and forget about subtitles - it doesn't do much handholding at all; you get thrown in at the deep end, and i just spend a lot of time pausing my video to stare at the shape of things. ceres station feels really and truly lived in, down to like, the crack in det. miller's phone that he couldn't be fucked getting repaired, and a bird trying to figure out flying in low gravity.
character stuff, re books-> show; vaguely spoilery for both:
julie (juliette andromeda) mao, who is the missing girl at the centre of miller's life, is honestly really fucking interesting. often you get a princess in a tower sort of situation with these sorts of macguffins, but julie's complex and interesting and badass and has a lot of internal agency. miller's approach to her - he's obsessed with her, he loves her, he refuses to let his mental conception of her take responsibility for her actions and thus overwrites the real force of her until he has to - isn't glorified; it's dangerous and unhealthy and makes him worse at his job. we never get a lot of information about julie but we do get is fascinating - contradictory, impressive, intelligent, angry. i would read novels about julie mao, and i think the show really gets that about her, and likes her; it's managed to filter out a bunch of the ways miller's narration gets caught up in her, without disregarding how tangled in her he's become, or how impressive a person she is.
holden is way less annoying!!! holy hell. r/theexpanse spends a lot of time complaining about how the crew of the roci dislike each other far more initially in the show than they do in the books, but it works a lot better, imo, because holden is a fucking tool and everyone acknowledges it. (if they don't cut the stupid "i've always loved you" naomi plotline i will be FURIOUS; holden-before-the-roci in no way deserves that.) but steven strait is surprisingly good in the role (to be fair, my only familiarity with steven strait is in the classic film 'the covenant', in which he plays a boy witch who gets kissed by sebastian stan; i own it on dvd and know literally all the words) and the show does a lot in showing that holden's actually like, not incompetent at his job and ought to be respected for it, and is also tremendously willing to take advice, which is his book character's saving grace. there's a lot of repetition in the books about holden's Notable Moral Centre with little actual proof of it, but i really appreciated that the show decided to immediately show it, by having him disobey orders to respond to a distress signal. it's pretty emblematic of what you want holden to be, which is an impulsive, mostly-smart dude with a really good heart. (still doesn't REALLY explain what makes him qualified to lead the crew over, say, naomi, who the books get around being much better at everything than he is by having her just not want to do it, but whatever.)
i like this holden. i want to watch him do things. i don't get upset when i stop watching miller do things to watch holden do things, which is a problem i had in the books. holden is just a good guy, and loyal, and it's really nicely-handled. i really like watching good people do things; i like watching them be challenged and have to bend, but not break. that's something i think the books really intended to do, and i applaud the intent, but it really doesn't come across like it ought to. book holden mostly just seems like a guy who lucked into a lot of things, and the universe has equated that with him being good at shit; show holden seems like he's actually going to earn his stripes.
miller is my guy, my character of characters: he's trying so goddamn hard. he wants to be a good person and he's fucking depressed. he thinks saving julie mao is going to save him but of course it isn't (did i cry at the end of leviathan wakes? shut up, of course i did); he doesn't want to sit around being oppressed but he doesn't trust the opa, either. he protects his partner, who's from earth. he wants everything to be okay, but he's too jaded to think it ever can be, until julie mao. god, this guy. he's so fucking sad. nothing is ever going to be all right. thomas jane really loves playing him, you can see it; it's hella fun to watch, and while i do regret the loss of the claustrophobia of his narration, being able to see his world is worth it.
i'm reserving judgement on the two heads of the opa. fred johnson, who is originally from earth but defects to join the opa and be its diplomatic arm, really spends most of leviathan wakes being a plot point. his backstory is killer in both book and show (he killed a bunch of revolting miners who had just surrendered and felt so bad he renounced earth citizenship) but he doesn't really do much, just provides resources and quests. so he's my reservation.
ANDERSON DAWES, on the other hand: anderson dawes is played by jared harris, who is so fucking into it. he's the terrorist side of the opa, a man who killed his disabled sister because she was too much for his dirt-poor family to support (in the books it's unintentional, he's a kid who gets sloppy with environmental controls). he's compelling: you want to listen to him speak. he's dangerous as all hell, and the epitome of end justifies the means, and really not a guy you want to hang out with, but god, is he compelling. i love what the show's done with him.
the crew of roci have really not gotten a lot of development but i trust the show a hell of a lot more than i trusted the books at this point and i like the way they've woven in backstory.
naomi is the smartest person in the room, probably; she got passed over for xo position for jim holden, which is boring and typical because he's a white guy from earth and she's a mixed race woman from the belt. she's got some pretty fucked up belter backstory which is the thing that really got me interested in her - before that in the books she mostly just wanders around being holden's voice of reason slash love of his life, which is boring. but give me former freedom fighting (even though the weird backstory with her ex husband is really a gross way to strip her of agency; it's more of a better in concept than in execution thing) any day. the show seems liable to move up a bunch of the backstory, which is great, because naomi deserves having stuff to do. also she's beautiful, and it's really fun to watch the way that she moves differently compared to her crewmates, who are all earth/mars types; naomi, like miller, speaks with her hands. the show's given her a bunch more to do - she challenges holden a lot, she's goddamn terrified of fred johnson; when she chooses to side with holden it really feels like she's made a choice, rather than the plot having to go a certain way. i'm still sort of wary of her; i feel like things could go either way, wrt how interesting she becomes, but i'm hopeful.
amos, who is an amoral bruiser type, grew up in a brothel in baltimore and is very respectful of sex workers; he's also completely incognizant of how morality ought to work, and thus he has to let other people be his moral compass. (he does, however, sometimes figure out that people he trusts aren't necessarily doing the right thing, and is happy to have a chat with them about it.) he won't just pick anyone: his trust is a Big Fucking Deal. his relationship with naomi, who he's picked to be in charge of him, is honestly wonderful; they respect each other, and know each other, and he's absolutely devastated when she tells him she didn't disclose that holden is the one who made them go to the distress beacon (and inadvertently caused their home ship to get destroyed) because she didn't know what he'd do. i really hope that the show keeps the relationship they have, where naomi is his boss even if holden is in charge of the ship, because i really liked that about the early books and was sad to see it extend to holden, too. i think it works just as well if amos respects holden but is most loyal to naomi; it's okay to have those little hierarchies even on a ship as close-knit as the roci.
also, i really hope he makes out with a dude. the scene in 1.06 when he just calmly converses with a male prostitute was really nice - no, i'm not interested; are you well treated? good; oh, that dude has a knife on you, just fyi - and i can't really see amos burton getting hung up on gender in a sex partner. (sidebar: i was embarrassingly startled when book four, i think, had a married lesbian religious protagonist; well played, james s a corey.)
alex kamal is the pilot. he is a martian from the mariner valley with texan accent and he used to fly in the navy but he wasn't like, extraordinary at it or anything; when he got home and missed space he had to take a job hauling ice because the mars navy didn't want him back, and his wife was understandably unthrilled (okay, i love the bit in the books when he goes home asking for closure and she's like "um fuck you stop being so selfish you don't get any"). he's funny and kind of an asshole and like amos, very good at being subordinate in the ship's hierarchy without being like, weak about it; so far i'm more attached to the concept of him than his execution in both books and show, but again, i'm hopeful; he does a really good job of defusing tension, in the books, and he does get to fly the ships, which is mostly hella fun both to watch and to read. (also i truly ship him and bobbie, who is a terrifying lady space marine of samoan descent, and wonderful.)
ultimately, the expanse is a really fun space opera with great physics, fun themes of oppression and political manouevring, and potential for really interesting character development to go with the balls to the wall worldbuild. i have a lot of feelings! you should feel them with me.